How to Maintain Growth During A Recession: A 3-Step Playbook

Navigate changing tides with demand performance strategies

When budgets are cut, the temptation is to solely prioritise acquiring new clients to maintain cash flow. However, this is likely to lead to higher churn rates, particularly during a recession.

Even the most loyal of clients churn if they believe your solution does not meet their current needs. In fact, our Voice of the Buyer Survey showed that 47.8% of buyers will evaluate new vendors if their current ones are not meeting expectations. This is in direct correlation to recent changes in buyer behaviour due to increased financial pressures, budgetary scrutiny, and increased buyer education.

As a result, deploying personalised nurturing for these long-term relationships is more important than ever. Provide clients with valuable resources that showcase how to make the most of your products to fit their current needs and solve their new challenges.

Make your Client Success team readily available, and remind your clients that you are here to meet their needs and that you will stand by them. Maintaining a healthy relationship with clients is not only essential for retention but also helps to increase client lifetime value (CLTV) as you will have more opportunities to secure renewals and cross-sell opportunities.

Make sure your sales pipeline is healthy and prepped for growth. You want to make sure demand generation initiatives continue and are supported by omnichannel outreach to drive opportunities to sustain growth.

Demand generation in particular will be important in nurturing the full sales funnel and guiding leads through it with well-crafted nurturing activities. Our Voice of The Buyer Survey reported that 40% of buyers consume 4-6 pieces of content before a purchase, which highlights the importance of effective nurturing and personalisation. Although the value of demand generation activities may take longer to come into fruition, it is essential for maintaining a healthy sales pipeline and bringing in quality leads.

Indeed, rather than cutting demand budgets, now is the time to maintain or even increase your spend. Any limitations you set in terms of budget will have a detrimental effect on the number of new opportunities.

Pause your campaigns and evaluate them to guarantee the relevance of their messaging. As frustrating as it may be, campaigns may quickly become irrelevant as the economy and buyer behaviour shift, so it is essential to take necessary adjustments.

When evaluating your campaigns and messaging, be sure to leverage intent and other segmentation data. A data-centric approach will aid in ensuring that your targeting, messaging, and content are accurate and effective for all members of the buying committee—30.5% of buyers have 4-6 people involved in the buying process (Voice of the Buyer Survey).

Assessing in this way will empower you to set up your content creation process with updated messaging tailored to relevant pain points, better positioning your brand and solutions.

Most companies lay off staff as soon as a crisis hits, as we have seen in Q4 2022 and the beginning of 2023 (as well as in 2020 with the start of the pandemic). However, whilst this knee-jerk reaction is logical for the short-term, it is not the best approach to guarantee long-term growth.

The Great Resignation is partly due to these layoffs at scale, with companies laying off staff and then rehiring as soon as the economy starts to bounce back—only to find themselves competing in a tight market for talent. In the later part of 2023, this phenomenon will likely repeat itself, making it a far better strategy to maintain your talent as best as you can and provide the support your team members need to grow.

Regularly upskill your team to meet the changing needs of your business, giving them the opportunity to boost their skillset in areas aligned with business goals. Fostering personal growth even in uncertain times is essential for maintaining morale and improving retention.

If your business or team is being affected by layoffs and you have no autonomy or responsibility over the layoff process, it will be important to pivot business strategies and processes to adapt.

This can be done by ensuring that remaining team members are trained in multiple overlapping areas within their jurisdiction and have the skills to facilitate inter-team support. It will also be important to do a full audit of your tech stack to determine its efficiency and how well suited it is to the new environment and processes. By cross-training staff and consolidating technology, businesses can streamline their processes and reduce spending. Indeed, according to a recent State of Sales report by Salesforce, 94% of sales and marketing executives stated they will be consolidating their tech stack in 2023.

Better communications between teams will also contribute to a stronger company culture and better empower organisations to tackle the challenge of reducing teams, even if temporary.

In times of economic recession, transparency is essential for success. By openly acknowledging the challenges that arise, organisations can develop effective strategies to overcome them.

Utilise  internal communications, such as email or newsletters to keep the entire organisation up to date on the state of the business. Be honest, accept challenges, and use these moments of transparency to demonstrate resilience in the face of the economic recession.

Optimising your approach and utilising both upselling and cross-selling are efficient ways of leveraging the resources at your disposal to generate the best outcomes.

Audit your spending to determine which activities are providing a reasonable ROI, and use this to identify which campaigns, tech, and nurturing activities need to be adjusted or cut. This is also a good time to reevaluate your lead scoring methodology to ensure that your lead segmentation and targeting is accurate.

