When economic and market turbulence strikes suddenly, SaaS founders and marketers naturally start to wonder... should we cut marketing budget, pivot our message, or hold the line?
In Episode 83 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks, co-hosts Brian Graf and Stijn Hendrikse explore how B2B SaaS companies can not only survive but thrive when the economy takes a dip. You’ll hear why maintaining focus on customer value is more important than ever, and how to avoid knee-jerk reactions that could hurt long-term growth.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Why value beats panic pricing: How to double down on real customer value and practice value-based pricing instead of slashing prices or entering a race to the bottom, ensuring your offering remains essential even as budgets tighten.
Adapting your ICP and personas: How to re-evaluate your Ideal Customer Profile in a downturn – identifying which segments of your market still have budget or greater need for your solution – and adjusting your buyer personas (e.g. addressing newly empowered CFOs) to align with shifting priorities.
Retention and expansion first: Why it’s crucial to prioritize customer retention and expansion over pure new customer acquisition during a recession. Learn ways to strengthen customer success, keep your existing clients happy, and grow revenue from your install base so you protect your ARR.
Smart budget optimization: Guidance on trimming the fat in your marketing spend without killing your growth engine. Discover how to audit your channels and CAC, cut the underperforming tactics, and double down on the efficient strategies so your go-to-market stays lean and effective.
Flexible pricing & “survivor” offers: Creative strategies to help customers stay on board. This includes shifting to usage-based or monthly pricing options, offering more flexible payment terms, or even introducing a limited-time “survivor package” – a pared-down, high-ROI product tier designed to prevent churn and attract budget-conscious buyers from less flexible competitors.
Pivoting your content strategy: How to tweak your marketing messaging and content in tough times. The hosts share why thought leadership alone isn’t enough in a downturn – and how creating practical “survival” guides, checklists, and playbooks for your audience can build trust and relevance. (Help your champions justify your product internally by focusing on immediate execution and ROI, not just big ideas.)
Rather than resorting to fear-driven cuts, you’ll learn how to strategically adjust your approach – protecting the customer base you’ve worked hard to build and seizing opportunities that competitors might miss. Brian and Stijn’s advice will help you keep your growth engine running strong (even on a leaner budget), align your product and messaging with what customers need right now, and ultimately come out of the downturn with a healthier, more focused business.
B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks is one of the most respected voices in the SaaS industry. It is hosted by two leading marketing and revenue growth experts for software:
B2B SaaS companies move through predictable stages of marketing focus, cost and size (as described in the popular T2D3 book). With people cost being a majority of the cost involved, every hire needs to be well worth the investment!
The best founders, CFOs and COOs in B2B SaaS work at getting the best balance of marketing leadership, strategy and execution to produce the customer and revenue growth they require. Staying flexible and nimble is a key asset in a hard-charging B2B world.
Resources shared in this episode:
Brian Graf: Welcome to episode 83 of B2B SaaS Marketing Snacks. I'm Brian Graf, the CEO of Kalungi, and I'm here with Kalungi’s co-founder Stijn Hendricks, who's a serial SaaS marketing executive and ex Microsoft product marketing leader. In today's episode, we're talking about how B2B SaaS marketing needs to shift. When the economy takes a turn.
With recent events like the introduction of sweeping tariffs and a sharp dip in the stock market, many founders and marketers are left wondering, should we cut marketing budget, pivot our message, or hold the line? We cover why value-based pricing becomes even more important in uncertain markets. How to adapt your ideal customer profile and persona targeting and why retention and customer expansion should become your top priorities.
Plus, we explore whether usage-based pricing or temporary survivor packages could help keep your customers on board when budgets tighten. Let's get into it. All right, Stijn, thank you again for joining me and welcome back on this lovely Friday. I have a… I don't know if it's a fun topic, but I think it's a relevant topic given some recent events.
I think I have a good question for you at least. Just to give a little bit of background, when Kalungi was started, we were in a very bullish market. We had a lot of VC money flowing around, a lot of investments and the B2B SaaS strategy was growth at all costs. And in the last couple years, we've reverted to more of a Rule of 40 law and more of a focus on more immediate ROI, shorter payback periods when it comes to marketing and, and investing in marketing.
