With a downturn in profit of up to 13.5% and consumer spending falling, recessions are difficult periods to survive for small businesses. Especially in the world of Software as a Service (SaaS), which relies on companies and consumers continually subscribing to their platforms, recessions are often incredibly difficult moments in time.
But, if you’re gearing up to take on a recession, there are a few products that you can rely on to ensure you have a continual flow of customers and are as efficient as possible. Each of these four products and services aims to benefit your business by either allowing you to continually generate new customers, manage the customer base you already have, or effectively work within your own organization.
Q1 2022 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
HubSpot
During a recession, people have less disposable income to throw around on different SaaS products, meaning they’re less likely to be actively visiting various company websites. This then poses the question, if fewer people are visiting my site, how do I get the word out about new products and repeated sales?
That’s where HubSpot comes in, offering a detailed and free email marketing tool that will allow you to directly connect to your audience in mere seconds. By cultivating an email marketing list through your sales process, you’re able to create a repository of email addresses that you can directly contact.
Instead of waiting for your customers to come to your page, you use HubSpot’s email marketing to bring your services directly to them. With a whole range of creative tools, this is a wonderful way of getting your name out there, establishing a connection with your customers, and ensuring you stay at the top of their priorities list.
By taking this active approach with email marketing, you ensure that your business stays in your customers’ minds, even during a harder recession period. What’s more, Hubspot makes it easy to create email templates, completely streamlining the process and making it as easy as possible.
Walnut
Walnut is a sales experience platforms that allows teams to make customized sales demos within seconds. These demos are all deeply personalized, allowing you to focus on the part of your SaaS business that you want to display to the world, while connecting to each potential customer on a personal level.
Going beyond just product demonstration, Walnut also lets you integrate these sales experiences into your website, without having to learn any coding. By doing this, your customers only need to access your homepage to discover your product, allowing product-led growth to take the reins of your sales efforts.
We list Walnut as a fantastic product for the recession because it is a tool that allows you to show 100X more sales demos with your current manpower, so you can skirt the need to hire more employees and as a result, pay more salaries. Demo customization is simple and quick, so sales reps don’t have to continuously begin crafting each demo from scratch each time; they can simply copy-paste templates and then personalize certain elements quickly.
More importantly, Walnut’s personalized demos convert better than traditional ones. Each demo is hosted on the cloud, ensuring zero downtime.
With this in mind, it's no surprise that Walnut can help you get more leads, close sales faster, and revolutionize how you demonstrate your product on a daily basis. This product makes the sales process as seamless as possible, letting you demonstrate your product in the very best light, all the time.
Gong
In the modern world of sales, customer-facing interactions can take place across a range of different social mediums. From web conferences and email engagements to direct phone conversations, there are a huge range of channels that you need to manage. Especially in recession-like climates, where you may have less staff on-hand, communication across all of these different streams is harder than ever.
Gong acts as the solution for this, creating a singular platform where all the information from every single one of your sales channels can be directed to. This platform rallies against data silos, ensuring that your whole team has access to all the information they need to close a deal.
Focusing on total alignment, Gong provides autonomous insights that act as additional guides for your employees. Instead of just containing information about users and where they are in the sales process, Gong also gives you actionable insights using their customer data.
These insights will allow you to more effectively target these people, increasing the total revenue to your platform and saving time. In fact, Gong saves on average 20% of your time when closing a deal, as well as increasing general revenue by 27%.
Statistics like these are vital, allowing you to make the most of your business - even in the worst recession imaginable.
Toggl
Toggl Track is a time tracking and reporting app that allows you to supercharge your productivity and ensure that your entire team is all on the same page. By giving every employee in your network a Toggl account, you give them a range of tools that allow them to more effectively track your time.
If you create a project on Toggl and assign a range of different members, you can then see how much time every single element of a project is taking. With this, you’re able to streamline your projects, find outliers, and ensure that your team is on track.
One of the hardest parts of running a business within a recession comes down to managing your employees effectively. As you may have less staff to work on projects, you can use tools like Toggl to ensure that every moment at work is as productive as possible. With this, you ensure you can save time during the day and continually work towards making every second count.
Final Thoughts
By using these four platforms and products, you’ll be able to cover all of your bases and ensure that the recession doesn’t hit your business too hard. Whether you’re looking to boost your company’s productivity, reach new customers, or consolidate relationships with past customers, these products are perfect for you.
Be sure to try all of them out and see which benefits your business most.
