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

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, say 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, 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. (instrumental music)

Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny, and my aim here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. 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, and they're now building SaaS products for salespeople. Sahil 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 partly because he was a longtime salesperson himself. And as you'll hear in this episode, he has closed some incredible deals, including a wild story about cold emailing Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook and what that led to. In this episode, we focus on what founders should change in how they do sales during this market downturn, including how you should approach sales quotas, how you should rethink the way you do comp. plans for salespeople, how you do forecasting, also why you should refocus on retention and your existing customers, how to improve your sales technique in general no matter what role you're in. As someone without a lot of depth in sales, I always find it fascinating to learn how to get better at sales, and this episode has something for everyone. With that, I bring you Sahil Mansuri. Hey Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile, how many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

At least 40%.

And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?

Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

I am zero percent surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign up conversion and increasing long term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.