In this episode, we dive deep into the incredible journey of a top salesperson who went from closing zero deals in his first few months to becoming the number one salesperson at his company. Learn how he navigated the challenges of the 2008 recession, the strategies he used to turn things around, and his insights on the current state of sales and marketing.
Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction0
2:15 - The Early Struggles in Sales
08:30 - Turning Point: Becoming the Top Salesperson
14:45 - The Power of Being Different
20:10 - Launching Bravado AI
25:50 - Authentic Marketing Strategies
31:40 - The Current State of Sales
38:00 - Final Thoughts and Advice
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Sahil Mansuri:
And in my first three or four months that I was selling, I closed zero deals. I literally didn't sell a single contract. And then in 2009, I had a really great year in sales. I actually was the number one salesperson.
Andy Mewborn: Being different is better than being better. Being better than your competitor, you can't just be 2x better or 3x better. You have to be 20 times better for it to make a difference.
Sahil Mansuri: Like just record yourself using the product. No filtering, no editing, no scripting. Just you use it. Whatever you think, whatever you see, whatever comes to your mind, you just use it and we'll loom it and we'll just post it on LinkedIn. And that's the sort of marketing we do. There he is.
Andy Mewborn: How's it going? Good, man. How are you? Good, man. How are you doing? What's the latest? What's the latest?
Sahil Mansuri: Dude, you're catching me on launch day, actually. I didn't even quite team this all up. But today isā¦ We just launched Bravado AI today. So it's a busy day in Bravado land.
Andy Mewborn: Dude, well, tell us about it. You got to tell us about it. What is Bravado AI?
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah. We have built what we think is the fastest, easiest, most data-driven approach to sales hiring.
Andy Mewborn: Oh, really? And is that what Bravado is focused on right now? Because you guys have a massive community, right?
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah. So we have a B2C side of our business and a B2B side of our business. And so the B2C side of the business is obviously focused on helping salespeople grow their careers, be more successful in their current roles, get promoted, make more money, hit quota. And then the B2B side is focused on helping companies hire top salespeople.
Andy Mewborn: Nice. So, so the AI, so how are you going to use the AI just so I can kind of understand? Cause I'm a huge nerd.
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah. Are you, you do go check it out. Go to, go to bravado.co slash talent. You can, you can do it yourself. You don't need, you don't need me to, to tell you about it. You can just try it.
Andy Mewborn: Just bravado.co slash talent. Oh, nice. So I can just go on here. Take a look at this. Oh, find me five enterprise that you so fast growing. Oh my, oh, this is awesome.
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah. And if you scroll down, you can seeā¦ If you scroll down, you can see what sort of data you can search off of. So unlike on LinkedIn, when you're searching based on like, oh, where someone went to school or where they worked, you can actually search on, hey, I want someone who sold into my ICP. Think about outreach days, right? You're like, hey, I want someone who's worked at a Series B or Series C company. I want someone who sold CRM. I want someone who sold into RevOps or SalesOps. I want someone who sold 50 to 100K deal. I want someone who's familiar with the Salesforce ecosystem. And so you can find reps in a much more prescriptive way than you could if you were just searching on LinkedIn or elsewhere.
Andy Mewborn: Nice. And then you're using the data from people that sign up to Bravado, like the community, when you're like using what they've said on their profile and stuff to kind of put this together.
Sahil Mansuri: That's right. So basically, it's just like LinkedIn. LinkedIn does the same thing where you have your profile on LinkedIn. And then based off of that, you show up in results and filters. It's the same principle, except on Bravado, your reputation and your profile is built around your sales stats, not built around where you went to college.
Andy Mewborn: Oh, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Man, that's actually really cool. I like that because then you can easily just search, filter, find, because LinkedIn, the filtering is just like they've worked at one company before. Like what companies have they worked at?
Sahil Mansuri: That's right.
Andy Mewborn: It's definitely a little more clunky. So you're narrowing it initially, niching it down, niche, niche, whatever. I don't know, niche, niche, meme, meme, who knows, you know?
