YouSaid · the spoken record

Sahil Mansuri

lines on the record: 100
first: 2022-12-04
most recent: 2022-12-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And more of a value added advisor that can help you actually plan and prepare for what to do next. I think most companies are not good at it. You know, they put out a white paper for lead gen. I want to put out a white paper for customer retention. One thing that we're actually doing is we're basically saying to all of our clients, hey, we'll tell you what percentage of companies that look like you are hiring or not hiring. I'll tell you how they're adjusting quotas. I'll tell you how they are changing their comp plans. I'll tell you how much they're paying. I'll tell you what percentage of their sales team is hitting quota, et cetera, if you stick around with us as a client. So now you're not just, I'm not just like placing sales reps. We make our business as a recruiting marketplace. So we help companies hire sales people. Obviously, that slowed down tremendously because people are scared to hire and spend money right now. But if they're getting insights on what's happening in the market, that's still valid.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Example, let's take something like an analytics product. Let's pick on amplitude or mixed panel or pick your favorite. If I was a company like that and I was like, okay, don't know how many new customers are maybe able to sell, but I've got a lot of really good customers I want to keep, I would invest a tremendous amount of energy into helping product managers and product leaders get benchmarks and stats on how other product teams or like what changes they're making. Because the advantage you have as a vendor, this advantage we have in sales as bravado, but the advantage that every vendor has, is you get a cross section of what everyone who fits a certain ICP is doing at the same time. How good are you at extracting value out of that and finding ways of becoming less of a tool as part of the SaaS stack?”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's bad advice. I can't predict the future any more than anyone else can, but I can tell you it's what we're doing. I can tell you, like, I'm actually doing it. We're taking our best people and are moving them into CSM and Bravado. We're trying to maintain every customer we have. Because I believe that doing so sets us up for the best chance of success in the business. Maybe you disagree with that and you think that that's not right for you. You should do what's right for your business. But I would say that, you know, it's not just talk. It's action. You know, like I'm doing it. I'm also telling every one of my portfolio. I do a decent amount of angel investing. I'm telling everyone of my portfolio companies to do the same thing, discussing the same thing with our investors and with our board as well. And then let's talk about how to like, okay, so you put your best people on it. What else should you do? So I think that what often goes underserved is the opportunity to help your customers themselves survive. So let's take a, I don't know, what's a good product?”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would take your best account executives pre-sales reps, and I'd put them into CSM. And I'd say, it doesn't matter how much you do business, we work on the next six to nine months because it's going to be hard anyway. But what we cannot under any circumstances do is lose our existing customers because replacing them is going to be impossible. So it's kind of like, you know, you got your leaky bucket. You got to like patch that leak really, really fast and really hard. And I think putting your best people on it is one good way to start. Now, there's a lot of people who are going to listen to this and think that's crazy. Like, why would I take my best performer in a tough market and move them to post-sale? Like, this is bad advice.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell most sales orgs are divided. Typically, you put your best people in pre sales because it's harder. It's harder to sell a new customer than retain the one you have. That's always the case because you got to actually be able to build trust, build the relationship, evangelize something that they haven't bought before. So you typically take your best talent and put it in pre-sales, and then you take the people who are really good relationship builders and really carrying and nurturing and not necessarily the people who are the most gifted at creating value or whatnot and you put them in CSM. That's obviously a huge generalization because I know many CSMs were much better at sales than new business.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You sorry, sorry. I should have too jargony. Thank you. So typically, most sales orgs are divided into pre sales and post sales. Pre-sales worked with companies that are not yet customers to get them to sign up. Post sales worked with companies that have already signed up to help them either find value or retain or renew or upsell.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Section is for you because What you should be doing. Here's, I will tell you the most dramatic thing you could do, and then we can kind of work backwards. Take your best salespeople and make them CSMs. There's no point. There's no point in having your best salespeople sell. Well, what's the point? People aren't going to buy anyway. I mean, and if they do, they're going to buy in onesie twosies, not these big enterprise deals. I'm always going to sign these big accounts right now. Who in tech today is like, wow, I can't wait to sign a multi-year contract with a new vendor we've never tried, right? Nobody's doing if people are signing things, they're signing for three month pilots or kind of like, you know, all sorts. I mean, the deal sizes are coming down, et cetera. I mean, this is all very common. Make your best salespeople CSMs and be like, your job is to make sure that all these great customers we have never, ever, ever leave.