Sahil Mansuri: commitment

Transcript context

…Here we are now. That's right. But the point is sales when done well doesn't feel weird, okay? If it ever feels weird, you're a bad salesperson, right? I've been selling now for 14 years. I've sold literally hundreds, millions of dollars worth of deals. I could pretty much call any customer I've ever sold to and have a conversation with them and it would say, "How's it going?" Whatever. That's because I put a tremendous amount of energy into investing and building a real friendship, not relationship, not business, friendship with the people that I sell to. So I'll tell you a couple of sales stories and maybe from that we can mine the nuggets that you're fishing for. I will tell you about how I sold to Facebook when I was at Glassdoor. This is a fun story. So Facebook was the Moby Dick of Glassdoor. I think the first time they tried to sell to them was end of 2008 or something like that. Facebook was one of those accounts that obviously should be on Glassdoor because the way Glassdoor's product worked is that the more people that came to your company page on Glassdoor, the more value there was for you as a recruiting firm to put branding and to put jobs and whatnot. Facebook was the most visited page on Glassdoor. So by virtue of that, it was the best account to sell to. It had gone from CEO to VP of sales to new VP of sales to rep to rep, et cetera. I finally got my hands on it Feb of 2011. The only reason I got my hands on it is because I closed Microsoft. I think I closed both Microsoft and Google at that point. But certainly at least Microsoft. Certainly at least Microsoft. Well, it's important to the story, not to brag. So I looked at it and I looked at who we are talking to, Lori Goler, who's the chief talent. I think she's still the head of talent there, but was the head of talent who we had pitched and every time we got the same response, "No, we are not interested in outside partnership at the time. No, we are not interested." I think she had a canned response for all vendors and it was just the same response in the CRM over and over again. So again, Einstein, right? Same thing over and over again, different result. So I tried something different and I sat there and I went through every single review that had been written about Facebook on Glassdoor. First I had it pulled by a data scientist and did a word cloud and did a bunch of analytics on what was being discussed there. Pulled salary ranges, pulled salary ranges for Google and Amazon and Microsoft. So Glassdoor had three types of information. They had the review of the company, they had the outlook of the company and then they had the review of the CEO. So it was like, "Do you approve of Mark's handling the company? Yes or no?" Mark had I think 96% approval rate. He was one of the highest rated CEOs on Glassdoor at the time. I have no idea what it is today, but that's what it was then. ark's handling the company? Yes or no?" Mark had I think 96% approval rate. He was one of the highest rated CEOs on Glassdoor at the time. I have no idea what it is today, but that's what it was then. So I basically called every review, all the salaries and then Mark's approval rating, and turned it into a nine page report that broke down how Facebook employees, specifically software engineers because that's what we're specialists at recruiting for, how software engineers at Facebook talked about working at Facebook and how it compared to how Google engineers talked about working at Google and whatnot, salary band comparisons and even reviews of Mark specifically versus the other CEOs of the other big tech companies. Then sent an email to Sheryl Sandberg, a cold email to Sheryl Sandberg whose email address I did not have, but that I assumed had to be one of 15 things. So I think I put ssandberg@facebook.com in the two line and then in the BCC line put every variant I could think of, everything. I mean everything I could think of I put, underscores and dots and first name and last name and abbreviations and et cetera. The title of the email was Mark's approval rating on Glassdoor. I was like, "Hey Sheryl. I'm from Glassdoor. I was doing research on Facebook and comparing it to all the other big tech companies. I personally work with Microsoft. So I have a little bit of insight in this. Here's what your employees think about you. Here's what Mark's approval rating looks like versus others, et cetera, et cetera." This whole research report, I kind of broke out some highlights, a couple screenshots, attached the report and said, "Hey, I'd love to discuss this with you sometime." I think I sent the email around 3 or 4PM on a Sunday. By 6PM I got a response back from Sheryl Sandberg CC'ing elt@fb.com or something like that, which I later found was executiveleadershipteam@facebook.com saying, "Hi Sahil, this is super interesting. We'd love to meet with you tomorrow. Are you available to come to Facebook HQ at 10AM.' So at the time I was 22, 23 years old or something like that. It was pretty new to Glassdoor anyway. So then of course I said yes. I sent the email to the CEO. He was like, "Do you want me to come and whatever?" I just said, "No, I'll handle it." I brought a customer success person and the two of us went. We actually got to meet first with Sheryl and then I got to go to the fishbowl. I don't know if you know this story, but Mark had a famous office that was all glass in the middle so that he really played [inaudible 01:04:15] or whatever so his known as the fishbowl. So I got to go to the fishbowl. I met Mark Zuckerberg himself. As it turns out that report and that rating got added to their weekly packet because Mark wanted to know on a weekly basis how his rating and how the employees view of Facebook was, how it was changing week over week and what people were writing, et cetera, and it became a thing. I don't know if it's still a thing today, I have no idea. and how the employees view of Facebook was, how it was changing week over week and what people were writing, et cetera, and it became a thing. I don't know if it's still a thing today, I have no idea. But I got to have this in depth strategic conversation with the executive leaders of Facebook around their reputation, what their employees thought, their pay bands, their interview questions, leadership, guidings, shared the word cloud, sentiment analysis, et cetera. Needless to say, of course, we closed a massive deal with them and whatnot. But that's the kind of shit it takes in order to close deals, right? So this idea that I'm going to go onto my CRM system and fire up a hundred cold emails and I'm going to close business, that works when capital is cheap and everyone's buying everything and every rep hits quota and every company's growing, et cetera. That shit does not work when you are in tough times and desperate measures, you got to figure out a way to build your business. So what I would say is you got to really over, over, over index in the whole I'm going to teach you something, right? It's not that I'm going to give you value because that's a really weird thing to say and it's not like my product's going to solve a problem for you because, frankly, I don't know if you know what my problems are. But I think that one thing I would advise is how can I do something that will make this worth your time in a way that it isn't about buying my software or putting job ads on my site. So that's how Facebook became a customer of Glassdoor.…

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