Sahil Mansuri: preference

Transcript context

…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. I love that advice. Be helpful. Find ways to be helpful even if your core product isn't... Basically go above and beyond what you're already doing as a software product and find ways to help your companies be more successful. Feels like there's just a ton of nuggets you just shared. I want to make sure we also get to this other topic that I think is also going to have a lot of great nuggets, which is around just advice for closing deals in this time. You touched on a couple of these, warm intros, a couple things. Anything else you could share of just ways to increase the rate at which you close deals during this wild time in the market?…

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