Sahil Mansuri:

Companies that are meaningful only are created because they first find real, true product-market fit and then scale. If you can't sell your own product with the luxury of being the founder, nobody else can do it.

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Ross Pomerantz:

That's what I'm saying.

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Pouyan Salehi:

We're back and I'm so excited for this conversation today. Not just because Ross is here, but... Hey Ross.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Hey.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Hey.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Great to be here.

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Pouyan Salehi:

But I think the real exciting piece is neither one of us, but we've got Sahil here. Beyond thrilled to have you here and hear your perspectives.

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Sahil Mansuri:

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Pouyan, good to catch up. Rossie, good to see you. Yeah, I'm Sahil, founder and CEO of Bravado. We are a professional network for salespeople and our mission is to make salespeople smarter, happier, and richer.

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Ross Pomerantz:

And then you forgot to mention you're my boss.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Yeah. I was going to say, you guys know each other a little bit.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Isn't that kind of the big thing here?

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Sahil Mansuri:

I have never once, not one day, not one minute within one day, ever felt like your boss in the time that I've known you. But I certainly do feel like I report to you on a regular basis.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Well, you've babysat me before.

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Sahil Mansuri:

That I can say, yeah, I definitely-

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Ross Pomerantz:

You've seen me cry.

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Sahil Mansuri:

That's just because we'd hold each other.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yeah.

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Pouyan Salehi:

How does it feel to be in that position, but not have to do pipe reviews? I mean, you both have done a lot of them, right? And maybe Sahil, actually, that's a good entry point to hearing more about your experience, but I want to hear the pipe reviews first. Do you miss that?

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Sahil Mansuri:

I never did pipe reviews, I think, in the way that a traditional sales leader did. I never really did anything traditional in sales. And that's why I think, for better, for worse, saw some outsized success in some ways, was because I just think that most of sales is contrived. And most of the reason why sales managers do the things they do is because their boss did them, not because they actually think it's the right thing to do. That's because most people who are sales managers shouldn't be managers. So there's a lot of sludge in the system.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Maybe you can just share your experience. How did you get into sales? Why did you get into sales?

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Sahil Mansuri:

Not that there is orthodoxy around sales, because no one grows up playing with their GI Sales figure as a four-year-old.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Hell no.

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Sahil Mansuri:

So I went to school in DC in order to work in politics. And I worked on the Obama campaign from 2006 to 2009. When you're 20 years old, in college, and you're managing 4,000 people, you learn a lot. The thing is, it kind of taught me how to objection handle. So when you're objection handling someone who thinks that someone's going to take away their gun or whatever, you got to be real sensitive. You got to be able to be nimble on your feet. You can't be really pushy with them, whatnot. So that's where I learned to sell. And then I walked into B2B SaaS, and all I saw around me were blunt objects.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Can you pause there for a second? What do you mean, “Walked into B2B SaaS?”

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Sahil Mansuri:

Yeah, so, graduated college, was supposed to go work in the White House. My father fell ill, and so I couldn't be in DC and I needed a job. And so what I knew what to do was phone, in person, whatever. Someone told me I should do sales. When I heard sales, what I heard was, you know you go to a mall and there's people trying to sell you Dead Sea salt, like those AHAVA kiosks or whatever?

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Ross Pomerantz:

Oh, yeah.

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Pouyan Salehi:

I love how you use that as the example.

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Sahil Mansuri:

But that's not figurative, that's actually what I thought. And I was like, “You know, I don't know that that's what I want to do.” And I was lucky that my career counselor's husband was a VP of sales at Oracle, and she was like, “No, no, no. I mean tech sales.” And I was like, “What?”

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Pouyan Salehi:

Wait, did you say Oracle?

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Sahil Mansuri:

Yeah.

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Pouyan Salehi:

I saw Ross get excited for a second there.

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Ross Pomerantz:

No, that was, I threw up in my mouth.

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Sahil Mansuri:

I don't think that was excitement. And so she basically was like, “No, I think you'd be really good at tech sales.” I didn't know what to do. And so I took one interview with this random company called Meltwater, which I know we'll get into.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yes please.

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Sahil Mansuri:

And so then there it was. I basically started a week later.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Okay. So what was the vibe of the office when you walked in there? What was this office? Where were you? I know Meltwater, they're like a plague. They're literally everywhere now.

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Sahil Mansuri:

The office? So Meltwater has an interesting philosophy. They do what are known as small pod offices. So they had 52 offices when I started. There were 1000 employees when I started, 925 were salespeople.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Wow.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Love that.

