Post by sumiseo558899 on Nov 9, 2024 23:54:01 GMT -5
Sergey Klenkin (SK): A crisis can be compared to a forest fire. Usually, weak animals die, unable to escape to a place safe from the fire. But sometimes strong animals die too, when they simply fail to get their bearings and choose the wrong direction. We chose the path of aggressive development, and it turned out to be the right one. In figures, from March 2015 to March 2016, our revenue grew by a third.
Larisa Vlasova (LV): The current economic crisis in Russia is systemic and long-term. That is why anti-crisis concepts and life hacks from Russian and global business content writing service
gurus are in demand more than ever. Providing universal anti-crisis recipes for everyone, regardless of the scale of the business and its specifics, is an unrealistic task. Practical cases from experts who have experience of going through crises at the helm of large businesses can be truly valuable.
Reduce and optimize
SK: During a crisis, companies go into a strict savings mode. Marketing budgets, internal expenses, staff, advertising expenses, etc. may be subject to cuts. However, I do not recommend reducing marketing and advertising budgets. These channels bring you clients, and now every contract must count.
A couple of months before the obvious signs of the crisis, we traditionally engaged in "costkilling": we parted with several employees "for growth", who at the moment did not bring clearly measurable profit, temporarily suspended the pumping of office space. The largest part of the costs is salaries and office rent. The idea of cutting expenses in this area seems logical at first glance, but in practice it will most likely cause negativity among employees and, as a result, slow down the work. And in the end, all the savings will come to nothing due to lower productivity.
Motivation is not only about bonuses and corporate events. You can also support morale in non-material ways. Has someone particularly distinguished themselves this month? Give them a subscription with the opportunity to come to work an hour later for a whole week. Someone, on the contrary, did a bad job? Let them come earlier.
Sergey Klenkin is the CEO of Original Works. Original Works was founded in 2009 in Samara. In 2012, it was re-profiled into a digital agency. It has representative offices in Moscow and Samara. It specializes in online sales. The company ranks 5th in the TOP-100 best website promotion agencies in Russia in the Equipment segment according to the analytical project Runet Rating.
Try to be as open as possible. For example, every employee knows the exact marginality of the project they are working on and is financially motivated in relation to it. The scheme is transparent - the faster and better the employee does their job, the more they earn.
I consider the elimination of unnecessary manual data entry operations to be a special merit: the system is fully automated, you just need to open a page in the CRM, and all the numbers are on the screen.
LV: Now is the best time to start debugging business processes within the company. The lull in target markets gives an opportunity to redirect the focus inside the company and understand what can and should be done so that any decisions (especially decisions affecting the interests of the client) are made faster and their implementation is more effective. This front of work only seems like a boring routine. In fact, optimizing internal processes is an exciting activity, a real intellectual "puzzle"!
Imagine that you regularly organize a large and important event, such as a gala social event for hundreds of guests. Each time, most of the guests are happy, but there are always some rough spots. One day, you have time to better prepare for the next reception. Make sure that everyone has enough parking spaces, there are no queues at the cloakroom, the menu would surprise the most demanding gourmets, and all the waiters are attentive, smiling and efficient. The task is not an easy one, and its solution requires an analysis of the reasons for all the shortcomings and the introduction of new standards in the work of the management team. If you succeed, you receive a standing ovation from most of the guests. And even those who refrained from applauding can say that the evening was a great success and will definitely come to you again. In the case of financial companies, "standing ovations" turn into recommendations, and a promise to return - into repeat requests and contracts.
Barno Tursunova (BT): Our optimization consisted of business automation. Everything that happens at the enterprise should be as transparent as possible for the owner. It took us exactly a year to understand and analyze all business processes and another two years to develop an IT platform based on cloud technologies for business automation. We registered all possible algorithms for employee actions in the program. But since the system fully tracks the activities of personnel at each stage and the time spent on completing tasks, and also calculates motivational bonuses, it quickly became clear that digitalization does not solve all business problems. For example, when switching to new operating principles, a significant part of our staff quit. Not everyone welcomes control over their actions and time. But theft in the company has significantly decreased: unreliable employees have lost their usual opportunity to take away parts, conduct transactions bypassing the cash register, or simply avoid work.
Work with staff
SK: First of all, you need to invest time and money in training – strive to ensure that the qualifications of employees become as high as possible above the average on the market in your segment. Send them to paid conferences, update the internal library.
