Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 146: A break down of 2 companies’ answer to “what do you do?”

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146: A break down of 2 companies’ answer to “what do you do?” · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Two cybersecurity companies were asked to explain what they do in 30 seconds or less.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Find out which companies they were, what they said, and how they can improve on their answers in this episode.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because it's cybersecurity companies.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: It's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: Sales Bluebird gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, and ideas from people who know a thing or ten about selling and also building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_02: And today we're continuing our series on answering the question, what do you do?
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Last week, what we talked about was the framework to think about, about how best to answer it.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: And this week, we're going to take two examples and look at how two companies did it and give them some ideas for how they can improve on their answers.
• 1:36
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• 1:43
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• 1:47
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• 1:48
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• 1:57
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• 2:00
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• 2:04
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• 2:11
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• 2:15
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• 2:19
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• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: So the what do you do question that uh we all get.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_02: We got them all at DRSA and coming up in a week or two is Black Hat.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm recording this towards the end of July 2022.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and it's your one chance to capture their attention, their head, their heart, make them want to lean in to what you're doing and saying, as opposed to lean away or be disinterested.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: And it's your chance to be, first of all, memorable in a good way rather than in a bad way.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: The framework we used last week is the foundation, and this week we're looking at two companies.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, what I'd like to do though is say a huge thank you to David Spark, uh who runs the SISO series podcast.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_02: There's a bunch of podcasts and also, I think, YouTube uh live streams that he does around cybersecurity.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_02: He gave me permission to use the audio that you're gonna hear from his capture the SISO series, where essentially it was a few early stage companies were pitching SISOs almost like in a shark tank kind of format, although not really.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, they could have gone through various runs.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: And he allowed me to use the audio that we're gonna listen to today, but you know, the point in his podcast where the host said, What do you do?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: If you haven't already, go check out David's whole media site, Siso Series, I think, or do David Spark Siso series, and you get his website.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: He's got, I think, three or four different podcasts on there.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_02: Highly recommend the content.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: Really, really good stuff.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: And by the way, this is not a coincidence that this series is going out uh between RSA and Black Hat.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: You know, my inspiration was going to RSA and listening to a whole bunch of companies.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: When I asked them, so what do you guys do?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_02: And listening to the answers, I thought, God, there's got to be some help given about how to do this a bit more effectively.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, Black Hat's coming up.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_02: So my sincere hope is that people will listen to this and go, well, let's do this a little bit differently.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get together as a team and uh figure out how we can do it differently and be more effective at Black Hat.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: If you do want to engage with me and get some help with this or anything else to do with the effectiveness of your team, book some time with me at talktoandy.com.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: Talk toandy.com, and we can just have a quick chat about what's going on in your team, what help you think they need, and whether I can help or not.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes, you know, it's just not what I do, the help that's needed, but sometimes it is.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, talk toandy.com.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: All right, so we're gonna get into them right now.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_02: And the first one up is conveyor, c O N V E Y O R dot com.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: And the T up to this is the host uh introduced them and said to the person, I think Conveyor, it might have been the founder or the CEO.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_02: So why don't you take 30 seconds to tell us what you do?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: And what I'm gonna do is play you the answer that person gave, and then we can look at what we heard.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: So let me play it to you right now.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Our vision is a world where security questionnaires are a thing of the distant past.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that we're bringing that about today, if you have a vendor to review, just tell conveyor, if they're on our network, you get instant access to their security and compliance artifacts.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: If not, upload whatever you've got, their SOC2, their security white paper, their trust packet.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: We will parse those documents and find answers to your questions or the controls that matter for that vendor and flag issues proactively for you.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And in doing so, we save you 79% of your time on that security review and help you complete it five times faster.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: So thank you to the person at conveyor.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of goodness in this one.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: I thought it was the person was very captivating.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: They talked about some good stuff.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: They started with the vision, you know, started with a why.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: And this kind of goes back to Simon Sinek's, you know, start with why.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I love that bit of he described what they do, right?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: So he kind of went through, you know, if you have a vendor to review, so he made it more personal, which I really liked and it worked for me.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And he talked about the outcomes at the end, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Save 79% on a security review and do reviews five times faster.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Good, hard kind of stats there, metrics on outcomes.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: So I really liked all that bit of it.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, what would I do to improve this one?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, what I would do is actually name the ideal customer profile, name the buyer.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_02: So if a CISO's the buyer, I would start with you know, saying that Cisos find that or Cisos Realize that or whatever it is, you know, heads off, compliance, whatever it might be the conveyor really goes after.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: Because then people will just know, okay, this is designed for me, if that's me, or someone that, you know, is in my organization or whatever, that's something I understand, right?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Sometimes they might go into it saying, well, what does it mean for me?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: What does it mean for me?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: And you just say, look, you know, this is for someone completely different.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_02: At least then you're letting them know that, right?
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: The second point I pick up on, and I think this is probably the more important one, is there is an implied problem, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Because he says that he wants to make security questionnaires a thing of the past.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: So therefore, there's an implication is they're not good, right?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: But implied problems are not as effective as explicit problems, right?
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: Explicitly saying, here are the problems, here's what people can't stand.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's going to connect with someone, especially if they're having those problems, right?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: So don't leave it the chance that they're gonna understand what the problems might be, especially if it's not the ideal customer profile, right?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: If it's not the ICP, the persona that usually is the buyer.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Don't leave it the chance, right?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: Just say, you know, CISOs, find that and then name the problems as they come out.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And you can do it in a very passionate way.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_02: So he clearly he was very passionate about making security questions, I think, in the past.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_02: Still do that, right?
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: You can talk passionately about the problem as well as the solution.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: What's true though is people are much more motivated to go away from bad problems right now than they are just to get to a good future, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: So all he gave us really was the good future.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: So the prime motivation from people, and this is borne out by studies, is get away from problems right now.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: So if you tap into that, if you connect with that, then the person you're talking to is going to have a connection with you.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing that's true as well is when you clearly articulate the problem and you do it in a manner where you, you know, you know this problem, right?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_02: You've talked to 30 other people, 50 other people, 100 other people, just like this person, and you just know right what that problem is, and you articulate it to them in a way that portrays that you know it, it's in your favor.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And here's why.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: When people believe that you completely get their problem, like intimately get their problem, they are much more likely to believe that you have the solution, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: When you just get it, if they sit there and go, that's right.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's going on right now.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: This guy gets it, this girl gets it.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_02: Then they're gonna be much more willing to believe that you have the ideal solution.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm gonna go out and limb here.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't really know much about conveyor except what the person said on this and quick glance at their website.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna give my quick, quick cut at what a different version might be with what was said and also with my feedback.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: So let's go with this and see how this sounds.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: So, security leaders like you hate security questionnaires.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_02: We hear this again and again.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: They can't stand that they're so slow to complete.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: They're fed up with the amount of resources it takes to complete them, and then also then figure out what to do with the answers.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: Our vision is that security questionnaires are a thing of the past.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: If you have a vendor who is already in our ecosystem, you'll instantly get access to their info.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: If it's not, you can upload all the artifacts and real quickly tell you what the issues you should care about are.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: This means that you save 79% on a security review and you complete reviews five times faster.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: Let me ask you though, how are you handling security reviews right now?
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that was my quick cut of it, right?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: I went pretty hard on the problem, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: I used emotional words that were quite impactful.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: I people hate security questionnaires.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_02: They're fed up with the amount of resources.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: They can't stand they're so slow to complete.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_02: These are words that I chose specifically, right?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Because again, if someone is even close to thinking, God, I hate security questionnaires, you're gonna connect with them, right?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's how you're gonna do it, and you're digging into the problem right here.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: And then I went into the middle bit, was really just what he said, right?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_02: Our vision is that security questionnaires are a thing of the past.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_02: I went into a little bit about uh how it works for people, and I used their stats, their metrics at the end.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_02: The one thing I did is I added a question on, right?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: And then maybe that was implicit or you would have done that normally and not in this weird kind of shark tag environment.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: But the question I asked was, how are you handling security reviews right now?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I the two phases of two types of question in this situation, one are is what's going on right now?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: And the second question is if you could dispatch security questionnaires to the thing of the past, what would it mean for your program?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you're looking for the future.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: And this one I went with what's happening right now.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: So out of curiosity, how are you handling security reviews right now?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so that I believe that will be a few tweaks in there to help conveyor better answer that question and get more of a connection with the person that they're talking to.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, I don't know much about conveyor, so I might have missed a few intricacies here and there.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: So give me some leeway on that.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_02: Second one that we're gonna look at is a company called Votiro, V-O-T-I-R-O.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: Same deal, right?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: They were asked, you know, take 30 seconds and uh tell us what you do.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: So let's hear what their answer is.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Votira's API proactively disarmed content of known and unknown threats at scale that other security solutions miss without adding any friction, without blocking files, and without interrupting the users.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we reduce the work for IT and security teams, reducing the risk while enabling seamless and instant flow of safe content and data into the organization.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: We do that by applying content disarm and reconstruction technology, which actually turned the problem on its head.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of looking for bad stuff, we always deliver good known content.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: So that's what the person for Votiro gave, I believe again, it was maybe the CEO, the founder.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: So my notes on this.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So you imagine he was asked the question, so take 30 seconds, tell us what you do.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_02: The way he started out was to tell us what they do, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_02: Votira is an API proactively disarms.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you went straight to the kind of logical, rational, you know, this is actually what we do.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you listen to the the previous episode when I talked about the framework for doing it, you know, my recommendation is that you don't do that.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: That really what they're asking is, what do you do for me?
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: What problems do you solve for me?
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, a couple other questions that we talked about.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_02: So wasn't a big fan of how that started out.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Does put in benefits, right?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: No friction or reduce friction, reduce the work, reduce the work for the operations team, enables the business, things like that.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_02: There were a bunch of buzzwords in there, not a fan of that as well.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: So proactive, seamless, instant flow, content disarmament, reconstruction technology, might even got those words wrong.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_02: So there were words in there that, you know, anytime you're doing that, it can throw people off.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm going to acknowledge something, which is sometimes when people use these words, and I'm thinking specifically when he said content, disarmament, reconstruction technology, what they're trying to do is name a category or name a new submarket inside cybersecurity, right?
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_02: Put something on it so that people kind of latch onto it.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I want to recognize that's maybe what they were trying to do there.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_02: And when I do my version, you'll see how we do it maybe a little bit differently.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: So my recommendations, it'd be a lot more impactful.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: Again, start with the problem.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_02: Who's experiencing the problem?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Who's the buyer?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is it security leaders?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: Is it someone else?
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_02: Put in those words that I did in the first one.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: Need to be clear about what the problem is so people get it.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: So persona, who's who's experiencing the problem, what the problem is.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And then also, I don't know, a clearer statement about what Votira does.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I quite really got that.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: The buzzword might confuse me a little bit.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not sure.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: Is it something that's like a gateway thing?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: Is it cloud?
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: You write things through clouds, is it sitting on a desktop?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if I really got that from what he was talking about.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: I got kind of lost in the middle there somewhere.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: So if I was to do it a little bit differently, what would I do?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: So I might do something like this, right?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_02: And again, you know, I don't know anything about Boutiro except this sound byte plus a website visit.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: But it might go something like this.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's so much content flowing between companies these days, is a normal part of business.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it's really hard for security teams to monitor and clean these files without disrupting the business.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: This means the teams themselves are often feeling a little vulnerable with what's going on and what's coming into their organizations.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: We solve this with a cloud service that looks for known good objects in files and allows them through to the end user and then cleans up the rest.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: We call this API first content disarmament and reconstruction as a service.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Our customers love that they're significantly reducing their risk while enabling the safe flow of content into the organization.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious, when you look at all the business partnerships that you have right now, what are you doing at the moment to try and assess and protect the organization from risks that are coming in through those vectors?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_02: So let's break down what I did there, right?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I started off with a there's so much content flowing, right?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: This is a big thing in business these days, right?
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, 10, 15 years ago, there was not nearly so much of a flow of files and data going on.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And these days it's what's happening, and that's what puts the stress on the security teams, right?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I then got into problems.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: So it's hard for teams to do that without disrupting the business, and that means they're feeling a little bit vulnerable because you know they know they're not catching everything or perhaps doing a great job, but it's not because they're bad people, right?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's because they just don't have the right tools to help them do it and give them scale.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I put that in there.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not exactly sure that this is how Vutira does it, but I try to describe a little bit about how it was done.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: We solved this with a cloud service that looks for known good objects.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: And then what I did, if you notice, is I still put in there the content, disarmament, and reconstruction of the service, but I described first what we do, and then I said, we call this, and then I named it, right?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_02: So if this is done right, someone could follow along and go, okay, I kind of get a sense of what they do.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, and they've got a way to name it.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: If you do it the other way around, right, and you say, we've got something that's uh API content, it's like I don't have no idea what that is.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: You've kind of confused me a little bit already.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: I'm still thinking about that, those words and trying to remember the words you said when you're already five seconds past this trying to explain what they are, right?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I think the more effective way to do it is lead up to the naming of your technology.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: And then I use the phrase, you know, our customers love that.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: So I use that as a lead in to the benefits of use Votiro.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I finished up with the question about what's going on right now.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_02: So that was how I did that one.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Hopefully I didn't butcher too much what Votira does.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: But uh for me, this might be a more impactful way to describe or to answer the question, what do you do?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: This is a really interesting exercise these companies went through with David Spark's capture the CISO series here.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: You know, they put themselves out there, they're willing to kind of say in public with all their competitors listening, what they do.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, if you listen to the rest of the episodes, which I encourage you to do, you'll hear them then going much deeper into what it is and how it all works.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, they're just out there as startups in our world of cybersecurity trying to stand out, trying to make a difference, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it's not easy to do that.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: To me, they were both actually pretty good, and hopefully these ideas will give them maybe a couple of things to work on.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_02: And if you think about how you're doing your answer to the question, maybe there's some tips in there you pick up and use.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: And remember, the reason why is when you explain clearly what you do in a compelling way, you vastly increase the chances of your prospect understanding what you do and remembering it.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: See you next time.