Over the past few months, we have started to see some warning signs that the world could be headed for a recession. In fact, European stocks are on the fall, and the DOW Jones slid by more than 1,100 points, which goes down as its worst day in the markets since June 2020. So what is the cause for this?
To begin with, the market has already been under intense pressure. As a result, investors have become concerned, wondering what is on the horizon and what politicians will do to combat it. Second, many of the major tech companies, such as Amazon, Netflix, and Zoom, are struggling to keep up as the world emerges from the pandemic.
Why? Well, simply put, the pandemic was advantageous to big tech. Due to low credit rates and the abrupt shift to quarantines and remote work, individuals had no choice but to rely on these services for work and pleasure. Now that the world has adapted to COVID-19 and employees have returned to their workplaces, big tech businesses are fighting for consumers’ time and attention once again. As a consequence, Netflix lost almost 200,000 customers in the first quarter of 2022, resulting in the layoff of around 150 employees.
Lastly, we are living in one of the most challenging geopolitical periods in recent memory. From China enacting extremely tight rules to combat a surge in COVID-19 cases by closing down cities as large as Shanghai (26 million people) to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine putting immense pressure on commodities prices, investors have reason to be concerned. In light of all of this, Goldman Sachs analysts forecast that the US economy will enter a recession within the next 24 months, which many experts believe to be a conservative estimate.
On that note, we’ve compiled a list of three tools to help safeguard (or perhaps improve) your business during a possibly pending economic slump.
Walnut
When a recession hits, sales revenue will undoubtedly take a hit as consumers become less willing to part with their cash. Thus, you need to take all the help you can to help improve your sales output. Walnut, a market-leading SaaS solution, has developed an innovative sales experience platform designed to help you achieve better outcomes by connecting with prospects in more meaningful ways.
The software, which is entirely hosted on the cloud, allows your sales teams to create highly customized sales demos that demonstrate the value proposition of your products and services in a way that directly appeals to the prospect’s exact wants and needs. The Walnut platform is built for conversions from the ground up, making it a must-have tool if you want to extract maximum revenue from your sales efforts. In addition, the software is no-code, which removes sales personnel’s reliance on back end teams such as graphic design and IT to participate in the sales process. In turn, this allows you to streamline departmental workflows and focus your resources more effectively.
Workday
During an economic recession, most businesses restrict their recruiting procedures in order to safeguard capital and reduce risk. This provides you with an excellent opportunity to capitalize and acquire high-quality talent on favorable terms, and Workday can help make that happen. In short, Workday is a cloud-based software vendor that focuses on delivering applications for human capital management (HCM), and financial management, and enterprise resource management (ERM).
Workday enables you to manage the whole recruitment lifecycle in a single system, including workforce planning, sourcing, and comprehensive personnel analytics. Within the platform, you will have access to all the tools you need to discover, share, engage, and select the finest internal and external candidates for your business, even during a recession. As a result, hiring managers may attract top talent by providing a consistent and engaging candidate experience from outreach to induction, resulting in the acquisition of top-quality talent.
Salesforce
Salesforce is an industry-leading customer relationship management (CRM) system that provides a single, shared picture of every customer across your internal departments, including marketing, sales, and customer service. Armed with a comprehensive dashboard of applications and data, your team will be able to provide outstanding customer experiences across the board, thereby lowering churn and increasing customer retention rates. This is not only a useful tool when times are good, but it becomes crucial during a recession. That’s because customers are more likely to cut ties with goods and services during an economic downturn, so you must demonstrate your value to them by providing high-quality service. Alongside these established SaaS solutions, the emerging micro-saas trend is also gaining traction, offering niche, cost-effective tools tailored to specific business needs, which can be particularly advantageous during economic downturns
Furthermore, customer retention/churn is critical to both short- and long-term success. Since sales and marketing acquisition expenses frequently surpass the costs of customer service and delivering customer satisfaction, it is often considerably cheaper to keep existing customers than to gain new ones. Therefore, you need to make extra efforts to keep hold of your customers throughout a recession, and Salesforce can help you do that.
Final word
With many experts anticipating a recession in the coming months/years, now is the time to act by safeguarding your business and preparing for the worst. The three tools suggested in the article can help your organization survive economic downturns and thrive by gaining a competitive advantage over your rivals and, hopefully, capturing a greater portion of the market.