27 min read
Today's guest is Sahil Mansuri, the CEO of Bravado, the better way to hire sales talent. Sahil led sales teams since 2008 at companies like Meltwater, Glassdoor, before starting Bravado to change sales hiring for the better. Here are three really interesting conversations I had with Sahil today.
- Are CMOs better positioned to be CROs?
- What do sales leaders think about brand versus performance marketing?
- Is the ZIRP Era growth over?
Time-coded show notes
00:00 — Introduction
01:00 — Sahil’s viral LinkedIn post
03:00 — Sales leadership and market challenges
07:00 — The diminishing role of outbound sales
12:00 — Marketing’s role in creating affinity
16:00 — The blame game: Marketing vs. Sales
20:00 — Growth and the myth of the ‘Zorp Era’
24:00 — Bravado’s new product launch
28:00 — Lightning round: Marketing topics
32:00 — Closing thoughts
Full transcript:
00;00;00;03 — 00;00;27;04
Pranav: Today's guest is Sahil Mansuri, the CEO of Bravado — the Better Way to Hire Sales Talent. Sahil led sales teams since 2008 at companies like Meltwater and Glassdoor before starting Bravado to change sales, hiring for the better. Here are three really interesting conversations I had with Sahil today. Our CMOs better position to be CROs. What do sales leaders think about brand versus performance marketing?
00;00;27;11 — 00;01;00;24
Pranav: And finally, is the czar era growth over? So let's get into it, Sahil. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. This is this is an interesting one. So I'm going to start with the fun story. You totally got me on LinkedIn. I was scrolling my feed and what a masterful troll two weeks ago when you said something like, CROs are best positioned to be CMO's or something of that nature.
00;01;00;27 — 00;01;21;29
Pranav: And I was like riled up and I think I reacted and I reposted with something like ridiculous. And after like 3 hours I realized that it was a troll and I was just like laughing at myself and I to did my own post. Tell us what happened when got you to post about that. It's just a funny little topic to start off it.
00;01;22;03 — 00;01;52;29
Sahil: Yeah, sure. I mean, look, there was a woman on LinkedIn who I believe is the SVP of Marketing at Trust Radius who wrote a sincere post about how CMO's would be better off being CROs than sales leaders. Basically that marketing leaders are a better position to be CROs than than sales leaders are, and then cited a bunch of reasons supporting that argument.
00;01;53;01 — 00;02;33;13
Sahil: And the way in which she constructed her argument basically painted a caricature ized version of sales, which was basically that, like salespeople are these blunt instruments who don't understand technology, don't understand metrics, don't understand data, don't understand analytics, that the only thing they can do is close deals and that, you know, marketers who have a much more holistic view of demand, gen of systems, orchestration of like revenue, end to end, etc. are better posed in order to own the revenue function.
00;02;33;15 — 00;03;08;22
Sahil: And you know, the post was at best misguided in reality, probably just like ludicrous that somebody who has never been a CRO, never will be a CRO, would have the audacity to claim that, you know, someone that the entire category of people who are doing a job are ill equipped to do it. It reminds me a lot of the reminds me a lot of, you know, this this this idea that from afar, everything looks easy.
00;03;08;24 — 00;03;37;27
Sahil: You know, like, you know, there's this there's this really funny adage of, like every B-to-B founder after they've found it a B2B company, the next time they found A, B, C company, you know, because they're like, man, B2B so hard, you know, I B2C is way easier. And then I see founder starts a B2B company and they all pivot back, right, Because they realize very like actually it's all hard and others there is no you out and that everything just looks easy from the outside.
00;03;37;29 — 00;03;58;17
Sahil: Or put differently there's a beautiful song that talks about how from 40,000 feet the Earth just looks green and blue, the water looks clean, always look green, you know. And so from 40,000 feet, everything looks perfect. And you have to, like, zoom in to see the poverty and this pain and the suffering, the hunger and whatever. And it's the same with any work.
00;03;58;17 — 00;04;07;17
Sahil: And so I made a satirical response to that cause. And I think you got caught up into the sarcasm there.
00;04;07;20 — 00;04;22;24
Pranav: It was great. I love it. I love I love when stuff like that happens because you it improves your understanding of the world, right? It gives me an opportunity. I reached out to you and you were kind enough to come on and we'll talk about this topic. So thank you for taking it off. And I completely agree. I've had the same thing.
