By Robert Imbriale
Business Success Coach

Business owners are facing challenging times, there’s no doubt about that. What’s interesting is that you can divide businesses into two major groups: those that will survive, and those that will be nothing more than a distant memory.

The difference is in how they run their businesses on a day to day basis. Do they have a real solid marketing plan that allows them to make changes as the economic climate shifts, or are they just waiting for customers to stumble in the front door?

In tough times, it takes more effort to make each sale. That means a business has to be able to reach their customers more often with more offers than at any other time.

When times are good, making sales is much easier, and businesses can indeed rely on sales from walk-in traffic.

This changes dramatically when times are tough. Customers who are watching their dollars are not likely to be strolling around the mall because they may be tempted into spending money they simply don’t have to spend.

What happens is that those businesses that have relied on walk-in traffic suddenly find that that traffic is all but gone, and they may find themselves asking anybody who’ll stop and listen, “Have you seen my customers?”

By taking a few simple steps a business can literally build multiple streams of marketing into their business plan so when the economy changes, they have other options.

The first big step is that every business, even retailers and restaurants should be collecting names, mailing addresses and e-mail addresses of everybody who buys from them. There are no excuses for not doing this all the time.

Next, every business should be using both e-mail marketing and direct mail to reach out to their loyal customers at least a dozen times a year. Even in good times, this is an important piece of the marketing puzzle and it will insure that you have more marketing options at your fingertips when times get rough.

Finally, there is no substitute for customer appreciation. If you take good care of your customers when they buy from you, and long after they buy from you too,  they will be more loyal and many times more likely to buy from you when times get rough.

What if you’re a business owner who is already in trouble, and have no customer list, and very limited funds to invest in marketing? Can you still pull out of the nose-dive?

The short answer is yes, of course you can. The long answer is that it’s going to take some effort on your part to pull it off.

I recently consulted with a hair salon that was struggling to fill their schedule with clients. What they were finding is that people were waiting longer between hair appointments and they had more open spots on their calendar than was healthy for the business.

To make matters worse, their client list was not up to date, and funds were too limited to mail their customers even a low-cost postcard. If they were to do nothing, they would be doomed and would be out of business inside of 6 weeks.

By helping them take full advantage of the resources at hand, I was able to help coordinate a simple no-cost joint venture between them and a local movie theater located in the same strip mall.

It took just 2 weeks to fill almost every open spot in their schedule with new clients, and more new clients are showing up every day even in a “bad economy.”

Another client was struggling to sell products on their web site and had seen their sales diminish to levels so low that they would have been out of business within 90 days. I offered to advise them on how to boost sales and gave them a powerful strategy that literally emptied their inventory within one week.

What I offered them was something most any business can do quickly and easily and that’s make it easier for your customer to buy from you. Instead of selling their programs one at a time, I created product bundles that were cheaper for the customer than buying one at a time. Sales took off.

As you can imagine, I’m now getting more and more calls from business owners to help them turn things around. I know what’s possible and I always look first for the under-used assets every business has, and then I look for ways to reach more people for little or no money as a primary tool for increasing sales fast.

Often, the hardest thing for a business owner who is caught up in the day to day running of their business is to be able to see the solutions that at their finger tips. This is where a good business coach can literally make the difference between success and failure of a business.

The most important thing to realize as a business owner is that you’re not alone. While it may seem that you are, and that nobody understands the pressures you face, there are plenty of people who are there to help. It’s your job to reach out to them and ask them for help because you’re not going to be able to do this alone.

I’ve spent the better part of the last 22 years working with business owners in every imaginable business and I know what’s possible and how quickly things can turn from looking bleak to actually being incredible.

Don’t wait to reach out for help. The quicker you do, the better off you’ll be.

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Robert Imbriale is the author of the best-selling book, Motivational Marketing. He is a successful business coach, and seminar leader who has helped hundreds of thousands of business owners create bigger, more successful businesses, and he can help you too. Tell him what your biggest challenge is with your business right now! Go to www.AskRobertImbriale.com If you would like to have Robert help you with your business, you can reach him at 1-800-541-3816 or at www.RobertImbriale.com