A Drop in Demand Isn't a Market Problem—It's a Business Model Problem
When an entrepreneur says, "demand is dropping," they almost always mean one of four distinct things. And each requires a different remedy.
Four situations described by one term
First: You have clients, but they are paying less. Your average ticket has decreased, while purchase frequency and client touchpoints remain the same. This means the client’s budget has tightened, and your position among their expenses is no longer a priority.
Second: There are fewer clients, but those who remain are paying the same as before. This means your value proposition is working, but the top of your funnel has dried up. Perhaps your acquisition channels have shifted, or demand has dropped within a specific segment.
Third: The number of clients and the ticket sizes are the same, but the sales cycle has lengthened. Deals that used to close in two weeks now take two months. This means the client is deferring the decision—essentially, your product has become "non-urgent."
Fourth: A specific segment has dropped off. For example, corporate clients stopped buying, while small businesses continue to buy as usual—or vice versa.
Before making any changes, look at your numbers over the last 12 months, broken down by: average ticket, number of deals, sales cycle, and client structure by segment. One of these metrics will have declined more than the others. Start there. The most common mistake is trying to "fix everything at once" instead of identifying exactly what isn't working.
Solution 1. Reposition your product in the client's wallet, don't just cut the price
The most common mistake when demand drops is lowering prices. This might work for a quarter or two, but then margins collapse, and the client gets used to the new price and won't go back.
What I see in growing companies looks different. They don’t lower their price—they change their product’s position in the client’s budget. If their service was previously seen as an "expense to be cut first during a crisis," they repackage it as an "expense that allows you to cut other costs."
A real-world example: In 2025, a corporate training studio sold sales workshops as "team development." In Q1 2026, clients started canceling en masse: "We don't have time for development; we need to survive." The studio repackaged the same product as a "revenue retention tool for the crisis": the exact same training, but with a focus on handling objections and customer retention, rather than "unlocking potential." The price remained the same. The budget the purchase came from changed. Revenue recovered.
This isn't a marketing gimmick. It’s changing the answer to the question, "Why do I need this right now?" If your product currently looks like a "nice-to-have," people will stop buying it. If it looks like "something we'll lose more without," they will buy it even during a crisis.
The question you should ask yourself is: what is my client cutting first in a crisis, and how can my product help them cut that, rather than being the target of the cuts?
Solution 2. Reduce the breadth of your offering and go deeper
The Paradox: In a crisis, most entrepreneurs expand their product line. “Since people aren’t buying our core offering, let’s try this and that.” In reality, this dilutes your focus, confuses the customer, increases operational costs, and yields no results.
Growth-oriented companies tend to do the opposite during a crisis. They narrow their offering to what sells best and double down on that specific niche.
Example: A B2B agency that provided “turnkey marketing” (SEO, content, PPC, targeted ads, SMM) with 60 million ₽ in revenue and an 18% pre-crisis margin. By the end of 2025, revenue dropped by 25% and margins fell to 9%. An analysis showed that 70% of the money came from SEO for one specific niche: medical clinics. The decision: they shuttered SMM and targeted ads, leaving only SEO + content for medical clinics. Six months later, revenue recovered to 50 million ₽ (still lower than the original 60), but margins grew to 28%. Most importantly, the flow of inbound leads tripled because the company became the “best in the niche” rather than “one of a dozen marketing firms.”
The Lesson: In a crisis, the market doesn't value generalists. A client pays for the certainty that you will solve their specific problem. A generic offer is perceived as “they seem to know how to do something, but I’m not sure they can do my thing.”
If you currently have 8–10 services or products, look at which three generate 80% of your margin. The rest is operational noise that must be the first thing you cut during a crisis.
Solution 3. Shift from one-off sales to subscriptions or retainers
Businesses that rely entirely on one-off transactions lose money the fastest during a crisis. Every month, you have to acquire customers from scratch, and every month the sales cycle grows longer than the last.
A business with a subscription model or long-term retainer model loses money more slowly because a portion of the revenue arrives "by inertia." Clients who are already paying continue to pay for several months, even if they stop making new purchases. This buys you time to pivot.
This isn't new knowledge, but it is applied in strange ways. Subscriptions are usually built from scratch as a separate product, which takes a long time. It is much faster to repackage an existing product into a recurring format.
A concrete example: a law practice that sold one-off consultations to small businesses. Revenue was volatile and dropped by half in early 2026. The solution: they repackaged those same consultations into a "remote lawyer" subscription for 35,000 ₽ per month—this included up to 10 hours of consultations per month plus legal review of any contract within 48 hours. Within three months, they migrated 40% of their client base to the subscription. Revenue stabilized because they gained predictable MRR.
What’s important: don't try to build a "true subscription" like a SaaS company. For service businesses, a simple logic is enough—the client pays a fixed monthly amount for a package of what you were already doing. Build in a small discount relative to the one-off price, because you are selling predictability, not a markdown.
Solution 4. Restructure your sales department for retention, not acquisition
In companies where revenue is declining, the typical reaction is to hire more salespeople to "chase new leads." This rarely works because the problem is usually not a lack of leads, but the fact that the existing client base is underutilized.