00;04;22;24 — 00;04;47;09
Pranav: I was like, I've been at it for, you know, maybe a couple of years on this B2B sort of startup journey. And I'm like, Yeah, let's do B2C next time. But I'm super actually excited about what we're doing. So that's, that's, that's not real. Okay, So I want to start with, you know, you've been in sales for pretty much your entire career, and then you've started a company a few years ago.
00;04;47;12 — 00;05;09;04
Pranav: And so I'm really curious to understand what your view is on the relationship between marketing and sales. What is your personal experience been when you were a sales leader or even within your own company? Hiring salespeople, hiring marketers, maybe. And what's your take on what's going well? What's not going well? In the last couple of decades?
00;05;09;07 — 00;05;40;06
Sahil: Yeah, well, I think I think to look at the past couple of decades would lead to a misleading sort of indicator of where we are today. I think historically things were very different than they are now. And the biggest reason why is because the traditional outbound function that most companies are used to using in B2B in order to grow pipeline are no longer effective.
00;05;40;06 — 00;06;09;01
Sahil: And so you have the vast proliferation, the rise of the role of the SDR, spurred on by sales, often outreach, predominantly equipping 22 to 25 year olds making 60 $70,000 a year with the capacity to out prospect any 250 $300,000 enterprise seller, even with a massive network because of the volume of efficiency. And so you're able to send a thousand emails with a click of a button, they all look personalized.
00;06;09;01 — 00;06;32;07
Sahil: No one had seen personalized email coming from an individual's inbox before, and it looked and felt nothing like Marketo or HubSpot or whatever. And so you had all of these buyers who are inadvertently being tricked into responding to these messages that were effectively just marketing emails, but coming from the inbox of the salesperson and looking and sounding like they'd been written by a human.
00;06;32;09 — 00;07;03;04
Sahil: And that trick worked all the way from like 2014, 2015 until 20 2021. And then when we had kind of the great reset after the economy crashed, what started happening is, is that paired with the rise of tools like chat, CBT have made it so prevalent and so easy and mass consumerization of the SDR function that now people are already aware that any email that comes from the inbox of any salesperson is most likely not personalized.
00;07;03;04 — 00;07;24;29
Sahil: And so the default assumption of every email that lands in your inbox from anybody at all is that it is a mass marketing, even if it doesn't look and feel like one. And so given that that's the case, the number one weapon that the sales team had in order to grow and you can I don't I don't care if it's sales or marketing I know something's I'm.
00;07;25;01 — 00;07;26;07
Pranav: Sure yeah.
00;07;26;09 — 00;07;49;07
Sahil: Report to marketing and some they referred to so the core weapon that the sales and marketing team had in order to drive and create demand that didn't rely on inbound, which was of course SDR is an outbound outbound emailing has has died in efficacy since people have moved out of the office. Cold calling has also died in efficacy and so now cold calling and cold email are relatively ineffective.
00;07;49;07 — 00;08;12;06
Sahil: Plus, LinkedIn has become just an absolute cesspool of marketing emails and messages that come to your inbox. And so yeah, social selling. Yeah. No, these channels are dead too, per se, but all of them are dying in efficacy and are far more difficult, far less effective and far less efficient than they have been historically. And so in a world that looks like that, what is the role of sales and marketing today?
00;08;12;09 — 00;08;36;01
Sahil: I think the role of marketing now is to, you know, do the things that need to be done in order to create a warm entry point for a go to market motion to begin. And the way that you create a warm entry point for a go to market motion to begin is you create some sense of affinity, some sense of familiarity, and some sense of friendship.
00;08;36;04 — 00;08;59;03
Sahil: And you can do that by creating really thoughtful pieces of content that help a particular persona do their jobs better. You can do that by inviting people to go to a baseball game. You can do that by inviting people to come to a dinner. You can do that by sending them warm cookies in the mail. There's a variety of ways you can do that, and many more exist that I didn't mention.
00;08;59;05 — 00;09;27;04
Sahil: But ultimately, I think the job of marketing or top of funnel, whether you in marketing, yeah, the job of top of funnel is to make sure that when the customer is interested in your product, you come up in the conversation or that the sales team has an opportunity to introduce a problem, to expose a problem the company was unaware of and to showcase a potential solution to that problem as efficiency gain.
00;09;27;05 — 00;09;30;18
Sahil: So in other words, it's to get the ear of the customer.
