1. Surprise your clients with something for free, even in tax season, when everyone thinks you’re busy—say, a 2-to-3 hour clinic for your clients’ kids who are now college graduates on how to do their own taxes.

2. Hold topical, lunchtime, 60-minute phone calls for five of your medium-sized clients’ treasurers on recession-relevant topics. You run the logistics and line up the topics. And do it when they’re hurting, even if you’re busy with tax season

3. If you’re a professional services firm with underemployed staff, offer to swap them for a client’s similarly underemployed staff. Both will gain valuable perspective and experi­ence without being taken off critical work. The employees involved will feel grateful and challenged. And the linkages between the firms will be strengthened—none of which would happen easily in good economic times.

4. In tough times, shift your business development efforts away from new client acquisi­tion to existing client development. Not only is current-client business development always more efficient, but this is the time to show the love. This is not a recession; this is the bottom half of a natu­ral business cycle. This is the time you earn the loyalty that clients will remember later.

5. Buy two tickets now for a major cultural or athletic event scheduled for mid- to late 2010. Send one of the tickets to a highly favored customer or client, with a note saying: “We will get through all this, together, and I look forward to celebrating with you once we do. Keep this ticket in a safe place, because mine is the seat next to yours.”

6. Offer to defer payment if, in the middle of an important assignment, a key client tells you he can’t afford for you to finish the work. Talk it over with him and offer to wait until he can pay. That could be a long time. But if the relationship is good, this generous offer creates trust and greatly reduces the risk of nonpayment. And the cost of financing these days is very low. It doesn’t cost much to be generous, and it lowers credit risk by creating trust and reciprocity. A little faith and courage can do wonders for a relation­ship!

7. It’s a naked world—you really can’t hide anything anymore thanks to e-mails, meetings at Starbucks, and cell phone records. You may be practicing transparency unintentionally. But “oops” moments make you look deceitful, especially in lack of spin in sales in downtimes is so refreshingly counter-intuitive that your sales will increase.

8. Once you develop your plans for addressing the recession, share your information and concerns with key customers, sales. So, don’t do that. Don’t say or write anything you wouldn’t mind everyone reading in the newspaper. Honesty and including how your plans could affect the relationship. This can create an intense, positive discussion.

9. Do NOT tell your business development people to close existing client deals sooner —just think how you feel when a vendor is pressuring you for more sales in a downturn. Instead, re-deploy resources from new client acquisition so you can over-invest in a better job of selling, absorbing longer time frames as necessary.

10. There are no free lunches. Of course you have to trim back. But trim back on second-tier clients and new business development. This is the time you make the case for loyalty. This is the time to earn trust by investing selectively in key clients. This is when you buy low, so you can reap the benefits of selling high later.


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