How to sell during economic uncertainty without cutting your marketing budget

By Accelity’s CEO and founder, Jackie Hermes, who has spent 20 years building the sales and marketing systems growth-stage companies rely on to turn pipeline into revenue.

Summary: Uncertainty doesn’t stop people from buying. It makes them slower and pickier about who they trust, and the businesses that keep closing deals are the ones that stay visible instead of going quiet. This guide covers:A four-step framework for earning a nervous buyer’s trust and keeping deals moving.Questions to help you decide what to cut, protect or change in your own marketing budget.Current data on how much brand trust weighs in a purchase decision right now.

I wrote an early version of this post back in 2013, when a government shutdown and the still-new Affordable Care Act had every business owner I talked to bracing for the worst. 

More than a decade later, the headlines have changed, but the pattern hasn’t. Last fall’s government shutdown ran 43 days, the longest in U.S. history, and by the time it ended in November 2025, plenty of business owners had already put spending decisions on hold. Add tariff uncertainty and a wave of internal budget scrutiny, and it’s no surprise that WARC’s Voice of the Marketer report found 42% of marketers expect their 2026 budgets to shrink, up from just 22% a year earlier.

If you’re running a growing company, you feel this before you see it in any report. Prospects go quiet. Deals that looked closed slip to “next quarter.” Meanwhile, your team still has a number to hit, and “everyone’s nervous” has never been an acceptable answer to a board, an investor or yourself.

This guide answers the questions I hear most from founders and CEOs when things get shaky: how to keep buyers moving, and what to actually do with your own marketing budget while you wait things out.

How do you encourage purchase when buyers are uncertain?

You encourage purchase when buyers are uncertain by staying visible, naming the uncertainty honestly and letting proof do the convincing—not by pushing harder. 

Uncertainty doesn’t stop people from buying. It just makes them slower and more selective about who they trust. The businesses that keep closing deals during shaky stretches are the ones who understand that consistency matters more than shouting louder.

Is the economic uncertainty in 2026 different from past downturns?

I’ve watched a version of this play out a few times now, and the fear response looks the same every time, even when the cause doesn’t.

I graduated college in 2008, the year the bottom fell out of the economy. I was working at GE at the time, trying to climb the ladder and build new internal programs. Then the hiring freeze hit. I left, bounced through a couple of rough jobs and watched everyone around me stay where they were out of fear.

Twelve years later, COVID caused another once-in-a-generation slump. Accelity lost 40% of our business almost overnight while we were still a young company. After six years of ups and downs, CEOs are constantly watching every headline and tightening their belts before anyone’s fully sure how bad things will actually get.

Here’s the part I find interesting: some economists have pointed out that business leaders are talking about a downturn louder and earlier than usual this time, and changing their spending and hiring because of it. 

I’m not an economist. But after watching this pattern up close more than once, I believe a leader’s fear of a downturn can shape their decisions just as much as the downturn itself, sometimes before anyone’s confirmed there’s a downturn at all. That’s exactly why how you respond matters as much as what’s actually happening in the economy.

Why do buyers freeze when things feel uncertain?

Confusion erodes trust faster than almost anything else, making the sales process move a lot slower. Uncertain events—whether it’s a shutdown, a tariff announcement or a recession warning—are genuinely hard to follow. They get spun differently depending on the source, then passed from person to person like a game of telephone until almost no one has the full picture. That confusion doesn’t build trust: not person to person, not person to business and not person to government.

When trust drops, so does anyone’s willingness to spend money on something that feels optional or risky, even if your product or service is neither. That’s the real obstacle you’re up against right now. It’s rarely that your offer got worse. It’s that the ground underneath your buyer feels less stable, so they’re being more careful about where they plant their next dollar.

How do you get nervous buyers to purchase anyway?

Winning back a hesitant buyer comes down to the same four moves every time:

1. Become the expert they turn to first.
2. Name what’s happening instead of dancing around it.
3. Prove your value instead of just asserting it.
4. Stay patient instead of pushy.

Here’s what each one looks like in practice.

1. Become the expert your buyer turns to

Do the specific research your buyer hasn’t had time to do themselves, then publish it somewhere they can actually find it If a prospect wants to delay a purchase because of tariffs, budget freezes or a shutdown they read about, the only way to change their mind is to understand why it worries them in the first place. That means doing real research into your specific buyer’s pain point, not just skimming headlines about the topic everyone’s talking about.

A few steps to put this into practice:

• Read primary sources, not just hot takes. A CBO estimate or an industry report will tell you more than a pundit’s reaction to it.
• Translate the complicated version. Demystify what’s going on and how it impacts your industry into something your buyer can actually use in their own decision-making.
• Publish what you learn. Put your findings somewhere your prospects, and increasingly, the AI tools they’re using to research vendors, can find it. Being genuinely useful and specific is what earns you a place in those answers. We wrote about how that works in how to show up in AI answers.

Do this well and you stop looking like a company trying to make a sale. You start looking like the partner who actually understands what your buyer is dealing with.