00;09;30;20 — 00;10;02;28
Pranav: And I love it. I love it. You said you said, you know, a few things that really strike at the heart of what marketing is all about, right? The the friendship, the affinity, the warmness, the getting the interest of the customer. All of those things are absolutely what should be happening. Now, Tell me what the dysfunction or this, you know, the spark that maybe not the spark, but like the debate we had on LinkedIn about CMO's are better suited OCR, OCR is a better suited at being.
00;10;03;01 — 00;10;24;07
Pranav: I was like, why are we still stuck in this debate? What do you think is like broken at the heart of it, where these conversations are happening? When you and I get on the phone and we are talking about this like we're very light about what the role of marketing is in enabling those warm conversations. So why do you think this happens?
00;10;24;10 — 00;10;53;07
Sahil: Because companies are losing. So, you know, there's there's a there's a great expression from the from Sam Altman where he talks about how growth solves all problems. And so when companies are winning and people are hitting revenue targets, nobody's complaining. Yeah, I mean, you might have a little jabbing here and there, but ultimately people are cheering the marketing team and people are cheering the sales team and people are cheering the finance team and they're cheering the tech team and everyone's cheering everyone.
00;10;53;07 — 00;11;11;21
Sahil: You know, it feels good when you're missing revenue targets, when your company isn't able to raise the next round, when you're going through rounds of layoffs and you're, you know, and now when you're turning out customers, now all of a sudden everyone starts pulling out their magnifying glass and trying to look for a scapegoat. That's really what's happening.
00;11;11;23 — 00;11;37;06
Sahil: And marketing has to take responsibility. So they blame sales. And sales don't want to take responsibility, so they blame marketing. And I actually think in most cases it's neither sales nor marketing's fault. I actually think that the the conversation here here's here's you know, maybe your your takeaway for for this for this answer is that Marc Benioff has a great expression that I love, which is great.
00;11;37;06 — 00;12;03;06
Sahil: Companies are built at the intersection of an excellent product meeting, an excellent go to market strategy, and many companies have optimized the shit out of their go to market strategy. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Many companies have shitty products like the product that good, like it's fine in a certain use case to a certain type of persona or whatever.
00;12;03;08 — 00;12;30;28
Sahil: But there's a lot of competitors out there that do very similar things for the price that you're paying. The are a lie is is is is tough to measure. The only reason you've even priced it the way you have is because other people price their products that way and everybody's like, Oh yeah, we'll charge $100 a user a month, you know, because that's how it's off or products cost or, you know, RACV is going to be between 40 and 50 K because that's what a VC told me should be my CV or I read it from Jason Lemkin or whatever.
00;12;30;28 — 00;12;46;03
Sahil: Like, you know, it's like, it's like these dumb reasons to price a product that way when ultimately maybe the amount of value your product is creating is only $2,000 a year. And if you price your product to $2,000 a year, then you would anyone would be able to sell it and anyone would be able to market it. And you get a lot of customers.
00;12;46;03 — 00;13;22;07
Sahil: You may not have a business and $2,000 a year, right? But that's not a problem. That's a go to market problem. That's a product problem. And so or it's a it's a TAM problem or it's you know, so the problem is, is is that, you know, you have founders who don't understand how to build a product in a market, in a product that is valuable enough in a market that is big enough with a willingness to buy at a certain price point that can allow you that can that could earn you the right to build an excellent go to market strategy.
00;13;22;07 — 00;14;06;01
Sahil: And instead what they do is they spin up a mediocre product without fully understanding all of the use cases and without actually knowing how to price the product. And then they shift all of the responsibility of revenue generation to the go to market team and basically have the product team operate in a silo where it's like, Oh yeah, we're going to build these features and we're going to like do all this shit as opposed to ever coming back and saying, Well, did we actually ever validate that there was a willingness from the market to buy a $50,000 annual contract for 20,000 companies that would enable us to build, you know, a $100 million business here.
00;14;06;07 — 00;14;23;14
Sahil: And I would be willing to bet that for most companies to answer that question is no. And so I think that sales and marketing are the scapegoat. And the fact that they fight amongst each other is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled right? Is that marketing and sales fight amongst each other without actually turning out and being like, This fucking product sucks.
00;14;23;20 — 00;14;43;19
Sahil: Like, this product is good. Like, actually there's ten other products in the market that do the same thing and some of them are way cheaper and some of them are way better and some of them are have way bigger marketing budgets and some of them have way more customers and traction. And so what makes us actually think we can win in this market, in this product, in this way, Nobody ask questions like that.
