Sahil Mansuri: belief

Transcript context

…That is awesome advice. As a PM, it makes me think a little bit about moving to an agile sprint sort of system versus this long term waterfall oriented planning process. Have you seen this need happen in the past? Is this the first time we need to plan to reforecast throughout the year? Or have you been through periods where this is just the way people operate when times are super uncertain? First of all, I think the vast majority of CEOs and sales leaders haven't been through a period of dramatic uncertainty in their careers. I mean, there are obviously people who have been in business for more than 15 years and who have been through other downturns. But unless you were a sales leader, a CEO, an executive in 2008, which I would imagine that not very many people were or certainly not everyone was, then you haven't seen anything like this. People try to analogize it to COVID, but I think that that's actually not a good analog for this. The reason why is because COVID was an external factor versus this is actually an internal issue, which is to say that there are actually industries that are doing much better these days except for tech. Tech is getting crushed, right? In COVID, everyone's getting crushed. So it didn't matter if you owned a yoga studio or gas pump or whatever, a hotel. There was nothing that was working well unless I guess you owned Amazon Fresh or something. There were very few businesses that were doing better as a result of COVID. But there's a bunch of companies that aren't doing that bad. I mean, if you listen to other podcasts, you've probably seen that tech is the one that is getting the most hammered in this, although I think in the last two weeks, crypto has caught up pretty quickly. But it's really kind of tech, right? So when you see a slowdown in tech that is disproportionate, you have to assume that it may last for a much longer period of time than you imagine. I think that given the lack of visibility and the amount of volatility, I think it is a unique situation for most companies, for most leaders. I think that the only response to which is to try to get really comfortable with being wrong and adding new data in in order to make decisions regularly without the fear of coming across as not knowing what you're doing. Things seem to have been crazy for a long time. It's interesting that this is the first year where you're finding that companies have to do this. Before we get to the next topic, I wanted to come back to the stats that you had real quick. Can you talk again about how you get those stats? Is this like a salesperson plugs into their system somehow in exchange for getting access to the benchmarking? How does that work because that's very cool?…

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