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To spend the money. I actually like the thing, but I'm not going to buy it, which means the same thing for you as a business, which is that you're not picking any money. In a world in which you can't sell to new customers, your only hope is to keep the ones you got for long enough to survive, and then hopefully even maybe be able to upsell and cross-sell those customers into new products, as well as potentially leverage those customers to get warm intros into a potential new business. So first, let's psychologically, when times are tough, people hoard. People keep their things closed. people trust the safety of those they know versus those they don't this is basic human psychology right and so given that that's the case if you're a company that doesn't have a lot of customers and you're trying to go out to market and sell your product or that you're in a lot of trouble if you are a company that has a large customer base and you've done a shitty job of engaging retaining maintaining relationships with them and prioritize top of line growth this is your alert this”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's start here, which is cold, call, cold email response rates have never been lower. Never been lower. And I think you're seeing this across every sales team again. If you're listening to this and you have a sales team, you know what I'm saying is true. And top of funnel pipeline is drying fast, faster than our planet's drying up, in fact. And enterprise sales cycles are you just getting longer. You know, we are lucky to have a couple of investors who have really, really broad exposure to the tech market, you know, everything from really large public IPOs all down to small startups. And in conversations with them, they've been really clear that they're seeing this incredible, like, you know, the average enterprise sales cycle was 62 days. It's not like 115 days or something. And so customers are dragging their feet. Everything's going to no decision, no decision typically means I'm not going to say yes now because I don't.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Measuring top line revenue growth numbers and number and logos and whatever is, I think, more meaningful than people are willing to admit.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I wouldn't say that we at Bravado were immune from this, by the way. It's not like I'm sitting here on my golden throne pontificating to the masses. Like we made a bunch of decisions over the course of growing this business that were incentivized for the short term. And every single time we did that, it ended up being really expensive. Now, sometimes we caught that before money ran out and before we saw the problem. Sometimes we didn't. And then we were like, oh shin, it's a fire drill. But at the end of the day, there is no replacement for building a product that customers love and having a great go-to-market motion that brings up product and that value to your clients and ensuring that they actually are thrilled that they bought your product and are getting a lot of value from it. Yeah, it sounds so simple, but the amount of companies that actually don't really care if their customers get value from their product versus just”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's right. And, well, I mean, that is right because that's what everyone signed up for. But then all of a sudden, and again, that was okay because even if all your customers turned, it didn't matter because you could just go raise more money based on the growth and then just keep pouring more money on it and more money on it. No one gave a shit about the leaky bucket, right? Because you could just keep adding more water at the top. Now all of a sudden the faucet's off. And so, you know, given this like seismic change in the market, how is it that we can reverse the short-term thinking and start to actually build good businesses? Because I think that's the real problem, right? The real problem isn't sales compensation plans and quotas. That's a symptom. A real problem is we all just wanted to have hypergrowth instead of thinking are we actually building goods?”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, let's say I just told you those were your options. I can figure out a way to increase revenue by 75% this quarter, though I can give you no promise as to what that means for the future, or I can make you a plan where we increase revenue 20% quarter over quarter for the next six quarters. Which of those two plans would you sign up for? What do you think is a percentage of startup founders six months ago, eight months ago, 10 months ago, to indefinitely?”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to set com plans. They are just listening to what other people tell them should be the way they do it. There's a way it's done, and it's really hard to break that. You know, it's kind of like when you talk about waterfall versus agile, like once you do agile, you're like, wait, why would we have ever done it the other way? Well, it's because everyone was always doing it that way, right? Like, et cetera, et cetera. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, you know, et cetera. You get where I'm going. But the other thing, Lenny, that I think is problematic is everyone loves to optimize in the short run when it comes to revenue and sales. That's really, I think, the other big driver. If I offered you a plan that said, hey, you can grow by 20% revenue quarter over quarter, or we can spike revenue by 75% this quarter, though I don't know what that's going to do to the business in the future. Which of these do you want? Tell me how many founders really are willing to take option A. What do you think?”