Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 123: Scott McCrady, CEO of SolCyber Managed Security Services, talks about the important role MSSP plays in today's cyber security market

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123: Scott McCrady, CEO of SolCyber Managed Security Services, talks about the important role MSSP plays in today's cyber security market · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get go-to-market fit, grow revenue, and scale the sales team.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, examples, and ideas from people who've been doing this for many years at many companies.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Scott McCrady, CEO of Soul Cyber Managed Services.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Scott, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Hey Andrew, good to see you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation we're going to have.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Managed services, managed security services is an area I'm always intrigued by, and we'll get into that during the conversation.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: But before we get there, let me just have a call out to the listeners.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: So for the first time we're taking sponsors now on the podcast.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you're interested in reaching cybersecurity sellers, sales teams, sales leaders, then go to salesbluebird.com.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: The top menu there, there's an option for sponsors.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: It'll tell you all about it.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to talk to me directly, just hit the button up there to do that and we could have a conversation.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: But great opportunity to reach a bunch of salespeople, sales teams, and sales leaders.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Scott, back to you.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: Six questions for you to get to know the real Scott McCrady.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And these are not up for debate, and it depends, and maybes, and I don't know, is it quick answers?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever comes into your mind, first of all.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Are you ready to go?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm ready.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Alright, first one.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Dive bar or cocktail bar?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ooh.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: Probably cocktail bar.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Sweet of the four seasons or cabin in the woods?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Oh god.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um probably cabin in the woods right now.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: Crypt type Jeep or German car with all the gadgets.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh definitely German car with the gadgets.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Beach or mountains?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: I'd go beach.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely a water guy.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: You are, okay.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they say home is where the heart is.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Where is home for you?
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right now is Dallas.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up here, but I spent a lot of time overseas and other places.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but yeah, Dallas is home now.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's made up made a full circle.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, how did you first make money as a kid?
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh, that's a good one.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um I did this thing called lot washing in Dallas, actually.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you have these huge car dealerships and they'd want their cars cleansed on Wednesday, Thursdays, and Fridays before the weekend.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So we would go out and spend about 14 hours cleaning these cars.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'd do anywhere from 800 to 1,000 cars in a day at all these different lots around Dallas.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, you know, my parents loved it because it's just completely wrecked by the end of the day, right?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you come home, you just like fall asleep immediately and don't bother your parents.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that was how we did it.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Hard manual labor.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: How old were you when that was going on?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Technically, I was uh underage.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think I started when I was about 15.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I wasn't supposed to be doing it, I think.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: But I loved it.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was great, and it paid my way through college.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: That's hard work.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's out in the heat, right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was, yeah, and almost all of it was summertime.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, 15-year-old boys are sort of indestructible and we're not very smart.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, throw them at throw them at cars.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: The joke I had actually was really funny.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was a super skinny kid, but we'd ring out these leather chamises, and so you'd ring these leather chamises out, you know, I don't know, a couple thousand times a day, right?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the end of the summer, I had these huge Popeye forearms and just didn't have like a muscle anywhere else on the rest of my body.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I I had I had one good forearm um and no no biceps, no triceps, no, nothing else.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's the opposite of the true de France cyclists, right?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I have one good muscle.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I had not heard of that before, that whole concept, but I guess they need their cars cleaned before people come in the weekends to buy cars, right?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they're sort of dusty, they're not really that dirty, but obviously you got birds around.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, you you get this pressure washer and you spray them down, and then you come, there's usually a three-man team, one person sprays, and then two people chamois either side of the car, and you ring out your chamois, and you can knock a car on about 45 seconds.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like all things.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you get very good when you're doing thousands of them a day.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no kidding.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, what a great story.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Going on to professional life, when I look at your your LinkedIn profile, I see big, big, well-known companies: EDS, NTT, Semantic, FireEye, SonicWall.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: These are you know big companies with EDS and NTT, but in the cyber world in the last 20 years, big names in there as well.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Where where were your formative years that you really got going with your career and learned the most?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I was I was an engineer coming out of college.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I built out network security systems right when they were becoming a thing in web hosting and web security.