00;14;43;19 — 00;15;04;15
Sahil: Everybody assumes, oh yeah, the CEO knows what they're doing, the VCs know what they're doing, the product team knows what they're doing, you know, whatever. And then it's just a matter of execution. And I actually think that many companies are flawed and and sitting on a house of cards at the foundation of the business and the strategy itself.
00;15;04;17 — 00;15;31;03
Pranav: So well said. I tell marketers often that you remember the old school marketing had product as a PE and the four piece of marketing. And I think the same applies to sales where sales and marketing leaders really do think about the product and inform the product strategy and execution, because without that, as you said, the go to market is useless.
00;15;31;06 — 00;15;56;07
Pranav: So I fully agree with that. Okay. Switching gears a little bit, you talked about the the tough market that we are in. But at the same time, I've noticed that you also talked about how there is a myth that the. Zorpette our growth is over. Can you share more about what you're seeing there in the market and why that people are maybe falling for that, that there is no growth and everything's super hard?
00;15;56;07 — 00;15;58;17
Pranav: Like what evidence are you seeing that's contrary?
00;15;58;19 — 00;16;23;06
Sahil: Yeah, I mean look, let's start with let's start with why where the myth comes from. So the myth comes from the fact that when companies are losing, when companies used to grow revenue 3x4x5x ten X year over year, and now all of a sudden they're growing revenue 10%, 20%, 30%, or their revenue is flat or declining. You need someone to blame.
00;16;23;08 — 00;16;43;17
Sahil: So we just spend a lot of energy talking about sales and marketing. We spent some energy talking about founders and DC. But another easy thing to blame is the market. Well, it's not my fault. It's the market's fault. You know, like this was just a Zarb era phenomena. And then you have these LinkedIn influencers who I won't give airtime to, but I think we know who they are.
00;16;43;20 — 00;17;16;11
Sahil: These LinkedIn influencers who try to build their brand as like the people who are making excuses for these companies and for these leaders. And they're basically saying, Well, nobody's growing like this. They know it. Just be profitable, just be efficient, you know, profitable, efficient growth. Like that's the thing that you're supposed to do. And the reality is, is that that is that is true of a $500 million a year business because you have such a large base and you've created so much enterprise value in your company.
00;17;16;18 — 00;17;44;01
Sahil: If you're a five, ten, 20 million, $50 million a year business, there's nothing there's nothing to defend, you know, like, what are you defending right at that pace? Right. And so, again, people just have a have people are just looking for anything to latch on to, any any false profit, any false hope that that someone can give in to the market, even if it's completely misguided and wrong, because the other half of it and you ask me where I get my data from is that I do a ton of angel investing.
00;17;44;01 — 00;18;04;11
Sahil: My wife is of the seed and I do a batch angel investing. I write, you know, Anyway, I don't write very big checks. The biggest check I might write is like 100 grand, but most of my checks like 2550. Okay, so I don't write big checks, but I get to see a lot of companies because as a founder, there's there's value.
00;18;04;15 — 00;18;25;08
Sahil: There's some perceived value in having a check for me versus a VC because at least like they can call me and ask me about the problems my companies having and we can share stories about the problems that we're running into together. And so there's some like operational overlap there. And and I would say that I see plenty of companies that are growing at ten X revenue, 20 X revenue a year over year one.
00;18;25;08 — 00;18;47;22
Sahil: So and many of them are orange and I but they're not all I mean, there is investments that I have in like real estate like, like, like SAS, the businesses that are in real estate or that are in services businesses or even restaurant businesses or whatever that are growing. 20 sales tech martech h.r. Tech that are nice 500% 1,000% year over year in revenue.
00;18;47;22 — 00;19;11;18
Sahil: They are and they're getting funded and they're they're accelerating. They're doing really well. In fact, one of these businesses that i was very, very lucky to be a very tiny part of is this company called Lumos, who just today announced that they raised a $35 million Series B and they've grown revenue. They publicly announced it's not sharing anything confidential, that they've grown revenue nine X year over year.
00;19;11;20 — 00;19;38;00
Sahil: Right. And I and and so that's what it takes to raise a series B if you're not raised, if your revenue isn't going up nine X year over year, it's not because observe error phenomena, it's because Lumos has a outstanding product and an outstanding go to market team and they're able to combine those two things in order to build a really meaningful execution, really meaningful, amazing business that investors are willing to fund.
