Dec 4, 2022 · 1h 26m · lennys-podcast
How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Lenny's Podcast, Bravado founder and CEO Sahil Mansuri outlines actionable frameworks for navigating macroeconomic downturns, focusing on dynamic milestone forecasting, restructuring sales compensation, reallocating resources toward customer retention, and executing high-leverage outreach.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 13.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 2.5 Guest teaching 4.7 Guest disagreement 1.7 Lenny pushing back 0.5
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:23:02 Sahil interrupts Lenny to dispute his sales self-deprecation
Sahil immediately cuts off the host's closing remark, rejecting Lenny's self-deprecating claim that he would make a poor salesperson by asserting that Lenny's community building is the epitome of great sales.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 33:00 Lenny questions the practicality of long-horizon comp modelsLenny presses Sahil on why founders continue using standard compensation schemes, pointing out the extended feedback loop required to assess customer renewals and admitting he would personally choose short-term revenue spikes.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 28:40 Sahil details the toxic incentives created by standard SaaS comp plansSahil contrasts a celebrated high-churn sales rep with a low-key high-retention rep to demonstrate to the host why standard SaaS compensation models severely damage business durability.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 19:06 Lenny maps quarterly sales re-forecasting to agile sprint methodologyLenny leverages his product management background to crystallize Sahil's complex financial forecasting philosophy into an agile versus waterfall development analogy.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sahil Mansuri's Background from Field Sales to Bravado | 2 | 3 | 1 | 0 | Lenny invites Sahil to share his sales background and openly frames himself as an eager learner without deep sales domain expertise. Sahil outlines his career selling through the 2008 recession at Meltwater, scaling enterprise accounts at Glassdoor, and building Bravado. | |
| Reframing Go-to-Market Priorities for Market Shifts | 3 | 4 | 2 | 0 | Lenny proposes five tactical adjustments for founders facing the downturn. Sahil gently reframes the premise, emphasizing that macroeconomic shifts require an entirely different go-to-market strategy rather than just general sales optimization. | |
| Rethinking Sales Forecasting and Milestones Amid Market Volatility | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Sahil delivers proprietary Bravado data showing a sharp rise in sales quota misses and outlines a milestone-based re-forecasting model. Lenny contributes strong product management expertise by drawing an apt comparison between this approach and agile sprints versus waterfall planning. | |
| Redesigning Sales Compensation Plans for Long-Term Value | 3 | 7 | 3 | 2 | Sahil deconstructs traditional 50/50 sales compensation plans, using a Rep A vs Rep B scenario to prove how traditional incentives encourage customer churn. Lenny pushes back by asking why founders rarely adopt retention kickers given how logical it sounds, admitting he himself would historically optimize for short-term growth. | |
| Sponsor Segment: Collaborative Whiteboarding and Roadmapping with Miro | 2 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Following the Miro sponsor segment, Sahil advocates a controversial stance to move top pre-sales reps to post-sales customer success to defend revenue. Lenny acts as an inquisitive sounding board, clarifying sales terminology and extracting tactical retention methods. | |
| Leveraging In-Person Events and Group Text Intros | 3 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Sahil forcefully rejects cold email outreach in favor of customer-only retreats and persistent group text introductions. Lenny validates the efficacy of the texting tactic, noting with humor that Sahil used that exact technique on him to book the interview. | |
| How Cold Research and Data Closed Glassdoor's Facebook Deal | 2 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Sahil shares the detailed story of how custom data analysis on Zuckerberg's approval rating secured a meeting with Sheryl Sandberg and closed Facebook. Lenny listens with admiration and probes Sahil's internal psychology upon receiving the executive reply. | |
| The Psychology of Founders and CEOs as Chief Salespeople | 2 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Sahil reframes the fundamental role of CEOs and venture capitalists as purely sales-driven positions requiring internal cynicism paired with external optimism. Lenny remarks on Sahil's infectious enthusiasm and validates the mindset shift. | |
| Innovative Business Models and Launching Bravado Flex | 2 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Sahil explains how Bravado reacted to a market freeze by inventing Bravado Flex for fractional commission-only sales talent. He urges founders to rethink fundamental business models rather than attempting micro-optimizations. | |
| Rapid-Fire Lightning Round on Books, Shows, and Tools | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 | Lenny runs a swift lightning round covering media, literature, and software preferences. The dynamic is brisk and warm, with Lenny accurately identifying the author of Stumbling on Happiness. | |
| Redefining True Salesmanship, Community-Led Growth, and Final Remarks | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | When Lenny makes a self-deprecating remark about being bad at sales, Sahil cuts in to firmly reject the framing, explaining that Lenny's community-led audience building represents the highest form of modern salesmanship. Lenny modestly deflects the compliment before wrapping up. |
Statements from this episode (22)
Mansuri: Meltwater reached $100M ARR with zero venture capital
“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.”
