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

Dec 4, 2022 1h 26m 15 insights Episode Page ↗
Lenny interviews Sahil Mansuri, CEO/founder of Bravado, the world's largest online sales community. They discuss how founders should adapt sales strategies during a market downturn, focusing on adjusting forecasts, rethinking comp plans, prioritizing customer retention, and innovative sales techniques.
Actionable Insights

1. Innovate Business & Pricing Models

When traditional business or pricing models fail, be willing to completely change the rules of the game. Explore new approaches like commission-only sales roles or flexible month-to-month pricing to adapt to market shifts and unlock new growth opportunities.

2. Reassign Top Reps to CSM

In a tough market, reassign your best pre-sales account executives to Customer Success Manager (CSM) roles. Their primary job should be to ensure existing customers never leave, as replacing them will be nearly impossible.

3. Prioritize Customer Retention

Shift your primary focus from new customer acquisition to retaining existing customers. This strategy is crucial for survival in a difficult market and provides opportunities for upsells, cross-sells, and warm introductions.

4. Become a Value-Added Advisor

Invest significant energy into helping your customers survive by becoming a value-added advisor. Leverage your unique cross-sectional data to offer guidance on market trends, hiring, budgets, and other critical business decisions.

5. Create Exclusive Customer Insights

Allocate product marketing and data analysis resources to generate exclusive, valuable content and research reports for existing customers. These insights, derived from your unique data, can help guide their business decisions and enhance retention.

6. Secure Text-Based Warm Intros

When seeking warm introductions, ask for an immediate connection via text message and keep the introducer on the thread initially. This tactic increases the likelihood of the prospect responding and showing up for the meeting.

7. Deeply Understand Customer Psyche

Go beyond standard sales tactics by investing significant effort into deeply understanding the customer’s internal psyche, challenges, and perceptions. Create highly customized, insightful reports or analyses that demonstrate unique value and perspective.

8. Teach, Don’t Just Sell

Approach potential customers with the goal of teaching them something valuable or changing their perspective on how to do their job. This builds trust and makes the interaction worthwhile, rather than immediately pushing your product.

9. Host Strategic Customer Events

Invest in strategic in-person customer events, inviting only current customers. These events foster goodwill, can reduce churn by offering an incentive, and create perfect opportunities to gather warm introductions to new prospects.

10. Conservative Planning with Milestones

When facing limited visibility and major headwinds, set a conservative plan with short-term milestones. These milestones should pre-determine when to accelerate growth and spending based on hitting targets, helping to avoid optimistic bias.

11. Regularly Re-forecast with Checkpoints

Forecast for a year but establish regular checkpoints and milestones to re-evaluate and make predetermined decisions. This allows for agile adjustments to your plan based on real-time data, rather than sticking to an outdated forecast.

12. Align Sales Comp with Metrics

Rethink sales compensation plans to align incentives with the metrics that truly matter to the business, such as net dollar retention and renewal rates. This ensures salespeople are rewarded for long-term business health, not just top-line growth.

13. Incentivize Long-Term Customer Value

Implement sales compensation that rewards reps for long-term customer value, such as kickers for renewals and bonuses based on the renewal rate of their acquired customers. This encourages better customer qualification and lasting relationships.

14. Reconsider 50-50 Comp Split

Question the traditional 50-50 base-to-OTE (On-Target Earnings) compensation split for sales teams and leaders. This structure often incentivizes short-term, mercenary behavior rather than fostering a focus on long-term business health.

15. Balance Cynicism and Optimism

Cultivate an internal pessimism to effectively disqualify leads and prioritize your time on viable opportunities. Simultaneously, maintain an external optimism to positively influence and sell to qualified prospects.