How to hit revenue targets in a recession

Sahil Mansuri is CEO and founder of Bravado, a community and tooling network of about 300,000 B2B tech salespeople, and a longtime sales leader who closed deals through the 2008 downturn. The conversation covers how founders should change forecasting, quotas, comp plans, customer retention, deal-closing tactics, and business model innovation during a tough market.

01Key learnings

• Plan next year conservatively, but set short-term checkpoints (e.g., Q1 revenue targets) that unlock extra spend or trigger downward reforecasts, and agree on those decisions with the board in advance.
• Avoid founder optimism bias in forecasts; predetermine what decisions will follow from hitting or missing each milestone.
• Rethink sales comp so reps are rewarded for renewals, retention and customer quality, not just new bookings, since current plans ignore churn.
• Reconsider the typical 50-50 base-to-commission split and 5x quota ratio; align incentives across the customer, business, and rep.
• Shift your best salespeople toward customer success and retention, since losing existing customers is harder to recover from than slowing new business.
• Help existing customers survive by sharing proprietary benchmarks and insights from your data, turning your product into a trusted advisor rather than just a tool.
• Use warm introductions and in-person customer events to generate referrals; move intros to text and keep the introducer on the thread to keep momentum.
• Change the rules of the game when old models fail: Sahil's team launched a commission-only/fractional offering and experimented with pricing models like monthly or daily billing.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.