To speed up learning, we hold weekly internal seminars. Any employee, if he is good at something, can give a lecture, and anyone who wants to can attend. We always support the desire of employees from different departments to learn not only in their main profile. For example, if someone from the sales department goes to listen to a lecture on creating websites. Colleagues understand each other's work better and, interacting on common tasks, value each other's work more highly.
If you send your staff to paid conferences or buy courses, an employee who has absorbed the knowledge can give a lecture to everyone. Presenting the main ideas of recently read business books is also well received.
An important point is independent work. If an employee simply listened to a lecture, there is a chance that not everything will fit into his head. We recommend giving not particularly difficult and long, but mandatory practical tasks or tests. Knowledge is consolidated and applied better.
During a crisis, customers' anxiety increases significantly, and any little thing can lead to negative consequences. We have become more strict in monitoring customer communication standards and have conducted explanatory work with ordinary employees. The standards are digitalized, there is a clear understanding of "good" and "bad", employees understand the basic principles and have freedom in making decisions.
BT: We have implemented a new system of personnel motivation – the “principle of private property”. We have turned employees into business owners within a business. This is when any resource that arises during business processes has its own owner-employee who can earn money on it. For example, an incoming call from a potential client is a resource, the client himself is also a resource that can bring profit. Our team is a kind of chain of employees, where each “sells” a client to the next employee with an additional markup. But everyone earns money only when the client is satisfied and pays for the service.
Barno Tursunova is the co-founder and CEO of the smart car service network "Wilgood". The company was founded in 2012 in Russia. The startup created its own IT platform WILGOOD IS, which allowed for the complete standardization of the car service business processes. Today, "Wilgood" is 32 car services and more than 400 employees in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Tyumen, Cheboksary, Voronezh, Khabarovsk, Ufa, Tula, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The company's annual turnover is 400 million rubles, average monthly profit is 7 million rubles.
The employee perceives each of his actions as an investment in future profit, which everyone receives if the client is satisfied with the quality of service. The employee plans his actions in the same logic as the business owner, within the framework specified by the company regulations. In practice, it looks like this: for each processed call, the operator will receive a certain number of points: if it was possible to turn the call into an appointment for service for the client - one number of points, if not, but for objective reasons (for example, the client calls from a city in which our representative office has not yet opened) - another, if the seller simply failed to interest the client - a third. When each subsequent link achieves success, the previous one gets additional points, that is, each link is interested in transferring the client to the most successful and reliable employee. And if the client is satisfied, the entire chain gets the maximum number of points. And each employee is interested in the effective work of the next one, because the chain consists of people whose profit directly depends on the quality and result of the work of each team member.
LV: During a crisis, highly qualified specialists in rare professions often fall under the knife of layoffs. In some cases, their former employer simply leaves the market. This situation is the best opportunity to qualitatively strengthen your own team. It is important that you do not engage in aggressive hunting and lure professionals with super-high salaries. When searching for those super-competent employees that your company so lacks, pay close attention to the regions: as a rule, it is the territorial divisions of federal companies that are the first to fall under the wave of layoffs. And one more thing: your management team may become smaller, but it certainly should not become weaker.
Increase your customer flow
SK: During a crisis, customer rotation always increases, some simply close their business and leave the market, others start frantically changing suppliers in the hope of saving their ship. Therefore, in order not only to survive the crisis, but to grow, you need to provide yourself with a constant and stable flow of customers. In normal times, you can feel comfortable with only "incoming" customers, but now this is an unjustified risk. In B2B, cold calls and specifically the tactics of echeloned sales work well. In order to provide ourselves with as many daily contacts with potential customers as possible, we expanded the staff of sales managers, and outsourced cold calls to a call center.
If you have never implemented cold calling, it may seem like a rather controversial topic. To put it bluntly, yesterday a person may not have known about your existence, and today you are already offering him to buy something from you. There is no need to doubt or be afraid, because your main goal is as many new orders as possible, you need to try all available methods of getting them. But remember that in a crisis, it is important for the client to know how much he will earn on investments. Be useful from the start - let the manager not blindly sell, but consult the potential client, understand his problems and tasks and offer options for solving them.
During a crisis, it is especially important to work carefully with current clients. Have you made a deal? Maintain communication. Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to offer other services that may be useful to the customer. Perhaps your client has not even thought about the fact that you are ready to help them with other issues, and will be happy with the offer. After all, it is better for them to buy a service from trusted partners than to get bogged down in looking for pigs in poke. But be honest and convey the essence and benefit that you can bring as clearly as possible.