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was sort of the focus was technical.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got this hilarious story to me, anyways, hilarious, is I got sent to London with EDS to help on some deals over there.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I was a technical person explaining how we got all the security pieces together, really young, wet behind the years guy, right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd go to these pubs with the sales guys afterwards and they'd start talking about commissions and all this other jazz.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And as an engineer, I I knew almost nothing about this.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so they would explain how they're going to buy a car and a house, you know, whenever they close this big government deal.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and I was like, Well, how does that work?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I how do you buy a house when you when you sell something?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Don't you just get your salary?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I ended up coming back to EDS and to Plano, and they ended up closing the deal.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And my boss came to me and said, Hey Scott, by the way, great job, loved everything you did, got great you know, response back.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: The sales guy said you would agree with the customers.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And because the deal won, they gave me a certificate to the EDS company store.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: I swear to God.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the certificate was five dollars less than what it cost to buy a shirt from so like there they didn't have that much stuff in there.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: They had like shirts and like water glasses or something.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I remember I had to pay the extra five dollars to actually top up the gift certificate to actually get to actually get the shirt.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember just going, I've got to get into sales.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm like, I'm an engineer, uh, but somehow, someway, I've got to get into sales.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um that was they didn't know that the uh the gift was what was the final straw that forced me to make a career change.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I became a sales engineer, uh, and I moved companies into managed security services.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a great story.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you got a lot of good thank yous though, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: I got like they were it was great.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: They were like, they're like, we never give you know certificates to the company store.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: You usually have to spend your own money there.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that was uh that was the the funny part is I told uh some friends about it.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh that's a really nice gesture.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, yeah, but you know, Johnny England over there just got you know like five, fifty thousand pounds and went out and bought a Porsche, you know.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So uh and then I just spent five dollars extra to get my shirt.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Which I didn't really want anyway.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Who wants to wore an EDS shirt?
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: No offense to ES, but so from those beginnings then you moved on to was it I guess it was Vario then, was it?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: They were part of NTT or that's right.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I was a sales engineer for Vario, and they were, I mean, I think most people know Vario if you've from if you're back in the internet days, they were a huge uh ISP.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: They got purchased by NTT, and then I was actually helping on the managed services even way back then, because we'd done a partnership with this company called RipTech.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: So RipTech was the original uh MSSP, and so back in the day, sims weren't really a thing because compute wasn't strong enough for on-prem sims, security information uh event management.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so you had to do it in the cloud.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So Amit Uran started this company called RipTech, which was the original MSSP, and NTT and Vario had done a partnership.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I was responsible for the partnership with RipTech.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was I was going to Japan and doing training out there in Japan on this, and they were getting into the MSSP space.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then I was responsible for sales basically in the US.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it just finally, with the acquisition and the changes, I actually ended up going to RipTech, which eventually became Symantec.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you were there at Symantec for nine years.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: Was it you were in the MSS group there all that time, is that right?
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: The entire time.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where you know you talk about formative, there's always a couple of major changes that sort of guide you on your path.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone's like, How did you stay at Symantec for you know almost a decade?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer was is I had great opportunities.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: They just kept giving me interesting things to go do.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: So during that time, I got a chance to actually go to Asia.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I lived in Sydney for four years, and I built out their entire Asia Pacific and Japan business.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: So built out a SOC in Sydney, built out a SOC in Japan.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: I basically took that business from zero to a really, really solid business.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and then I got asked to come back and run the whole uh business, which at the time I think was the largest MSSP in the world.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: We had, I think, 450 to 500 employees.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: We had six security operations centers around the world.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was a pretty, pretty good-sized business.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, inside of Symantec, we were a relatively small cog in the big wheel that was really a consumer-based or an enterprise-based software business.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: So our piece was relatively small, but it was a blast because it felt like you're in a small company inside of a large company.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so 10 years went by very, very quickly.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, when you get to be a general manager of Asia and then get to be a general manager of an entire business, there's things that you learn that you're just not going to pick up in a standard large company, right?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you know how to run your own PLs, how to run operations and sales and marketing.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a really just formative experience.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I got to live overseas.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was fantastic.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: So Semantic really treated me well.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then after nine, almost 10 years there, another big name, FireEye.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Were you doing the same sort of thing for FireEye?
