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

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. 

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, Overcast, and YouTube.

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Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Todays transcript will be live by 8am PT.

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Where to find Sahil Mansuri:

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

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

• Email: sahil@bravado.com

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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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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.