And then just for those who are listening when we're recording this, the day is April 4th, 2025 and yesterday, Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs. And so sweeping tariffs across many of the other countries in the world. And as of Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, the major stock indexes dropped as much as 6%.
The stocks overall lost about $3.1 trillion in market value. The NASDAQ and the S&P 500 are down 4%. Right now, the Dow is down 1500 points. The dollar fell, big tech stocks fell. Nike and Lululemon fell. So, the markets are reacting to those tariffs. And then we're waiting for the other shoe to drop in terms of what retaliatory measures other countries are going to weigh against us.
And China's already moved with a 34% tariff. So that's where we sit right now and we're having the conversation and hopefully it's just a blip and it all goes away. But it brings up the question of if things shake out poorly and we end up going into more of a bear market or a recession.
And the economy slows down. How does that impact how you should think about marketing for a B2B SaaS company? We've gone from this very growth, heavy focus and market in recent years to maybe one that's a little bit more contracted. So I'll just open the floor to you.
How do you think about marketing generally in say, a more boom market versus a more bust? And maybe we can go from there.
Stijn Hendrikse: A long list of things will change in this environment. You do wanna take the long view. Playing a long game, if you will, if you're building a software company that's not here just to succeed just next year, but for many years to come.
So no knee jerk reactions. But things have changed and you have to shift your thinking. So here's a couple of areas to frame the thinking. A lot of people will tell you in the next couple of days in the news and a lot of the stuff will be about things like, Hey, reposition yourselves around efficiency and risk reduction.
How do you help your customers save money? And protect margins, do more with less. You know, you'll hear a lot of that. Reducing waste maybe is of course a theme of the day. So there's nothing wrong with that. So when you create value, and it includes doing that by reducing cost or reducing friction, do that.
But, the real thing that never changed is that you still have to create value. And that's probably even more important now, although the words may change. If you do create value, then you should, for example, not get into much of a price pressure environment that is driven by, Hey, the costs have gone up for you if you're in software. Most of your costs are driven by the cost of your people. And maybe a little bit of hosting cost and data cost and things like that. But some of those will go up, but that will probably be a delayed effect. Things like wages impact of inflation will maybe be a little bit delayed, but none of this is really relevant.
If you are doing what you should be doing, which is value-based pricing and not necessarily cost-based pricing, or maybe what often comes between like market-based pricing. Figuring out what the market can bear because both those things, cost-based pricing and market-based price will be immediately impacted by, by inflationary effects.
Or even if prices of your specific cost of goods would go up. Let's say the price of Azure or Amazon Web services, but if you do value-based pricing, then that's not as much of a direct concern. You just need to figure out… is the value that your clients perceive to be valuable changing?
And that goes back to the words you use are more about cost efficiency, reduction of waste. Et cetera. So that will be my first thought.
Brian Graf: So to reiterate your point, number one, it's almost like if your product already has product market fit and is truly adding value to the market, then you double down on that and make sure that that is reflected in your pricing.
And that's a good first step. Definitely don't panic. Don't start slashing prices and join a race to the bottom.
Stijn Hendrikse: If your value is real, if you're really creating value by, for example, your practitioners of some form of health profession are more productive 'cause of the software that you provide, that should have both a revenue opportunity.
The value creation side, which often also has a cost and efficiency, value creation side. And there it's more about which of those two things you emphasize than anything else. So that's area number one. That's the way you think about your value proposition, how you communicate that.
There's absolutely a reason to, to rethink that a little bit, tune it a little bit, but without, of course, going to a race to the bottom in market based pricing. The second area to think about is your market. Segmentation, the ICP, the ideal custom profile that you're targeting, is that impacted by this?
Are there now clients in your ICP who are less ideal, and is there maybe another part of the market or a subsegment of the market is actually really ideal? So think about the ICP question as in who is still spending money. Within the segment, within the market segment that I am focused on.