Mansuri: In downturns, cross-selling must replace cold prospecting
“Cold prospecting goes down 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 capi…”
Mansuri: 63% of tech sales reps missed their Q3 2022 quotas
“In Q three of this year, 63% of sales reps missed quota. 63%. That's up from 54% in Q two and 46% in Q one.”
Mansuri: 76% of tech companies missed their Q3 2022 revenue targets
“76% of companies missed their Q three target. 76% of companies missed their Q three target. That's up from 59% in Q two and 51% in Q one.”
Mansuri: Predicts over 80% of tech companies will miss Q4 2022 goals
“We would predict based on the data that we're seeing that over 80% of companies will miss their Q four goals.”
Mansuri: Counteract founder optimism bias by using predetermined quarterly checkpoints
“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 Q one and being like, oh, we missed in Q one, but no, no, we're really going to hit it in Q two. Yo…”
Mansuri: A SaaS sales rep's quota is typically five times their OTE
“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%.”
Mansuri: Salespeople act like mercenaries because comp plans incentivize it
“Salespeople get labeled as coin operated and mercenaries and, you know, 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.”
Mansuri: Over 92% of VP sales leaders are men and 85% white
“92% of sales leaders are VPs of sales are men. Over 85% of sales leaders are white.”
Mansuri: Flawed sales compensation is a symptom of prioritizing hypergrowth
“The real problem isn't sales compensation plans and quotas. That's a symptom. A real problem is we all just wanted to have hyper growth instead of thinking, are we actually building good businesses?”
Mansuri: The average enterprise sales cycle doubled to 115 days in 2022
“The average enterprise sales cycle was 62 days. It's now like a 115 days or something.”
Mansuri: Reassign your best salespeople to customer success during a downturn
“Take your best salespeople and make them see a sense. 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 in the…”
Mansuri: Companies either grow or die; cutting burn to survive fails
“Companies either grow or they die. There's no middle, right? There's no like, oh, we're gonna cut burn and just try to like survive the winter long enough so that like, that doesn't work, right? Because employees get, get demoralized. Investors lose faith. The…”
Mansuri: Email is where deals die; sales intros should happen over text
“Stop using email. Email is where deals go to die. Text message is where deals get done. And so this notion that, like, I'm going to e-entry over email and that's how we connect is just far worse than the thing that I would really recommend”
Mansuri: Cold emails and SDRs cannot sustain companies over the next year
“I don't think just relying on a bunch of STRs and cold emails and stuff is gonna get you through the next six to 12 months.”
Mansuri: Cold email blasts fail in downturns unless reps teach prospects something
“This idea that like, I'm going to go onto my CRM system and fire up a hundred cold emails and I'm going to close business. Like that works when capital is cheap and everyone's buying everything and every rep hits quota and every company's growing, et cetera. T…”
Mansuri: The core function of a venture capitalist is 100% sales
“100% of VC is a salesperson. Cause they're selling LPs to give them money and they're selling CEOs to take their money in exchange for equity. Like that's the job of a VC. All the analytics, all the data and the, this and the, that, those are just like updatin…”
Mansuri: Great salespeople are internally pessimistic and try to disqualify prospects
“Great salespeople don't have what I call happy ears. This is a problem that people misunderstand. People think that being a great salesperson is being ever the optimist, and that's actually not the case, because then you'll waste your time on a bunch of deals …”
Mansuri: 100% commission-only sales roles do not exist in SaaS
“It doesn't exist today in SaaS. It does exist in other places. It just doesn't exist in SaaS really.”
Mansuri: Founders cannot optimize their way out of macroeconomic downturns
“People try to like optimize their way out of problems. You can't optimize your way out of a problem. You got to completely change the rules of the game.”
Mansuri: "Stumbling on Happiness" teaches founders the psychology of buyer decision-making
“And I think, especially if you're a founder or a, or an executive who wants to learn how to sell and wants to understand how your buyers make decisions, I think it's really impactful and teaches you a new way to think about sales using psychology.”