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The advice most founders receive during turbulent economic times is predictable: cut costs, extend runway, and plan conservatively. While necessary, this defensive posture often lacks the nuance required to actually navigate a market where visibility is near zero. When capital is expensive and investors demand strong unit economics over growth at all costs, the old playbooks for sales and revenue generation simply stop working.
Sahil Mansuri, CEO of Bravado and former sales leader at Glassdoor, manages a community of over 300,000 sales professionals. This vantage point offers real-time data on how quotas are being missed, how pipelines are drying up, and crucially, what the few successful companies are doing differently. To hit revenue targets in a recession, leaders must fundamentally restructure how they forecast, compensate their teams, and engage with customers.
Key Takeaways
- Adopt Milestone-Based Forecasting: Instead of a static annual plan, set a highly conservative baseline and unlock growth budgets only after hitting specific quarterly milestones.
- Redesign Compensation Plans: Move away from the standard 50/50 split that rewards new logos exclusively. Incentivize net dollar retention, renewals, and customer success.
- Pivot Talent to Retention: Consider moving your top sales performers into Customer Success roles to plug the "leaky bucket" of churn.
- Modernize Outreach: Cold email response rates are at historical lows. Shift to warm introductions via text message and provide high-value, proprietary research to prospects.
- Innovate the Business Model: You cannot optimize your way out of a market shift. Consider changing pricing structures or engagement models (e.g., fractional services) to meet buyers where they are.
Forecasting in an Era of Limited Visibility
The transition from a growth-focused market to an efficiency-focused one has been jarring. Data from the Bravado portfolio indicates a stark trend: in Q3 of this year, 63% of sales representatives missed their quota, up significantly from previous quarters. More alarming is that 76% of companies missed their team-wide targets.
In this environment, traditional forecasting is a liability. Founders often oscillate between "we are doomed" and "everything is back to normal" based on a single good month. To combat this volatility, companies should abandon the "optimism bias" inherent in startup culture and adopt a milestone-based approach to planning.
The "Unlock" Strategy
Rather than setting a hopeful target for the year, establish a "survival plan" that assumes a revenue contraction—potentially planning for a 10-20% drop. This conservative baseline protects the business. However, you do not want to be unreasonably conservative if the market turns.
The solution is to set short-term milestones. For example, if the company hits a specific revenue target in Q1, that achievement "unlocks" the ability to hire or increase spend in Q2. This method allows for agility without risking the company's runway.
"You have to get really comfortable with being wrong and adding new data in order to make decisions regularly without the fear of coming across as not knowing what you're doing."
Realigning Compensation with Business Health
For the past decade, the standard sales compensation model in SaaS has been a 50/50 split: half base salary, half commission, with the commission tied almost exclusively to new business revenue. This structure creates "mercenary" incentives that are dangerous in a downturn.
Consider two theoretical sales representatives:
- Rep A: Closes $1.5 million in new business. They hit accelerators, win the President's Club trip to Cabo, and are celebrated as a top performer. However, 60% of their customers churn within the first year because they were poor fits sold aggressively.
- Rep B: Closes $1.2 million. They miss the accolades and earn significantly less. However, 100% of their customers renew, become references, and upsell into larger contracts.
In a capital-rich environment, Rep A is valuable because churn can be masked by new funding. In a recession, Rep A is actively damaging the business, while Rep B is the company's lifeline. Yet, 99% of compensation plans still reward Rep A.
Updating the Comp Plan
To survive a recession, compensation must align with the metrics that matter today: Net Dollar Retention (NDR), efficient acquisition, and customer health. Founders should restructure plans to reward long-term value. If a customer renews or upsells, the original account executive should receive a "kicker" or ongoing commission. If a rep consistently brings in bad churn, their accelerators should be capped. This shifts the sales mentality from "closing at all costs" to "closing the right customers."
The Strategic Shift to Retention
When cold outreach response rates plummet and sales cycles lengthen—from an average of 60 days to over 115 days in some sectors—new business becomes incredibly expensive to acquire. The mathematical reality is that companies must survive on their existing customer base.
A radical but effective maneuver in this climate is to redeploy your best talent. Traditionally, the strongest salespeople are "hunters" (pre-sales) and the relationship builders are "farmers" (post-sales/CSMs). In a crisis, this hierarchy should be inverted.
"Take your best sales people and make them CSMs... What we cannot under any circumstances do is lose our existing customers because replacing them is going to be impossible."
Moving elite closers into Customer Success ensures that clients are not just supported, but strategically managed. These reps can identify risk early, navigate complex organizations to secure renewals, and identify upsell opportunities that a traditional CSM might miss.
Becoming an Information Partner
To retain customers, vendors must move beyond being a tool in the tech stack and become a source of business intelligence. Companies sitting on aggregate data—such as an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) knowing hiring trends or an analytics firm seeing usage patterns—should package this data into exclusive insights for their clients.
If you can tell a CFO, "Companies of your size are currently pausing hiring in these three departments but doubling down here," you become an advisor essential to their survival, making your software much harder to cut.
Tactics for Closing Deals When Budgets are Frozen
Even with a focus on retention, closing new business is necessary. However, the tactics that worked in 2021 are now obsolete. The "spray and pray" approach of sending hundreds of automated emails is yielding diminishing returns as buyers retreat to safety.
The Death of the Cold Email
Trust is the primary currency in a downturn. Buyers rely on their networks, not cold solicitations. Consequently, the most effective channel is the warm introduction—specifically via text message.
When securing an introduction from a mutual contact or investor, request a group text rather than an email intro. Email intros often languish in inboxes or get BCC’d into oblivion. A text thread creates immediate social pressure and intimacy. The key is to keep the introducer on the thread for the first few exchanges to ensure accountability and prevent ghosting.
The "Research Report" Pitch
When prospecting high-value targets, standard value propositions fall flat. Instead, lead with deep, customized research. Mansuri famously utilized this tactic to close Facebook (Meta) as a client for Glassdoor. Rather than a standard pitch, he compiled a comprehensive analysis of Facebook’s employee sentiment compared to Google and Microsoft, including a word cloud of reviews and CEO approval ratings.
He sent this unasked-for but highly valuable report directly to Sheryl Sandberg. By providing immediate, strategic value before asking for a contract, he bypassed the gatekeepers. In a recession, you must teach your prospect something about their own business before you ever try to sell them a product.
Innovation as a Survival Mechanism
When the market fundamentals change, you cannot optimize your way out of the problem. Small tweaks to pricing or slightly better email copy will not suffice. Founders must be willing to change the rules of the game.
This requires examining the structural friction in your business model. If clients are hesitant to sign annual contracts, introduce a month-to-month option at a premium. If companies have frozen full-time hiring but still need growth, consider fractional or commission-only sales models.
For example, as full-time hiring slowed, Bravado launched a "Flex" model allowing sales professionals to work on a fractional basis. This met the market reality: companies had work but no headcount budget, and reps needed income but faced a hiring freeze. By innovating the engagement model, they turned a headwind into a tailwind.
Conclusion
Sales is ultimately a transfer of energy and belief. In a recession, the "energy" of the market is low, and cynicism is high. Founders and sales leaders must balance internal pessimism—rigorously disqualifying bad deals and conserving cash—with external optimism.
This is not the time for "happy ears" or assuming deals will close because a prospect was polite. It is a time for rigorous qualification, deep relationship building, and a fundamental restructuring of how the organization values and retains revenue. The companies that survive will be those that treat sales not as a numbers game, but as a strategic operation centered on customer survival.
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