What are the parts of that market that are not as impacted or that are more impacted? And because of that, they need our solution even more than they did before. So we fine tune your ICP. And think at the company level. Which are the ideal clients, the ideal companies that you focus on with some form of filters and signals. The way we do ICP optimization, but then of course the next question is about the personas within that ICP. And then you're not gonna be able to ignore the CFO any longer. There are gonna be roles in your client's executive team in their company, that are maybe getting a little more power than they had before.
Maybe you were selling to, if you're selling contact center software, you were selling to a contact center manager before. Now maybe that contact center manager suddenly gets an email from the CFO that says, Hey, how can we cut 10% of all our costs? They may not have as much free reign over their budget as they used to either.
Stijn Hendrikse: And then if you're doing marketing or sales, figure out: how do you connect with that? How do you provide content that helps the contact center manager do that type of cost? Cutting or optimization exercise, or if they don't want a cost cut, they want to convince their CFO that they shouldn't.
It's an important investment for the company that actually would have a negative effect. Then you help them with the talking points. Or making that business case right. And so that's sort of the area number two, where my thoughts go. Basically your question, Brian. And then I always think in three.
So number three would be if you're a real SaaS company. Of course this should have been on your mind already, but now it might be increasingly so the first thing to do as a SaaS company is retain your clients. And, and drive revenue expansion from your existing clients and before you worry too much about getting more logos, more new clients.
So this is the time to, if you didn't do this already, to absolutely make sure that your current clients are getting everything they need, that you're making sure that they have the right solution. They're onboarded correctly, they're utilizing what they pay for. All those things that go into a really solid customer success.
Function couldn't be more important than under a downturn. Or when there is pressure. When maybe the CFO email that we just talked about includes. Hey, do we actually need this software? That I'm seeing here on an automatic credit card payment every month.
So yeah, that's what I would say about those three areas. Brian, the language you use being more about efficiency, reduction, cost, thinking about the ICP, whether that changes whether there is a certain part of the market that is less prone to recession or actually does need more of what you have to offer now?
And the personas that then also change with that, and then make sure that expansion and retention are more on your radar than ever before.
Brian Graf: You're basically saying that you can use a market shift like this, whether it's a downturn or even an upturn, for lack of a better word. To take a step back and basically reassess your product marketing like you, you reassess how your product fits with the market, how the market has changed, how consumer sentiment or preferences have changed, and making sure that you're basically staying with the times, I guess, and that your product is adding the right amount of value to the right people in the right places, which makes a lot of sense to me.
One thing that I noticed that you didn't say and I agree with is to start hacking and slashing at the marketing budget. What I've seen is that marketing can be an easy or a tempting lever for somebody like a CFO to pull. If budgets start to get tight or uncertainty appears in the market.
Do you have any thoughts on that? You know, I'm sure that marketing of all areas always has a little bit of fat. That could be cut. But is there any direction that you would lean there on a principle level?
Stijn Hendrikse: Again, if you didn't do this before, if you didn't fix the roof when the sun was shining, then now when it's raining, you still gotta fix the roof and you probably gotta fix it a little faster.
So if there is actual fat. If your customer acquisition cost is not optimal. If you can lower it, if you're still investing in channels that maybe are not as efficient as some of the other channels. If you could do more product led growth or marketing led growth where you're still investing in sales led growth, which is more expensive.
Then you can no longer hide from that responsibility. You have the, the lifetime value over CAC equation will get more aggressive. So firing bad customers, now is the time. We're not even signing those up. So I don't believe cutting the marketing budget or cutting into your sales and engine is a good idea if that muscle is actually strong.
There is also now, of course, no more hiding if the muscle hasn't been always optimized.
Brian Graf: Well, because if anything, the markets will get only more competitive. Like you, each ICP customer that's out there becomes that much more valuable. And so it is critical to keep your go to market engine strong. And it can be lean. But strong.
Stijn Hendrikse: And then there's the one side is the customer acquisition cost. Of marketing and sales. But the other side is when you think of pricing and packaging. Are you able to think again more from the customer's perspective. Are you able to tweak your pricing and your positioning a little bit?
So it's more usage based versus user based, for example. Because if you're a customer, you're probably looking at what am I really using that I'm paying for. Instead of maybe the amount of users I'm paying for. Can you offer relief to customers that helps them today? Deferred payments, milestone based plans being able to go month to month instead of maybe an annual commitment.
