How to sell In a recession

Selling in a Recession

Recessions change how buyers make decisions. Budget cuts force teams to justify every purchase with clear, measurable value. If there’s no business case, there’s no deal.

Most sales teams don’t adjust. They increase activity, push product, and rely on messaging that worked when spending was easier. But volume doesn’t fix weak positioning. Generic outreach doesn’t create urgency.

To sell in a recession, reps need to understand where buyers are under pressure and what’s driving financial decisions. Messaging should lead with specific business problems. Once a deal is in play, the focus shifts to converting it through accurate discovery, clear ROI, and deal-by-deal inspection. Progress comes from precision, not volume.

Most Sales Tactics Break Down in a Recession

When the economy slows down, buyers stop entertaining anything that feels optional. Every purchase is reviewed, debated, and measured against immediate business impact. Deals that lack clear justification get cut early.

Traditional sales tactics don’t hold up in this environment. Feature pitches and demo-led conversations put the burden on buyers to connect the dots. Most won’t. They’re not trying to explore possibilities, they’re trying to solve specific problems under pressure.

Reps who lead with product details or company stats get ignored. The buyer doesn’t care how it works unless they believe it fixes something that matters right now. Selling in a recession demands a shift in focus: understand what the buyer is struggling with, and show how your solution helps them recover faster or avoid deeper losses.

Focus Your Targeting

Shrink your ICP. Only go after companies that are likely to have the specific problems your solution solves. Stop targeting by company size, industry, or revenue unless those factors directly connect to the business issue.

Pick accounts where pressure exists. Look for signs the company is exposed to the effects of the downturn. Build your list around those triggers. Skip everything else.

A smaller, focused list gives you a better chance to start real conversations and move deals forward.

Study the Business

Once you’ve narrowed your targets, dig into how those companies operate. Learn what they sell, who they sell to, and how the recession affects their performance.

Look for broken processes, stalled projects, or cost pressures tied to market shifts. Identify the departments under strain. Find the metrics that are slipping. These are the entry points for a real sales conversation.

General knowledge isn’t enough. You need specifics: what’s causing delays, where money is being lost, and which outcomes are now harder to reach. This is the work that makes discovery effective.

Lead With a Specific Problem

After studying the business, you should know which problems are getting worse under financial pressure. Start there.

Pick one that’s serious enough to justify action. It should be tied to lost revenue, rising costs, or operational risk. Your job is to call it out clearly and explain why fixing it matters now.

Don’t wait for the buyer to connect the dots. Do the work for them. Use their language. Point to the cause, the impact, and the risk of inaction.

If the problem isn’t clear, the deal won’t move. If the problem doesn’t matter, the buyer won’t act.

Prioritize Conversion

Top-of-funnel activity doesn’t matter if the middle of the funnel leaks. Reps spend too much time chasing leads and not enough time advancing the ones already in play.

Opportunities cost time and money to create. Every meeting, email, and call adds up. Once an account shows interest, the focus needs to shift. Review the deal. Validate the problem. Confirm what’s driving urgency. Make sure the path to close is clear.

This starts with better inspection. Reps need to capture meaningful data. Managers need to review it early. The best teams measure opportunity quality, not just volume.

Build a Repeatable Inspection Process

Good discovery doesn’t help if the data stays buried in call notes or isn’t reviewed until the end of the cycle. Sales teams need a structured way to assess each opportunity as it moves through the pipeline.

Start with a defined methodology. Everyone should know what information to collect and why it matters. That includes problem details, root causes, business impact, and buyer motivation. Without it, reps fall back into feature pitching and surface-level conversations.

Make it easy to capture this information in the CRM. Set up custom fields tied to your method. Managers should use this data to coach deals early, not just react to stalled closes.

Review every opportunity multiple times throughout the process. Don’t wait until the forecast is due. Look at what’s been uncovered, what’s missing, and what’s holding the buyer back. Inspection should happen early and often.

Track the Right Metrics

Activity volume doesn’t show which deals are real. To improve win rates, measure the quality of information tied to each opportunity.

Score deals based on what’s uncovered during discovery: problem severity, business impact, and urgency to act. Review those scores regularly. Use them to improve deal reviews and focus manager feedback.

Monitor how scores relate to close rates, sales cycle length, and average deal size. If low-scoring deals rarely close, tighten qualification. If certain reps consistently drive high-scoring deals to close, study their process.

Let the data show where execution is strong and where it needs work.

Start selling in a recession with a strategy that works under pressure. Download the full playbook now.