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Sahil Mansuri:

Every single month we had something called closing week, which was the last five days of the month. And every morning of closing week, one of the executives, every morning, would send this 15-paragraph email trying to fire up the team. Now the first time, in December 2008, January 2009, the first time you get this, you're like, “Whoa, this is really inspiring.” Like the CEO, the VPs, the executives are in the trenches with you. By the 26th month of going through closing week, and you're just seeing the same analogies and the same contrived bullshit being spewed, it was, I mean, Meltwater was an amazing, it was like a beautiful tragedy.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Grinders, straight grinder machine.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Do you think that then led to, if you get called by somebody at Meltwater, you're just like, “I'm just going to answer because I know it's not going to stop.”

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Sahil Mansuri:

No. No. In fact, I'll tell you what we did. Meltwater, in our office and in other offices as well, intentionally used these really old school phone systems, and the phones that we used had the ability to change the number manually to be any number, to show up on caller ID. So I could literally make it look like your own cell phone was calling you.

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Pouyan Salehi:

You just took it to a whole nother level. It's like, let me pick the person.

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Sahil Mansuri:

That's right.

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Ross Pomerantz:

That's probably illegal now.

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Sahil Mansuri:

The funniest one was when you would set the number just as the person's number. So it was like your own number calling you, like you have to answer, right?

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Ross Pomerantz:

Because it's you from the future, maybe, telling you to invest in crypto.

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Pouyan Salehi:

There is so much I want to unpack there, but one thing you said, and it's on your shirt now, is bullshit. So I'd like to come to bullshit for a second. What's the biggest bullshit you feel like is being fed to sales reps?

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Sahil Mansuri:

I think that the majority of companies don't deserve to have sales teams.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Okay, tell me more.

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Sahil Mansuri:

That to me is the biggest lie. The biggest lie is the majority of companies don't have product-market fit. But instead of trying to build the right product that actually has product-market fit, they just throw bodies at the problem and assume that by selling their shitty solution, that they can find product-market fit. So they hack their way to a few million dollars in revenue because you can brute-force that. And then they go raise a large round of funding or a decently-sized round of funding from an investor, promising that the brute-forced 2 million ARR will grow to 10 million by next year and 30 million by the year after and 100 million in five years.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yeah, dude, it'll scale. Hell yeah!

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Sahil Mansuri:

And then they go to sales reps and they say, “Look, we've already closed $2 million in revenue, and we just raised a $20 million series A or series B or whatever. And now this thing's taking off and your base is only 100, but your OT's 200. And if you hit accelerators it'll be 300,” and reps come in and grind their ass off to try to hit quota and sell a product that doesn't have product-market fit. So then what you do is you blame the reps for not hitting quota or not performing. Then you blame the sales managers for not being good at coaching people up. Then you blame the VP of sales for having the wrong strategy. So then you fire the reps, you fire the managers, you fire the VPs, you hire in new ones. You keep going, you keep going, you keep going.

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Sahil Mansuri:

And eventually one of two things happens. Either, you do figure it out, you do actually build the right product, or somehow you manage to find product-market fit. Let's call that the 5% rule. And then there's a 95% rule, which is a bunch of reps who have eight to 10 months on their resume, who are labeled as job hoppers, a bunch of VPs of sales that are forever traumatized, and so therefore they're like, “I'm never going to work for an early-stage company again.” People feeling like stock options are worthless, and that this whole thing's a game, and sales is mistreated and whatever, when in reality the problem is you don't have a product with product-market fit.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yes.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Damn.

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Ross Pomerantz:

It starts at the top. The overscale, the classic overscale.

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Pouyan Salehi:

I love that you took the glasses off to just drop all that knowledge. That's the equivalent of the mic drop right there.

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Ross Pomerantz:

That's like, wait a second, I'm blind.

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Pouyan Salehi:

You started your own company. You're investing in other companies. How has that experience informed how you approach either investing other companies, advising other companies or building your own company?

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Sahil Mansuri:

I never wanted to start a company, and basically spent 10 years in sales and then got an opportunity to move into product, because I was the customer of a company that was building a product for salespeople and I was actually one of their largest customers. And I kept complaining about a bunch of things that I thought were obviously wrong with the way they were building the product, and the CEO and I became friends through my complaining, and basically he thought I had good instinct around product. And so he was like, “Why don't you come in?” I did some product marketing, worked on some product. I also helped with sales because I love sales, it's my passion. I would sell for free, I just enjoy doing it. And I started realizing that the amount of professional resource that was around product, around design, around engineering, was just completely absent in sales.

