How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 4 December 2022

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sahil Mansuri is the CEO of Bravado, the world’s largest online sales community. Sahil is passionate about sales, and his experience dates all the way back to 2008, working for Obama’s presidential campaign. During his time at Glassdoor, Sahil was able to close some incredible accounts, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. In today’s podcast, we talk about why sales is a crucial part of any business and how to continue selling successfully through a recession. We get super-specific on building a conservative plan for the near future and cover everything from where to place your best salespeople to restructuring comp plans. The episode is full of great advice about how to shift with this market, improve agility, and perhaps grow an even stronger business with happier customers.

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Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-hit-revenue-targets-in-a-recession-sahil-mansuri-bravado/#transcript

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Where to find Sahil Mansuri:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/svmansuri

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahilmansuri/

• Email: [email protected]

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny

• Merge: http://merge.dev/lenny

• Miro: https://miro.com/lenny

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Referenced:

• Bravado: https://bravado.co/

• Stumbling on Happiness: https://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/1400077427

• All-In podcast: https://www.allinpodcast.co/

• How I Built This podcast: https://www.npr.org/series/490248027/how-i-built-this

• The Blacklist on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/70281312

• The Newsroom on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-newsroom-3d51e070-e77d-4294-ac83-cab80d3f94dd

• The West Wing on HBO Max: https://www.hbomax.com/series/urn:hbo:series:GX5nwgQDNJZ6aoQEAAAHJ

• Jeopardy!: https://www.jeopardy.com/watch

• Frasier on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/frasier-0cb9b63b-de82-4751-99c9-1cb12118ab9d

• Slack: https://slack.com/

• Zoom: https://zoom.us/

• Grain: https://grain.com/

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In this episode, we cover:

(04:19) Sahil’s background

(08:26) What is Bravado?

(10:27) How to shift your sales strategy to meet the market

(12:00) How to set a conservative plan that still allows you to lean in when growth is possible

(19:06) Why the downturn in tech may not be over anytime soon

(21:34) How Bravado gets its data from users and creates global benchmarks

(23:04) Why SAAS has an outdated comp structure

(33:23) Why companies are resistant to restructuring comp plans

(37:18) The problem with hypergrowth in today’s market

(41:18) Why it’s time to shift into a retention-based strategy

(43:28) Why your best sales staff should transition to post-sales for customer retention

(51:20) What are warm intros, and how can existing customers help you get new ones?

(59:30) How Sahil was able to get Facebook’s account at Glassdoor

(1:08:08) Why CEOs are actually salespeople

(1:12:50) How to survive a downturn

(1:19:44) Lightning round

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	It's hard to plan what you should do for all of 2023.
0:05.0	And I think the advice that most founders are getting from their boards is when you have limited visibility,
0:10.0	you have to plan in the most conservative way. And on the one hand of
0:14.8	course that's true like you have to be conservative. But on the other hand you
0:18.8	don't want to be unreasonably conservative because you know say you don't want to be floundering from like, oh, we're screwed to
0:26.4	everything's better to we're screwed everything's better. And so the way I think about setting up a plan
0:31.2	when you have limited visibility and some major headwinds is setting up a really
0:36.7	conservative plan and then having milestones, short-term milestones that unlock the ability to lean into growth and spend based on hitting those targets.
0:49.6	Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny and my aim here is to help you get better the craft of building and growing products.
0:56.2	Today my guest is Sahil Mansuri. Sahil is the CEO and founder of bravado, which has built the world's largest online sales community of over 300,000 salespeople,
1:07.0	and they're now building SAS products for salespeople.
1:10.0	Sawhill has one of the most unique perspectives on the art and skill of sales, partly because of the community and the company that he runs, and probably because he was a long-time salesperson himself.
1:20.0	And as he'll hear in this episode, he has closed some incredible deals including a wild story about cold emailing Cheryl Sandberg at Facebook and what that lets you.
1:29.0	In this episode we focus on what founders should change in how they do sales during this market downturn,
1:36.0	including how you should approach sales quotas, how you should rethink the way you do
1:39.9	comp plans for sales people, how you do forecasting, also why you should refocus on retention
1:46.0	and your existing customers, how to improve your sales technique in general no matter what role
1:50.9	you're in.
1:52.4	As someone without a lot of depth in sales,
1:55.0	I always find it fascinating to learn how to get better at sales.
1:58.0	And this episode has something for everyone.
2:01.0	With that I bring you, Sahil Mansuri.
	...

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