Sahil Mansuri: I haven't heard Meme before, but I see what you're going for and I like it.
Andy Mewborn: Dude, all right, let's get into the state of go to market sales, whatever we want to call it today, right? Let's get into it. Man, because things are changing, as you probably know, you know, if you log into LinkedIn, you feel like you're dying because everyone's saying everything's dead. And so, man, I want to chat with you and kind of just see like, Where's your head at with all this stuff going on right now with sellers, hiring sellers, sellers being successful? We can get really deep into this, but what's the state of go-to-market and sales specifically?
Sahil Mansuri: Better than ever. I think, look, there's a lot of value and a lot of money to be made. by standing up there and declaring that everything is dead. Outbound is dead, inbound is dead, cold email is dead, prospecting is dead. But if you want to see the future, come check out my $99 course. Or if you want to see the future, then buy my product, you know? And so one of the things that I've found about LinkedIn is that it's a bit of an echo chamber. People just kind of read other people's posts and then either agree or disagree and try to take somewhat of a contrarian point of view on it. And I don't mind that that's what people do. Ultimately, we're all trying to figure out how to be content creators. You and I started in sales and got to be in content creation as part of our work as well. So early on, that's what people do. I think the thing that bothers me is that there's all this talk about sales being dead and The era of the Zerp era growth is over and let's just focus on profitability and efficient growth and the days of double, triple, triple, double or over or whatever. It's just not true. That's just the problem. It sounds really good to say on LinkedIn. It's just not true. The vantage point that I get on Bravado, which I think is somewhat unique, is we have 100,000 sales teams, 450,000 reps, 100,000 sales teams. who are using Bravado in order to log and categorize their sales stats. So I get to see on a quarter-over-quarter basis, every 90 days, our membership updates. What percent of quota did they hit? How many deals did they close? What was their ranking on the sales team? Did their team hit quota? What percent of quota did they hit? Etc. And we've been tracking these stats now for four and a half years. And we've been seeing all the peaks and valleys and the highs of the 2021-2022 days, the real lows, the dip of 2023. But things are back in a really meaningful way. 42% of sales teams hit quota last quarter, which is up from 21% just three quarters ago. And so quota attainment has actually doubled in the last three quarters. On top of that, 47% of sales reps hit quota last quarter, which is up all the way from 19% just three quarters ago. So quota attainment is on the rise. Teams are hitting quota, reps are hitting quota, and companies are scaling and growing. The number of unannounced massive Series A, Series B, Series Cs have never been higher. You're starting to see them come out now, but it's still really early. And I'd say that Four-fifths, five-sixths of the rounds I've seen done over the last six to nine months are unannounced. And so companies are growing and scaling revenue really fast. And they're using all of the same tactics that everybody keeps claiming are dead. I see cold emails working. I see cold calls working. I see inbound working. I see events working. I see networking working. I see referrals working. I see VC networks working. I see it all working. Is it harder to do than it was before? Yes. Does it require more strategy? Yes. Can you just brain pray with a bunch of 22-year-old SDRs who are sitting there with a sales loft or an outreach instance who are sending 1,000 emails with the click of a button. No, you cannot do that. But that was never really the thing that great sales teams were doing anyway. I mean, you worked at outreach. You know this intimately. The best sales teams, the ones that were growing and scaling the most, they were always spending a lot on marketing. They were always spending a lot on brand. They were always throwing a lot of events. They were always doing a lot of stuff to support the outbound effort anyway. So, I guess in short, I would say, you know, the reports of the death of sales and outbound are greatly exaggerated. I think salespeople are doing really well. I think companies are doing really well. I think go-to-market teams are performing really well. It's just a little bit harder than it used to be and it requires a little bit more skill and thought than it used to.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah. And, you know, one, I just want to say I like your optimism on that. Right. Because, man, I used to see more content from you on that. I love that. Right. I'm like, all this stuff is dead, but it's not. And you have stats around it actually growing, which is insane. Right. And like, actually it getting better over time. And One of my hypotheses on this is that we also had this five year period where it was one of the best periods in software of all time. And we kind of had an easy button, as you mentioned, which was like load things in the outreach, you know, spray and pray, and then you'd still get meetings and all that fun stuff. And my hypothesis on that is a lot of people that came up in that period, just from what I noticed, all they knew was the easy button. Right. And so now when we actually get to like what it what it's really like to do sales and stuff, people are like, oh, my God, like it's dead. Right. And that's the first thing when it's like, no, we just have the easy button for a while. And now you've actually got to like strategize, figure out better tactics, understand how to how to do things that make outbound a lot easier. Right. Whether it's content events, you know, whatever you want to do. So I also think there's that interesting period because if you look at a lot of people saying things that are dead, right? It's like, well, that's because you've only seen one way that was the easy way.