00;19;38;02 — 00;20;02;16
Sahil: If your company at the series stage is only growing, you know, 40%, 50%, no one's going to fund that thing. And that's the thing that that people should be saying on LinkedIn is that if you're working at a company where your revenue isn't doubling year over year and you have less than 25, $50 million a year revenue will leave your company, Go join a different one because that company is debt.
00;20;02;16 — 00;20;25;09
Sahil: It's just a zombie. It's still walking. But the soul died a long time ago. But no one's willing to do that right. Instead, people want to give false hope to all these VP's and all these people that like, Oh, your equity may be worth something. One day. Your equity might be worth anything like just quit your job, call it don't cry over spilled milk and go join a company where the minimum growth rate is 200% year over year.
00;20;25;15 — 00;20;35;14
Sahil: If revenue isn't growing 200% year over year and you have less than 50 million in annual revenue, you are working at a zombie of a company. And it's just the reality of it.
00;20;35;17 — 00;20;49;29
Pranav: I love that. Okay, that is super sugar. If you're not growing 200% or more year over year and you're less than 60 million in revenue, you're probably doing something wrong. So go find a different company. That's it's not right. You I like it.
00;20;49;29 — 00;21;09;14
Sahil: And it's fine. Every company has a rough patch. We had a rough patch. You know, we had a really bad patch in the last year and a half because we make our money off sales, recruiting. And so, yeah, nobody was hiring salespeople, so we weren't doing very well as a company. And, and that, that wasn't, that wasn't the moment for me to throw my hands up and say, Oh, shit, like the market sucks.
00;21;09;14 — 00;21;28;29
Sahil: So like, let's just like focus on being profitable. That was the moment when we were like, All right, we better fucking save this business. Like we have to do something different. We got to find a different way to earn revenue, a different way to monetize, a different way to approach the market. And we did. We spent a tremendous amount of energy and, you know, we're going to be launching a product that talks about exactly how to do that.
00;21;29;01 — 00;21;45;17
Sahil: But but we had to spend a lot of soul searching, a lot of work to try to fix what was broken in the company, not to say, oh, well, you know, interest rates are high. So like, you know, that's it. Yeah. And I think that's what a lot of people are doing. And I think it's bullshit.
00;21;45;19 — 00;21;57;20
Pranav: I love it. I love the transparency and the candidness with which you're talking about this. So let's jump into that. Tell us about what you are launching you. And when this goes out, it probably is already launched. So yeah, tell the world what you just launched.
00;21;57;27 — 00;22;19;07
Sahil: Yeah, that's right. I mean, it's it's very simple. We launched a product that is significantly better than LinkedIn at that you can use to hire salespeople. That's the product. The product is a better way to hire salespeople than than you can only do. And the reason why it's better is because it lets you search across heuristics that you can't on LinkedIn.
00;22;19;10 — 00;22;49;11
Sahil: So you can search by things like based OTB, you can search based on previous ICP sold to, you can search based on previous client rolodex. You can search based on percent of quota or annual quota that the person made. You can search based on how many people they've managed or which departments or functions that they've managed. And we do everything from ATSDR, CSM, kind of frontline reps to VPI, CRO executive search and kind of everything across the middle of that.
00;22;49;13 — 00;23;20;11
Sahil: It's limited justice and market discipline. We don't do engineering or whatever it is, it is solely limited to sales and kind of the general go to market functions like we'll do like rbob, sales engineer, stuff like that. But the idea behind it is that the way that sales hiring has been done for a long time is fundamentally flawed and broken because what you do is you sit there and you go, Ha ha, find me salespeople who worked at Salesforce, and then you find a list of people.
00;23;20;11 — 00;23;37;16
Sahil: Yeah, and some of those people are really good and many of those people are bad, but you don't know which ones are good or bad. So you message all of them and then some of them get back to you. Typically the ones who are bad because they're the ones who are looking for jobs and so they get back to you and then you talk to them and then you're like, Oh, well, this person worked at Salesforce and before that they worked to do better.
00;23;37;16 — 00;23;59;26
Sahil: So like, we're gonna hire them, which has nothing to do with whether they're a good salesperson or not. In fact, the person who worked at Salesforce is probably not a great rep for you out of Series A company, but you don't think that. You just think, Oh, I want someone to work at Salesforce because you know, like they want and instead we think, Oh, you should look at here's the ICP I sell into, here's a my average deal size looks like, here's the stage of company.
