Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 184: One way to maximize a first meeting

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184: One way to maximize a first meeting · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird Podcast, where we help cybersecurity startups grow sales faster.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, we give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we're talking about one way to maximize those precious first meetings.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: A quick break to say that this episode is sponsored by the Security Funded Newsletter.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Staying on top of all the latest news of the business of cybersecurity is really hard.
• 1:19
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• 1:27
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• 1:29
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• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's written by Mike Privet, who is a CISO himself and who also advises startups and investors on the business side of cybersecurity.
• 1:47
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• 1:59
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• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you're a founder, investor, or just someone who wants to stay informed about this rapidly evolving industry, the security funded newsletter has something for you.
• 2:15
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• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's salesbluebird.com slash funded.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now back to the discussion.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So stop me if this sounds familiar.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of effort goes into getting that first meeting with your ideal prospect.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you yourself are dialing or emailing, maybe you've got some BDRs and SDRs doing it.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe even you've you've got an outside firm, either uh an outside outside SDR BDR firm, or even one of the meeting appointment uh companies that are out there specifically for setting meetings with uh with SISOs.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of time and money goes into getting that meeting.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the call itself, usually there's a couple of things that we're thinking.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: One is, you know, that call went well, right?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: We had a really good conversation.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: They talked a little bit about themselves.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the good news is they even have the problem that we solved.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when we talked about what we did, we did a really good job.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: We got the DAC out, we showed a quick demo, we showed them how we can solve that problem.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe even after the at the end of the first call, uh, we agreed to set up a second meeting as a follow-up, maybe to go into a deeper demo, bring more people in.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But when we really think about what happened and where the outcome of that call was, the real question is there was a lot of interest there, but do you really have an opportunity?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Is that prospect of the mindset right now that they're gonna be spending some money, their hard earned money, and also their time to solve this problem in a period of time that's acceptable to us, right?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna be in the next few months, or perhaps is it next year or even the year after?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing that often happens is that when we're honest with ourselves, we realize that we don't really know enough about their problem.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sure they mentioned it, right?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Or if we brought it up, they said, yeah, yeah, that's a that's a challenge.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: But often what happens at that point is our happy ears take over.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And anyone who's been in sales for any amount of time knows exactly what I'm talking about, right?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: You you you ask about the problem, they go, oh yeah, that's that's a pain.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, here's what we do, and it's a pain, it's a pain, and you're going, yes, I here's someone who has the problem that I that I solve.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into why we can solve it and how we solve it uniquely and why we're so great, right?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where your happy years take over.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: But when we really think about it, what you don't know is the so what, right?
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So what if this is a problem?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: Who's impacted?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: What the how's the business impacted?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who's getting fired?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Who's measuring what?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the one banging down the doors of the security team saying this needs to be solved?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is it them?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Is it someone else?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a revenue stream?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then where on the list of priorities is this, is this gonna sit?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, no one we talk to is shorter things to fix and go do.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the real question is, is they gonna bump this up from nowhere into their top three to five things to solve?