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I was pre-IPO at FireEye.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: So after 10 years, I wanted to go somewhere smaller.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh went pre-IPO, and of course, that was just a crazy time with the Mandian acquisition, and you know those guys really, really well.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Super, super talented people, some of the smartest people in security, you know, were sort of congregating in the Fire Eye Mandian ranks.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So just a fantastic chance, and basically did the same thing, helped build out their MSSP program, both for sales outbound, but also to work with partners and channels.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a fantastic experience because at the time getting the managed services around the product was a little bit unique.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we were also working with partnerships.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we landed like a massive deal with SyncTel where we helped build SyncTel's actual managed security services using our products and services together as well.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we sort of got to rebuild an MSSP business, but using the FireIon Mandate components.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that was clearly in your DNA and everything you were learning.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: Fast forward a few years in January 2021, you become the CEO at Soul Cyber MS Spanish Security Services.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can see it kind of built as the modern MSSP.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm wondering what you learned along the way that says, yeah, we need to do this a little bit differently or a little bit better at Soul Cyber.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think I think the main thing.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: So most of us, I mean, I've been in the space now for over 20 years, and almost that entire time was you know, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 sales.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so this concept of saying there's a lot of smart people in these companies and they build out a security program.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And once that's all done, they then contract with an MSSP to consume that data, provide interesting analytics against it, and let them know when something bad's happening.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: That is the standard model.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is the breaches in the mid-market were just accelerating, Andrew.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like we were just seeing the breaches at call it 5,000 seats and below, just continuing to accelerate.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: So when we when we were thinking about sole cyber, we're like, why is that?
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why is this mid-market in such a you know difficult position?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And our view was you've got three hard things to solve.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is one, everybody calls themselves an MSSP.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: So there's this explosion of nomenclature out there around who is one, who's not one, what's an MSP, what's an MSSP.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the mid-market wasn't really getting what we would call Fortune 100 level security in order to repel these attacks that you're seeing that are more sophisticated against them than they used to be.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that was because, two, oftentimes they didn't have the people in order to implement these programs.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So even if they had somebody who's really smart that could actually like pull together a program, they were getting derailed during the POC process.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, okay, in order to be secure, you probably need, I call practical security, you need seven or eight things to really get that you know problem solved.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so if if you if you're looking at eight things that you have to go do, and each of those is three POCs for each of those eight things, it's taking them two or three years, and then people leave.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so they weren't working their way through the process.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third thing was a lot of times they didn't have a person to pull the program together, so they'd never really get started.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: So our view was how do you take Fortune 100 level security?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not a, you know, everybody here, like for instance, we've got General Keith Alexander on the board.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like he stood up uh US cyber offense and defense.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we're we're here to provide really, really good security.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you take Fortune 100 level security and how do you get that into the mid-market and like super easy to consume, really straightforward like packaging and pricing and concepts so that it makes the decision easier for them?