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Sahil Mansuri:

My co-founder at Bravado, Yoni, was the chief data scientist at said company that I was working at, called Sales Predict. And Yoni was teaching me R and I was having trouble with something, and so I basically was having the syntax error when I was trying to query something. And so I was pinging him and he's like, “You know you can just Google it, right?” And I was like, “What do you mean you can just Google it?” And so I literally copy the error and paste it into Google. And boom, here comes this magical website called Stack Overflow that just gives you the answer.

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Sahil Mansuri:

And I was like, “Why doesn't this exist for sales? Why isn't there a way for me as a rep to be able to figure out how I should set up my cadences, or for me as a sales manager to think about how I should do a better job doing pipe reviews, or as a VP of sales, think about how I should be building confidence?” Like why don't salespeople work together in an intercompany way, because we're all trying to do the same shit, right? We're all trying to call, email, close deals, renew, right? We're all doing the same things. I just didn't find it anywhere, so I just decided to make it.

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Sahil Mansuri:

But to answer your question specifically, which was more, “How has my experience of being on both sides taught me?” We have zero salespeople at Bravado. That's what it's taught me. And we will have zero salespeople at this company until I am 100, nay, 150% sure that we have absolute product-market fit, that I know that what we are selling is not only something that buyers want, but that they will repeatedly want. And I know what the TAM is, and I know what the motion is. And only at that time will I open the doors for us to actually hire salespeople.

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Pouyan Salehi:

You've talked a lot about commission and commission structures, and it's interesting hearing your thoughts here on your approach with product-market fit and then sales. How do you factor in, let's say you do hire salespeople, or would you hire salespeople earlier to help maybe figure that out, but take commission out of it? Would you still consider that part of sales?

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Sahil Mansuri:

No, I would not, because that's not the job of a salesperson. The job of the product team is to figure out what is something that users need, that they are willing to pay for. And then the job of the marketing team is to figure out a way to get people who haven't heard of this solution, but have this pain, to come to your website and discover it. And the job of the salesperson is to take that demand and convert it into revenue. Now, once you have that funnel up and running, you earn the right to do outbound sales. You earn the right to then start cold calling and prospecting and whatnot. Companies that are meaningful only are created because they first find real, true product-market fit and then scale. If you can't sell your own product with the luxury of being the founder, nobody else can do it.

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Ross Pomerantz:

That's what I'm saying.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Sales isn't something you can just kind of layer in or add in. It's a core part of the company. And maybe you're not the best sales person, but that's all right, but go through the motions, do it first. Speaking of which, I know Ross has strong opinions on this. SDRs, who do they report to?

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Sahil Mansuri:

First of all, I think the term SDR is too broad. I think that SDR means too many different things in too many different companies. So let's first separate inbound versus outbound. So if you are an inbound SDR and your job is to take inbound leads that come in and qualify them in order to see if they're worth something or not, I'm more of the belief that that's a function of marketing, to drive demand, so I think they sit there. But anything to do with outbound is sales, and has to sit with sales. And I don't think that people who are qualifying inbound leads are SDRs.

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Sahil Mansuri:

So I guess, in a roundabout way, I'm saying they should report to sales. But I also know that when you say SDRs, you are counting, because most people do, inbound. And I don't understand why sales is responsible for qualifying marketing's job. Marketing has to qualify their own leads. And then you get into this really fun world, because then what happens is marketing can choose to qualify a greater percentage of the leads than they should necessarily, they could choose to do that.

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Ross Pomerantz:

They will.

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Sahil Mansuri:

But then that's where you get to see actual conversion percentage come in. Those leads that come in through inbound, that get qualified, will go into the same pool as the ones that are outbounded. And then you'll just look at conversion percentage. So you'll be like, “Okay, well, marketing generated 500 qualified leads and sales generated 200, but the 500 leads that marketing generated only led to 10 closed deals for $1 million, while the 200 that sales generated led to 50 closed deals for $5 million. So as it turns out, marketing is one-fifth as effective, even if they're getting 2.5 times the volume.” But that can't be done today, because there's so much friction around this qualification process. So you just split call. I think that's what I would do.

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Ross Pomerantz:

Yeah. Get out those frosty kombuchas and get to qualifying.

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Pouyan Salehi:

Thanks for joining, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

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Sahil Mansuri:

Cool, Pouyan, great to be here. Thank you for having me and Ross, always a pleasure.