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That and so, like, I'm just gonna hire this 50 year old white guy who's done this at a bunch of different companies and then have him bring in, because it's always a 50 year old, it's always a white person, and it's always a guy, right? Sales is one of the least diverse professions when it comes to leadership, and it's one of the things that we really champion here at bravado is this idea that, you know, 92% of sales leaders are, VPs of sales are men. Over 85% of sales leaders are white. And so like, you know, is that representative of the total population of who should be a sales leader? No, of course not. It just representative of the fact that like, oh, you don't want to innovate here. Just hire someone who's been there and done that before. And so you get a lot of sludge in the system. You get a lot of people doing the same shit over and over again, even though it doesn't work, which is kind of the opposite of that Einstein quote, right? And so founders don't know.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No matter where it comes from, is not true anymore. So I guess that's the answer to that. Coming back to the other question, though, which is why are sales complates not innovated off of? Because this seems obvious. First of all, it's obvious because of how I explained it. And it's not that I'm taking credit for it. It's just that like I'm giving you a lot of context that you would not get otherwise, right? The context you would get otherwise if you just walked in and you got your traditional old school VC and CEO doesn't really know what they're doing and is just listening to their board is like, here's how sales comp plans work, right? You want to grow revenue. You want to get customers. Like you got to pay top dollar. You got to fire them up and set aggressive quotas. You got to push them. And you want to put these big spiffs out there because that's how salespeople work. And like a founder doesn't know, you know, like this is the problem is that people don't know because nobody really understands sales and salespeople. They just kind of are like, well, I can't sell and like I don't really want to.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do this excellently. I just know a lot of companies that do it better than most, and I think it depends on your company, your business, and your incentive. But I would say that in today's economy taking a longer term view to a sales compensation and the short term, like you're a hunter, your job is just to close deals and like, you know, it doesn't really matter, a dollar is a dollar.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll answer the second question first because the answer to the first question is really simple. I think that there is a lack of transparency around how a lot of sales compensation plans work. And companies tend to make it up as they go along. Oftentimes companies change their comp plans like each month, each quarter. based on like whatever is the business unit or the the goal of the business so i've seen things like oh company released product b after only selling product a so we'll double the commission on product b because we want to get it in people's hands or we really want to target cpg customers so cpg customers are worth extra commission and so like companies tend to weigh down comp plans with um basically a bunch of that doesn't have anything to do with how the compensation plan should be structured but just has to do with the whims of the executives and the board that month or that quarter and so you know i don't know of any organizations i think”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to instead come up with compensation that aligns the incentives, again, of the customer, the business, and the rapid leader. And so I think that, you know, setting up a longer horizon where if the customer you sign up today ends up renewing tomorrow, the rep should get a kicker on it. We should look at what the overall renewal rate is of the sales rep, comparing it, of course, to the renewal of the rest of the business. And if one rep is doing a better job of qualifying the right customers up front, they should be rewarded for that. And so things like that, I think, are missing from sales compensation. And I'm excited to see them come to the front this year.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ensuring that those metrics are the ones that your sales team is rewarded for. I also call into question the notion that your sales team should have a 50-50 split on compensation. And by the way, that doesn't just extend to the sales team. That's often how the VP of sales is compensated. So your executive, your chief revenue officer, VP of sales who sits on the same table as your CMO and your CFO and your COO, that person also has a 50-50 split in most cases. Sometimes it's 60-40. But it's very rarely 90-10, which is what it is for almost every other executive on your team. And so salespeople get labeled as coin operated and mercenaries and all these other adages because the way we compensate them, the way we treat them, the way we measure them is in a mercenary sort of way. And again, I would call on founders and VCs and executives to rethink that.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The kind of made sense up until six months ago. And so sales comp plans are stuck in the Stone Ages. They're stuck in the world of Glen Gary, Glenn Ross, Boiler Room, Wolf of Wall Street, like, you know, get the dollar in through the door, Matthew McConaughey. That's where sales comp plans are. And what we haven't done is built a modern technical sales compensation plan that actually aligns the needs and incentives of the business, the customer, and the red. And so I think that, you know, for a while there, I mean, I've been riding and talking about this for years. For a while there, it fell on a lot of deaf ears because no one cared. People care now because all of a sudden, for the first time, all of the things that we're talking about around retention and renewal rates and stuff are coming up. And so I would say that, you know, my general advice to companies is to say, what are the metrics that matter?”