This will make sure that those customers don't leave just because they're not able to right now commit to an annual renewal.
Stijn Hendrikse: And even if that means you have to ask five or 10% higher price level. To keep your unique economics healthy. You still might be offering a lot of value to customers to give them a more flexible way to pay you.
So there's all these things that you can think about that drive value for the client that are not that hard for you to do.
Brian Graf: And particularly with some of those examples, you are not actually. The way that you're describing em wouldn't actually require you as a company to take a huge hit. Like financially, you may just shift things around.
Stijn Hendrikse: If you, for example, go from long-term commitments to short term commitments, the amount of lifetime value that you can bank on is gonna be lower. But it doesn't really change the long-term value of the customer. The LTV of the client will not go down and it's much better than just the clients churning out, right, because they're, it's, they're too uncertain.
Brian Graf: Would you mind talking about a little bit, 'cause we, we talking about usage-based pricing and value-based pricing. I know what you're gonna say about this, but I feel like some people would be hesitant to switch to usage-based pricing or value-based pricing because they'd be worried that subscription-based pricing is so stable, I guess from a revenue perspective.
You know what you're gonna get as long as you retain the customer and it's a stable amount. And it just goes on theoretically forever versus usage based. If you switch to something like that, I guess the fear would be that, well, what if people don't use it that much?
And then my revenues go down. And of course that brings up the question of product market fit and the actual value that you're delivering. But how do you talk to executives about that decision?
Stijn Hendrikse: In the end, pricing and packaging is one of the most powerful levers that you have to both increase enterprise value for your own organization, but also to help customers understand the value that you deliver. From a positioning perspective, make sure that you're seen as a premium player or maybe a value player and whatever your positioning goal is.
The main thing here is to make your pricing model a better fit for who you try to serve. There's been a lot of motion, I think, over the last two years towards usage-based pricing. That's where every SaaS company should go. Abandon the user bank. No, absolutely not. I don't buy into that at all.
I also did not buy into previously: it should all be user based pricing. But that's easy. Everybody understands it. It's an easy way to expand your clients over time. The reality is you probably need a combination of those based on what you're selling, how you're communicating value.
And so let's use the example of cell phone plans, right, which has been around forever. At some point, the price that you pay for your cell phone plan moved more from the price of the usage, the data, the amount of data that you would have access to, the amount of minutes before that when minutes were still valuable.
Right now it's all data, so access, but you still pay per user, it's called a line. You pay for two or three or four lines on your family plan. The amounts have been tweaked over time, so it just makes sense. People understand, Hey, I pay $10 extra if I want an extra line, because you're paying for an extra user, and that's worth something.
But then we also understand that the data is really what's driving not only the value for the person using it. If you're able to watch 10 hours of YouTube video. That's of course more value to you as a consumer. Then if you're only able to watch three minutes of YouTube video.
So there's a very clear alignment there. Which is why usage based pricing is so suitable for many sales companies and their clients. Because they understand that that's how value often is easy to measure. But then access is important too. So whatever the right combination is of a user based pricing, which is about, how many people have access to this capability versus usage-based, which is more like your electricity bill.
Which ideally is more closely aligned with how people perceive the value of using this over time. And there are other pricing models too. Per device is another one per feature. Those are still super valid. It's just about getting the mix right. And this is an opportunity to figure out what do my clients really value?
What do they value today? Maybe that has changed compared to yesterday. And is it possible for me to meet them where they are without maybe doing some major changes in your packaging and pricing model that are hard to then roll back later? And that is maybe even hard to implement.
Brian Graf: And I do think that there are some, to your point, even on the pricing side, some ways for companies to show that they care.
And help customers out as well, even in the short term. Not as a lasting pricing change.
Stijn Hendrikse: Well, that's a great idea. Brian, sorry. You just made me think of something. Why not build a temporary package, like a survivor tier of your product.
Hey, you normally only have the basic standard and elite package. Yeah, treat your pricing model, whatever it, that's your standard product lineup. Why not have a really nice package that you only have available now and you don't necessarily put an end date on it, but you do not commit for it to be available forever.
