Selling in a Downturn: Bravado CEO Sahil Mansuri on Forecasts, Comp Plans, Retention and Warm Intros

Mansuri says he has spent his whole career in sales, starting with phone banking and field work on the Obama campaign. His first month with a quota was September 2008, in the middle of the last financial crisis. At his company Meltwater, revenue fell slightly in 2009 for the first time, and that same year he broke the company's individual sales record, which he cites as proof that you can sell in a downturn.

He later became a sales leader at Glassdoor, joining as one of the first 20 to 25 employees. He says he personally closed Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and many other large customers there. For the past five years he has run Bravado, a network of about 300,000 B2B tech salespeople, including roughly 50,000 VPs of sales and CROs.

Bravado's War Room works like Stack Overflow for sales, and its Seller Portfolio tracks how reps and teams perform against quota in real time. That gives the company a live view of which companies and industries are hitting or missing targets. Mansuri says the way you sell must change with market conditions: with capital expensive and funding dried up, investors reward unit economics and retention, and cold prospecting gives way to cross-selling and upselling.

Mansuri shares Bravado's quota data. In Q3, 63% of sales reps missed quota, up from 54% in Q2 and 46% in Q1, and 76% of companies missed their target, up from 59% and 51%. He predicted over 80% would miss in Q4, and in October, 85% of reps on monthly quotas missed. He notes that companies were blowing out quota from November through March, then hit a wall in April, briefly beat revised forecasts in the summer, and then faced a double dip.

With that much volatility, he says, boards tell founders to plan conservatively, which is right, but being unreasonably conservative leads to whiplash. His approach is a conservative annual plan with milestones that unlock growth spending. In his example, a company with $10 million of revenue plans for $9 million, and if it beats its first-quarter number it revises up and releases budget, while a clear miss triggers a cut.

The key is deciding those responses upfront and agreeing on them with the board and sales leadership, so nobody argues for optimistic exceptions when the quarter arrives. Founders have a bias toward optimism, he says, and in this market that is more of a disadvantage than an advantage. Asked whether this has happened before, he says most leaders have never lived through such uncertainty and that COVID is a poor analogy, because this slowdown hits tech disproportionately and may last longer.

Mansuri explains that Bravado's benchmarks work on a give-to-get model. Members enter their own numbers and receive global benchmarks in return, so accuracy is rewarded. The data can be sliced by company location, buyer type or quota size, and it is shared for free with participants.

Mansuri explains how sales compensation differs from other jobs. Reps get a base and on-target earnings (OTE), most commonly split 50-50. With a $200,000 OTE, the base is $100,000, and the quota is typically five times OTE, or $1 million, because a fully loaded rep should cost about 20% of what they sell. Most account executives are responsible only for new business.

He compares two reps. Rep A closes 15 deals worth $1.5 million, hits 150% of quota, earns accelerators of roughly $400,000, and wins the trip and the awards. Rep B closes 12 deals worth $1.2 million and earns about $250,000. That made sense when investors demanded triple-digit ARR growth, but the music stopped about six months ago and net dollar retention and efficiency suddenly mattered.

Now suppose 10 of Rep A's 15 customers churn, while all of Rep B's customers renew, several upsell, and some agree to be references. Rep A's pay is unchanged, because churn is blamed on customer success, and Rep B gets no credit for choosing the right clients. Mansuri says only a handful of SaaS companies, such as HubSpot and monday.com, tie comp to this, and that sales plans remain stuck in the world of Glengarry Glen Ross.

His advice is to reward the metrics that matter and to question the 50-50 split, which also applies to the VP of sales, while most other executives are closer to 90-10. Salespeople are labeled mercenaries partly because they are paid in a mercenary way. He would give reps a kicker when a customer renews and compare each rep's renewal rate against the rest of the business.

Asked why few companies have changed, Mansuri points first to a lack of transparency. Plans change month to month based on the whims of executives, for example doubling commission on a new product or giving extra for a target industry. He knows of no company that does this excellently, only many that do it better than most, and he says the old view that a dollar is a dollar wherever it comes from no longer holds.

A second reason is that founders often do not understand sales, so they hire an experienced leader and copy what others do. He says the profession is also one of the least diverse in leadership, citing figures that over 85% of sales leaders are white, which reinforces hiring people who have done it before. He compares the inertia to waterfall versus agile and to the idea that no one gets fired for buying IBM.

The third reason is short-term optimization. Offered a spike of 75% growth this quarter with unknown consequences versus 20% growth for six quarters, he suspects almost every founder would have taken the spike until recently. When money was cheap, churn did not matter because you could raise more and add water to a leaky bucket. Now the faucet is off, he says the real problem is a hunger for hyper-growth instead of building good businesses, and Bravado itself made short-term decisions that proved expensive.

Mansuri says cold email response rates have never been lower and enterprise cycles are getting longer. Investors he talks to say the average enterprise cycle has gone from 62 days to about 115, and many deals end in no decision. In tough times people trust the familiar, so existing customers are your best route to survival, upsells, cross-sells and warm introductions.