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you use best of breed technology?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I know you had uh Mark on from Sentinel One.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we use Sentinel One as an example.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: We don't to make additional margin, we don't build our own endpoint because Bank of America wouldn't build their own endpoint, they would use something like Sentinel One.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a fundamental concept, and we felt very strongly that the tech had to be amazing, but you had to marry it with a business model that was super simple and really easy to consume.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So our entire business model is literally like per user per month, and you can just like sign a contract and go.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have like one line on our service order form, you know, maybe two lines at most, and there's no initiation fees, there's nothing.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, these mid-market companies can go from saying, it will take me two years to get really solid security in place that's focused on like a user-based, identity-based security model, which is applicable today, versus like a hardened perimeter with a crunchy, you know, crunchy perimeter with a soft, gooey middle, which is what a lot of these guys have.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we can get it done in 30 days.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no upfront fee.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we try to do is we we said we can't just focus on the tech.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: The tech has to be good.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: You got to figure out a way to get the messaging really clear.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so, like one thing we tell our salespeople like you're not allowed to use the words ML or AI in your sales process.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're just not allowed to do it, you're not allowed to do it in any outbound.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just it's verboten.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can't do it.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, talk about business outcomes and talk about time frames and talk about simplicity.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's really, I think, the lessons we learned.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: So, one of the things that I've heard before about MFSP, the business, is the cost basis is actually quite high.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: When you try and put together all this really good technology, it comes at a price.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you have to add on some super smart people to have it run for the clients, it becomes expensive very quickly.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is that is that what you've is that what you've been facing as well as you look to build out the model?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we've the one good thing is we've done it a lot, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're I've got 20 plus years, my head of product management's got 15 to 20 years.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're we know that there's some corners that you can run into pretty quickly from a cost standpoint.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we try to be really smart about you know managing that that cost on the backside without sacrificing the the security components.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: So there's some things that you can really do if you've been through the game a few times that allow for some really nice cost savings, um, you know, and and without like going overboard of saying, okay, well, we can't provide amazing security.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a bunch of little things that if you do it well, really add up.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: So great technology.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, one of the things I I tell everybody is the dirty secret in the MSSP space is if you don't have the right tools in the right location in the right part of the enterprise, then the MSSP is blind.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so having the right tools in the right places that generate high fidelity information allows for much more efficient SOC operation.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: As one example of ways to get efficiencies and keep cost under control.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think sorry, one more.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have a spaceship.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: So every SOC before would have, you know, uh multiples, physical semantic.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: We had six, so we don't actually have a physical location for our SOC.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: So we save money by actually having a non-centralized location where everybody has to come into every day in order to have you know to do the work.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they're sitting they're sitting in their home offices with their with their mini spaceship.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly it.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 17:26
  unknown: Yeah.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Looking at looking at bright and green.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And in the mid-market, you got to keep pricing, you know, at something really, really attractive.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: What are you seeing as the drivers in the mid-market for them to actually want to do something?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, another good question.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think two or three years ago, you know, the reason why we didn't start Soul Cyber two or three years ago is I think the mid-market felt very differently about cybersecurity.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I and something's definitely changed, and that's probably a combination of some of the regulatory environment that's come into place.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: So even some mid-market companies are now beholden to a little bit more regulatory burden than they were, you know, three or four years ago.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the bigger impact has been the change in the attack patterns.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it seems like ever since some of the some of the more sophisticated tools have been commoditized, the ability to break into mid-market organizations, um, if you're a bad guy, is higher.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so before, you know, the bad guys would target larger companies because they had quote unquote more assets and they were, it was more interesting to them.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: They just sort of look for somebody that messed up.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: But now you can break into the mid-market and actually make good money if you're you know a nefarious actor.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think that's where the games changed.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the mid-market is much more of a target now than it ever was, you know, two years ago.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you can see that in insurance premiums going up, you can see that in the number of ransomware events happening in the mid-market.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: So just on a lot of levels, you can that that plays out when it comes to the statistics.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: It was the ransomware that's sprung to mind for me is that you know, some of them they're not asking for millions and millions of dollars, right?
