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When a recession follows a boom (as it often does) it’s even more difficult to keep up the spirits of your sales team. Denial is generally followed by despair. It will be up to you, the business owner, to put your own anxieties aside and focus on creating a strategy to get your team, and your company, through it.

Face It Head On
The first thing you will have to do is revaluate your own expectations and get realistic about the market. Take your team out of the office for a day and work together to create reasonable sales goals for 24 months. It’s important to let employees be empowered, as opposed to set up to fail. You may need to reconfigure compensation: less base, more commission. Or use this as an opportunity to usurp high commissions with profit sharing. If cash flow is going to be a problem, consider offering the team a four-day week, flex-time, or the option to work from home for a cut in pay.