BT: During a crisis, clients become especially selective. In such a situation, high technologies help to "hook" a demanding client. The IT platform allowed us to implement a new monitoring system for clients: now they can track the status of work, receive notifications via SMS, and monitor the fulfillment of their order online.
Larisa Vlasova (LV): The current economic crisis in Russia is systemic and long-term. That is why anti-crisis concepts and life hacks from Russian and global business content writing service
gurus are in demand more than ever. Providing universal anti-crisis recipes for everyone, regardless of the scale of the business and its specifics, is an unrealistic task. Practical cases from experts who have experience of going through crises at the helm of large businesses can be truly valuable.
Reduce and optimize
SK: During a crisis, companies go into a strict savings mode. Marketing budgets, internal expenses, staff, advertising expenses, etc. may be subject to cuts. However, I do not recommend reducing marketing and advertising budgets. These channels bring you clients, and now every contract must count.
A couple of months before the obvious signs of the crisis, we traditionally engaged in "costkilling": we parted with several employees "for growth", who at the moment did not bring clearly measurable profit, temporarily suspended the pumping of office space. The largest part of the costs is salaries and office rent. The idea of cutting expenses in this area seems logical at first glance, but in practice it will most likely cause negativity among employees and, as a result, slow down the work. And in the end, all the savings will come to nothing due to lower productivity.
Motivation is not only about bonuses and corporate events. You can also support morale in non-material ways. Has someone particularly distinguished themselves this month? Give them a subscription with the opportunity to come to work an hour later for a whole week. Someone, on the contrary, did a bad job? Let them come earlier.
Sergey Klenkin is the CEO of Original Works. Original Works was founded in 2009 in Samara. In 2012, it was re-profiled into a digital agency. It has representative offices in Moscow and Samara. It specializes in online sales. The company ranks 5th in the TOP-100 best website promotion agencies in Russia in the Equipment segment according to the analytical project Runet Rating.
Try to be as open as possible. For example, every employee knows the exact marginality of the project they are working on and is financially motivated in relation to it. The scheme is transparent - the faster and better the employee does their job, the more they earn.
I consider the elimination of unnecessary manual data entry operations to be a special merit: the system is fully automated, you just need to open a page in the CRM, and all the numbers are on the screen.
LV: Now is the best time to start debugging business processes within the company. The lull in target markets gives an opportunity to redirect the focus inside the company and understand what can and should be done so that any decisions (especially decisions affecting the interests of the client) are made faster and their implementation is more effective. This front of work only seems like a boring routine. In fact, optimizing internal processes is an exciting activity, a real intellectual "puzzle"!
Imagine that you regularly organize a large and important event, such as a gala social event for hundreds of guests. Each time, most of the guests are happy, but there are always some rough spots. One day, you have time to better prepare for the next reception. Make sure that everyone has enough parking spaces, there are no queues at the cloakroom, the menu would surprise the most demanding gourmets, and all the waiters are attentive, smiling and efficient. The task is not an easy one, and its solution requires an analysis of the reasons for all the shortcomings and the introduction of new standards in the work of the management team. If you succeed, you receive a standing ovation from most of the guests. And even those who refrained from applauding can say that the evening was a great success and will definitely come to you again. In the case of financial companies, "standing ovations" turn into recommendations, and a promise to return - into repeat requests and contracts.
Barno Tursunova (BT): Our optimization consisted of business automation. Everything that happens at the enterprise should be as transparent as possible for the owner. It took us exactly a year to understand and analyze all business processes and another two years to develop an IT platform based on cloud technologies for business automation. We registered all possible algorithms for employee actions in the program. But since the system fully tracks the activities of personnel at each stage and the time spent on completing tasks, and also calculates motivational bonuses, it quickly became clear that digitalization does not solve all business problems. For example, when switching to new operating principles, a significant part of our staff quit. Not everyone welcomes control over their actions and time. But theft in the company has significantly decreased: unreliable employees have lost their usual opportunity to take away parts, conduct transactions bypassing the cash register, or simply avoid work.
Work with staff
SK: First of all, you need to invest time and money in training – strive to ensure that the qualifications of employees become as high as possible above the average on the market in your segment. Send them to paid conferences, update the internal library.
To speed up learning, we hold weekly internal seminars. Any employee, if he is good at something, can give a lecture, and anyone who wants to can attend. We always support the desire of employees from different departments to learn not only in their main profile. For example, if someone from the sales department goes to listen to a lecture on creating websites. Colleagues understand each other's work better and, interacting on common tasks, value each other's work more highly.