Sahil Mansuri: I mean, my first month with a quota that I ever carried a quota was September of 2008. And if you remember, September 2008 was when Lehman Brothers failed and we had the massive depression crisis recession of 2008. And that was my first month ever with a quota. And in my first three or four months that I was selling, so September, October, November, December, I closed zero deals. I literally didn't sell a single contract at a time at which we had monthly quotas. It was only a 5k ACV. And basically, if you didn't sell a deal within the first eight weeks, you got fired. And I didn't get fired because there was all this recessionary stuff. But I didn't know any of that. I was 21 years old. I didn't know shit. So I was just likeā¦ I still don't know shit. I still don't know shit. Yeah. I was just plugging away. I was just plugging away. But I learned how to sell. And then in 2009, I had a really great year in sales. I actually was the number one salesperson out of almost 1,000 at the company that I sold at. And I learned to sell in a recession. And so did a lot of people, to be clear. It's not like the market has always been up and to the right. There's a lot of salespeople who sold through 2000. There's a lot of salespeople that sold through 2008, 2009, who have seen recessionary environments before. And by the way, there are also salespeople, many salespeople I know, who have been really successful selling in 2021, 2022, and 2023. It's not as if great salespeople can't sell at a time at which the market is bad. It's just that the salespeople who aren't very good can't sell in a time in which the market is not doing well. And so if you think about the fact that the average team has somewhere around 60 to 70% quota attainment in a good year, And in a bad year, that team has like a 20% to 30% quota attainment. The delta between that 40% are the people who are effectively order takers. Those are people who can sell when it's easy to sell, but don't actually understand the effort and grind and skill that goes into sales. And ultimately, I think it's a healthy thing for the industry. Because what happens is you actually start to value the people who are really great at sales. It's an old adage of when the racetrack is in perfect conditions, or when the golf course, there's no wind, there's no like, anyone can play well. But it's only when there's 30 mile an hour winds and it's really hard to hit the ball, or it's only when the racetrack is wet, do you actually see who can drive, who can actually play golf. And so like, you know, we've been, we've, we've had like perfect conditions for a while. And then as soon as conditions got hard, a bunch of people were like, Oh, the game is broken. And it's like, no, no, no, the game isn't broken. You just got exposed for your lack of skill. And that's okay too, because you can be bad at something and get better at it. But sitting around saying, Oh, outbound is dead is bullshit. Like that's not true. Outbound isn't dead. You're just not good enough at it in order to sell in this environment. So level up, get better. And I think that if people took the challenge on themselves and said, Hey, I need to improve. my company needs to improve, our go-to-market strategy needs to improve, as opposed to just declaring the death of something. I think that's where people have the right growth mindset in order to be successful.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah, and what companies out there do you see from the outside that are just doing a phenomenal job right now that we can all take as like, oh, that's the North Star of how to be agile, how to adapt, how to take these changing market conditions and kind of move forward?