00;23;59;28 — 00;24;13;00
Sahil: Find me someone who's sold a similar product to a similar ICP at a similar stage and who has a proven track record of being successful in doing so. And so we're we're trying to change the conversation around how sales hiring.
00;24;13;02 — 00;24;21;17
Pranav: That sounds fantastic. And is this for any type of companies? So it could be a series A all the way to like public companies or who's your ICP?
00;24;21;19 — 00;24;50;27
Sahil: Yeah, so our ICP is B-to-B technology companies. We work with everything from Seed series to publicly traded companies, though I think the majority of our customers choose a slightly different offering depending on which size of sure they are. So the publicly traded companies and we work with are often are often folks who are looking for like a tool for their recruiting team to have access to or to search or whatever.
00;24;51;00 — 00;25;08;29
Sahil: Right. Versus Series B companies might be looking at us for more of a outsource agency perspective because they don't have it in how seem to manage it. We support both cases in order to ensure that whatever size of company you're in, we have an offering that means your needs.
00;25;09;01 — 00;25;31;18
Pranav: That's fantastic. And I imagine the real sort of value add is the proprietary data that you've been collecting for the last whatever number of years as a result of the community efforts and sort of other sources and that sort of the unlock because to your point, you can't search LinkedIn for that, which makes complete sense. That's awesome. Congrats on the launch and we're not in the market yet.
00;25;31;18 — 00;25;37;25
Pranav: But when we are for a sales leader or a sales hire, we will we will try to give you a shot and cool.
00;25;37;25 — 00;26;01;23
Sahil: Oh, I appreciate that, my friend. And look, at the end of the day, we we built this product out of my own personal frustrations as a sales leader who is trying to hire who would spend 50 to 75% of his day trying to do sales hiring and was always struggling with it because like I would get a lot of irrelevant candidates that weren't very good.
00;26;01;23 — 00;26;25;15
Sahil: I get a lot of people who like kind of looked the part on paper, but I talk to them and I'm like, This person can never sell at this org. There's a lot of things like that that we would run into. And so I wanted to find a streamlined way to hire salespeople based on what I thought was a much better indicator of, of how the quality and fit of a salesperson, which is notably, who have you sold to?
00;26;25;18 — 00;26;37;14
Sahil: What stage of company have you worked out, what types of products have you sold, and what was your previous track record? And I feel like those heuristics are a better map than Where'd you go to college? And where was your last job?
00;26;37;16 — 00;26;57;22
Pranav: I love it. This podcast is all about the science of marketing. So your approach, a scientific approach to finding those leading indicators that better fit with what your business needs makes makes perfect sense. Okay, I'm going to do a lightning round with you. I have a bunch of, like, questions about marketing, but I think your perspective would be would be super interesting.
00;26;57;22 — 00;27;01;12
Pranav: So what's your take on brand marketing? Does it help sales?
00;27;01;14 — 00;27;46;16
Sahil: Yes, much more. So much more so. I think brand marketing is much more effective at helping sales than direct marketing. It's I think direct marketing feels good in the short run, but is relatively expensive and inefficient and doesn't scale unless there's a lot of brand affinity associated with it. I think brand marketing is is it the the the brand marketing is underappreciated by most companies, but for those companies who understand its value, you know, having a tribe, a community, having support from an organization and a and a persona and a and a in a group of individuals who are championing what you're doing, you know, it gives you a lot of runway, a lot of
00;27;46;16 — 00;27;49;28
Sahil: mistakes that you get to make that others can love it.
00;27;50;01 — 00;27;57;18
Pranav: Okay. What do you do? What did you have to learn about marketing as a CEO that you didn't appreciate as a salesperson?
00;27;57;21 — 00;28;41;09
Sahil: How I think I really had to understand that telling people how to do their jobs better is a really poor way to market sight recognizing and voicing that. I understand why their job is hard is much more effective. And so as an example, one of the most successful landing page campaigns that we have ever run in provider history, which we paired in concert with our jobs product launch on the on the candidate side, we ran a thing that said find sales jobs that don't suck.
