Three-step go-to-market plan for a tighter SaaS market

Executive overview

When budgets tighten, buyers stop spending on nice-to-haves and cut to essentials. SaaS founders who position as a painkiller — not a vitamin — keep winning regardless of macro conditions.

The framework has three components: your ideal customer profile (ICP), your manifesto (strategic narrative), and your Broadway show (marketing and sales execution). Each must be stress-tested against one question: is this mission critical, urgent, and important?

Position as the painkiller your best customers can't cut, not the vitamin they tolerate.

Revamping the ideal customer profile

• Segment your ICP by which customers treat your product as mission critical vs. optional.
• Customers who churn quickly or go out of business signal a "nice to have" fit — not a viable segment.
• In a downturn, small startups have high mortality; prioritise segments with stable budgets.
• Identify which part of your market will survive and for whom you are genuinely essential.
• Do a gut check: are you actually mission critical to them, or just claiming to be?
• The ICP choice determines everything — wrong market means no budget regardless of product quality.

Building a manifesto

• The manifesto is your value proposition, positioning, and messaging rolled into one central narrative.
• Every outbound email, LinkedIn post, ad, and sales deck should carry a consistent strategic message.
• Frame your product around the transformation it delivers, not its features.
• Apply the urgent-and-important test: buyers will spend on problems that are both — not one or the other.
• If the problem is important but not urgent, they won't buy now; both dimensions must be present.
• Communicate: what the problem is, why it's urgent and important, and how your solution solves it.

Running the Broadway show

• The Broadway show is a consistent set of marketing and sales activities that bring your manifesto to your ICP.
• Focus spend on channels with measurable ROI; cut underperforming channels and low-closing reps.
• Double down on what is already working — organic channels with clear pipeline attribution come first.
• Apply the same mission-critical filter to your own spend that your buyers apply to theirs.
• If you are early and lack data, pick the highest-probability channels rather than spreading thin.
• Efficiency and profitability per channel are the metrics that matter in a constrained environment.