The recession is sticking around for awhile, causing the pond of prospective buyers to continue to dry up, what this means to you and other decision makers is that you'll be fishing for customers differently. Although you have little control over the drought, there are ways of contending with it just the same.

A high number of laid-off employees—a.k.a. your customers—won't get rehired or find new jobs any time soon.  With fewer employees, leaders and managers will maintain and/or increase productivity through the improvement of processes and the utilization of technology.

Even when the economy shows signs of rebounding, the rate of rehires will be conservative because 1) during the downturn management will look to improve individual productivity and 2) there will be reticence to commit to new hires when overtime pay, temp workers or a little more effort might fill the void.

The slow re-absorption of talent—approximately 3.4 million jobless Americans and tens of millions around the world will lengthen recovery time. (There are over 22 million displaced workers in China alone)

As a leader, you'll secure and maintain business by realigning tactics in sales/marketing and operations. These tactics must be scalable, adaptable, and progressive.

Sales and Marketing

Whether your organization is online, brick and mortar, or a combination, an effective customer-capturing sales/marketing tactic is referral business.

One of the most advanced industries in the area of referrals is the controversial and thriving online-adult-entertainment industry.  (No worries: our lesson is rated-G.)  Their high volume of suppliers and products mimics today's mainstream marketplace: compressed profit margins and fierce competition.

Here's how their model works.  A prospective customer visits a marketing website looking for a product/service.  The website advertises the product, but typically doesn't actually sell the product; the site is an affiliate that earns commissions by creating advertisements and referring prospective customers to the actual product seller.

The company that sells chat services or online-video access pays the referring affiliate $25 to $125 for each sales lead, even if the buyer signs up for a $1 trial offer.  Although the ratio seems like a profit loser, it succeeds.

Behind the scenes, adult-entertainment marketers have turned marketing into a science. Beyond advertisement creation, they know EXACT conversion rates of trial offers into subscribers.  As a result, they can pay an $80 commission on a $1 sale and know with confidence that their referral process will turn a profit.

Here's how one tactic, referrals, can catch more customers:

• Calculate profit: Calculate your per-sale profit, including fixed overhead expenses, not just cost of sales. Enlist help if you need. What you're looking to find is the value of the customer over a period of time.  How much do you earn and how long will they purchase from you.
• Pay handsomely: If your dentist offered $25 for referring new patients, you might refer others, but you might also forget since the payout is very small. If the dentist could calculate that the average new patient stays for 7 years he/she could increase the commission to $100 and in a tough economy you'd find patients telling all their friends.
• Toss short-term gratification: Be willing to break even or take a loss on first sales, depending on the profit analysis. The challenge here is you must be confident that a referral will come back. Look to operations (in next section) to gain repeat business off the referral. Your dentist might secure the $100 referral due to shorter wait times, significantly effective pain management, or online scheduling of appointments.
• Track the numbers: Record your conversion rates. Use the data to tweak commissions, fees, and/or products and services to increase profitability.     

Operations

Most firms lose more customers out their back door—operations—than their front door—sales/marketing.  Imagine if you never lost a customer unless they went out of business or underwent some drastic change that eliminated their need for products like yours.  Your business would be healthy even in rough times.

Your job is to "create a better mouse trap."  Cheese is placed up front—sales and marketing—to attract a mouse to step on your trap; however, the trap must work properly to complete the mission—operations and the back end of your business.  The back end is where more business goes wrong than right. 

A service garage owner secures a customer based on his services, but his crew loses future sales because they swear in front of customers and muddy up vehicle interiors. A restaurant manager entices patrons with a new menu and ideal prices, but the janitorial staff loses future customers with filthy restrooms.

To build a better mousetrap:

• Be your own customer: Pose as a secret shopper or solicit the help of a friend to interact as a buyer to your firm. Assess the experience.
• Enhance systems and structure: Talk to employees who field customer complaints. Categorize the complaints by departments and functions. Redundant patterns of problems will highlight causal areas and target where you need to adjust systems and structures.
• Improve customer service with technology: Standardize routine processes, speed up response time, or eliminate human errors by implementing technology. For example, with numerous programmers out of work, the price is right to technologically perfect complex tasks, such as building a back end tied to your database and work flow so that customers can access and manage their own information. Convenience and consistency hook and keep customers.
• Review and ramp up products: Update your offerings for the current market.  Sometimes simple and small nuances suffice. The Wall Street Journal recently added a sports section to catch customers at a time when other dailies are closing shop. Many New York Times subscribers—turned off to the paper's perceived journalistic biases but wanting a paper offering a sports section—are biting the bait and switching loyalties to the WSJ.
• Hire better talent: Amongst the jobless are highly qualified, salary-hungry people who are willing to work for less. Now's the time to swap out dead weight with quality talent.  A California-based interior-design firm owner thought that employing a world-class marketer was beyond her budget. She recently filled the position for $100,000 less per year than she would have two years ago.

Many businesses are doing well in this economy.  They secured lines of credit before the drop, have been creating products and services that keep them current, have been streamlining operations all along, understand their numbers, and have been actively marketing.

The same leadership understands that even with everything going well, they must continue to improve their business so that when the economy rebounds, they are one of the few standing and positioned stronger than all the others. 

By readjusting and realigning, you, too, can put your firm in a position of strength.

David Goldsmith, is a consultant, speaker, author, and professor who is known worldwide for improving decision makers' individual and corporate performance. Mr. Goldsmith has provided results for Fortune 200 CEOs, was recognized as NYU's Outstanding Professor the Year, was named one of Successful Meetings Magazine's 26 Hottest Speakers, and was awarded CNY's Entrepreneur of the Year Award. To learn how you can improve your performance using these award-winning proven strategies and tactics, check out www.davidgoldsmith.com, email david@davidgoldsmith.com