All businesses are governed by supply and demand according to basic economic principles. Demand (and especially low demand) has an impact in all aspects of our business, even the way we communicate. This is something we can’t control. But, believe me, you can still grow your business when demand is low.

It’d be amazing to be able to increase demand by clicking a button from our desks. But this isn’t going to be happening any time soon, I’m afraid.

Demand governs how much we sell, the price of our products and services and our revenue at the end of each month.

However, when demand is low, there are things we can do instead of selling to make our business grow. This is not about changing the demand in your industry as many people claim to be able to do. I’m talking about focusing on the things we can actually control to adapt to a situation where demand is low.

But, first things first:

Low demand vs not enough clients

We shouldn’t mix these two scenarios. Both of them probably translate as low revenue at the end of the month. But the cause of this in both situations are completely different.

We can control how many clients you work with. If you feel that you need more clients, you can always work on your marketing strategies to reach more potential clients to work with.

But, as we mentioned before, demand can’t be controlled so easily. A low demand is normally caused by circumstances that you can’t control.

In this case, you may have enough clients, but right now these clients aren’t buying from you because they don’t need your services, they can’t afford your services, an unexpected situation made them rethink their budgets… You name it.

But the course of action will be different in these two scenarios. And today we’ll be focusing on what to do when demand is low.

Tough situation are necessary to grow

Most people reluctantly accept that when demand is low, they’ll probably face a decrease in their revenues, “because that’s the way it is”. They don’t do anything about it. They just go with the flow.

However, I can tell you that overcoming tough situations is what has made my business grow after 7 years. This is the ideal moment to stop, assess, think and improve.

The changes we make today will make us stronger once this situation comes to an end. But if we reluctantly accept the situation and do nothing proactively, we may be able to face a similar situation in the future and still won’t have the necessary resources to overcome them.

When you struggle, your business is talking to you. And you should stop and listen to it.

The biggest asset that low demand gives us

You may think that low demand can only bring bad news: lower income, lower workload, less opportunities to find new clients… However, low demand offers something good and, believe me, it’s really good: free time.

Time is a very powerful asset for your business.

I don’t know about you, but I never have all the time I need to invest in my business. At the end of the day, 70% of my time is invested in meetings with clients, drafting and sending quotes, translating texts, sending invoices and making sure payments are processed.

However, when demand is low, it’s very likely that you can recover this time. Now, how are you going to invest all this time?

Most people tend to accept that there’s nothing to do, so they do nothing. The thing is that there’s so much you can do… As a matter of fact, you can even step ahead of your competition just by knowing how to invest this newly acquired free time.

Let see how you can invest your time to grow your business when demand is low.

Let’s start with your annual action plan

I have talked several times on this blog about the importance of having an action plan for your business. This is an exercise I do every year on December before Christmas to plan how the new year is going to look like for Circa Lingua.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I’m pretty sure you’re familiarise with this. If this is the first time you hear talking about an annual action plan, in a nutshell, this is a document that is going to guide your actions over the course of a year.

This plan analyses the things that worked and didn’t work the previous years and defines new objectives for the upcoming year. But, the most interesting part of this action plan is when I breakdown the new goals into projects and actions that I need to carry out over the upcoming year to meet these goals.

These goals are translated into 3 categories of projects that I’ll carry out over the course of a year:

• Projects related to sales: These projects will be focused on how to achieve my financial goals, i.e., reviewing my rates, launching new products or services, etc.
• Marketing projects: These ones are related to increase the visibility of the business and brand awareness, i.e., increasing email subscribers or implementing a content marketing strategy to attract visits to my website.
• Internal projects: These projects address an internal aspect of your business that your clients probably won’t be able to notice directly, i.e., improving your software/hardware, hiring employees, etc.

And the way I prioritise these projects is: 4 projects related to sales, 3 marketing projects and 2 internal projects. As an example, the project section of my annual action plan could look something like this:

Sales	Marketing	Internal projects
1. Audit my rates and negotiate an increase with X and X clients, offering X service as an added value.   2. Increase by 5% my client base for X service.   3. Launch X product by May and increase sales by 5%. 4. Cross-sell X service to X and X clients to increase sales by 5%.	1. Define a content marketing strategy to increase page visits by 20% at the end of the year.   2. Translate my website into Spanish to increase my audience coming from Spanish speaking countries by 30% at the end of the year.   3. Start a newsletter and increase the number of subscribers by 25% at the end of the year.	1. Upgrade my quoting software and improve my quote proposals to increase rate of acceptance by 20% at the end of the year.   2. Upgrade my newsletter software and improve the consistency and content of my weekly and monthly newsletter to engage my audience and increase the number of subscribers by 25% at the end of the year.

Now, if we don’t actually implement these projects, this is merely a wishlist. So now, we need to translate these projects into annually, monthly and weekly actions to implement over the upcoming year.

In order to do so, I normally split a year into three periods of 4 months to actually assess the implementation of these actions based on the initial goal I want to meet.

And then, I start planning what actions I’ll be implementing every month and week to meet my goals at the end of each period and ultimately at the end of the year.

And how is this going to help grow your business when demand is low? Have a look at the next section of this article.

Prioritising your projects to grow your business when demand is low

There’s no doubt that, if you follow this method, your monthly actions will be a  mix of sales, marketing and internal actions.

This is an example of what a month could look like for me:

However, we need to adapt this action plan to optimise the results when demand is low.

It’s probably not a good idea to focus on projects to increase sales when the demand for your products and services is low. It may not be a good idea either to offer additional services to existing clients when they’re also facing a low demand.

These projects will require more time to meet your objectives and they will be much harder to complete successfully.

On the contrary, we can invest this extra time that these projects require when demand is low to get our business as ready as possible when demand goes up again. That’s why it’d be a good idea to prioritise marketing and internal project.

• Marketing projects will help up reach more potential clients. These new potential clients will get familiarised with your business and you’ll have more chances to actually sell your products and services to them once demand is restored.
• Internal project will help your business be ready to cover and accelerate incoming projects when demand goes up.

In conclusion…

• When demand is low, you have more free time to invest in our businesses.
• A decrease in demand will make you rethink the actions you take weekly and monthly to adapt to the new situation.
• You can grow your business when demand is low by investing your time in marketing and internal actions.
• This actions will get your business ready once demand goes back up.

Did you ever have to rethink your strategy due to a decrease of demand? What actions did you have to take? I’d love to hear your thought on the comment section below. I’ll make sure to reply all your comments.