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: Or are they gonna say, yeah, you know, I've got the problem and I'm kind of interested, but really it's sitting there down there at number 25, and they're just not ready yet to assign some money and some resources to go work on this.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: This time's a lot, right?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh I think we all know that.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's an area that most people can get a little bit better at.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what I do with my clients is I go through a simple exercise to help them get better at doing this.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to take through, take, take you through this today to give you a sense of how you can quickly make a mindset shift, but also a habit shift in how you're doing things to really get to the root of the problem here.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: So bear with me on this, right?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine a piece of paper and it's got four boxes on it.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's one at the top left, there's one uh bottom left, there's top right, and there's bottom right.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they're evenly spaced in this page.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And um label the top one blue, or or if you're really inclined, color it in blue, but top one's blue, the button left one is orange, the bottom right one is red, but I'll say that again.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: The top right one is red, and the bottom right one is green.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, if you can't label them as well, the top left one is current situation and problems, that's the blue one.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: The orange one at the bottom left is impacts of problems.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: The top right one that's red is called ideal future, and the one at the bottom right in green is positive impact in the future.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we got current situation and problems in blue, impacts of problems in orange, ideal future in red, and then bottom right, we've got uh positive impact in the future.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: So this is a very simple discovery framework that I work through with my clients.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the first step to do with as a team is to brainstorm great questions to go into each of those boxes, right?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you want to just think about what might be great situational or current situation, problem questions, what might be great questions to get to the impacts of those problems.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: When you're thinking about the you know, the prospect and what they think their ideal future is, what might be great questions to understand that, and then what are good questions in the bottom right?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: Understand, okay, if you fixed all that, what might be the impact in the future?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the first thing is to get the team to get out on the piece of paper, on the whiteboard.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: I actually use, I do all my work with clients online.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I use Mural, or you can use Mural Mural.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole bunch of these online whiteboarding collaboration tools that are out there.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, BlueScape as well is another good one.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you can do it like that, or if you're in person, just go up to the whiteboard and start doing this.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But get get them to put their questions up there, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the next step is have them then vote on the best questions.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Which ones do they love that are on there?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you imagine uh the whiteboard, whether it's virtual or in person, you get a whole bunch of sticky notes on it or scribblings on it saying, here's a question, here's a question.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you want them to go up there and just say, I love that one over there, no matter where it came from, right?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: It could be from them or it could be from one of their peers, it could be from you, it doesn't really matter, right?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you want them to start voting on these great questions because then it's gonna surface to them.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Here are you know the questions I'm familiar with, but here's ones from others that I could beg, borrow, and steal that are really good as well.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I just guarantee it that everyone in that team is gonna learn more questions or better questions than what they have right now.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: But what it does do is it surfaces the ones that they as a team believe are the ones that are really good.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you've crowdsourced the really good questions out there.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things that's true, uh back to my original statement, right, is we've spent a bit of time asking about the problem and what's going on and all the rest of it, is that we are all much more comfortable having conversations in the top left blue box, which is the current situation and the current problem, rather than any of the other ones.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think about, you know, if there was such a thing as an ideal call, and it never is, is that your time would be reasonably evenly spaced between the four boxes.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: That never happens, right?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: But uh that that directionally, that's the way that we should be thinking about this.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is that 80% of our time uh on these calls is dominated by the blue or the current situation and problem uh questions or conversation.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and very little time is allocated towards the other one.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what you'll often find when you do this exercise is that you you the team finds it very easy to put it in the questions for the blue box, the current situation and problems, and much more difficult to get questions for the other boxes, right?
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you you might find this as people start doing this, that that's where most of the questions are.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: So if you find yourself, especially in the orange box at the bottom left there, right, which is the impacts of the current problems, if you find yourself a little bit short of good questions in there, this is when you might want to step in and say, okay, let's just work on this orange box a little a little bit more.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: What more questions could we add in here, right?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and get the team to focus just on that one.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that should bolster the number of questions that are in there.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you can do this after the voting happens, or you might even want to do it before, right?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you're sitting there going, well, we've got 18 questions in the top left and we've only got three in the bottom left.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's just focus on the bottom left and then we'll vote, right?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can do it that way, right.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, you probably need to add a few more in there with the team.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Importantly, though, you don't do it for them, right?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: You really want them to work on these themselves because it's creating themselves, they're learning, they're thinking, they're taking ownership of those questions.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So what you're gonna end up at the end of this process with is a bunch of questions.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: You you surface the ones that are getting the most votes, i.e., the ones the team really likes.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now that the reality is, is that in many situations, we don't get the chance to ask a ton of questions.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you think about it, even on a 30-minute call, which is a first meeting often, you know, the first few minutes are spent doing intros or waiting for people to show up.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe you burn five minutes right there.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you do a really good job, you're burning the last, not burning, but you're using the last five minutes of the call to kind of do next steps and wrap up and you know, things like that, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Book in the next meeting.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: So really that first meeting in that situation might just be 20 minutes, right?
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is exacerbated when you think about maybe some of the speed dating events that that uh uh startups usually go to, right?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: Or even you think about conferences such as RSA, you know, like you're sitting there for 45 minutes or an hour and time to really go into a whole bunch of questions.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, time is compressed.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So what I do next with my clients is I give them the three question challenge, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: So they've got all these questions up there.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let's imagine it's you know, up top.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Down below, I give them a couple of scenarios, right?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it might be that, right?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: You got a 20-minute first meeting.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the person gets on the call and says, I'm glad to meet you.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know, I'm in a real problem with the area that your company's in, right?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in uh, I don't know, database security, I've got a real problem with the speed of encryption, decryption in my database, right?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in um in cloud security, they might say, you know, we we we bought a couple of solutions last year, the year before, we've realized that it's not quite enough, right?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Set up a couple of common scenarios that you you might hear.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then the three question challenge is if you only could ask that person in each of those scenarios three questions, what question would you ask?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: What questions would you ask?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: And by using this constraint, what the team is forced to do is to say, well, I don't want to burn three questions on situational type questions.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what do you have?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: How many do you have?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: What have you tried?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that, right?
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: I actually do want to get to the impact as quick as I can and spend as much of my time asking about that.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what you'll ideally find is when they write down their three questions, they are much more focused on finding out the impact, finding out the so what, finding out what's being affected by this problem and what's the size of the problem, things like that, right?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way they're going to gravitate towards when they do this exercise.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So after that, what you've hopefully got is two, three common scenarios that you get into, right?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Whether it's at a conference or the 20-minute first meeting or whatever it might be, and you've got the team to create their own three highly impactful questions to ask that they believe are the ones that are going to get the biggest results.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's gonna help get the conversation in the right area, right?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you think about our problem statement to start.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: We found out there's a problem, but we don't know enough about the depth of the problem to know whether there's someone on the other side that's truly gonna spend money and precious resources to solve this problem.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we got to the point where the team has got their own questions to drive the conversation in the right way.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: But we're not done yet, right?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because you know, often you've got sellers who've been doing this for a while, and what we're asking them to do is behavior change.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: We're asking them to change the habits of a lifetime.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, if we're sitting here around a table theorizing on it, it's much easier to do than when you're live on a call or face-to-face with a prospect to remember, don't settle back into your usual way of doing this.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to challenge yourself to ask those questions that you wrote down.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the last step in the process is to spend 20 minutes and role play each of those.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you and I both know there's people who hate doing role plays.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, when I was a seller, I didn't like it.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I grew to know and learn that actually is a good way for me to embed things in my brain.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it's easier for me to do these things on calls.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I learned to do it.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, role plays are not real, role plays are set up, role plays, you know, all the usual things that you hear about how people think that role plays suck.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll tell you what, what's the alternative?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: The alternative is you sit there and go, well, I'm going to role play or practice with my prospect.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: That is not the great way to do it.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a recipe for success, right?
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: So challenge the team to the, you know, I get it, these aren't real, but let's get into the habit of the knee-jerk is when someone says, my database encryption and decryption is too slow, you don't say, great, let me tell you how we solve that.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Your next question is one of my three impact questions, right?
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you want to get into the conversation so they're used to asking those three questions.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So don't shy away from the role play.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Get that embedded in their brain so that you can all be more successful.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then uh, if you really want to go the extra mile, what to do is create a cheat sheet.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, take these questions that have come, summarize them on a one pager, and then make sure each of the team has that one pager to sit beside uh them on the phone, um, on the screen in front of them, wherever it might be.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: So at the end of this whole process, the team will now have some great questions of their own.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: They've created these questions themselves, remember, right?
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they've practiced them and they've got a cheat sheet.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So they're set up for success to now do these first meetings, which are so precious and sometimes so hard to come by and maximize them.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So getting those first meetings is hard and we want to maximize them.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to understand the so what in all these deals.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, we're in danger of chasing opportunities that don't really exist.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, a couple of things to wrap up with here.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Sales Bluebird.
• 17:18
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• 17:21
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• 17:27
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• 17:30
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• 17:39
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• 17:46
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• 17:47
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• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: It gets us more listeners and it gives me the energy to keep doing these uh every week.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last thing I'd say is another exercise I do with clients, or another piece of work I do with clients, is working on the sales deck they use in first meetings.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you know in your gut your deck is missing the mark with prospects and you believe it could be better, head over to firstmeetingdeck.com to see how you can improve it.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: In just a few days, your deck will be transformed into one that sellers actually like to use, believe it or not, and that prospects will lean into rather than just simply ignore.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all at firstmeetingdeck.com.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for joining me today and see you next time on Sales Bluebird.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget that what you do is important, and I'm rooting for your success.