Winter Is Coming

A CEO and CMO Guide to Seizing Share While Others Freeze.

Autumn is here. Winter is coming. And if you’re sitting on cash and trust, it’s not a threat — it’s a once-in-a-cycle opportunity.

Many companies are freezing as we speak. They’re delaying decisions, reducing headcount, and cutting marketing. On paper, they’ll look smart. In reality, they’re ceding opportunity to you. If you choose to take it.

Markets don’t vanish in a downturn, but they do change hands. If you’ve got capital and customer loyalty, this is your moment to capture what others are abandoning.

When the moment comes, you'll know it. For me it was October 1, 2008. I was running product marketing for a $500M subscription business at Dun & Bradstreet. As the starting bell for Q4 hit, our entire customer base seized. Clients were laying off teams, freezing spend, and asking for help staying solvent. My phone rang off the hook from Sales Leaders who needed help. In this market, the vendors that won weren’t the ones who sold harder. They were the ones who showed up, stayed flexible, and helped customers survive the storm.

That downturn didn’t kill the market. It reshaped it, moving share from the timid to the strategic.

We’re in that moment again.

Not a collapse — a compression. Supply chains are fragile. Input costs are sticky. Sales cycles are dragging. Even Salesforce flagged “increased deal inspection” in Q1 (Source: Earnings Call).

Most revenue teams are about to make the same mistake: follow the crowd. Cut spend. Delay brand. Wait it out. And on paper, they’ll be right. Executive comp plans and CMO tenures point in one direction — toward caution, toward cuts, toward this quarter’s number. Good old American Short-termism guarantees that your competitors will fold under pressure, leaving the door open for private companies with happy customers to seize the day.

And that’s what makes this a transfer moment. If your company has happy customers, strong cash flow, and a healthy balance sheet, now is the time to go on offense — because your competitors won’t.

These aren’t just survival tactics — they’re designed to create separation while others tread water.

Move 1: Protect Your Core Accounts Like a Partner, Not a Vendor

Your customer’s business may have declined. Their usage is probably down. That’s real, and you can’t will them back into growth. But you can make sure they still get value.

Your job is to sit on their side of the table and help them win anyway. Start by asking: What’s changed? Where are they under pressure? What can your product still do that moves the needle? Then rebuild the value equation:

• Reset ROI expectations based on lower usage

• Expand access to features or tools with no marginal cost to you

• Introduce integrations that help offset lost headcount

• Deliver benchmarks that help them defend your spend internally

Don’t reach for a discount. Reach for leverage. Help them stretch what they’ve kept and deliver more value under the existing contract.

Then make that value visible — in slides, in dashboards, in board decks. Quiet value gets cut first.

Finally: go public with your partnership. Co-market success. Share wins. Show the market what helping looks like.

“You can’t will your customers to survive. But you can help them last longer. And when they land somewhere else, they’ll remember who stood with them.”

Move 2: Buy Brand While It’s Cheap

When others go quiet, stay visible. When others pull back, move up the list.

If you’ve got cash and operational headroom, now’s the time to trade growth for position. Shift your focus from topline expansion to voice dominance and brand authority — while everyone else is whispering.

The data is clear:

• B2B brands that invested to maintain 8% or more extra share of voice during the downturn were nearly four times more likely to deliver major profit growth coming out of it (source: LinkedIn — 5 Principles of Growth). This wasn’t a brand tax — it was a profit multiplier. While others went dark, they absorbed mindshare that doesn’t revert once the market recovers. Attention gained during scarcity becomes market share during recovery.

• The penalty for silence is steep. Brands that pulled back completely saw a 24% decline in brand usage and a 28% erosion in brand perception — in just six months (source: Institutes for Practitioners in Marketing). Not because they did anything wrong — but because they disappeared. In a downturn, presence becomes proof. And absence becomes risk.

This is the moment most companies flinch. They pause hiring. They pull back from brand. They wait. And they open the door for you. Make brand your voice of proof. Highlight customer wins. Celebrate resilience.

Become the name buyers remember when they unfreeze budgets.

Move 3: Pressure-Test the Revenue You’re Building On

Every dollar on your bookings report isn’t real. Not until it clears. And right now, some of that revenue is at real risk, even if your topline says otherwise.

At AlphaPoint, in 2019, 50 percent of our revenue — $9 million of $18 million — sat in receivables. That was six months of earned revenue, waiting to be paid. Crypto winter hit, and our customers were burning cash and stretching payables. By the time we saw the exposure, it was too late. Teams had been hired, servers had been purchased, and expenses were real. There was no other option but to cut.

Same story at LivePerson in Q4 2000. The dot-com collapse hit. Customers stopped paying. Not one at a time, but all at once.