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Meanwhile, SalesRee, who closed fewer deals, 12 of them, let's say all 12 were new. And not only do all 12 renew, but let's say that three of them actually are so happy with the product and service that they're willing to be featured on your website as, you know, the folks that you advertise. And let's say six of them are actually willing to be references. So they help you close even more business by getting on the phone with prospective customers and are willing to actually advocate for your product. let's say that not only do they renew, but four of them actually upsell because they're so happy they end up spending more and they sign multi-year contracts and whatnot. How much did that affect? Sales are at beast performance. Do we go back and revise and say, well, wait a minute, actually sales are at bees customers way better? And actually, we should probably have rewarded Sales Rep B because they actually had done the homework of finding the right clients. And so I just shoving product down people's throats. And no, none of that happens. And again,”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much does that affect Player A's compensation, their performance, their celebration, etc doesn't affect them at all. Make no difference. 99% of SaaS companies are set up this way, right? Every SaaS company you know of with very small exceptions, HubSpotMonday.com, there's a handful of them. Except for very few SaaS companies, no difference to the salesperson's performance. It's seen as a failure of customer success, you know, other people get blamed for it. Sales rep, no change in their comp work or their success.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customers, and you know, all of a sudden, profitability, efficiency, retention came into focus as everybody realized that, you know, unprofitable growth was no longer going to be rewarded because you couldn't just keep spending in order to acquire customers. And acquiring new customers was going to get harder. So retaining the ones you had and making sure they were happy was actually far more important. And so let's go back to our example. Player A who closed 15 deals for 1.5 million poster child for the company got $400,000. Let's see out of their 15 customers, 10 of them churn next year. And only five of them actually end up renewing.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ones that are celebrated or championed and they're seen as like a good performer but but you know not as good as you know team player a. That all makes a lot of sense in a world in which companies are really focused on top line growth and nothing is more important than the amount of ARR you're making and how fast you're growing and investors are basically demanding that you go three three two two which is common parlance for you know if you make five million dollars this year you should make 15 million next year you should make 45 million the year after and then you can slow down to going 90 then 180 this is this is how VCs often think about funding SaaS companies and they look for this like 3332 sort of multiple growth on ARR new business arr and that's how the world used to function until six months ago and then six months ago all of a sudden the music stopped and capital got expensive and everybody started being like whoa wait a minute we should think about things like net dollar retention and we should think about you know what renewal rates look like and we should think about how efficient you are at acquiring”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Point five million dollars, they wouldn't make 300k, which would be 20 cost of sale. They might make 400k. That's pretty common in sales. And so this person who closed 1.5 million dollars in business from 15 deals ends up making $400,000 and they get taken on a free trip to Cabo because they made presidents club and they're put on the leaderboard and the CEO of the company gives them an award at the end of the year and they are heralded as the pinnacle of all things that are sales and the VPS sales says, wow, I can't wait to clone 10 of you. And that's how sales teams are set up, right? And then you have sales rep B. Sales are at B only closes 12 deals for 1.2 million dollars. So they still exceed quota, but they only exceed quota by 20%, not 50%. That sales rep ends up making, let's say, $250K, right? So they make $150,000 less money. They don't get to go on the trip to Cabo. They don't get the award at the end of the year. They're not the”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's pick two theoretical examples. Let's say they're sales rep A and sales rep B, and they both have the same quota, same OTE. And we're selling for the same product, same sales team. Sales rep A causes 1.5 million dollars to a 2022. And just for easy math, let's say that's $1,500, $100K deals. So the product is 100K, they expose 15 deals a year. They close 1.5 million dollars. That means that they would hit 150% of quota. When that happens, when you exceed your quota, you hit in sales what are known as accelerators. So it's not like if you hit $1 million, you make $200, but if you hit like, you know, 1.2 million, you just make an extra on the 200K, you actually often make extra, extra money for exceeding your quota. And the more you exceed your quota, the more money you make. And so you would imagine that if someone sold more.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What that means is that you, as a salesperson, have to sell $1 million of software in order to make $200,000 of money. But that $1 million of software is only around new business. The vast majority of account executives are only responsible for new business, which means top line revenue growth.