Yes, conditions tighten. No, that doesn’t explain everything. When spend shrinks, buyers don’t stop buying—they start ...
Yes, conditions tighten. No, that doesn’t explain everything. When spend shrinks, buyers don’t stop buying—they start prioritizing. The winners become uncuttable; everyone else becomes “later.” If your pipeline’s stuck and renewals wobble, the market isn’t your enemy—it’s your feedback loop.
Four moves that separate compounding growth from slow decline:
- Relentless relevance. Drop the feature parade. Hunt the top two urgent outcomes your customers must hit this quarter (savings, risk, speed—name it). Repackage your product around those outcomes and price to the value delivered, not the hours burned.
- Cut to invest (on purpose). Slash the nice-to-haves in your own house and redeploy into what makes you uncuttable: roadmap items tied to hard ROI, data/automation that compresses time-to-value, and the specific enablement that gets users to “Aha” faster.
- Retention > acquisition. Net revenue retention is the scoreboard. Over-communicate wins, run QBRs that show outcomes not activities, and offer help before it’s asked for. If a line item has to go, make sure it’s not yours.
- Experiment while others freeze. Pilot a pricing model that removes friction (tiers, usage, outcome-based). Test a wedge use-case. Spin up a skunkworks to attack one gnarly customer problem and ship something imperfect but undeniable.
If a soft market exposes you as optional, that’s a gift with a deadline. Use it to become necessary—now. The firms that mix discipline with offense don’t wait for sunnier macros; they manufacture tailwinds by being the last thing a customer would cut.