Yet, most of us hope that the recession will come to an end sometime, with optimists saying that the market situation should start improving by spring 2010. In the meantime, however, many smaller businesses will have to deal with a set of totally new challenges. Therefore guidance and advice on how to handle them and survive the recession should be particularly valuable - and in great demand. In fact, the forthcoming retra conference will explore the potential opportunities for growth, which are present even during the recession, and will provide plenty of practical advice on handling the current challenges.

The IER team also constantly looks for sources of actionable advice for retailers on everyday business issues or sales techniques, which could be particularly useful in recessionary times. For example, in the April issue you will find not only a report on the sources of finance for business - with many information links (see page 26), but also an article on employing NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) techniques in the process of communicating with the customers (page 30). This article is full of tips helping to assess what your customers really want and how to build rapport with them. If you test them, I would very much like to hear from you.

Anna Ryland, Editor

aryland@datateam.co.uk

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