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the answer is contingent upon what stage you're at. So I don't think that the strategy that a large public Capco is using can necessarily work for an early stage company. And I think the inverse is also true. And so it kind of depends on a stage perspective. I can tell you a couple of things that I've seen that I've found to be really interesting or really effective. Let's talk about your friend Adam, who's been making some waves on social with his Sixth Sense attacks, right? So for those that don't know, the CEO of retention.com has basically been on a public crusade against Sixth Sense and has been posting all of this stuff. about Sixth Sense which has garnered hundreds of thousands, millions of views, all these comments, even got a lawsuit, news articles around it, whatever. I'll tell you what, the number of people that knew who Adam and what retention.com and whatever his product was, the number of people that knew who he and his products was two months ago versus the number of people that know him and know his products today, I'd be willing to bet it's probably like tens of millions of dollars of earned media, you know, tens of millions of dollars of advertising dollars that he could have spent to get the same level of brand exposure and reach. And so am I saying start publicly calling out your competitors and get sued by them is the strategy? No, that's not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is you got to do something different. You got to do something provocative. You got to get people's attention. You can't just get up there and be like, You know, the thing that everyone loves to do is be like, oh, you know, we just released this awesome new feature and it's awesome and you should come check it out. And here's a white paper about it. And oh, like here, we're doing a webinar about how awesome our feature is. And literally, you know, you get nothing and then you're like, well, shit, your webinars are dead. And meanwhile, I bet if Adam was like, hey, I'm going to host a webinar about how to get sued by your biggest competitor, I bet a lot of people would show up to that because that's interesting content. That's the sort of thing that people like to see. And so tapping into the psyche of what I like to call the human OS, we are just like very We think we're so complicated, but we're pretty simple people. If you see a traffic accident across the way, you're going to slow down and rubberneck. Everyone does it. It happens every time there's an accident. What you got to do is make a big enough accident over here that people slow down and pay attention. And I don't think enough companies understand the value of that.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I was talking to Udi from Gong last week. Udi was on the pod and we just we just launched like a partnership with Gong Distributed. And so I was like, hey, you know, Udi, let's celebrate. Let's get you on and let's, you know, jam on this. And, you know, one thing that he said on the pod, which is something that I love, I even made it like a cultural value of our company. Right. I was like, oh, this is the shit. Was he said being different is better than being better. Being different is better than being better. And I go, holy shit. I had to think for a sec like you just did. And I was like, yeah, that is amazing. Like being different is better than being better. And then, and then we got into it and I was like, why do you think that is? And he goes, And it was all about brand and stuff. He goes, look, to be better than your competitor, you can't just be 2x better or 3x better. You have to be 20 times better for it to make a difference. And so rather than trying to be 20 times better, which is really hard, you can simply just be different. And he goes, that's a lot easier, believe it or not. And I go, holy shit, that makes a lot of sense, you know? And so that really stuck with me because I'm kind of the guy, I'm like, you know, I see some similarities with you where it's like, I don't take the standard route. Like if you look at our branding, it's like crazy donkeys and you know, like all this stuff, but people, some people hate it.
Sahil Mansuri: Some people love it.
Andy Mewborn: I've had some in, you know, when we were raising monies, some investor was like, we're passing because your donkey has a gold tooth and that's offensive. And I go, Wait, what?
Sahil Mansuri: Why?
Andy Mewborn: Like, okay, like, we're probably not a good fit anyway. It's like, you know, um, and so just to give you an idea on that, I'm like, I don't care. Like, I'm going to be different because I want to bring personality into something. And when you do that, it, it's going to cause a little bit of friction with, with some people and, and not others. Right. And I think that's when, you know, you're kind of trying to be different or be on this different path. Um, like with Adam, right. I mean, we were texting before he was doing this and he was like, should I post it? Right. And we were like, we were like debating. He was like, this is, this is going to like, this is definitely gonna ruffle feathers. Right. And so it was like, it felt because no one has done it and it definitely feels a lot different. And I think that that's a good feeling that a lot of companies avoid. Right. Because they're like, oh, no, it's not been done that way. So we're just going to stick to what's safe. Yeah. And now that we're becoming more saturated, you know, with software coming out everywhere, how do you how do you be different? I think it's becoming even more important, which, you know, well, because you work like you work with Corporate Bro, right. And so he's a part of Bravado's, I believe, somehow. Right.
