I’ve spoken before about accepting the uncontrollable aspects of your life while really nailing the controllables.

When life is going your way, you might be able to get away with being disorganized and just wing it. At least for a while anyway.

But it works out, that in isolation, being disorganized just doesn’t cut it. Adding disorder to a high-anxiety environment only makes things worse.

Unsolicited sales communication is on the nose like never before.

Even traditional business development is currently parked.

So what should we do in relation to targeting customers and prospects during the epidemic?

I believe we need to pivot from sales and business development activity to an external communications model.

There are three choices to make regarding your sales and marketing within the current climate.

1. Continue with traditional sales & marketing activities.

2. Do nothing.

3. Pivot to a Communications Model

Let’s look at these three options in turn.

With your teams working virtually, your internal communication has never been so important.

Without the physical collision zone of the office, incidental interaction and face-to-face meetings have been replaced by Zoom meetings and phone calls.

Speaking with business owners each week, so many of them want to discuss how they can manage effectively and efficiently with a virtual workforce. Owners are struggling to find a balance with the frequency, mode and messaging of their communications with employees.

I thought it would be useful to explore the frequency, mode and messaging around internal communications with team members.

A few years ago, I read Dr Russ Harris’ excellent book The Happiness Trap in which he outlines powerful psychological research outlining ACT – Acceptance & Commitment Therapy.

Harris advises us to ‘accept’ our thoughts and feelings while being present, ‘choose’ a valued direction and ‘take’ action.

It turns out in business that we often set goals, avoid taking action and get stuck. We freeze and fail to follow through. ACT helps to navigate a path forward and get unstuck.

Imagine there are three large jars in front of us on our kitchen bench. Outcomes you seek are to be placed in only one of the three jars marked:

1. Outcomes we Control

2. Outcomes we Influence

3. Outcomes we Hope for

It turns out that we actually control very few outcomes. We spend endless hours agonizing over trying to place many outcomes in the control jar. It is terribly unfair to ourselves and leads to unhappiness, anxiety and even depression through setting unrealistic expectations.

Working with clients through this crisis has led me to identify a constructive process to come out the other side. I have termed it Re-Platforming. Imagine there is a huge tornado that rips up your house from the very foundations. After the storm passes, you need to re-platform your property from the ground up. Your business is no different in an extreme crisis.