It has been nearly three months since the Coronavirus started to flip our lives upside down. We are all in the midst of an outbreak of Covid-19 caused by the novel coronavirus and the impact on our normal daily lives has been profound.
A lot has been said about the Covid – 19 Pandemic and its impact on business.
While roughly 8-million South Africans recently returned to work under Lockdown Alert Level Three, it is still business unusual in the country.
The lockdown has dealt a body blow to an already weak economy, with estimates that it will contract more than 5% this year. Treasury’s worse-case scenario projects a 16.1% contraction, and seven million job losses.
Major establishments like Edcon have already lost almost R2-billion in sales.
The sales miss, and the decline in collections of the debtor’s book has meant that Edcon is unable to pay its suppliers for both the March and April month-ends.
The effects of the outbreak of the virus has also led to travel disruptions and restrictions across the world, leading to the grounding of aircraft, releasing employees, and cancelling of flights for many airlines.
SAA, with its long-time struggles with solvency, is not immune to these realities. Even Comair, which has had a long history of profitability, recently applied for business rescue.
As a Demand Generator at Mpowered Business Solution, a B-BBEE software solutions company, my workflow has been deficiently affected by the outbreak and lockdown.
Being the first contact of the company in most instances, it has become a very difficult and awkward task to interact with new and existing clients regarding software and B-BBEE for that matter.
With companies still wanting to maintain or try achieving better ratings with their B-BBEE, it has become an awkward conversation to start. On one hand, we obviously cannot come across as inconsiderate of the current situation, with businesses taking financial strains.
On the other hand, businesses are expected to try stay afloat and to go on as per the norm.
Companies that were previously engaging us, considering our solution prior to the lockdown have also taken a conservative stance to try figure out their operations during this lockdown period.
Not knowing when it will all end has also created a huge amount of awkwardness when having conversations with new prospects.
But the reality is that, although businesses want to work together and benefit from each other’s services to reach their goals, there is always frication when first approaching the prospect you
want, Covid or not.
At the end of the day we all need to work together and given this tough situation we must be more open to looking at business as collaboration rather than money-making and sales.
I urge people to be more patient when approached by sales personnel from other businesses.
You may be surprised at how you might need the services on offer. We all find ourselves in awkward conversations with people calling us, trying to get us on a product or certain services, be it a simple cell phone contract or a hospital cover. With that said, you never know when your day will come.
So, let us try to take the collective view on things and help each other out.
Besides, taking extra measures at these uncertain times could turn out to be a prudent decision.
As Mpowered, all our teams are working together to try to collaborate with businesses in South Africa to help them reach their transformation goals.
As a company, Mpowered is fortunate to be able to truly operate under these conditions; we are able to deliver on our promise to assist companies achieve their transformation goals. The nature of our business means that we are geared for remote onboarding and support: for more information visit our new website.
Author – Thando Bembe aka The Mr Miyagi of Lead Generation , 19 June 2020