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: They're asking for tens of thousands, which a mid-market company might be tempted to pay.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, that's going to drive a lot of attacks at that level for companies.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm going to take you right back though, when you were, you got to see all the experience in this industry, all the thoughts about what was really needed, but you probably still had to do some mid-market customer testing, get the design partners together and figure that out.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: How difficult is it to do that in the mid-market where company by company, it's actually quite different, right?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Vertical markets, everything like that.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Did you have to talk to a lot more people than if you targeted the Fortune 500?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you do.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think I think there's I think two things really matter um in the mid-market.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um is one, and and I don't know if we want to talk about product market fit at some point in time, but this question that comes up a lot on my side, which is how do you find product market fit, especially in the mid-market?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: But when you're going out and talking to the mid-market, your your addressable market actually, ironically, is huge.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so your ICP, right, your ideal customer profile, it's really easy to sort of get distracted by the fact that, you know, if I say to a sales rep in the Southeast, for instance, like you're targeting the Fortune 500 in your territory, there may be 50 companies, right?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they know who those 50 companies are.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: But if you say you're targeting the mid-market, there's thousands.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's very easy to like just sort of you know do a walkabout and then do what I call, which is get you know, happy years.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: So customers like, oh, Scott, mid-market MSSP, that's easy.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love that idea.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's the best idea ever.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that has zero impact on whether or not somebody's going to buy your solution, right?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where I think, especially founders and and people that are in the startup world, is.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned this the hard way by having been in sales, but coming from an engineer.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're an engineer and somebody says, I love what you're doing and your tech's amazing, you're like, oh, they're being honest.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course they're going to buy.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like they just told me that's this little widget I have is super fantastic.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you get into sales and you get the root awakening of a customer's happy to tell you good things, right up to the point where they're not happy to buy your stuff, right?
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that that gulp, uh, that gulf, that gap is massive between I like it, but we're not going to sign.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was a lesson I learned on the sales side.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we're looking at targeting uh mid-market, we went and talked to a lot of people.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the question wasn't like, does this make sense?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, that was sort of in there, but it's like, would this help you have an outcome that matters to you?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: That this is because this is a problem.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is this truly something that you need to solve?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: And we would get a lot of like, oh my God, this is this thing that's like hangs over me.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: I know I need to do it.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: I get distracted every day by a million other things.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: I want to just get this off my plate.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then we'd say, Would you pay for it?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Well, yeah, 100%.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd say, Would your boss approve you paying for it?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're like, Well, yeah, I think so.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, Well, how much is it?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd actually sort of go through this, what I'd call almost like a sales process before we even actually sold them anything.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so with that done, we felt fairly confident that we were going to come out with something that was interesting and unique.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: But to be candid, like when it launches, you're still nervous, right?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're like, okay.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, when you get your first dozen customers, you feel super happy.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're very excited because you know that there's you're onto something and you're solving a problem for people.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's really the probably the main thing we hear.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: As we get customers like, oh my God, this is the most practical, easy to understand presentation.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: It actually solves a problem for us.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not complicated.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to explain to my CFO.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, let's go.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so that I think the feedback was solid, but it seems like it rang true when we got into the sales motions.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: And when you're doing that, it sounds like you're talking with the person of the company who's being the IT manager, right?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: The person who just does computers, right?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Unless they're the CFO or the CEO.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because we talked to more business uh leaders now, but when you're trying to get some feedback, we did talk to some CISOs and CFOs that we knew that were friendlies and that would be very candid about whether or not we were good or not.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um so we did actually talk to some of the C-level people, but we also talked to some obviously operators for sure.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And they were friendlies, right?
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: So it was easy to have those conversations and be very It was, but we actually asked them for some recommendations too of non-friendlies that they're like, oh yeah, this person's really up front, they'll tell you what they that they really think, they're not going to sugarcoat it or tell you something that you don't want to hear.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we were trying to get a broader feedback loop than just what our friendlies would have, for sure.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and how did you know that I mean you use the phrase, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: When did you say, I think we're ready to start scaling that?
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's I think it's two pieces.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's an official definition, right, out of the VC world, uh, which is call it your first, you know, 10 or 12 customers inside of a cohort that is similar, that you that and that looks to be repeatable.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so you say, well, product market fit says I've gone and gotten a certain number of customers.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then you go to say, well, is it a repeatable product market repeatability?
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's saying, well, now that I've got my 10, can I turn that into 50?
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: The the thing for me around product market fit, I think that really matters is there's also a little bit of the art to just pure raw formula.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the art is what is being said during the sales process and what is the complexity, difficulty, or lack thereof in that sales process.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so we got to the raw formula fine.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that was so that was a checkbox, right?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: But then the question is really like, okay, if you have product market fit, how hard or easy is it to get to product market repeatability?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we were just getting fantastic feedback.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: So when you're in a sales call, right, and nobody wants to talk to you a second time, you know that you're gonna have to get more at bats.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's just the fact of life.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in a sales call and almost everybody's willing to have a second conversation, you know that your number of at bats are going to be more impactful.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we were having really high volumes of success in these whenever we were getting conversations.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And during the conversations, we were just getting incredibly positive feedback around this solves a fundamental problem that we have.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're all we we're very happy to move forward.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: So our success rate, our close ratios, and our closed time frames were way faster.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were having deals closed from non-friendlies.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: These are people that found us off our webpage on MSS deals, you know, in four weeks and six weeks, which is unheard of in our space.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you just don't tend to close an MSSP deal, you know, in a month.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: And we actually had deals closing that quickly.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think there's some metrics that are in there around just time to close and how long it takes to work through the sales funnel that you could actually apply to this.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: But there's definitely a little bit of like, okay, we're getting really positive feedback, which gives you more confidence for sure.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: How much of that do you put down to having a really easy business model that you're not asking for someone to sign a contract for five years or something like that, right?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's just easy to get going with you.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And how much of it is they just got the security technology and thought, yeah, this is going to solve our problems.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Andrew, my my head of sales says it's the model.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: He says it all the time.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: He says in sales training and enablement, and he goes, guys, it's the model is the model, it's the model.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think happens is if you're trying to solve this problem, there's 3,500 security vendors in the market.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so the and our customers have some people that are very savvy on security, and we have some people that are like, listen, I'm I'm an IT director and I know I need to do it, and they're very smart people, but they've got a broad view, and security's aid in the aspects, right?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: But regardless, you still got to work your way through these 3,500 vendors.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so what we do is we say we take best debris technology, and it's proven this is Gartner Magic Quadrant.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: Again, Sentinel One is a great example.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so so we sort of take this like um, are you using something weird off the table?
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we just say this is exactly stuff that a big bank would use, and you can see it via Gartner or other places.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: And most of them are these technologies people have heard of.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: So we take that off, and then it goes to the business model.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so to answer your question specifically, it's probably 80% of it to some degree.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a bunch of secret sauce around how we hang it together and how we install it easily, and and we've got intellectual property, but that component um I think is often overlooked in the security space because most of us are purist in a way, right?
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're like, you you can't, you it's easy for people in the security space to sacrifice the good for the perfect.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's just in our nature, right?
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: And business models sort of I think comes second or third or fourth.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, why does that matter so much when you should not be able to be breached and you should be protected?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's very easy in our space to sort of lose that.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I think we focus really hard on trying to make sure we get those two things together.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of tension between great security and a good business model.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we spend a lot of time trying to get that right and make that simple.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: And and to give you an example, um, like on our portal, you can actually see your business plan out there.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_00: So so we try to make sure that it's easy.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, how much did you buy?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: When wouldn't, you know, how much of it stood up?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like these are things that aren't traditionally thought about in our in my view, and and just haven't been in the space, because it's so technically focused.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Here's your incident, here's what's happening in your incident.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that stuff is actually relatively easy to plumb through.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's the business stuff that's actually really hard.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thinking back on my career, there's a lot of decisions being made on technology that's good enough, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't I don't need the 100% perfect lawful doors thing.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this thing over here, half the price is good enough for me, thanks, right?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and understanding that it seems like it it's it's really important to get that perspective about how people think about security.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Because your point, they don't think about it like maybe we do as practitioners, right?
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_01: Or the industry does as practitioners.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's hard, it's hard to translate it.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: How do you translate good enough versus really good enough from a business standpoint?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I I totally get where most people are coming from because they they think that what they have is sufficient and covers their business risk.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so we really try to help drive a different conversation.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh an example is um we're coming out with a a partnership with insurance because cyber insurance is prices have gone up so much.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're using our foundational coverage, you can get up to a 30% discount on your cyber insurance.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: We don't make any money on it, it's nothing we did, but we would spend a lot of time working with some insurance companies to try to get this in place just to solve that problem.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, there's it's good marketing for us.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know, it's not purely altruistic, but it's not a financial thing.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're just trying to help companies solve this business problem, which is a combination of security, finances, and risk.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we're trying to do that as broadly as we can.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: So going back to when you were still in the sales team, then, how did you think about getting the right people and and where you started, right?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Did you get a leader first and then bring in some AEs, or did you start with SDRs and build up from there?
