Crisis & quittingOussama Ammar
Adapt marketing and sales to the situation
Keep serving a real need, and communicate with awareness of what customers are experiencing.
A crisis can make ordinary commercial work feel unimportant. People still need useful services, connection, pleasure, and relief. A business can contribute without directly addressing the event that dominates public attention.
Return to the reason for the product. Explain why it matters now and to whom. Do not communicate as if customers face unchanged conditions.
Use tact and clear evidence. If you struggle to judge the tone, ask a person with strong empathy to review the message. Criticism from an irrelevant audience should not replace attention to the actual customer.
Sales may require more direct effort and longer contact. Review where prospects stop and what helps them continue. Adjust targets when the conditions change, rather than treating an altered market as individual failure.
When familiar contact disappears, create another way to explain the offer and build trust. Clear written material and useful conversations can help. A repeated event format has little value if it teaches the customer nothing.
Protect people through a sustained disruption
Ask about the conditions under which employees work. Care responsibilities, isolation, and loss of normal support can affect people differently. Do not infer capacity from silence or compare output without context.
High output can hide a problem as easily as low output. Someone who works every evening may be losing the ability to recover. Permanent availability is not a stable operating plan.
Use regular individual conversations to learn how people are doing. Show care through the response, not only the question. The leader also needs support and a sustainable way to function.
Give the team near-term goals that it can influence. Visible improvements create confidence. Repeatedly missing an obsolete target can damage morale without producing useful learning.
Use the recovery to repair neglected work
Once immediate survival is secure, available capacity can support longer-term improvements. Better documentation, clearer expenses, and more reliable delivery can strengthen the next stage. Choose work that serves the core business.
Do not treat the crisis as a reason to pursue every new opportunity. Concentration still matters. The useful opportunity is one the company can actually serve without losing its ability to continue.
A shorter operating cycle can remain valuable after conditions improve. Keep the habit of making decisions, observing results, and correcting the method. Restore longer commitments only as the evidence supports them.