His most dramatic suggestion is to take your best salespeople and make them customer success managers. Typically the best talent goes into pre-sales and the relationship builders go into post-sales, but he says that in this market new business will be hard regardless and losing existing customers cannot be afforded. He is aware that many will call this bad advice, but says Bravado is doing it and he is telling his portfolio companies to do the same.

He also advises helping customers survive. A vendor sees a cross-section of everyone matching a given customer profile and can turn that into benchmarks and insights, becoming a value-added advisor rather than just a tool. Bravado now tells clients what share of similar companies are hiring, how they adjust quotas and comp, and what share of their teams are hitting quota.

He gives examples for analytics tools and applicant tracking systems such as Greenhouse, which could publish reports on hiring freezes and headcount by company stage. He would turn product marketing into a research team, put a data analyst or two on it, and create exclusive content for customers as a retention white paper rather than a lead-generation one.

Mansuri argues that companies either grow or die and that a pure survival mindset drains energy, which startups depend on. He says to cut where needed but still invest in an in-person customer event. He suggests a trip in February for customers who are still customers as of a set date, which uses psychology to reduce churn, because sales is a human, belly-to-belly sport.

At that event he would invite only customers, not prospects. During the dinners and happy hours, ask who else they know with the same problem who might benefit. Don't stop at a name: ask for an introduction, and ideally over text rather than email, because in his words email is where deals go to die and text is where they get done.

He also keeps the introducer in the text thread for the first 10 to 20 messages, which holds the person accountable to show up. In one case he kept pinging a group thread every week or two for nine weeks until a leader finally took the meeting, and that company became a customer. He calls these small edges worth 2% or 3% each, which add up in this economy.

Mansuri says good sales never feels weird, and that he invests in real friendships with his buyers. He tells the story of Facebook, which he calls the Moby Dick of Glassdoor. Reps had pitched it since 2008 and always got the same canned no from the head of talent, so after closing Microsoft he got the account in February 2011 and decided to try something different.

He had a data scientist analyze every Facebook review on Glassdoor, pulled salary ranges for Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and included Mark Zuckerberg's CEO approval rating, which was about 96%. The result was a nine-page report comparing how Facebook software engineers talked about their employer with how engineers at other big tech companies did. He cold-emailed Sheryl Sandberg, guessing her address and covering variants in the BCC line, with the subject line "Mark's approval rating on Glassdoor."

He sent it on a Sunday afternoon and by 6 PM had a reply inviting him to Facebook headquarters the next morning. He went with a customer success colleague, met Sandberg, and then met Zuckerberg in his glass-walled office. The rating report was added to their weekly executive packet, and Glassdoor closed a massive deal.

His lesson is that mass cold emailing works only when capital is cheap, and that in tough times you must teach the buyer something that is worth their time regardless of whether they buy. He expected the email to work and says he cares about winning rather than commission. The part he is proudest of is that the rating became part of the leadership team's weekly report.

Asked if he misses being a full-time rep, Mansuri says CEOs are full-time salespeople. A founder has to sell themselves on starting, then sell more talented people to join, then sell investors, early customers, reporters and later candidates. He says VCs are also salespeople, since they sell limited partners to give them money and sell CEOs to take theirs.

He says great salespeople do not have what he calls happy ears. They are internally pessimistic, actively looking for signals that a buyer will not buy and disqualifying those deals, while staying optimistic externally. Good salespeople get misled by customers who say they want to buy and waste time on deals that never close.

He applies the same lens to fundraising, saying many CEOs are misled when a VC says a couple of good things. His test is to give the investor every chance to opt out and see who keeps talking. He concludes that being a CEO and a salesperson are the same job with different audiences.

Mansuri's last theme is that innovation is often set aside in downturns. Bravado's recruiting marketplace, like LinkedIn and AngelList, saw a massive slowdown. He asked what he would do if he were a founder who could not afford full-time sellers but wanted customers, and the answer was a commission-only sales role that barely exists in SaaS, aimed at the many reps who cannot find full-time work.

The result was Bravado Flex, a way for companies and candidates to work together outside full-time employment through contract hire, commission-only, fractional work, or a small stipend plus milestones. A year earlier the product would not have worked, because every rep had multiple offers. He says the business went from a massive slowdown to one of its best months ever, and the following month was expected to be better.

He recommends that founders also try changing pricing, for example charging $1,000 a month instead of $12,000 a year, or even a day-by-day price. Shaving a little off an old model is optimizing, he says, but you cannot optimize your way out of a problem. He also learned something new, which is that some reps prefer fractional work because they skip meetings and CRM updates and can pitch several products.

In the lightning round Mansuri recommends Stumbling Upon Happiness, which he says teaches how buyers make decisions through psychology. The podcasts he follows are All In and How I Built This, and he favors The Blacklist, Aaron Sorkin shows, Jeopardy and Frasier. His favorite tools are pen and paper and whiteboards, though he also names Slack, Zoom, and Grain for clipping moments from calls.

When Lenny says he would be bad at sales, Mansuri disagrees. He says Lenny built a business from the ground up, combined deep product knowledge with distribution, and gives people so much value that they love consuming his content. He closes with the idea that sales done well does not feel salesy, and that if every seller gave value and played the long game, the world would be better.