Sahil Mansuri: evaluation

Transcript context

…Thank you. Sorry, sorry. I'm too jargony. Thank you. So typically most sales orgs are divided into pre-sales and post-sales. Pre-sales worked with companies that are not yet customers to get them to sign up. Post-sales works with companies that have already signed up to help them either find value or retain or renew or upsell. That's how most sales orgs are divided. Typically, you put your best people in pre-sales because it's harder. It's harder to sell a new customer than retain the one you have. That's always the case because you got to actually be able to build trust, build the relationship, evangelize something that they haven't bought before. So you typically take your best talent and put it in pre-sales, and then you take the people who are really good relationship builders and really caring and nurturing and not necessarily the people who are the most gifted at creating value or whatnot and you put them in CSM. That's obviously a huge generalization because I know many CSMs who are much better at sales and new business. In many businesses, it's actually harder to be a CSM because the product isn't very good. So you actually have to do a lot of selling even after the product is sold. So that was a big generalization. But it is, in broad strokes, true. I would take your best account executives, pre-sales reps and I'd put them into CSM. I'd say it doesn't matter how much new business we work on in the next six to nine months because it's going to be hard anyway. But what we cannot under any circumstances do is lose our existing customers because replacing them is going to be impossible. So it's kind of like you got your leaky bucket, you got to patch that leak really, really fast and really hard. I think putting your best people on it is one good way to start. Now, there's a lot of people who are going to listen to this and think that's crazy. Why would I take my best performer in a tough market and move them to post-sale? This is bad advice. Maybe. Maybe it's bad advice. I can't predict the future anymore than anyone else can. But I can tell you it's what we're doing. I can tell you I'm actually doing it. We're taking our best people and are moving them into CSM at Bravado. We're trying to maintain every customer we have because I believe that doing so sets us up for the best chance of success in the business. Maybe you disagree with that and you think that that's not right for you. You should do what's right for your business. But I would say that it's not just talk, it's action. I'm doing it. I'm also telling every one of my portfolio, I do a decent amount of angel investing, I'm telling everyone of my portfolio companies to do the same thing. Discussing the same thing with our investors, with our board as well. Okay so you put your best people on it. What else should you? So I think that what often goes underserved is the opportunity to help your customers themselves survive. I don't know. What's a good product example? put your best people on it. What else should you? So I think that what often goes underserved is the opportunity to help your customers themselves survive. I don't know. What's a good product example? Let's take something like a analytics product. Let's pick on Amplitude or Mixpanel or pick your favorite. If I was a company like that and I was like, "Okay, don't know how many new customers I may be able to sell, but I've got a lot of really good customers I want to keep." I would invest a tremendous amount of energy into helping product managers and product leaders get benchmarks and stats on how other product teams, what changes they're making. Because the advantage you have as a vendor, this is advantage we have in sales as Bravado, but it's the advantage that every vendor has is you get a cross=section of what everyone who fits a certain ICP is doing at the same time. How good are you at extracting value out of that and finding ways of becoming less of a tool as part of the SaaS stack and more of a value added advisor that can help you actually plan and prepare for what to do next. I think most companies are not good at it. They put out a white paper for lead gen. I want to put out a white paper for customer retention. One thing that we're actually doing is we're basically saying to all of our clients, "Hey, we'll tell you what percentage of companies that look like you are hiring or not hiring. I'll tell you how they're adjusting quotas. I'll tell you how they are changing their comp plans. I'll tell you how much they're paying. I'll tell you what percentage of their sales teams' hitting quota, et cetera, if you stick around with us as a client." I'm not just placing sales reps and say we make our business as a recruiting marketplace. So we help companies hire salespeople. Obviously that's slowed down tremendously because people are scared to hire and spend money right now. But if they're getting insights on what's happening in the market, that's still valuable. That's still something that they can't get elsewhere that I am uniquely positioned to offer to my customer base. What are you uniquely positioned to offer to your customer base? Let's pick another example that I think is really easy which is Greenhouse or Lever or another app and tracking system. If you're an ATS and all of a sudden every recruiting budget's getting slashed and recruiters are getting laid off faster than any other department because no one's hiring, et cetera, you're probably at the most risk of being ripped out or being downsized or getting downward pressure to your [inaudible 00:49:37]. Can you do that nobody else can do in order to give your customers a really good insight into how they should navigate thinking about hiring versus layoffs versus headcount versus burn per department, et cetera? You've got some really interesting data, don't you? You know exactly how many customers have paused, how many roles and whatnot. If I was Greenhouse, I would be putting out all kinds of reports that tell me, let's use me as a customer here, "Hey, of series B companies that have roughly 50 employees, they used to have eight open head count, but now they're down to four. t all kinds of reports that tell me, let's use me as a customer here, "Hey, of series B companies that have roughly 50 employees, they used to have eight open head count, but now they're down to four. The main area that they're investing are X, Y, and Z. Salaries are moving up and down." You could get a lot of insight from a company like Greenhouse. Then I'd be like, "Whoa, this is so valuable. I can't live without this data because this is actually helping guide my business decisioning." I think moving from a world where you're just focused on how can I jam product down your throat to how do I use my unique perspective in the customer segment we serve in order to create broader insights for the industry is something I would heavily prioritize. I'd take my product marketing team and I'd kind of shift them to be my research team. I'd take a data analyst or two and stick them on the project and start to create content that is exclusive for my customers and have them see that as another point of value that they can get that would maybe help stay off chart.…

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