Episode #251: Getting New Clients During Covid’s Long Tail

We are all hungry for Covid to end so that we can get back to normal. It looks like it will be all good by September. Then it looks like October, then November and this goes on and on as some fresh piece of diabolical news filters out. Will a bell ring or an alarm go off announcing “Covid is done”? Unfortunately that isn’t going to happen. It will ebb and wane and then probably resurface intermittently over the next couple of years. So when do we start moving out of the orbit of our existing customer base? Are we just digging deeper into the fox hole, waiting for the all clear announcement or do we get up and head back into the fray?

New clients have been sparse. Companies are holding their money in a vice like grip concerned about the economic damage from Covid. Others are almost impossible to contact. Buyers and decision makers were always protected by an iron wall of nobodies who were preventing us from making contact in the good times. Now the buyers are not even in the building. Do we wait for them re-emerge from their hibernation, slip out of their cocoon? We could be waiting a long time.

We were having discussions with clients when Covid slammed into our businesses and scared the living daylights out of everyone. First in the batting order would be renewing those discussions. Should we just pick up the threads of that last conversation and continue? Take a good look at your own business? Has Covid created new dimensions, new concerns, new problems that weren’t there before? The answer would be “yes” and so that will be the same for the clients we were happily chatting with, before the virus wall came down to end all discussions.

Two good starter questions would be:

1. What are your strategic plans for a post Covid business world? and
2. What are your most immediate problems of concern

Obviously we will tailor these two broad question to our particular business.

The first question is a good one, because like a lot of us, our clients may not have had much bandwidth to start thinking about the future, given we have all been struggling to survive. We are leading them with our question to consider the future and by inference we see ourselves as being a partner with them working together as we go into the future. In manufacturing, getting into the “design in” phase is critical, because once your component is part of the design process, then you are a fixed supplier to the manufacturer and very hard to dislodge. We want to be part of the buyer’s design in process for the future and now is the time to have that discussion.

The second question is where the immediate money is located. We cannot survive on future income, when we are being battered senseless at the moment. Covid will have revealed a lot of problems for companies. What are they? We want to know that because we may be the solution. They may not have any money to invest in that solution right now, but that position will change. As Covid subsides, they will suddenly get religion and be ready to get back out there. We want to make sure we are uppermost in their minds when that happens. The only way we can do that is to be contacting them now while Covid is going the craziest it has ever been and as the vaccination rate starts to climb vertiginously. We may be meeting online but we have to be meeting nonetheless.

For new clients, the difficulties never get old. Only knowing the title and not knowing the person’s name is a big buffer to getting in contact. Companies in Japan are not very interested in business, which is why they make sure we cannot contact buyers. A friend of mine who had worked in Japan for many years went to Hong Kong to work. I was asking what was the major difference. He said, “when you go to a networking event in Japan, no one wants to meet anyone they don’t already know. In Hong Kong everyone wants to meet you to see if there is some way you can do business together. The mentality was door open rather than door slammed shut as it is in Japan”.

Nevertheless, we have to try again. Send a bulky package to the person. Make sure it doesn’t look like a flat sales document. Underlings are likely to just place it on the boss’s desk, rather than have the temerity to open the boss’s mail. This happens to me all the time. A package turns up whose contents actually aren’t for me, but there it is, carefully placed on my desk. Inside that package, include something that will really pique their interest enough that they will contact you. Is this impossible? Maybe. But what else are you going to do? You will have zero chance of getting through their KGB designed phone message system, specifically designed to screen you out. Try the “package technique” and keep experimenting to see what a successful “pique” looks like to a potential buyer.