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually only $100,000. So, unlike in most other professions, sales reps make very little base salary, but their OTEs are often higher than most other professions because they're variable. And so the second hundred thousand dollars you unlock through your performance on the sales team. And what is the most common, again, I'm going to use like the most common examples for this and every compliance different, et cetera. But what's really common is If you have a 200K OTE, 100K base, 100K commission, then your quota will be $1 million. So the ratio between your OTE and your quota is typically five to one. Your quota is usually five X. And this comes from this idea that your cost for a sales rep fully loaded should be about 20%. So you can afford to pay 20% of your salary to a sales rep. So let's talk about what that all means.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So comp plans or compensation plans for sales are very different than they are for most other professions. So in most professions, yours and product management, you have a base salary that encompasses the vast majority of your cash compensation. You then often have bonuses that are either based on company or sometimes personal milestone, which are often paid out in a quarter or end of year. And then you'll have an equity grant that you vest over the course of time. That's not how it works in sales. So the way it works in sales is that you have what's known as a base and then what's known as an OTE. An OTE or on target earnings is how much you make if you hit quota. And the most common ratio that you see in SAS is what's known as a 50-50 split. So let's just use some round numbers. Let's say that your OTE is $200,000. What that means is that your base salary.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Simple. Everything's available for free. Just come to bravado.co and we have something called a seller portfolio. You can go ahead and build one of those and then enter the information and then you'll start to receive the stats and they come out each.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. That's right. It's a gift to get bottle. And so the way it works is that you enter your stats and in doing so, you get global benchmarks of how you're doing versus other reps or other companies. And so there's a premium for being accurate here because otherwise you don't actually get a real sense of how you're doing versus others. And so there's an incentive structure that's built in to be really precise. And then that information feeds into our kind of global leaderboard where we are able to slice and dice and say, okay, of companies that are headquartered in San Francisco, here's how your company is doing, of sales reps that sell to CMOs, here's how you're doing, of reps who carry a quota of between 500, 700K this quarter. Here's how you rank. And so we do global benchmarking for sales, reps, and sales teams. And we share that information for free to anyone who is willing to participate in the ecosystem.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was nothing that was working well unless I guess you owned like Amazon Fresh or something. There were very few businesses that were doing better as a result of COVID. But there's a bunch of companies that aren't doing that bad. I mean, if you listen to other podcasts, you've probably seen that like tech is the one that is getting the most hammered in this, although I think in the last two weeks, crypto has caught up pretty quickly. But it's really kind of tech, right? And so when you see a slowdown in tech that is disproportionate, you have to assume that it may last for a much longer period of time than you imagine. And I think that given the lack of visibility and the amount of volatility, I think it is a unique situation for most companies, for most leaders. And I think that the only response to which is to try to get really comfortable with being wrong and adding new.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I think the vast majority of CEOs and sales leaders haven't been through a period of dramatic uncertainty in their careers, right? I mean, there are obviously people who have been in business for more than 15 years and who have been through other downturns. But unless you were a sales leader, a CEO, an executive in 2008, which I would imagine that like not very many people work, or certainly not everyone was, then you haven't seen anything like this. People try to analogize it to COVID, but I think that that's actually not a good analog for this. The reason why is because COVID was an external factor versus this is actually an internal issue, which is to say that there are actually industries that are doing much better these days, except for tech. Like tech is getting crushed, right? Like in COVID, everyone's getting crushed. And so didn't matter if you owned a yoga studio or a gas pump or whatever.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a bias towards optimism. That's generally how founders operate. And in today's market, that's more of a disadvantage than an advantage. And so my suggestion is to really think about forecasting conservatively, setting up checkpoints and milestones around what future success may or may not look like. And if you hit those goals, then decelerating or accelerating into it depending upon what you get there and coming to an agreement with your board, with your sales team, with your sales leadership in advance so that there's no debate about what to do when you actually get.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Despite our best efforts, because the market's going to be running tough. But if in Q1, you know, so that would mean that in Q1 you'd need to hit 2.5 million in revenue. And let's say in Q1, if we hit 2.5, then we should revise up our targets for the rest of the year. And we can unlock this additional budget to kind of spend off of. If we hit below two, we should revise down our number. And so kind of being comfortable with regularly reforecasting forecasting, you can't just like forecast a quarter out every time. Obviously, that's a tough way to run a business. So you got to forecast a year, but then set milestones, checkpoints, and kind of make predetermined decisions that allow you to avoid the bias of then walking into Q1 and being like, oh, we missed in Q1, but no, no, we're really going to hit it in Q2. You got to set the targets up front because as founders, we tend to.