A simple calculation: On average, in B2B, a client makes 2–3 transactions per year. In a crisis, this number drops to 1–1.5. This means that half of the revenue from existing clients disappeared not because they stopped buying, but because they started buying less frequently. If you restore their frequency to at least 2 transactions per year, revenue will bounce back without a single new client.
Practical steps: Look at your client base over the last 24 months. Identify clients who bought in 2024 but haven't purchased in 2025. These are "dormant" clients—the most undervalued revenue resource during a crisis. They already know you, you don't need to convince them from scratch, and the cost of "reactivating" them is significantly lower than the cost of acquiring a new client.
Most SMB entrepreneurs have more dormant clients than active ones. And almost no one works with them systematically. A simple outreach campaign—offering an "updated version" of your service tailored to the current situation or a consultation on "how we can be useful right now"—often brings back 15–25% of the base.
Solution 5. Stop selling what the client wants and start selling what they need
This is the most nuanced and counterintuitive solution. During a crisis, clients often don’t know what they need themselves. They say, "we need a lower price," "we need to wait," or "this isn't our priority right now." If you sell literally based on their requests, you’ll end up slashing prices, losing deals, and shutting down your business.
What successful entrepreneurs do: they retrain their sales teams to ask different questions. Not "what do you need," but "what is currently not working in your business?" From that problem, they position their product as part of the solution.
A concrete example: A manufacturer of catering equipment. In 2026, clients were collectively saying, "it’s not the right time, we’re cutting costs, let’s wait for better times." The sales team's standard reaction was to agree and wait. The new strategy: instead of talking about equipment, talk about the restaurant's revenue. "How much equipment downtime do you have per day?", "how much time is the chef losing on a single task?", "what is the prime cost of Dish A, and what is the energy share within it?" These conversations led to a calculation: the new equipment pays for itself in 8–14 months through cost savings. Half of the clients who said "it’s not the right time" ended up buying—because they were shown that waiting was actually costing them a fortune.
This isn't manipulation. It’s a shift in the salesperson's stance: they aren't "pushing equipment," they are helping to break down the client's business economics. From this position, selling during a crisis is actually easier than in prosperous times—because in a crisis, the problem becomes acute, and people are willing to pay for a solution.
What ties these five solutions together
If you look at them as a whole, a common logic emerges. They aren’t about “attracting more customers amidst falling demand.” They are about repositioning yourself in the customer’s reality. It’s not “how do I sell more when people are buying less,” but “how do I stop selling what people are buying less of and start selling what is actually needed in this reality.”
This is the difference between entrepreneurs who lose 30% during a crisis and those who grow by 20% in the exact same market. The former keep doing what they did pre-crisis, just with a “cheaper prices and more ads” adjustment. The latter ask a different question: what has actually changed in my customer’s life, and where does my product fit into this new life?
Quarterly Checklist
In order of priority.
First — analyze your revenue from the last 12 months, broken down by average ticket size, transaction volume, sales cycle, and customer segments. Identify which of these metrics took the hardest hit. That is your real diagnosis, not just “a drop in demand.”
Second — look at your product through the eyes of the customer in their new reality. Is it still just a “nice-to-have,” or will its purchase actually pay for itself during a crisis? If it’s the former, repackage your value proposition.
Third — trim your product line. Identify the three products that generate 80% of your margins. Everything else is a candidate for elimination.
Fourth — calculate how many “dormant” customers you have who bought from you 12–24 months ago but haven’t purchased recently. Launch a reactivation campaign for them before you start any new lead gen.
Fifth—retrain your sales team to stop talking to clients about your product and start talking about their business. This requires practice and will change your pipeline slowly, but it is the most sustainable of all changes.
Sixth—if all your revenue consists of one-off deals, look at what can be repackaged into a subscription or ongoing support. Any fixed recurring revenue is worth its weight in gold during a crisis.
Key Takeaways
The drop in demand in 2026 is the reality in which all Russian SMEs operate. But the "everyone is struggling, let's wait for things to get better" reaction is the mindset of a victim, not an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is someone who, in any reality, asks, "What can I do differently to make money here and now?"
All five solutions above are about one thing: how to stop blaming the market and start looking at your business model. Most companies complaining about falling demand today find, upon honest analysis, that it isn't "demand falling"—it's that their product stopped solving the client's problem in their new reality. And once that becomes visible, the situation stops being a catastrophe and becomes a task.
A solvable task. Not in a month, and not with one grand gesture, but it is solvable. I have seen dozens of companies in this session go from "revenue down 30% and no idea what to do" to "revenue up 10% and a clear strategy" within 6–9 months. And in not one of those cases was the solution to "wait for the market to improve."
If you’re currently facing a revenue slump and want to discuss your model with an active entrepreneur who has successfully navigated a drop in demand in their own niche, apply for a free 40-minute consultation at unimentors.ru. We’ll match you with a practitioner mentor tailored to your industry and business stage.
Sources used in preparation:
- RSPP survey: "The state of the Russian economy and company performance," April 2026 (Izvestia)
- Vedomosti: "Businesses report a decline in consumer demand in Q1," May 2026
- Forbes Russia: "Three-quarters of entrepreneurs report a significant deterioration in business conditions," March 2026
- OPORA RUSSIA survey on the consequences of the 2026 tax reform (3,500 respondents across 86 regions), March 2026
- Unimentors practice cases — anonymized examples from platform clients for the period of January–April 2026