That limits features maybe has really high value. ROI is easy. It's flexible because it is easy to say yes to. And you use that to both prevent churn, but maybe even win some new clients who come from a competitor who doesn't have that survivor package.
Brian Graf: Who isn't willing to go to bat for employees.
I think it would help. Increase loyalty and retention and also pick up some.
Stijn Hendrikse: You make this the title of the podcast, Brian, you need a survivor.
Brian Graf: The survivor package. Perfect.
One last question is more, a little bit more tactical, but would you say that in one of these more down markets, that the mix between a brand play and a more conversion based play changes, or do you think that it's basically your go-to-market engine either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't work right, you need to cut what doesn't work and double down on what does, and you need to keep that mix going.
Do you think that that changes at all or you think that it pretty much just continues on?
Stijn Hendrikse: I interpret that as driving awareness versus driving awareness and conversion. Yes, correct. And conversion in consideration, you throw those on one heap.
It's called the top of the funnel and the middle and the bottom of the funnel. I don't think you have to pick, I think there's opportunities in both. If you think of brand awareness or awareness for your product. For example, having a survivor pricing package might be a great way to gain some awareness where it was hard before.
To do that in a crowded category. In a field where everybody is bidding up the price of clicks in Google. So if you have something unique to offer that is really relevant now, it has been, it has been hard maybe for you to find some form of relative positioning to your competitors and now you have an angle to do so then awareness is a great play.
A reason to do that and then convert over to consideration and conversion, of course, you have to be able to convert all those limited number of opportunities that you get - the bets that you get. Because they're so hard to come by in a recession prone environment. And of course how you do that is not necessarily, hasn't really changed, but I don't believe it's one or the other. I do have some thoughts maybe on the type of messaging or content. The way you think about that in this environment, which both apply, I think, to driving both awareness and maybe consideration and conversion. One thought would be when you, when you do content, and I know we, we have another podcast more on like, wow, how now and parts of the funnel and what type of content you need.
But let's stick with this recession or potential recession environment. Thought leadership is gonna probably be more overrated than before. It's about doing, it's about execution. It's about how I can help you today? What can you do now to be more relevant in your organization?
So just like a survival pricing tier for a software company, maybe you wanna create survival playbooks for your audience. Survival checklist, survival best practices. For the target personas. So if you, you have great personas and you. You usually look at, Hey, what are their OKRs?
What is their job to be done? What's their emotional job to be done? How do they wanna feel when they're doing the job, the social job to be done? How do they wanna be seen by others? All those things that we typically put into doing really good personas and then build content around that. I. Now you give that an extra layer that says, Hey, do these.
We have often talked, I think about the “muscle pyramid” to use for persona and contact development. That one is now even more critical. Muscle, of course, is all about the pyramid of what people think they need. And. In this maybe a harsher economic environment the need for their job, the need for safety, security in their working environment.
It's probably bigger, more than it was before. So can your persona focus on that? Can you adjust the content that you create, the leadership content, not about thought leadership, but about how we help you survive leadership. That would be where I would go and then build lead magnets around that.
Brian Graf: Just to, to reiterate: if we go into the hierarchy of needs. The worry of am I gonna keep my job becomes very much more clear right in these down markets. And so being able to help your users out. And make sure that they are more successful, but then also going back to your earlier point.
Help them be able to sell their initiatives internally. And to help get them past blockers will be big.
Stijn Hendrikse: And then messaging, and this applies specifically for outbound, if you do a BM, accomplished marketing or prospecting. Yesterday I was doing some message coaching with someone.
And so, what we always do, we use the personas and we use LinkedIn profiles. We try to make a message for a certain individual as powerful as possible. So we use, for example, a trick that is what is their personality profile, how does this individual wants to be communicated to.