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are getting from their boards is when you have limited visibility, you have to plan in the most conservative way. And on the one hand, of course, that's true. Like you have to be conservative. But on the other hand, you don't want to be unreasonably conservative because, you know, you don't want to be floundering from like, oh, we're screwed to everything's better to we're screwed, everything's better. And so the way I think about setting up a plan when you have limited visibility and some major headwinds is setting up a really conservative plan and then having milestones, short-term milestones that unlock the ability to lean into growth and spend based on hitting those targets. And so here's an example. Let's say that you did that $10 million in revenue this year. And next year you have no idea what that's going to look like. Maybe you say, okay, let's plan like we're going to be down to 9 million. We're going to lose 10% of revenue next year.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would imagine that for the most of companies, going into the middle to end of September, they probably felt pretty good. They actually thought like, oh, maybe, you know, we can actually squeak Biden Q3. Maybe we can revise upforecast in Q4. Maybe we can hire into next year and we can go back to growing the way we were for the previous 10 years. And then October was just a bloodbath. On companies that do monthly quotas, 85% of sales reps missed quota in October for their monthly number. And I think it's going to be even higher in November based on what we're seeing. And so again, I share all this information with you to kind of set the stage on what's happening real time in the market. And so given that September felt good, but today we're totally screwed, it's hard to plan what you should do for all of 2023. And I think the advice that most found”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of like percentage to quota and companies missing their target. What was interesting is that a bunch of companies then revised down their forecast for the rest of the year. But then companies started beating those forecasts in July, August, September. And so for a moment there, it actually looked like we might be out of the worst.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the other hand, though, it raises the question of what do I do for next year? On the one hand, you don't want to bring down targets too significantly because it's going to raise a lot of red flags in terms of spend and burn and probably mean a lot of really painful decision. On the other hand, it's really hard to have visibility into what the market's going to look like, you know, six months. I mean, heck even like six weeks from now, you know, things are changing on a real-time basis. Something interesting that we saw is that because we have quarterly tracking, but we also have monthly tracking. So something interesting we saw is that from November until March of last year, companies were basically blowing out their quota sales reps were blowing out their quota. All of a sudden, everything came to a screeching halt in April. And April, May, and June were really tough times. And you saw that outwardly in the market in terms of layoffs and hiring freezes and such. But we saw it on a real-time basis in terms of.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Q2 and 46% in Q1. So you've basically got 30% more of the sales team missing quota today than you did literally just six months ago. If you broaden that out to a team-wide structure, 76% of companies missed their Q3 target. 76% of companies missed their Q3 target. That's up from 59% in Q2 and 51% in Q1. So you actually have 33% more companies that are missing target. And at this point, it's gone from being like, oh, like the occasional company is struggling to pretty much every tech company is struggling. We would predict based on the data that we're seeing that over 80% of companies will miss their Q4 goals. And so in a world in which the vast majority of sales reps are missing quota and the even larger vast majority of Companies are missing quota. And their forecast that on the one hand explains why you're seeing this Russian layoffs.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so let's start with some data and then we'll talk about why this matters. So on bravado, as I mentioned, we have 300,000 members, but only about 200,000 of them, so about 65% of the network, uses a product called the seller portfolio. And the seller portfolio is a real-time tracker of how you and your sales team are performing relative to quota. You can kind of think of it like mint.com, but instead of being for personal finance, it's for sales. Based on that, we're able to get a real-time perspective on which companies in specific and then overall which industries and which sectors are at or above or below quota. And so I'll share some stats with you. So in Q3 of this year, so I guess as of last month, in Q3 of this year, 63% of sales reps missed quota. 63%. That's up from 54% in”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In favor of cross selling and upselling your existing customer base because it's hard to break into new accounts when companies have budget freezes and hiring freezes and layoffs and everyone is watching it really closely the capital outflow from their business. And so your sale strategy has to fundamentally change in order to meet the moment and meet the market to where it is.