Nobody can quite agree on what a recession even means anymore. The technical definition keeps getting argued over while everyone’s actual experience of the economy, prices, hiring, buyer behavior, has shifted so much that the old word barely describes what’s happening. Inflation didn’t just make things cost more. It reshaped how people decide to spend at all, personally and in business. Buyers today weigh a purchase differently than they did five years ago, not because they’ve become more difficult, but because the math they’re running in their heads has genuinely changed.
Here’s the problem: a lot of sellers haven’t updated their approach to match.
That’s not like being behind on a hairstyle or a hem length. Nobody loses revenue because their haircut is a few years out of date. But a sales approach that hasn’t adjusted to how buyers actually behave right now does cost you real money, quietly, every single month, whether you notice it or not.
Buyers still buy. Sellers still sell. Business hasn’t stopped. But if you want to grow your share of a market that’s genuinely behaving differently than it used to, the fix usually isn’t a dramatic overhaul. It’s a handful of small, specific shifts, applied consistently, that compound into something significant. This post is about three of them.
Small Shift One: Find the Sleeper Niche Already Hiding in Your Client List
Most professional services firms think they know their niche. Fewer have actually gone back and looked, with fresh eyes, at where their real concentration of success already lives.
A sleeper niche is a pattern in your existing client list that you haven’t consciously noticed, let alone built a strategy around. It’s the handful of clients from one specific industry, one specific company size, one specific situation, where your work has consistently landed better, closed faster, or expanded further than everywhere else. Nobody planned for that pattern. It just happened, and because nobody planned it, nobody’s been actively pursuing more of it.
Here’s how to actually find it instead of guessing:
Pull your last two to three years of closed-won clients. Not leads, not prospects, actual clients. Look for anything that repeats: industry, company size, the specific problem that brought them to you, how they found you, how fast they decided. Most firms find at least one uncomfortable pattern they’d never consciously acted on, a segment where they win more, work less to close it, and often get paid better, sitting quietly inside data they already had.
The reason this matters more right now than it used to: in an uncertain market, buyers move faster toward sellers who clearly understand their specific situation, and slower toward anyone who reads as generic. A sleeper niche, once you name it and lean into it deliberately, lets you sound like a specialist to exactly the buyers who are already primed to say yes faster, instead of continuing to market yourself as a generalist to everyone.
Small Shift Two: Recognize the Unmet Need You’ve Stopped Noticing
This one is harder, because it requires admitting that what buyers need from you today might not be exactly what they needed two or three years ago, even if your service description hasn’t changed.
Inflation and economic uncertainty change what buyers are actually trying to solve for. A service that used to be purchased for growth might now be purchased for risk reduction. A service bought for prestige might now need to justify itself on hard ROI in a way it never had to before. The underlying need shifts even when the surface-level ask sounds the same.
The unmet need is usually hiding in the gap between what prospects say they want in a first conversation and what they actually end up caring most about once they’re deep into a decision. If you’ve noticed the same objection, hesitation, or follow-up question showing up across multiple recent conversations, something you keep having to explain that you never used to have to explain, that’s usually not noise. That’s the market quietly telling you what’s changed.
The fix isn’t necessarily a new service line. Often it’s smaller: a shift in how you frame the same work, an added layer of proof or reassurance you didn’t used to need to provide, a different opening question in your first conversation that surfaces the real concern faster. Small shifts in framing, aimed at a need that’s genuinely different than it used to be, tend to outperform a completely new offering built on guesswork.
Small Shift Three: Build a Real Engagement Strategy for Dormant Prospects
This is where the pipeline problem I mentioned at the top of this post actually gets solved, not just diagnosed.
Every practice has a graveyard of prospects who went quiet. Interested at some point, real conversations happened, and then nothing. Most sellers either keep sending the same generic “just checking in” message on a loop, or quietly give up and stop reaching out entirely. Neither approach works, and in a market where buyers are more cynical and less loyal than they used to be, doing nothing is a more expensive mistake than it used to be.
A real engagement strategy for dormant prospects looks different from both of those defaults:
Segment your dormant list by why they actually went quiet, not just how long it’s been. Some went quiet because timing was wrong. Some went quiet because a real objection never got resolved. Some went quiet because the person you were talking to lost internal buy-in. Each of those needs a completely different message, not the same “wanted to follow up” line sent to all of them.
Bring something new to the reconnection, not just a reminder that you exist. A relevant shift in the market, a new proof point, a direct acknowledgment of the specific reason you think they went quiet. The goal of the message isn’t to sound persistent. It’s to give them an actual reason to re-engage that wasn’t there the last time you talked.
Set a real cadence and a real endpoint. Dormant doesn’t have to mean permanently ignored, but it also shouldn’t mean an indefinite, undefined string of check-ins. Decide how many attempts, spaced how far apart, using what specific angle each time, and then actually follow the plan instead of reaching out only when you happen to think of it.
Why This Matters More Than It Used To
None of these three shifts are complicated on their own. What’s changed is the cost of skipping them. In a market where buyer behavior has genuinely shifted, and a lot of your competitors haven’t adjusted their approach to match, the sellers who make these small corrections are going to take share from the ones who don’t, not because they’re working harder, but because they’re working accurately.
I’ve been teaching some version of this for over a decade, first inside a client’s business back in 2012, again in a very different economy in 2021, and now again here in 2026 because the pattern keeps resurfacing in a new form every time buyer behavior shifts underneath sellers who haven’t caught up yet.
If you want to actually walk through your own client list, your own unmet need, and your own dormant pipeline instead of doing this analysis alone, that’s exactly the kind of conversation worth having directly.
[Grab a spot on my calendar →]
This is the first post in a short series running this month. Next week: how to actually tell whether a prospect is still alive in your pipeline or just smoke you’ve been mistaking for fire.