2. Address the elephant in the room with buyers

I’ve heard sales and marketing teams avoid naming the uncertainty in the room for years, worried that bringing it up will scare a buyer who wasn’t already thinking about it.

That’s backwards. Acknowledging what’s happening is the first step to earning trust, not losing it. Tell your prospect plainly that you understand why a shutdown, a tariff or a shaky earnings call might make them hesitant, and then show them the path forward anyway. You’re building a long-term partnership regardless of whether they buy this month or next quarter, and saying so out loud proves it.

3. Prove your value with content marketing

More than ever, because trust has become a purchase criterion in its own right, not just a nice-to-have. Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer found that trusting a brand is now as important to a purchase decision as quality or value, with 88% of people calling it an important or critical factor.

That’s exactly why case studies, real client results and specific data matter more when budgets tighten, not less. Show your work. If you haven’t looked at how to structure that proof lately, our guide on how to craft a case study that converts walks through it.

4. Stay calm when buyers hesitate

Pressure is the fastest way to lose a nervous buyer for good. When budgets tighten, I watch sales and marketing leaders panic into what I call spray and pray: blasting outbound messages at everyone they can find, hoping volume makes up for a shaky pitch. It rarely works, and it tends to annoy the exact buyers you’re trying to win over. 

If there’s ever a bad time to push a hesitant buyer, it’s when they’re already nervous about spending money. Stay patient, stay useful and let the relationship do the work the pitch can’t.

Should you cut your marketing budget during a downturn?

Not across the board, and not without a plan. It’s not just your buyers who get nervous. If you’re the one holding the marketing budget, you’re probably getting pressure from above to prove it’s worth keeping. 

Here’s what I tell founders and CEOs who call me panicking about their own spend.

Listen to the full episode of The Art of Entrepreneurship where Jackie breaks down the dos and don’ts → 

Will spending more on ads fix a slow pipeline?

No, and it usually just makes the problem more expensive. I’ve talked to plenty of companies spending $30,000 a month or more on ads, pointing that traffic at a website with confusing messaging, no thought leadership, dead-end pages and a 12-field form just to request a demo. Ads can’t fix a broken funnel. If your website and content aren’t doing their job, more paid traffic just means more people bouncing off it faster.

What marketing investments still pay off when times are tight?

The ones that compound: your web presence, your consistency on social, your team’s skills and your sales and marketing strategy. I know it’s hard to keep spending on things that don’t pay off immediately when you’re scared. But cut all of it now, and you don’t avoid the pain. You just move it later, when you’ll have less momentum to work with.

Can one person run your whole marketing function?

No, not well, and asking them to try usually costs you the person and the results. There’s no unicorn hire who’s equally great at brand, content, demand gen, sales enablement and analytics. Handing all of that to one person without the budget or support to do it is a fast way to burn them out, and then you’re right back where you started—minus the money you spent on their salary.

Should you hire in-house or outsource marketing right now?

Either can work, but outsourcing specific functions is often the lower-risk way to keep moving while your budget is uncertain. If building a full internal team feels too risky right now, that’s a reasonable call. Outsourcing gets you moving without a long-term headcount commitment, and you can bring pieces in-house as budget allows. Yes, I run an outsourced marketing agency, so take that with whatever grain of salt you’d like. It doesn’t make it less true.

What happens if you cut your team but keep the same growth goals?

You end up with the same expectations and half the capacity to meet them, which is worse than adjusting the goals honestly. Ditching your growth plans out of fear is one mistake. Keeping the same growth plans while cutting your team, or replacing experienced people with cheaper, less experienced ones, and expecting the same results is a bigger one. 

Junior talent can absolutely grow into the role; most of the best marketers I know did exactly that. Just make sure what you expect from the team matches what you’re actually giving them to work with.

How do you know what to cut and what to keep?

By measuring every program well enough to know which ones are actually driving pipeline before you touch the budget. 

This is the simplest idea on this list and the one companies skip most often. I’ve seen marketing programs running ten different tactics at once without measuring a single one of them, then getting gutted because leadership decided it “wasn’t working.” What, specifically, wasn’t working? You can’t make a good budget decision without knowing which piece is actually driving pipeline and which one is dead weight.

We wrote more about why the wrong things usually get cut first in this post; it’s worth a read before your next budget meeting.

How long do downturns like this actually last?

Long enough to hurt, and short enough that the companies who kept showing up outlast them. I’ve now lived through this pattern more than once: 2008, COVID and whatever we end up calling this one. The specifics change every time. The fundamentals don’t: stay visible, tell the truth about what’s happening, prove your value with real evidence and give people room to move at a reasonable pace instead of a panicked one.

Companies that kept showing up through uncertain stretches, honestly and usefully, are the ones still standing on the other side with a stronger pipeline than when it started. I’m still here. Yours can be too.

If your pipeline has gone quiet and you want a second opinion on what’s actually stalling it, talk with our team about building a marketing and sales system that holds up no matter what the headlines do next.