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it sounds great. I mean, I think inherent in this conversation will be things that you can do to be better at sales. But I think the way in which you sell has to be different based on market condition. If we had done this podcast eight months ago or 18 months ago or 28 months ago or 38 months ago, I think we would have had one set of conversations. We would have talked about growing top line revenue. We would have talked about how to get your first 20 customers. We would have talked about how to build and scale a sales team. We would have talked about setting quotas and whatnot. And I think that today the market has shifted because we know that the cost of capital has gone up. We know that funding is dried up and we know that investors today are only interested in companies that have strong unit economics and have high retention rates and cold prospecting goes down.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if you're familiar with Stack Overflow and what that network and community means to engineering, Bravado has a product that's affectionately known as the war room, which does the same thing. And so you have 50,000 companies, sales teams that are on Bravado. And we get a real-time pulse of which companies are hitting quota, which ones are missing quota, which sales reps are closing deals with which organizations, which industries are doing better or worse. And so we do get a really interesting perspective within the world of B2B tech sales, to be clear, a really interesting perspective on what's happening in terms of companies and revenue and forecast and quota, which gives us hopefully an opportunity to serve those members and the general tech community at large in terms of how they can beat the odds, especially as we're back to kind of”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People. That's called bravado. And bravado is a network of about 300,000 B2B tech sales. That's about 50,000 VPs of sales and CROs, about 150,000 account executives, another like 40,000 to 50,000 SDRs. And then the rest of it are kind of customer success, sales engineers, sales ops, sales enablement, et cetera. So it's a network that purely focuses on sales and much akin to your business, I suppose Mary's community, learning, upskilling, recruiting as this one place that a salesperson can go in order to beat the odds, be successful in their career, find a great job, or hit and crush quota in their role.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then went on to be a sales leader at a bunch of different places, probably most notably at Glassdoor, where I joined as one of the first 2025 employees, was responsible for enterprise sales there, personally called Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Ford Visa, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Walmart, and kind of, I think it was at its peak at one point. I think Glassdoor had about 100 of the Fortune 500 customers and I'd sold about 60 of them myself. So I did a lot of, I've done a lot of selling in my career. Also a decent amount of sales management and sales leadership, but really my forte is selling. Like I love to sell. I love to talk to customers. I love to train salespeople. And then for the last five years, I've been building a community for sales.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Story. It's one of the few companies that has made it to a hundred million dollars in recurring revenue without a drop of venture funding. It's a Norwegian company, actually. And if I remember correctly, don't quote me on the exact numbers here, but the company had basically gone 10 million to 30 million to 50 million to 70 million. And then in 2009, they went from 70 million to 69 million. It was the first year that they hadn't not only increased revenue, but revenue had gone down. And in that year in 2009, I broke the company record for the most sales by any individual person in one year in the history of the company. And I say that not out of hubris or out of pride. I say that because I've literally sold in a downturn, like in the middle of a recession, I have been an account executive selling, carrying a quota, and have been successful in doing it.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spent my whole career in sales. I started out in sales when I was in college. I worked on the Obama campaign. We didn't call it sales, right? We called it turning out the vote or, you know, street teamwork or field ops or phone banking. But it was sales. We were just, you know, selling the dream, literally, the American dream, as it were. And so, you know, I've been in some sort of a role where my primary responsibility was to cold, call, send emails, have conversations, objection handle, and try to get someone to sign a contract for my entire career. And that has spanned. I started selling in September of 2008 was my first month with a quota. So I started selling in the middle of the last financial crisis. And in 2009, the company that I used to do Salesforce, which is called Meltwater, this company, it's a pretty crazy.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to plan what you should do for all of 2023. And I think the advice that most founders are getting from their boards is when you have limited visibility, you have to plan in the most conservative way. And on the one hand, of course, that's true. Like you have to be conservative. But on the other hand, you don't want to be unreasonably conservative because, you know, you don't want to be floundering from like, oh, we're screwed to everything's better. So we're screwed. Everything's better. And so the way I think about setting up a plan when you have limited visibility and some major headwinds is setting up a really conservative plan and then having milestones, short-term milestones that unlock the ability to lean into growth and spend based on hitting those targets.”
2022-12-04 · Lenny's Podcast · How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source