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah. So Ross. Yeah. Ross and I partnered together, you know, almost four years ago now. Because he was graduating from GSB and I was guest lecturing on a class about sales and people were like, oh my god, do you know who's next door? This guy named Corporate Bro. And I was like, And it's funny because I'm like such a Luddite when it comes to social media that I had no idea who that was, you know, and I was just like, oh, that's cool. And it was my, you know, nothing about Ross. And so I looked it up and I was like, oh, this is fucking hilarious. And so he and I ended up meeting up and becoming friends and decided, you know, he has this mission that he wants to put some respect on sales, his name. Obviously Bravado is here to try to champion salespeople and grow the profession of sales. So a natural partnership emerged and Ross has been the head of our community now for about four years. We launched the War Room together back in January of 2021. And yeah, when we decided to work together, there were a lot of questions about like, hey, is this the right brand? Obviously, Ross has a provocative style of building a brand. I always felt something really simple, which is you've got to meet people where they are. You have to meet people where they are. And where the world of sales is, it's hard. You're a little jaded. It's a bit of a shit show. And a lot of days you're like, why the fuck did I sign up? Why the fuck did I sign up for this job? This was a horrendous decision. And then you close a really big deal and you're like, I'm the king of the And so it's highs and lows, it's ebbs and tides, it's a lot of Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, it's a little bipolar at times. And that feeling is something that we try to encapsulate in our brand, in our content, in everything that we do. And above all, salespeople don't like to be bullshit. You can't bullshit a bullshitter. You just can't bullshit a bullshitter. And that was something that Ross and I agreed on really early on. In fact, today, we just did our launch for Bravado Talent. And the way we did the launch was I gave Ross the keys to the castle, had him turn on his loom, and I was just like, just record yourself using the product. No filtering, no editing, no scripting. Just you use it. Whatever you think, whatever you see, whatever comes to your mind, you just use it and we'll loom it and we'll just post it on LinkedIn. And that's the sort of marketing we do. You know, it's not this like editorial, like companies spend all this time building beautiful landing pages and, you know, creating these perfect marketing videos. And then the actual product sucks, you know, and we want to be the opposite. We're like, we're just going to use the product in front of you. And if the results are shitty, they're shitty. If they're good, they're good. Just use it and let's just see what happens. And, you know, that sort of authenticity, I think resonates really strongly among the sales community.
Andy Mewborn: And I think especially right now, man, I think like it's a better time than ever for that because Um, if you look at like, I've been looking at, you know, YouTubers and, you know, getting into YouTube because I have the pod on YouTube and all that. And there's this guy that's like super buff and, you know, goes to the gym. I don't know if you've seen this guy, but he's racked up in a year, like a million subs. And dude, he just films himself with his iPhone, no edits, no jump cuts, none of this crazy crap talking about in the car, his workouts. And then while he's working out and they're like 30 minute long videos, dude. And he does one every day. And it's literally, I'll send it, I forget his name, but, and. I mean, he's, the one thing he has is he's like massively buff and he used to be a swimmer, I think, or like a diver and like do all these spins and stuff. So like the, the contrast is kind of crazy that he used to be like a diver, you know, doing flips and stuff. And now he's like massive, but he's just talking, man. Like that's all he's doing. And like, people are watching this guy. And so now I think a lot of YouTubers are seeing that and people content wise, they're just saying, How do I get through the bullshit of like doing all this crazy formatting and doing all this and just like what's the main idea that I want to get across and all the other stuff is just kind of noise, you know?
