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Hello and welcome back. We have officially survived to double digits, new microphones and all, though I will admit Mon and I had a moment of realising we cannot count. We got a little excited and thought we were further along than we were. Anyway, the sound is better, the count is corrected, and we are here.
This week feels heavier than most. There is a lot of uncertainty in the economy right now, with the fuel situation rattling everyone, and for a country that runs on diesel, that lands harder here than almost anywhere. So we wanted to talk about something that matters a great deal to Perth business owners right now: how you market when nobody knows what next month looks like.
The uncertainty phase is the hardest part
When a crisis hits, almost everyone reaches for the same instinct. Wait and see. Freeze. Pull back and hope it passes. The trouble is that uncertainty drives consumer confidence to the floor, and that is when the panic decisions start.
What we are seeing on the ground is that not everyone is affected the same way. We have clients who have sold out of every piece of stock they own, and we have clients sitting under real margin pressure as the cost of getting things delivered climbs. A vet clinic sat with us recently and had not yet opened the emails warning that oxygen, medicines and dog food were all about to cost more. The third group is the one that worries owners most: the quiet phone. A business that was comfortably getting four or five good inbound leads a day looks at the lead sheet and sees barely anything coming in.
Mel’s read on that quiet is the part worth holding onto. As she puts it, “Customers don’t disappear. Everyone’s just paused.” The work is to figure out where your customers actually sit, and you do that the old fashioned way. You speak to them.
Stop talking at everyone and start talking to someone
In a crisis, broad mass marketing is done for now. A generic “hey, how are you doing” message is not just a waste of time, it can damage a relationship, because it signals you have not noticed that things are not business as usual.
Mon framed the danger of getting this wrong simply: “Broad messaging right now almost just feels like a waste of time, and it can actually be damaging.”
If you think of a basic funnel of awareness, interest, consideration and sale, the top of that funnel pulls back hard in uncertain times, unless you happen to sell fuel tanks. So the energy moves to tailored, direct conversation. Is this affecting you? How is it affecting you? When were you actually planning to go ahead? At 3BY2 we sat down and reworked the message we take to market for every single client, because the social post someone approved two months ago is completely irrelevant today.
The worst thing you can do is discount
When owners get nervous, the temptation is to slash prices to chase a sale. Mel is blunt about it: worst tactic you can have.
If you have stock during a supply crisis, that stock might be your single greatest advantage. Slashing the price throws that advantage away, and the customer sitting in your pipeline knows exactly why you did it, which damages the premium brand reputation you have spent years building. Competing on price is a race to the bottom, and in B2B, where trust and long term relationships win the work, it is a particularly bad place to race to. On top of that, prices are climbing everywhere. That product you discounted today will likely cost you fifteen percent more in fuel and freight by the time your team installs it.
Three things to do this week
First, get incredibly close to your pipeline. The opportunities already sitting there are the ones most likely to carry you through the next thirty to ninety days. Foster them, understand what is delaying decisions, and keep earning trust. They have not vanished, they have paused.
Second, look after the customers you already have. Stay visible, keep communicating, and find ways to help that might sit outside how you have traditionally helped them. As Mel describes it, picking up the phone shows “that you give a damn about them,” and that visibility is what keeps you front of mind when spending resumes.
Third, plan ninety days ahead without being hysterical. Run a few scenarios. If this happens, then we communicate that. If that happens, then we do this. You do not need to plan to the tiniest detail, because the environment shifts too fast for that. But a plan creates calm, and people look to a calm leader and trust them for it.
Why this episode is worth a listen
The conversation goes deeper than we can fit here, including the Harvard framework Mel uses to sort customers into four mindsets during a downturn, and the real story of what happened to the businesses that kept investing through COVID versus the ones that froze. If you are sitting with a quiet phone right now and wondering whether to pull back, this episode will give you a clearer head and a steadier hand. It is an honest look at how to lead when you do not have all the information yet.
The businesses that froze in past downturns generally did not do well. The ones that stayed visible, kept the plan ahead and kept talking came out the other side as the big winners. The uncertainty phase is the worst phase, and in sixty to ninety days, the new normal will be clearer than it is today. Know your core, keep your nerve, and keep showing up. That is how you raise the bar when everyone else is hiding.