The art of cross-selling lies in personalisation. Showcase the value and specific relevance of your other offerings, rather than pitching data or jargon that may be perceived as generic. Prospects and clients alike will appreciate genuine care for improving their results with solutions and programs that benefit them.

Here are some ways to boost cross-selling:

Generating social proof is an evergreen priority for organisations. However, in times of economic challenges, showcasing recent positive reviews on your website and social media alongside outcomes is a must for positioning your brand and offerings. Indeed, in our Voice of the Buyer Survey, 48.1% of buyers reported that they rely on peers to make buying decisions, which highlights the importance of social proof in improving brand equity.

Keep in touch with clients and incentivise reviews so you can keep ranking on websites such as G2 and promote this social proof on LinkedIn. How you choose to motivate your clients to share feedback should depend on your audience. Get creative—many companies offer gift cards, however, you may find you have better results offering clients something more specific to their individual interests. For some clients, it may be enough to receive the service or products they already enjoy at a discount or add-ons at a premium rate.

During an economic recession, client priorities are likely to change, which will most likely also impact their behaviour.

Make sure you have a 360° overview of client behaviour, with a comprehensive martech stack supported by integrations. Even if fully tracking client behaviour is impossible, it is crucial to account for as many sources as your capacity allows, including actions in the dark funnel.

Compiling this data may reveal insights about your ICP:

Armed with insights from your client council and behavioural data, it is time to utilise these findings to inform the positioning of your brand.

As always, context is everything. The success of any marketing or sales campaign often rides on its ability to tackle the influences from lifetime or current industry trends as well as answer the current needs and pain points of your clients or prospects. Therefore, effective positioning to meet the state of the market is essential to ensuring consistent growth and the completion of your objectives.

Tackling an economic recession starts with an investigation into whether your brand requires repositioning. As the market shifts and realigns, so will your competitors. Take time to be introspective, assess your standing, and how your current strategy is performing.

Here are some key elements to consider making adjustments to or completely overhauling:

Unique value

In times of economic recession and increased pressure for marketers to provide consistent ROI, clients are looking to cut costs. It is imperative at this point to re-establish the unique value your brand and solutions offer your existing clients and prospects.

The first and simplest method of demonstrating value to your clients is by providing measurable results in line with their goals. This highlights the need for an up-to-date understanding of your client’s needs and objectives to provide an experience where not only are their expectations met, but exceeded. When your results are demonstrable and substantiated by an increase in leads and revenue, your clients will be left with little reason to doubt your value.

For leads and prospects, this can be demonstrated through the use of genuine social proof. The use of testimonials and case studies showcase a more tangible value to your products or services.

In terms of your brand, this is a great opportunity to revisit the roots and legacy of your company, as well as your original positioning. Assessing the foundation of your brand allows you to get straight to the original value proposition of your company beyond your current suite of products and to decide how your legacy and products compare to the context of today.

From this introspection, identify your core competitive edge and work to capitalise on it. Considering your legacy will help you build a roadmap for the future and inform the next step of your brand repositioning.

If the results of your offering and its worth to your clients can be called into question, you will have more difficulty maintaining retention. Similarly, higher prices have the potential to be overlooked if the results heavily outweigh the cost involved. However, 40% of buyers change vendors because of current costs being higher than expected (Voice of the Buyer), so ensure that the value of your offering is perceived to outweigh or at the very least be in line with your cost.

The best products are those that accurately reflect the needs of prospects and crucially, existing clients—all whilst helping you grow your business. Much like you should approach your brand image, re-examine the value of your products to identify features that still hold relevance or popularity. Buyers will always choose the supplier that provides the best experience and seamless integration over expensive system overhauls. Offerings that make daily activities quicker or easier for a market-related price will always come out on top, especially during a recession.

Co-marketing is an effective strategy for collaborating with a brand that has a similar audience to yours to expand your outreach and optimise your budget.

Content syndication is a prime candidate for co-marketing, and involves brands partnering to publish content across both networks authored by thought leaders from each company. This strategy can include a whole range of content formats, from reports, to even creating lead magnets together to generate leads and share the pipeline between both parties.

During a recession, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaigns should become a key pillar of your branding—as both a recruitment and demand generation tactic to secure a positive culture at your company and elevate your mission statement.

After all, companies with a clear mission stand apart, particularly with Millennials and Gen Z, where 73% of these generations only buy from brands they believe in. Establishing partnerships with nonprofits is not only a way to help your community, but also to build morale among team members and clients (you can even invite clients to participate).

Supporting communities and your team can go beyond financial aid: