Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 90: MT Robertson CRO at Bluescape Software on how to transition to product led growth

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90: MT Robertson CRO at Bluescape Software on how to transition to product led growth · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Bite Size Sales Podcast, where we believe that sales at B2B startups should be easier than we often make it, and that it's plain wrong that sales teams at startups don't get the help to succeed like sales teams at their bigger and more well-known competitors do.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a seller or a sales leader at a B2B startup, you're in the right place today.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to episode 90.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is MT Robertson, who is the Chief Revenue Officer of Bluescape.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: MT, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's great to be here.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to our talk this afternoon.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Before we get into it, though, I do have a sponsor for the episode today, and the sponsor is Primonio, P-R-E-M-O-N-I-O.com.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: As many of the audience will know, and maybe you've experienced this MT as well, you know, when you're doing a lot of sales planning at a startup, the default tool to use is spreadsheets.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: And usually they're homegrown spreadsheets as well.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of build them from the ground up for the sales model that we have, or we bring them from a previous life and adapt them for the new sales model of the company that we're at.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens is these are pretty good, but they're A prone to errors because it's you know humans making up calculations and trying to do it in a pretty uh multidimensional spreadsheet.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: But secondly, they're usually not in-depth enough to do really good, detailed planning and detailed analysis and doing detailed what-ifs.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if the channel model changes, if the go-to-market tiers of reps changes, the average order size changes, you know, what are all the effects of these on the model going forward?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what Promonio has.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a tool that's been built up over a few years.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: The CEO founder, Johannes, multi-time CMO of organizations, where what he was doing was working with the CRO to build up a model that they could use and have the confidence in the numbers to make decisions on the model and the changes and be confident enough to take these numbers to the board.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: And uh what he found over the years was he was able to adapt this model quite a bit, and now he's it's in into a software tool.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: So Premonio.com.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you're thinking about sales planning into 2022 and you're doing what ifs, youhannas would be a great place to go to to see if you can get some help.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's our sponsor for today.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: So, MT, if I look at your profile on LinkedIn, let me read back what I see here and you tell me where I've screwed it up, okay?
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Started out back in the early 2000s.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: The first one on here is Flexera, the North America Sales Director.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: You spent about almost actually five years at Flexera.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: You had a stop at Groundwork and then TaskRabbit, and then you had two years or so at Kanjoya as the head of sales and business development.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Zen Reach for a year and a half as the VP of sales, and then you spent almost three years at Tanium, uh director of sales there.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then for the last four years almost, you've been at Bluescape as the the chief revenue officer.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Have I got that just about right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, that's that's just about right.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: I left out my beginning, which was selling yellow page ads, so that's where I cut my teeth.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: You can't leave out the good ad badge of honor right there.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I know, I should I should add it.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Good.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, I see here different technology companies, Tinium, obviously in the cybersecurity space, also, I guess, in the system management space, and then for the last four years of Bluescape, we'll come back to Blue Scape in a second.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: But first of all, let's talk about this seven-year-old MT.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Where in the world were you and and what did you care about as a young lad?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I grew up in the East Bay here in the San Francisco Bay Area in a small town called Arinda.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: I was running around playing all sorts of sports, and uh that's been my passion for my life at transferred over into my volunteering life.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: I was a high school baseball coach for about 17 years.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So throughout that LinkedIn review, I was also coaching uh high school baseball, which is a great experience for me and a great transfer of how I run my sales teams aligned to my coaching days.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Did you play a lot of baseball at high school then?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: I played baseball in high school.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: I played water polo in college.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Water polo.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: My passion is baseball, so I went back to it and to my alma mater and just really enjoyed it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Water polo, that's a tough sport, right?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be unbelievably fit to do it.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's rough.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: People don't realize how rough it is, right?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I kind of cheated.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was a goalie, so I didn't have to swim.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: I just floated.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: All the other guys have a rough time, but no one could touch me.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have to swim.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I sort of played.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then in your teenage years, jobs, hustles, what were you doing to I was always hustling.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: We did everything from collecting golf balls at the local country club, you know, shining them up and selling them out in front of the grocery store to taking a mistletoe out of the trees, putting ribbons on it, and selling it to old ladies at the store as well.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: I ran a little fencing company at one point on a call, like on a summer college uh year.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Just things like that.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I was always hustling, making money.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been in my blood.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the in my local course, there's a house there on one of the holes, and these kids, they've got massive buckets of balls, all separated out by do you want a pro v1 X or a Pro V1?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want Callaway this or Callaway that they got it all mapped out, and you go up there and you buy like 12 at a time for I don't know, six, seven bucks or something.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're making good money.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, when you're 12 years old and you can have a hundred percent margin on a business like that, it's phenomenal.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, your cost of goods is nothing.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's amazing.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to wait for bad shots.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: Time.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I love that.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that yeah, good hustling then throughout the the teenage years.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I do find on these interviews that uh there is a correlation for those that were doing various things and hustling in the teenage years who end up being in sales and and doing very well.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Having said all that, there is no better way, MT, to find out about the real MT than by using one of these bullshit LinkedIn polls that are out there right now.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I've got three here to cover.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's no test to pass, it's just uh you know, three I found earlier this week.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the first one is from Garav Kumar.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: What most matters to you when deciding on hiring?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Is it A attitude, B, work ethic, C, growth potential, or D, salary expectations?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Man, that's a tough one.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say attitude.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me more.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you the reason why I say that in today's world, you know, in sales, now more than ever, people are making buying decisions without talking to a salesperson.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And having always having a good attitude uh and a positive attitude in a in a sport where you know oftentimes a salesperson, especially cutting their teeth, is losing 95 to 98 percent of the time.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta have somebody who has a solid, really just core strength of always coming to work every day with a positive attitude, no matter how many times you get kicked in the shins.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's it for me.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of those things follow that.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: But and the final thing, I will say the one thing that's not on there is trust.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's been one of the bigger uh things that I've looked for as since since COVID happened in looking to bring on new people is what is where's their network and where's their network of trust.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the results from Garav's poll echoed what you said.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: 55% shows attitude, and then 24% work ethic, and then growth was 18, and salary expectations only 3%.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: So that's interesting.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, for the right people, right?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: You you want to get them on board.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Next one, second question out of three.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: I I I don't expect, I don't know if I expect you to know this or not.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Cloud and AI analytics, NUMPI, NUMPY, stands for either numbering Python or numerical Python.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: I have no idea.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's some great acronym marketing fluff stuff for me.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: So the we have to go with the masses.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: 98% said numerical Python.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: So there you go.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Numpy.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's something you need to learn today.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Always learning, right?
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh final one from Falguni Katira.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you could spend a day with any one person, who would it be and why?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they give three options here: a someone famous, B, someone from my past, or C, someone else, you know, let me tell you it is.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Man.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um the first person who came to the top of my mind, and I wouldn't have said this, and I'm a big baseball fan, is actually Henry Aaron.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I say that because I'm a big fan of coaches, and the two managers in the World Series this year were both uh mentees of Henry Aaron, and both people who he brought into Major League Baseball under his wing.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that both of them made it to the top of their sport, and given everything that he did to get to the top of his sport in a time of inequality, in a time that was uh a very difficult time for our country, and that he was the center of attention, breaking the home run record.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to spend time with him because I think his views on the world, his views on hard work, his views on attitude, and being able to compartmentalize things and be successful, both as a player and as a mentor, is pretty, pretty awesome.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that was top of mind for me.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: I might have not answered that a different way some other time.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, love that though.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Good perspective, right?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it is interesting how I think you have this in sales, you have it in sport.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Good coaches breed great coaches and players, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I can think in you know, my world soccer world in the UK, there's certainly some groups where you just follow the lineage and you see it came back to some great coach, you know, maybe a few decades before.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny how that happens like that.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: All right, let's switch to uh work life.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you're the CRO at Bluescape.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't you give us quickly the 30-second elevator pitch for what Bluescape does, and then we can talk about a change that you guys made in the last year that is kind of important.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so BlueScape is a visual meeting technology where we focus on specifically the creative space for review and approve and allowing people to have an equitable experience with meeting around content.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: With the fact that we've all gone remote and not being able to be in the same room, the creative's challenge with screen sharing, the creative's ability to feel around, feel like they're around their content and immersed in it is a big challenge.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we've helped bring that to the next level.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it's no longer just about your typical voice video and screen sharing.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: We actually go well beyond that and immerse our users in a creative space.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, of course, everyone's gone Zoom crazy in the last uh couple of years.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the whole level above Zoom or it does it include Zoom or how does that we have integrations to Zoom and WebEx, and then we have our own meeting technology built in.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: So we try and create an experience that is in line with what your existing tools are.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you want to use our free video conferencing, you can leverage that as well.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: Got it, got it.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: All right, and in the last year, as I understand it, you you've kind of shifted the model a little bit, one from which was entirely enterprise sales led into one where product-led growth is kind of being part of the mix.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And correct, you know, a lot of talk right now, PLGs, you know, in the latest round of three-letter acronyms in our technology, where all PLG is the next one, right?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a lot of buzz around it, but it's not easy to do.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: People seem to think, oh yeah, we we're just gonna do product-led growth.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna be so much easier.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: I remember I was at a company three or four years ago, and it seemed like every month the CEO would say, Why are we not doing product-led growth, right?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: You made the switch, are you making the transition right now?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about the decisions you have to make to be ready for that and make sure that it actually works for you.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: How did you start going down that path?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: We started by bringing the senior leadership team together and realigning our mission and our vision because it starts there and then transitions down into the entire business.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is a relook at fundamentally moving from a white glove B2B, core B2B in the enterprise sale with an enterprise sales team to a product-led growth model.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And we had to bring all these teams together and get buy-in, create a plan to make the switch.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: We're in the middle of that.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the key factors has been our adoption of data across the entire business, which was lacking before because we were very much enterprise white glove focused.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more about adoption of data.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, at the core for us, NPS has become the most important metric that we look at.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then our ability to understand our investments in marketing, our investments in community, and the all the metrics around both of those areas and being able to see when we make a change, did it work or not?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we look at the data to be able to A-B test against these different key metrics that we're we're aligned to.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the key metrics are important.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of different metrics and stories you can tell, but it's about getting uh those key metrics nailed down and then being consistent with looking at them.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Why did you make the change?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: What was the reason in the first place?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of software companies out there start with the easy to use.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're just gonna be come in free trial or freemium and do a lot of really great marketing, make it really easy for the user to use and grow a user base.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: BlueScape took the opposite approach, which in in the long run, we think it's gonna pay off significantly.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: However, you don't typically go land a DOD customer and spend the first four years building up your security models and your ability to scale in a large enterprise to start.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we've done.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And once we had that solidified and and we know that investment is gonna hold true for a long time to come because it's in place, we feel like the time is now for us to transition uh into a more focused PLG company.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you start off with nailing the enterprise sale, and then you're coming, I don't know if the time market's the right wording, right?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: But you're just making it easier for smaller teams to engage.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the the buying's also really changed, we think.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: People are buying Teslas online.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: COVID has forced people to no longer show up to these very large conferences that I don't know if anybody wanted to go to to begin with, to be honest.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I'd never sold anything at one of those conferences.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think I've met people and gotten tchotchkis, but I've never actually taken an order.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, people are buying online, and companies are IT organizations are freeing up their employees to go out and uh use tools that they find valuable in their day-to-day workflows.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And IT will get involved once they have some sort of mass using a certain product, and then they will go and actually support it.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what our focus is, is to be able to give people in these large enterprises the ability to use our technology, get value from our technology, introduce it to others uh within their companies, and then as there's a big contingency getting value from our product, we can then go have a more strategic conversation with IT.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: It sounds like obviously you've got your history about where you came from, but what you're doing right now, maybe a little bit similar to Slack, where you know, one of the things that Slack had was naturally more people get involved in conversations and therefore they got you know into using Slack.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: In your world, it's all about meeting other people, so therefore they have to come into it.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: I see how team by team the expansion might happen inside a pretty big account.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Slack, Slack did an amazing job of this with no salespeople to start for quite a while in their infancy.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And not that salespeople aren't extremely important throughout this life cycle in their own right, but Slack figured out through community, through support, through a very, very high touch on the customer experience and the value that a customer receives.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: They invested a lot there.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're taking a lot of the ideas of what they've done.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think we're really doing anything novel, to be honest.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's really just about delivery and about consistency to delivering to a plan.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're focused on.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And speaking of salespeople, I imagine this has an impact on how the sales team is working and how they're going about doing their work.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Is that fair to say?
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: It does.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: It absolutely does.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: We've really changed the coverage areas of our enterprise team to focus on uh a very specific set of accounts.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we've then opened up a broader pool to uh a no-touch growth or very low-touch growth with other salespeople and adapted our entire CSM organization to be a complete partner to sales, which we weren't before.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: We had a much different, and we do still have some of that in our CSM group at the high-end large strategic enterprise accounts that we have.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: But for the most part, as people come in the front door, the CSM is much more involved in adoption uh and growth.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we've adjusted their compensation that way as well.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so um just trying to think if I'm gonna pick a company on, I don't know if they're customers or not, but let's say PWC, suddenly a massive worldwide company, someone comes in and does the free trial and says, I've got I need to buy 30 licenses.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: Is that the CSM own that, or is there a someone raising a flag saying we need to figure out how we expand this this PwC initial beach head?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's a velocity seller that's quoted on a monthly basis that takes that account.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: They get them set up, they introduce a CSM to them, and away they go.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the CSM then takes them from 30 to 50 or to uh 250.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: And along that path, we might introduce an enterprise, depending an enterprise sales rep, depending on how um aligned that project or those teams are with something more strategic across PWC's enterprise.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: But if it's not and it's very siloed, we'll keep it in that swim lane.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to play a little bit of it depends with our sales team, which is challenging, but it also has a lot of uh value to getting the most out of our enterprise sales reps, putting them in a position to succeed.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of enterprise sales reps that I have met tend to want more opportunity or more accounts.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think that that actually can be a detraction than an addition.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I yeah, I've experienced that before.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: I would imagine as well.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Going back to that company I was at where the CEO would constantly ask about why aren't we doing this?
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: I always felt it was a bit threatening to the enterprise sales team, right?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: I always felt like, you know, but this is an enterprise sale, this is what we do.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: If we're gonna do PLG, why would you need us?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: Have you had to address that with the team?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm a big fan of history.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was a history major, and there's a number that I point to.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Dunbar's number.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And essentially, what it is is what is the most connections or valuable relationships that one individual can have in their life?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And for males, it's 150, and for females, it's around 250.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I and that's everybody in your life.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's family, friends, colleagues, customers, partners.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you start thinking about how many people you need to be able to engage with and have a meaningful relationship at a very large enterprise account, it that number dwindles very quickly.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so my whole approach with that is if you can commit yourself to being a part of a big organization, being a part of it, understanding what their business objectives are, understanding what the personal goals of different people across a very large organization are as an enterprise sales rep, that's how you become successful in that account.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you can't do that across many, many, many accounts.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so, from a from a velocity perspective, and where we are.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: We will look at the penetration into some of these accounts with our product-led strategy.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we feel the tipping points right, an enterprise rep will be brought in to become successful.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so some people don't like hearing that.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: But from my perspective, that's where I feel like I've been around the most successful enterprise sales reps, are the ones who can create really meaningful relationships in the accounts that they have.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't do it in if you can only manage 150 relationships in your life.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, you and I were both at Tanium for a while.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, notoriously the sales team would have three to five to six accounts each, and that was it.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, Tanium was a product that it needed that kind of focus.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: And many of them did very well when they were selling there at Tanium, right?
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think that what rings true for me when I think about this is that yeah, there is that natural, I wish I had more, more, more, but the easier sell is the one that's the reference cell internal.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the stats, if you're gonna spend time doing prospecting, the absolute most meaningful and most valuable way to do it is get internal referrals in an existing account, right?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: And taking that example I gave the team of 50 at PwC, there's I don't know what it is, 250,000 people that work at PWC.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think I'd rather just navigate my way around that and keep growing and growing and then do a big deal in a year or two after you picked up 45 small ones, right?
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's absolutely right.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it it's no P PLG is no easy task, right?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because there's this natural challenge that we face a lot of times in the enterprise, where IT has a certain buying process and InfoSec has to get involved.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: And and for us, when we're uh managing IP at the core of what we do, we are handling these large companies' IP.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so security is of utmost importance.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: And while we want to have those conversations, I can't, I don't want to engage in those conversations with a velocity sales rep who doesn't know how to handle that path.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so giving PWC the opportunity to buy our software up to a certain point, when a more senior sales rep or a sales engineer gets involved, we will then go have those conversations with those groups.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a very difficult piece of the sales cycle.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of enterprises are dealing with it.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot of SaaS uh companies are are dealing with it as well.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: How to do that dance.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think that it seems like every year the CISO is has a higher profile and has more influence inside accounts.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: 15 years ago, they would complain they had virtually nothing, right?
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: And but these days they actually do.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that whole vendor acceptance, third-party risk concern is very valid these days, and many of them have programs around that.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: We run into it all the time, and as they should.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we put a very high bar on our technology.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're made in the USA, our data is stored in the USA.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: Some of our competitors are from countries that have attacked the United States and attacked our uh militaries, but yet their software is out in the wild in a lot of these enterprises.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it it's one of these things where clearly the CISO has gotten more power, but not enough to stop gray software.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's going to go on for some time.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's gonna slow down.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: But certainly as we get involved into a strategic thing and IT gets or security gets involved, we'll raise our hand because we're confident in our security stance and the investments we've made.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm more for figuring out with the CISOs how to make it easier for their customers to get their hands on high-quality, secure software.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love standards to be put in place, quite frankly, that if you're a SaaS freemium or uh free trial type of PLG uh company, that there be some sort of certification that you get.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think it would be a phenomenal addition to many of the SaaS players out there and ISVs out there who make solid, really long-term investments in their security and take it seriously because we do.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Did BlueScape have to change the product to make it more consumable to someone doing the free trial?
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're in the middle of that right now.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: We spent so much time, energy, and money following the requirements and rules that at the high level that you need in order to have an enterprise uh license pass the security muster.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: We're prepared to have those conversations.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: It impacted our ability to have a PLG strategy, have a nice, easy, you know, walk in the front door UI experience.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: We we'll be rolling that out in Q1, which is really exciting for us.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: But like I said it before, it's us going backwards.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the other side of our business, on the federal side of our business, we're we're light years ahead of a lot of the competition who is who's out there in the um in the visual collaboration space trying to get into the federal space.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: We will go into a Fed ramp in process next month, which will be the first solution available for visual collaboration and whiteboarding for for the federal government.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: So congrats on that.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a big milestone for us.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm sure.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: But so let's talk about something you said earlier, which is buyer behavior is changing.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: What are you seeing out there?
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: What do you mean by that?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: Look, uh people don't want to talk to salespeople.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: And to be able to go and and get information has never been easier through many, many different channels.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you just root yourself in Amazon and how many people just shop online, and the expectation that I can get something within two days as just a general consumer, the buying behavior that we all have is much more shifted, and and COVID even accelerated this further.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: You look at Amazon's business to e-commerce and doing all of your shopping online.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we look at it from a perspective of do people want to talk to my sales reps and engage a sales rep even at the velocity level, the answer is really no.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And we found an interesting stat.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: We had BDRs reaching out to our demo requests for the first, I don't know, year that I was here running sales.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we converted, and these are people who said, I want a demo of Bluescape, please contact me.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: We converted, I want to say around 12% to actually booking a meeting.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, just to get a meeting.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: We turned on one of these just little bots that that allows someone to book a calendar, get on someone's calendar.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: We went to 85%.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: 12% to 85% conversion.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: 85% of booking meetings.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you think about that, it and that translates not to just booking a meeting, but to trying the software, to buying the software, to upgrading the buying more licenses of the software.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that is an indication of where we're heading or where we are.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't even say where we're heading.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a key element in product-led growth.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you have to really, really nail that journey that a user is going to go through to be able to buy your to try your software, buy your software, have an emotional experience with it, invite another person that then can increase the number of uh licenses that they're using and make it feel smooth through that whole process.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very complicated.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: You need a really solid community.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Andrew, if you came and used our software, I don't want you to go and see a use case from, let's say, an ad agency.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to go see a use case from a sales trainer that's leveraging BlueScape for hosting some sales training meetings inside of BlueScape.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just using it as an example, not saying that you would, but it that's the type of experience that we need to create of connecting a like user to a like prospect.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's complicated.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: We we're blessed to have a very solid team on the product side who actually were the original product guys around the BlackBerry Messenger back in the day.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: So they're one of the very first groups to take a communications tool and scale it at the scale that they were able to into the millions and millions of users.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're applying a lot of the learnings that they had over those years of doing that to our own software.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really exciting where we sit with our engineering and product team.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's interesting what you're saying about someone wanting to be in a like group.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one of the things that I've seen is that there are these groups of CISOs, for example, who have their own Slack channels and they're sharing information and jokes and ideas and all the rest of it amongst themselves in real time, right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: And if they want to know, hey, this company's on my radar, anyone else using them, and what do you think?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: They get immediate feedback.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, you know, 15 years ago, they they didn't have that nearly so much at the end of their fingertips.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and they're also talking about sales reps who bug them or companies that bug them with marketing.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it can be a death nail for you.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a very, very delicate balance that exists in today's world that didn't just, you know, five, 10 years ago.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it also begs the question about what Gartner and Forrester are gonna do to play a better and and higher quality role in that.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Gartner buying Avanta was a big tell that they needed to be a part of these groups.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's great that they made that investment.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that they have a place to continue to offer value value to both an ISV and an enterprise.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: But it's gonna be interesting to see where that all goes and shifts and how the dance between um the ISV and uh either a CISO in the enterprise or an IT leader in the enterprise takes shape.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: I will tell you, having been more traditional at Bluescape with our marketing, from a PLG perspective, social is a very high focal point for us to be able to play in these communities where people and users are communicating.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not do just IT leaders have those channels, so do um people who are on the ground and creatives that don't make big buying decisions but make you know their own tool decisions to see what works better and what's the next best thing to help them be more efficient and get their job done better.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I would imagine that reading between the lines, you're doing less big webinars and more social and maybe influencer things.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that it's a goal to do more of those and and shift away.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people are on video calls constantly.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: And do they want to go and spend another hour on a webinar or do they want a five-minute high-quality review of a product that's from a third party that they can get it right off of YouTube very quickly, or a quick testimonial?
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: We just did a great couple of videos with Callaway Golf and uh USC around the use of our product, and they're you know 90 seconds to uh three minutes long, uh really well done, high-quality testimonials that we clip up and put on to Instagram and to YouTube and the like.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, that's stuff that we hadn't done here being an enterprise.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't think we weren't focused on that type of motion.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: But as we roll into PLG, it's you know, it's core.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's you look around at our peers and a lot of the great PLG companies out there that are successful do a very good job of that.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: How will you know in the next year or two that it's been a successful move for you?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Once you're a line that says, yeah, this is what we're shooting for.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, gosh, is that a question for me, for our investors, for you know, I I think that from the most basic level that when I get to see that this is a growth challenge, and I always want to stay here, that 90 to 95% of my sales reps are meeting or exceeding quota is a bar of success that I think is a very healthy measure for us to be at.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now I hope they're all over and we're growing and smashing it, but you know, somewhere in that 90% of them, I think that will be success.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: And what will trickle down from that is what is our growth?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if we can stay there, we're gonna keep, you know, as sales reps hate, we're gonna keep increasing quotas, we're gonna push our metrics higher.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: But that's where I really feel that that's success because it's success across our entire business at that point and in a healthy place.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I I could tell you, oh, if we're growing it, you know, 80% year over year in ARR, you know, I don't.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's fair enough.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: MT, I've enjoyed the conversation this afternoon.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: My second quick sponsor is Sales Bluebird.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to be greater at sales and leading sales teams, this is a weekly email with bite-sized tips and big ideas for sellers and sales leaders.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's practical, it's weekly and it's for free at salesbluebird.com.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: MT, if you're are you hiring right now?
