Sahil Mansuri on Sales in a Downturn, Comp Plans, and Winning Through Retention
Sahil Mansuri (CEO of Bravado, the 300,000-member sales community) and Lenny Rachitsky on how to adapt sales operations in a market downturn — realistic benchmarks from Q3 2022, how to restructure quotas and comp without destroying rep morale, and why retention of existing customers outperforms new logo acquisition when buyers go cautious.
Key ideas
- The 2022 benchmarks. By Q3 2022, 63% of sales reps missed quota and 76% of companies missed their Q3 target. October saw 85% of reps miss monthly numbers. The advice to plan conservatively is correct — but unreasonably conservative forecasts create a boom-bust psychological cycle that is hard to escape.
- Conservative plan with milestone unlocks. Rather than fixing an annual plan under high uncertainty, Mansuri recommends setting a genuinely conservative baseline and defining short-term milestones that, when hit, unlock additional hiring or spending. This keeps the company from oscillating between panic and optimism.
- Retention over new logos. In a downturn, the highest-ROI sales motion is keeping existing customers — expanding within accounts and preventing churn — rather than chasing new logos at increased sales cycle length and higher cost.
- Comp plan restructuring. Carry-over quota debt (where reps are penalised for last year’s shortfalls) destroys morale and accelerates attrition of the best reps, who have the most options. Resetting quotas fairly — tied to realistic market expectations rather than last year’s peak — is both ethical and strategically sound.
- The relationship advantage. Enterprise relationships built through downturns pay back asymmetrically in recovery. Founders who maintained buyer relationships through the hardest moments get preferred access when budgets reopen.