You want to help your customers survive. You should. But you also need to know who can’t — and plan accordingly. If Finance isn’t surfacing the weak spots, you’ll end up deploying sales and support against revenue you’ll never see.

What to do now — put your CFO to work:

• Ask Finance to segment receivables by risk: funding stage, burn, pay history, and customer concentration

• Watch for slippage: Net 30 turning into Net 60, slow replies, increased support requests

• Prioritize cash-positive accounts with expansion potential

• Reduce exposure to accounts unlikely to pay, not out of coldness, but out of clarity

This isn’t about pulling away. It’s about knowing who you can help — and who you're quietly subsidizing.

Move 4: Reposition Your Messaging Around Operational Pain

Your buyers are under pressure with smaller teams and workloads that haven’t shrunk. And nobody’s waiting for procurement to catch up.

Your existing product may already be what they need, but only if you position it that way. This is less about ROI and more about relief. Can you help them ship the project? Hit the deadline? Cover for two fewer people?

Your messaging should speak directly to that pressure. Drop the high-level value props. Lead with real-world leverage:

• “How teams are finishing Q4 with 30% less headcount”

• “What happens when your platform replaces two tools and three meetings”

• “No hire? No problem. Here’s how we’re helping teams stay on track with 60% of last year’s headcount”

Talk like you're standing in the war room with them. Not across the table trying to close a deal.

Move 5: in Front of Your Client’s CFO Before the Red Pen Comes Out

In most SaaS companies, 20% of customers drive 80% of revenue. Those are your strategic accounts. But here's the flip side: if those contracts are meaningful to you, there's a good chance they're also meaningful to your customers — and that makes you a line item worth cutting.

Your $250K contract might pay for two other tools. If the CFO is looking for savings, you're not a minor expense. You're an opportunity.

At D&B in 2008, we made this mistake. We were trusted by senior Credit Risk leaders at some of the world’s biggest firms. But when the budget knife came out, we weren’t protected. We weren’t on the CFO’s list of critical vendors. So we got cut — fast and deep.

This time, be ready. For your top 20% accounts, treat contract defense like revenue generation. That means:

• Executive conversations between your senior team and theirs before the renewal comes up

• A one-slide business case that your Client's CFO can understand and defend

• A clear, documented economic story that frames your value as essential, not optional

Examples by contract size:

• $25K Annual Contract “Cut manual work by 78%, freeing 15 hours/week for revenue-generating activity worth $180K/year.” “Eliminated $95K in compliance penalties. Audit prep dropped from 3 weeks to 2 days.”

• $120K Annual Contract “Increased close rate 43%. Shortened sales cycle by 28 days. +$940K in new revenue.” “Reduced churn 31%. Grew ACV by $18K/client. Net: +$1.4M ARR.”

• $250K Annual Contract “Cut supply chain costs by $1.2M. Improved delivery times 35%. 480% ROI in year one.”

Don’t wait for procurement to ask. Show up first, with numbers that hold. You’re not just defending a renewal. You’re defending your own place on their P&L.

Move 6: Get the Plan Resourced and Funded

The first five moves are strategically sound, but they don’t execute themselves. They require budget, buy-in, and alignment at the executive level.

That means walking into the room with a case the CFO can defend, the CEO can prioritize, and the board can back.

Lead with economics, not vision. For each move, map the investment to a business outcome that matters now: cost takeout, cash flow preservation, revenue quality, efficiency, or retention. Don’t sell an idea. Sell the impact.

Use this framing to align the team:

• Move 1 – Defend Core Accounts: Fund as a revenue defense initiative, preserving high-margin renewals by making accounts stickier at no added cost.

• Move 2 – Buy Brand While It’s Cheap: Frame as a long-term CAC reduction play, winning share of voice now to lower future acquisition costs and improve close rates.

• Move 3 – Pressure-Test Revenue Quality: Treat as a risk reduction move, reallocating attention away from revenue you’ll never collect to reinforce cash flow and forecast integrity.

• Move 4 – Reposition Messaging Around Operational Pain: Position as a conversion efficiency play, improving win rates with the same GTM budget by aligning to urgent buyer realities.

• Move 5 – Get in Front of the CFO: Justify as a strategic account protection measure, preventing silent churn among your highest-value customers by reinforcing their internal business case for keeping you.

The test: If the CFO wouldn’t sign the check, it’s not ready. If the CEO can’t repeat it in one sentence, it’s not clear. If the board can’t connect it to an outcome, it’s not fundable.

Clean up the argument, lead with math, then go get the resources.

What the Market Will Remember

This isn’t about optimism. It’s about realism. The next 18 months will shake out the timid. The ones who act now will be the companies remembered when budgets unfreeze.

And if you wait to act until the storm passes, don’t be surprised if someone else owns the shore when you get there.

The market won’t remember who flinched. But your customers will remember who showed up.