Sahil Mansuri: belief

Transcript context

…Awesome. Just to put this out there, I'm a very small investor in Bravado. I'm just a fan of these kinds of companies, community led SaaS tooling. I was really impressed with the way you're building and the way you're approaching it. Also, I don't have a lot of depth in sales, and so I loved this opportunity to learn about how sales works by participating. So thank you for letting me join the journey of Bravado. It's a really unique company and I'm excited to see where it all goes. So with this podcast, we were planning to talk about sales. Initially, it was going to be how to get better at sales, how to be a better salesperson. But you had this great suggestion that we instead focus more specifically on what founders should change in the coming year knowing the conditions of the market and how things are turbulent and how people are spending less and things like that. So we're going to talk about five things that you can do right now to change the way your sales process works starting now for the next year. The idea is once you listen to this conversation, you can go and do these things immediately with your team. So that sound good? Yeah, it sounds great. I mean, I think, inherent in this conversation will be things that you can do to be better at sales, but I think the way in which you sell has to be different based on market condition. So if we had done this podcast eight months ago or 18 months ago or 28 months ago or 38 months ago, I think we would've had one set of conversation. We would've talked about growing top line revenue. We would've talked about how to get your first 20 customers. We would've talked about how to build and scale a sales team. We would've talked about setting quotas and whatnot. I think that today, the market has shifted because we know that the cost of capital has gone up. We know that funding has dried up. We know that investors today are only interested in companies that have strong unit economics and have high retention rates. 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 really closely the capital outflow of their business. So your sale strategy has to fundamentally change in order to meet the moment and meet the market to where it is. Great context setting. You touched on a few of the things we're going to talk about, so I'm excited to get into it. The first topic I wanted to chat about is forecasting and quotas. You have some advice on how founders should be thinking about adjusting their forecast plans and their quotas for next year. Can you talk about that?…

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