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah. I mean, even when we do launches for products, I'll tell you something thatā¦ Here's maybe one thing that I can leave to your audience, which is everybody loves to put buzzwords into shit. When we launched this product, we called itā¦ Here'sā¦ I'll read you what we actually wrote. I wroteā¦ We wrote bravado, a better way to hire salespeople. That's it. Yeah. Right. And so theā¦ When we sent this out to our investors and to people to look at, the feedback I got was like, hey, that's so boring. Why wouldn't you put something like AI revolutionized sales hiring, the world's most powerful sales recruiting solution, hire great salespeople, all this shit. And I'm like, because at the end of the day, people are going to read that and be like, I don't believe you. That's the thing that's true is that everybody puts these grandiose claims and these huge things up front. And what we want to do is say, hey, we're just going to lead with the product. We're going to lead with simplicity. When we get on a sales demo with a customer, We don't sit there and run through this beautiful stylized deck. We don't run through a sample demo account with all these perfect candidates. We literally just turn it over to the customer and say, hey, use the product. Whatever you see, whatever comes out, that's what you're going to get out of it anyway. And what that does is it actually puts tremendous pressure on our product team. It puts tremendous pressure on our engineering team in order to deliver a product experience that actually works, not just a great demo experience, and then a bunch of vaporware to try to obfuscate what's actually happening on the back end. It also means we lose a bunch of deals because you'll get people on, they'll have a bad experience and they'll be like, this product fucking sucks. They'll be like, yeah, it did suck, didn't it? And so we need to make it better. And then we take that gone clip and we post it into our product channel and we say, we just lost this deal because this happened. And I guarantee you, every time it happens, our CTO and our data science team and whatever jumps on it to fix it. And that's how you build great products is with authenticity, with transparency and with accountability to the market. I think things like that got lost during the Zerp era because you had all these companies that were like, I'm going to build one perfect demo account, some great marketing, around it and then just have people sell it. And then when nobody was really checking the ROI of the product. And I think that's really changed, you know, is that now buyers are like, well, I'm going to triple check before I put $1 towards something that this thing's actually going to work. And when people are doing that, a lot of these products just don't have the ROI. The actual product experience isn't that great. I think it's a real challenge for companies to realize that if your product can't sell itself and you don't haveā¦ Mark Benioff has this great quote, Andy, that I'm not sure if you've heard, but it's one of my favorites where he talks about how Great companies are built at the intersection of a excellent product meeting an excellent go-to-market motion. And I think that a lot of companies focus on one of those equations. Many in sales tech focus on the go-to-market, many outside of sales tech tend to focus on the product. But very few companies focus on making both parts of that equation exceptional. And I think that's one of the reasons why so many companies have struggled over the last couple years.
Andy Mewborn: It's so true, I think. Some of the best founders and builders I know are super obsessive on making sure the product's great and then super obsessive that it's great so that when they go sell it, there's less kinks, right? Like the other day I have, you know, I was looking at distributing and I was Believe it or not, I was thinking about the color of a button. No, I'm not even kidding. I was like, what should it be? And where should it be located for this workflow? And my wife is like, it's just a button. You know, like, why are you, you're thinking too hard. It's just one button. I'm like, no. It's not just a button. This is what kicks off the whole workflow. This needs to be clear, right? It downstreams to multiple other things, you know? And that was a clear example where I was just like, no, it's not just the one button and all that. It matters because of this, this, this, and this, and this, you know? And so Well, you can really feel that in products today, right? Where it's something that's just hashed together and, you know, put together to like make a great demo versus something that's like thought through because you were in that role, you had that problem and you're like, this is how someone would actually use it to get blank, you know?
Sahil Mansuri: Yeah, that's exactly right. Dude, you nailed it on the head, which is that like part of the thing that's missing in especially in sales tech, especially in the world that you and I know well, one of the things that's missing is founders who are product obsessive. You have a lot of founders that are that are obsessive around the go to market and the use case and the ROI and whatever. But the actual product experience itself is shitty. And I'll tell you who I think is to blame for this. I'm sure I'm going to get some heat for this, but I think the company that is the most to blame for this is Salesforce, because
Andy Mewborn: Which is funny because Marc Benioff is the guy saying that quote too, right?