You know, Brian, I like to use DiSC. It's a simpler version of Myers-Briggs and BTI, so in DiSC, you have these four personality profiles. That is aligned with someone's communication preference. Some people have a tendency to appreciate numbers versus people who appreciate action over words or who appreciate working together, who appreciate being more communicated with in a more gentle way by being listened to doing things together. So if you figure out, and by the way, now with all the AI tools, it's super easy to do this if you just copy this. A simple trick here for the listeners, if you just copy paste someone's LinkedIn profile and a lot of the details, just the way they write their LinkedIn profile, what people say.
It's usually enough. You copy paste it into chatGPT or, or Claude for that matter or Perplexity, and you just type in “what do you think the DiSC profile of this person is?” You actually get a pretty accurate description of that. Anyway, that aside, so what's now more, if you send that outbound email.
Empathy with the person who you are sending is more important than ever. So we were actually doing this yesterday. So we had created this really beautiful email sequence that did incorporate the personality profile of this person. So we had done the DiSC analysis and this person happened to be I yellow.
It's a person who really appreciates creativity and teamwork and brainstorming and all that. Doesn't want to get to a conclusion too quickly. Doesn't necessarily care about exact numbers too much. Really wants to be allowed to work through a problem together. So we created messaging around that was all very positive.
That's also what really. They like positive messaging, et cetera. Right before the person I was coaching hung up the call, and he was going to use that messaging to create some outbound sequences. We did one last thing. We threw into ChatGPT again, on the LinkedIn profile, but now we just put the LinkedIn profile, link the URL, and we asked, Hey...
What are things that are timely for this person and the company they are working at? What is in the news these days? What are the current events to try to make the messaging a little more relevant, like up to date. You know what came out, Brian, that this person had just posted yesterday on LinkedIn that they were going to be out of a job in five days.
She had just gotten her dismissal. We didn't know that before. Now it was actually public information. She had posted, only it completely changed, of course, whether we even wanted to send this person an email, but we immediately turned it around. I said to the person I was coaching, I said, this is probably an enormous opportunity for you to show empathy, to send content that might be relevant.
This person may not be working at the company anymore that you would love to have sold to. But this person might work tomorrow at a company where you would like to, or at a company where she can introduce you to people. So there's always value in these connections. So, think about how powerful that is in a downturn.
If you can meet people who are maybe struggling right now to the point where they may be losing their jobs. If you can connect with that when you're doing, for example, outbound prospecting, I think that's very powerful.
Brian Graf: Really powerful. I like that. I like that a lot. Last question for you.
I feel like the easy lever to pull from a messaging standpoint will be to go after cost saving and efficiency. But I also feel like I am. It. By doing that, it will almost become table stakes a bit and you can, you can compete on the amount of efficiency that you can deliver and the amount of cost savings that you can deliver, but I feel like you'll need to showcase value on top of that in order to really stand out and be effective.
And of course, we're talking pretty generally right now, but does that seem to be the case for you? Do you, or do you think that like, because, because of a market slowdown, if you are, if you can lead the pack in terms of efficiency and cost savings, that's enough.
Stijn Hendrikse: I don't know. I think it all, I always answer these questions with whatever is the value that you can create, Brian.
If the value that you can create is really around cost savings, then do that. And of course you need to do it better than others. There's no way that you're gonna stand out if you're just copy pasting what everybody else does. One last thought before we wrap is that. The founder's role in being very visible is also more important than ever.
And whether that's how you make sure that you, as a founder, connect with your audience and know what value for them means. Even if it means let us help you keep your job right, and here are some tips and tricks to do that, and here's how we can help with that. But it's all about. You know, how do you create value and, and, and be authentic.
Be vulnerable. Also, maybe talk even a little bit publicly about how your company's also impacted by this. The people in your company. I think all those things go a long way when there's a lot of pressure going around for everybody. I think that's a good place for us to wrap.
Brian Graf: Thank you so much, Stijn.
I think this was a great conversation.
Stijn Hendrikse: Thank you.
Brian Graf: Thank you to Adriano Valerio for producing this episode and the Kalungi team for helping us make this whole thing work. And of course, you for choosing to spend your time with us. As a reminder, all the links we mentioned in this episode can be found in the show notes, and if you wanna submit or vote on a question you'd like us to answer, you can do that at Kalungi.com/podcast. Every time we record, we take one of the top three topics and jam on it. Thanks again.