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to tell people how they can get in touch with you if you want them to?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are always looking for uh new talent as we continue to grow.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can be reached just directly at MT at Bluescape.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty simple email address.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, we're hiring here in North America, you know, in the remote world and being uh a technology that's run remote, we don't really care where you're at.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're excited uh about taking a massive step forward in the video conferencing world and how we uh all work, Blue Scape's a great place to be in a very high growth company at this point.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Since uh since you brought that up, how did your world change in in March of last year, March 2020?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: Significantly overnight.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: I regret not having been in a PLG place at the time.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: We went and did some really large enterprise transactions, but being ready for PLG, it would have been more advantageous to have us done that in 2018, 2019.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, things happen for a reason.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's been a really strong market created and a lot of room for a lot of players, given the shift from 5% of the workforce working remote to we're gonna land somewhere in that 60%, depending on your industry, maybe 80% of the workforce working remote for some time.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of room, but uh it was a wild, wild ride.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: We did some transactions that I never thought were even possible in a very short time frame.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it was it, it's it's been an amazing ride and fun to be part of, and my family was right along with us, as were everybody else's, which was great.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that's actually been the best part about COVID, is I I've got to know my sales team much better now than I did pre-pandemic.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'd fly around and meet people at for dinner or whatever, I'd know them, I'd know that they had kids, but I didn't know what their kids look like, I didn't know what their wives look like, I didn't know what their houses look like.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: And now we do, and I feel there's it's weird, like there's a more closeness, but less human touch.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's a give and take, but it's an interesting time.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, for sure.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: Final question for you if there was one sales question or sales saying that you wished never to hear again in your life that could be dispatched into the further furthest reaches of outer space, what would that be for you?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: I honestly I think there's a number of them, but sometimes it makes me cringe when you feel that moment on a call when I'm listening to a sales call or something like that, where a rep says, Okay, so let's talk about next steps.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like didn't you already discuss all that?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: If you're doing a really good job, that should have already been done.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're asking the next step question at the end of a call, it makes me cringe.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not really a saying, but it's more like in the process, it just makes my skin crawl.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'll tell you a quick story about that.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the companies I've mentioned, I taught to the top sellers at the company what are you doing to drive deals faster and to drive deals bigger.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: And at the company, there was a drive to just do the demo, just do the demo because you know, they'll see the magic of the product and the POs will fall out of the sky kind of thing.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, they didn't, right?
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: And all these sellers I taught to, the best ones there, the most successful ones, said, Yeah, I don't do that.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: I do a proper sales job.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: We map ourselves around the organization, and then what I do with my main champion is map out all the next steps ahead of time so that each one is just a next step and a journey.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the seller could do it, you know, at the start of every meeting.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: The purpose of this meeting is to do this.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: And if it goes well, the decision is gonna be made is that we will go to whatever it is, bring in on our team, go to a POC.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Already decided that's what's gonna happen if it goes well.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: And when I heard that and saw them doing it, it was like poetry emotion.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's outcome-based selling, telling the person what's gonna happen at the end of the call, making an agreement on it, and that's it.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, then it's already decided.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: I love that, Andrew.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great story.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I wish I could wave a magic wand and help all the sales folks get there, but that's why we're excited to work with you, and it's been so valuable to be working uh alongside you.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's always room for growth, but if I could kill the uh sales rep saying, okay, so tell me what the next steps are in your mind, I would do it.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm with you on that.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, MT, listen, I enjoyed the conversation.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Good to catch up and uh wish you all the best in your transition to POG.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much, Andrew.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a pleasure.