I’ve been talking to lots of vendors in the marketing industry, and everybody has been saying the same thing for 6 months now. Everybody has cut their budgets to nothing, nobody is doing any work. And this isn’t just select vendors … it’s practically every vendor and competitor I know. Many of them have either curtailed their sales and marketing efforts or are halfheartedly applying themselves because of lack of anything better to do. Although I can’t blame them for taking it on the chin like this, there’s a silver lining that everyone seems to be missing in this scenario.
If nobody is contracting out any work and everybody has frozen their budgets, then right now you are on a much more level playing field with all your competitors, even the ones who are the incumbents. Look at it this way … they aren’t getting the work right now and neither are you, so why not set up appointments with all the prospects you couldn’t land beforehand just to say hello. Chances are better than even that they are in a holding pattern themselves, and you might have an opportunity to strike up a conversation with them and plant a few seeds. In the past, they weren’t even interested in talking to you, and amazing things can happen when people start talking and their mind starts opening to new ideas and alternatives.
Hey, it’s worth a shot, and it’s better than Tweeting your friends all day about when this recession will end. You don’t have control over that, but you can control what happens when we start to come out of it, and that will happen eventually.