00;28;41;11 — 00;29;01;14
Sahil: And then underneath it's sad because most sales jobs do suck, right? Because here's what happens. A recruiter reaches out to you, tells you this is an amazing company. Everyone's hitting, quote, Our product is amazing. Backed by top VCs. You got to go check this thing out. Throws a big O number at you. You get into the process, they sell the shit out of you.
00;29;01;14 — 00;29;17;28
Sahil: They convince you that this is going to be the next fucking year. You join the company, you show up and within a few weeks and a few months you realize the product doesn't work that well. Actually, nobody's hitting quota. Your VP of sales got fired within your first 60 days being there, and now you're like, Oh my God, what have I done?
00;29;17;28 — 00;29;41;14
Sahil: What a huge mistake. And then there's layoffs and then there's, you know, whatever. And and you're like, Oh my God, I just like my career on fire for no reason. And, and this is a fairly common story. And, and that landing page and the video associated with it and whatever was one of the most successful campaigns we've ever run in our history.
00;29;41;17 — 00;30;03;29
Sahil: And also the end. And the reason why I share that story is because my instinct prior to launching bravado and prior to spending many cycles would have been to be like, Find your dream sales job, find a job with high pay, find a job with great benefits, find a job that's safe. Instead, I would have spent all my energy selling you the benefit of what I was offering.
00;30;04;01 — 00;30;23;00
Sahil: And now I just spent all my energy telling you exactly what is happening in your life right here, right now, in a way that deeply helps you understand that. Like, I get it. Like you may not know how I can help, but, you know, one thing's for sure, which is that due to the bravado, get it like they they get sales.
00;30;23;04 — 00;30;35;06
Sahil: They know the plight of a salesperson inside out. And that loyalty and affinity that is manufactured by that is is the heart and soul of great marketing.
00;30;35;09 — 00;30;55;22
Pranav: What a wonderful answer I got was that who came up with the idea? Who Who coached you on that landing page? Copy. I wrote it. There we go. All right, Love it. Okay. Is there a marketing that hurts sales rather than help sales that marketers should just stop?
00;30;55;25 — 00;31;17;14
Sahil: I mean, I just think that people give a shit enough for something to hurt, you know, like, it's almost like it's almost like our attention is so frayed that anything that we don't like or don't care about just kind of like disappears from our viewpoint. But the next type of the tick tock or whatever. And so, like, I don't think anything hurts.
00;31;17;14 — 00;31;41;06
Sahil: I think I think companies internally think a lot about like, was this campaign successful or not or like, how did this make our audience feel or whatever? And the answer is like, if you, me, your audience didn't feel anything, like they didn't give a shit, you know, like people's apathy. And nine of them have stood by, you know, and, and I think we just have an overly inflated perception of our own importance in the world.
00;31;41;06 — 00;32;06;25
Sahil: We're like one tiny speck of one tiny software company on this giant spinning rock orbiting a giant flaming rock around the universe. And like our marketing campaigns don't matter that much. Just fucking have a good time, have fun, keep testing more and more shit, you know, be authentic and it'll be fine. And if you mess and something goes wrong or whatever, no one's going to care.
00;32;06;29 — 00;32;09;13
Sahil: No one's going to know. What's your character?
00;32;09;15 — 00;32;17;00
Pranav: I last one saw hell. So let's talk about NQ ls Do you care?
00;32;17;02 — 00;32;39;06
Sahil: Yeah. I mean it's it's again, I think I think ultimately I think ultimately that that's in it that it may be in about with the wrong company and that is its own problem but in that that's in at bat and if you can earn the right to have at bats, I think you'll end up in a good place.
00;32;39;09 — 00;32;51;23
Pranav: All right. Well, Silo, this was awesome. Thank you for the amazing conversation. I really enjoyed it. So everybody go check out Bravado's new product. What's the how do the how do you people just go to bravado? Like what's the you.
00;32;51;23 — 00;32;53;23
Sahil: Are a lot of Bravado. Bravado.
00;32;53;23 — 00;33;02;26
Pranav: That's all I there we go. So go check out Bravado dot CEO and go for the style for his master trolling on LinkedIn.
00;33;03;01 — 00;33;11;12
Sahil: Oh thanks so much and good luck to you and thank you for taking the time and excited about what you're building with Bear as well.
00;33;11;15 — 00;33;21;08
Pranav: Absolutely. Well, there you go, folks. Now Sahil CEO of Bravado will have many more fun and insightful conversation. So tune in again next week. See you there.