Sahil Mansuri: Right. But Salesforce's product is so painful to use for the end user and they just don't care. They know where their money's at, right? Their money is in the CFO and in the CEO and the COO of these and the CRO of these organizations and the Rev Ops teams and whatever. That's where their money is. They don't make their money off of AEs. They don't make their money off of SDRs, right? These are not the people that are making decisions whether to use Salesforce or not. And instead of investing in end user experience and making that experience really delightful and making it really magical and whatever, they spent all of the last 20 years, 25 years, just putting every drop of resource that they can into going up market, into enterprise, into cross-selling and more products and whatever, at the sacrifice of the delight of the end user. And what it led to, ironically, was this feeling that the end user didn't matter, almost. And then there was this next wave of companies, obviously, at Outreach that was like, never log into Salesforce again. It was meant to be the, end-user front-end solution of it. And they still didn't care. The only time that Salesforce actually started caring is when HubSpot started kicking their ass, right? When HubSpot started kicking their ass in CRM and started winning these mid-market and enterprise deals, and their stock started rising, and they started being more successful. That's when Salesforce got more serious about the end-user experience. And I think that that paradigm where the largest, most well-known sales tech product in the world, Salesforce, is actually one of the shittiest, worst UIs, super complex, impossible to set up, has a massive ecosystem of people just around it to develop it and integrate it and whatever, has actually created an incredible dissonance in sales tech. where people don't understand the value of creating a simple, delightful product. And you compare that in contrast, by the way, to products like Figma, which in the design world have made it so that someone like myself, who is not a designer, can very easily log in and start interfacing with the product suite and start working and collaborating with our PDE teams in order to develop products. Like there are these incredible products that have been created outside of sales tech that are really delightful. And then in sales tech, you have all these products that are clunky and just like heavy and difficult to use, not well designed, not thoughtfully made. And people are just rushing to throw SDRs and AEs behind them to try to sell it instead of actually building something that people want. Yeah. And I think product obsessiveness is a real challenge for many sales tech founders.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can give you my theory on that too.
Sahil Mansuri: Please.
Andy Mewborn: I want to hear it. Yeah. Which is. You know, I'm fortunate enough. I come from an engineering background. Right. So like, and then I got into sales, believe it or not. So most people don't know that. Right. Like I'm, I started my career as an engineer, um, in early outreach was more on the product technical side. Right. And so, you know, when you look at sales tech from a perspective of, of building it, a lot of people, and I don't have a number on this. It's just anecdotally, I will say a lot of people that build sales tech. we're not product people. You know, it was like, Oh, hey, I'm that which is don't get me wrong. It's amazing. Go build something like that's how you get started, whatever. But they look at it from a sales perspective, how can I sell this thing versus like the idea is cool, the marketing, we can do this and do all this. But then when it comes to the actual user experience and stuff, there's a disconnect, right? Because they haven't been product people and they don't understand that even the button location sometimes matters, right? Even the way you start these workflows really matters. And I think a bunch of people jumped into building sales and marketing tech that weren't necessarily product obsessive people, as you just mentioned. Right. There were sales obsessive said, Oh, I was in sales. And so you have this ego about you. I was in sales. So I know this is a product people need. Right. And your ego, unfortunately, almost you assume that you know what people want. Right. Versus you getting rid of that ego a little bit and saying like, no, I'm assuming what people I'm assuming what they want, but that assumption could be wrong.
Sahil Mansuri: Right.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah. And I think it that's it comes down to ego, man. I think is what the problem was with a lot of these products. Right. I was in sales. I know when it's like, no, you may not. Yeah. Yeah. And the ego kind of like I think screwed a lot of people in terms of building great product.