If you send your staff to paid conferences or buy courses, an employee who has absorbed the knowledge can give a lecture to everyone. Presenting the main ideas of recently read business books is also well received.
An important point is independent work. If an employee simply listened to a lecture, there is a chance that not everything will fit into his head. We recommend giving not particularly difficult and long, but mandatory practical tasks or tests. Knowledge is consolidated and applied better.
During a crisis, customers' anxiety increases significantly, and any little thing can lead to negative consequences. We have become more strict in monitoring customer communication standards and have conducted explanatory work with ordinary employees. The standards are digitalized, there is a clear understanding of "good" and "bad", employees understand the basic principles and have freedom in making decisions.
BT: We have implemented a new system of personnel motivation – the “principle of private property”. We have turned employees into business owners within a business. This is when any resource that arises during business processes has its own owner-employee who can earn money on it. For example, an incoming call from a potential client is a resource, the client himself is also a resource that can bring profit. Our team is a kind of chain of employees, where each “sells” a client to the next employee with an additional markup. But everyone earns money only when the client is satisfied and pays for the service.
Barno Tursunova is the co-founder and CEO of the smart car service network "Wilgood". The company was founded in 2012 in Russia. The startup created its own IT platform WILGOOD IS, which allowed for the complete standardization of the car service business processes. Today, "Wilgood" is 32 car services and more than 400 employees in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Kazan, Tyumen, Cheboksary, Voronezh, Khabarovsk, Ufa, Tula, Chelyabinsk, Perm, Komsomolsk-on-Amur. The company's annual turnover is 400 million rubles, average monthly profit is 7 million rubles.
The employee perceives each of his actions as an investment in future profit, which everyone receives if the client is satisfied with the quality of service. The employee plans his actions in the same logic as the business owner, within the framework specified by the company regulations. In practice, it looks like this: for each processed call, the operator will receive a certain number of points: if it was possible to turn the call into an appointment for service for the client - one number of points, if not, but for objective reasons (for example, the client calls from a city in which our representative office has not yet opened) - another, if the seller simply failed to interest the client - a third. When each subsequent link achieves success, the previous one gets additional points, that is, each link is interested in transferring the client to the most successful and reliable employee. And if the client is satisfied, the entire chain gets the maximum number of points. And each employee is interested in the effective work of the next one, because the chain consists of people whose profit directly depends on the quality and result of the work of each team member.
LV: During a crisis, highly qualified specialists in rare professions often fall under the knife of layoffs. In some cases, their former employer simply leaves the market. This situation is the best opportunity to qualitatively strengthen your own team. It is important that you do not engage in aggressive hunting and lure professionals with super-high salaries. When searching for those super-competent employees that your company so lacks, pay close attention to the regions: as a rule, it is the territorial divisions of federal companies that are the first to fall under the wave of layoffs. And one more thing: your management team may become smaller, but it certainly should not become weaker.
Increase your customer flow
SK: During a crisis, customer rotation always increases, some simply close their business and leave the market, others start frantically changing suppliers in the hope of saving their ship. Therefore, in order not only to survive the crisis, but to grow, you need to provide yourself with a constant and stable flow of customers. In normal times, you can feel comfortable with only "incoming" customers, but now this is an unjustified risk. In B2B, cold calls and specifically the tactics of echeloned sales work well. In order to provide ourselves with as many daily contacts with potential customers as possible, we expanded the staff of sales managers, and outsourced cold calls to a call center.
If you have never implemented cold calling, it may seem like a rather controversial topic. To put it bluntly, yesterday a person may not have known about your existence, and today you are already offering him to buy something from you. There is no need to doubt or be afraid, because your main goal is as many new orders as possible, you need to try all available methods of getting them. But remember that in a crisis, it is important for the client to know how much he will earn on investments. Be useful from the start - let the manager not blindly sell, but consult the potential client, understand his problems and tasks and offer options for solving them.
During a crisis, it is especially important to work carefully with current clients. Have you made a deal? Maintain communication. Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to offer other services that may be useful to the customer. Perhaps your client has not even thought about the fact that you are ready to help them with other issues, and will be happy with the offer. After all, it is better for them to buy a service from trusted partners than to get bogged down in looking for pigs in poke. But be honest and convey the essence and benefit that you can bring as clearly as possible.
BT: During a crisis, clients become especially selective. In such a situation, high technologies help to "hook" a demanding client. The IT platform allowed us to implement a new monitoring system for clients: now they can track the status of work, receive notifications via SMS, and monitor the fulfillment of their order online.