Sahil Mansuri: Andy, I really think you've hit the nail on the head and I can speak about this from personal experience. I think there'sā¦ Well, first of all, I want to agree with you entirely and say that I also had this experience as a founder where I assumed because I had spent my career in sales, because I had done a lot of sales recruiting and sales hiring myself, that I understood what the market needed without having to do the hard work of user research and customer testing. ABs and this and that that like instinctively I could just like develop the right product based on my own experience and how wrong I was about that. was a lesson that I learned multiple times over in the early journey of being a founder at Bravado. And the only reason that the company, I think, survived my blemishes and my mistakes is because I think there was enough support in the sales community around the fact that at least we were trying to do the right thing, even if we didn't do the right thing, that people were willing to give it a second and a third chance every time we tried again. And Now we've gotten a much better product development process, and I've learned a lot as a founder about what it takes in order to actually build a great product. So I actually agree with you entirely. I think there's another reason, by the way, that salespeople tend to struggle when they transition to being a CEO. which is that in sales, you're actually really good at objection handling. And it means that in your head, you can hear someone say four things that they dislike and one thing that they like. And you as a salesperson, your skill set is taking the one thing they like and turning that into a deal. When you're a founder, you have to do the inverse. You can hear four things someone likes about your product and one thing they don't, and you got to obsess over the one thing they don't. Because obviously for the one time that one person tells you they don't like something, there's hundreds and thousands of people who feel the same thing, but won't say it to you because you're the founder. And they're going to be like, oh, it's great. Even if in their head, they're thinking something else. And so in sales, you have this ability to take a glass that's like 10% full and make it and be optimistic about it. As a founder, you have to take a glass that's 90% full and obsess over the missing 10%. And I think that that's a really tough transition for someone to make when they've spent their entire career being optimistic. And as a founder, you have to learn to be pessimistic, right? You have to learn to think about the worst case scenario at all times. You got to start really worrying about the what-ifs. Where in sales, you only have to worry about the possibilities and the things that could go right. I guess as a salesperson, if you have 50 demos and if you close three of them, That's a really good close rate. That's pretty damn good. If you close 5 of them, you're really good. And if you ever close 10 out of 50 demos and you have a 20% close rate, you're the best salesperson on the team. And if you compare that to launching products and whatnot, you might get 3 to 5 shots on goal in the entirety of your company. And so you got to get real good at making every shot count. And I think that's sort of likeā¦ you know, dissonance can be really hard. So I actually agree with you.
Andy Mewborn: I think it's a really well said point. And you know, a couple of things that you mentioned that brought up something for me was you mentioned you have to obsess as a founder over the last 10%, which is one of the best product people I know once said that like building the first 90% of the product is always easy. The last 10% is where you will spend the most time of a product. Because getting that last 10% right is always a pain in the ass, right? And so it's like the final touches and the final little gadgets that people use and all that stuff. in anything I've ever built, Taplio, Outreach, now Distribute, like that is it. It's that last 10% where you're like, it's kind of an afterthought when you start, but then when you get into it, right, you're like, no, this is where we have to focus, right? Like this AI part and then like auto doing this and you know, when we won't get into specifics, but that last edge of the product is definitely something that comes to mind. And then the next thing I'll say on that is for me, I have this process where we're building product. I look at every new thing that we're basically roadmapping or planning or scoping. I go, I reverse engineer it by saying, what support tickets is this going to create? Because my job is to avoid support tickets when building a product. Your North Star is having zero support tickets. The product is that good and people understand it so well, right? And so when I think about it, I go, okay. What support tickets? I asked my team, you know, what support tickets is this going to create in here? And then we start to jam and say, well, they'll probably say something about this. And I'll say, well, then how do we avoid that? Oh, let's do this. And let's do this. That is, I would say, if I had one product secret, that's the one thing I will live and die by at all times. It's like, how do you avoid that support ticket of what people are like? I don't get it. Right. And dude, it works wonders.
Sahil Mansuri: Amazing.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah. There you go.
Sahil Mansuri: I love that. I love that. That's a great, that's a great tidbit. You know, whoever's engineering the support tickets that you're predicting, I think that makes a tremendous amount of sense.
Andy Mewborn: Yeah. It's almost, it's like objection handling, right? It's almost like, okay, what are the objections that they're going to have about this? And you don't want to show up to a call, most likely if you're good as a salesperson, and be like, oh, yeah, I never really thought through those objections. I'm just going to answer them on the spot. No, you would think through, like, here's what they're going to say. Here's how to respond to make sure they feel comfortable about that objection or whatever it may be, you know. So, yeah, man. Hey, Ceil, this has been awesome, man. Yeah, man. All right, brother. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. I'll talk to you soon, Ceil. Later, man.
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