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the biggest challenges in the in the space is there's a set model, and everybody sort of follows the set model.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you have to be very, very clear on what you're trying to do and how, again, to your business model, you marry your tech to your business model.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that also then obviously should impact your sales motion.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: So from our side, we're targeting the mid-market, and we're targeting a conversation that's supposed to just take the concern and the risk off and ease the mind of the people we're talking with, with whom we're talking.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so for us, I'm used to working most of my career with the Fortune 100, Fortune 500 type sales reps, right?
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: These are very sophisticated sales reps, very savvy, used to long sales cycles, uh, traditional sales cycle would be nine months, you know, going up to 14 months.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you're talking through a lot of really deep technical things because you're sort of competing on who's tech, you know, how's my analytics better than somebody else's analytics, right?
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: When it comes to MSSPs.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're not trying to compete on that.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_00: What we're trying to say is, hey, customer, you've got a problem, um, and we want to get you moved and migrated to a security stack that's very user-based, identity-based.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's super easy, right, for you.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we took a long, hard think into it, and we're like, I don't think we need the traditional high-powered MSSP sales rep.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: So we are most of our sales reps are younger folks.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: They understand security, but they're younger, they've got great energy, they don't have to know the tech details.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we've got obviously sales engineers that help with that, but they're really able to have what I would just call more of a generalized business conversation with the customer around saying, we're not trying to talk about machine learning, we're not trying to talk about our AI, we're not trying to like compete on who's does that better.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Our stuff is as good as everybody else's if you want to talk about it, but that's not really what the outcome you're looking for customer.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: What you're looking for is saying, can I take this problem off my plate and feel like I've got a partner who's covering me well?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so we went with a different sales model than probably what we even thought about at the beginning when we were starting, which is definitely sort of, you know, less large Fortune 100 focused, you know, super senior, super experienced, um, and more just you know, people that can go out and put a smile on their face, have a good conversation.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then we can back that up with technical where needed.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: And are they getting fed on inbound or have you SDRs that are are we do both?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: We've got probably about a four to one ratio of outbound to SD uh to SDR.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then how fast have you been growing the sales team?
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: And pretty quickly.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right now we're in the it doesn't stop phase.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: So if we if we see good people, we hire them.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, we're in a continual cycle of hiring folks right now.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so we'll we'll hire people, we'll get them on board, we'll go through our onboarding process on our training, our enablement, and then if we get another, if we find two or three more good people, we'll bring them on.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, the business is we're getting a really good response in the market.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you obviously want to take advantage of that.
• 33:18
  unknown: Yeah.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: So hiring great talent right now in cybersecurity sales is probably one of the, if not the biggest, challenge for sales leaders at the moment.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: Do you have a tip for other sales leaders, um, CEOs that are looking at build out a team that you can pass on?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I do because I think part of it is being super clear on like who your ICP is and what capabilities your salesperson needs.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, so many of these, so many of the security companies are like, I need a high-powered, tenured, you know, security expert, right, to go have this conversation in order to break into Bank of America, right?
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or something.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you need that, fine, go get it.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the first thing is be really honest about what you can do as a founder or your top-level executives to give that more sophisticated, you know, historical conversation.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'll I'll get on any sales call at any point in time with customers from the sales team.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that broadens it.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if you if you look at that and you say, I don't necessarily have to have that, I think it broadens the aperture.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is to me, anyways, don't be afraid of enablement or training.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: It takes the time, and obviously there's complications with that.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: But if you can, if you feel that you can cover their gaps by having some of your more senior people get on calls, and if you can do some really solid enablement, again, it opens the aperture.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, maybe you don't have to find a security person, you can just find a great salesperson who's young and hungry, and you can get them up to speed on security.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the tip I would say is one, make sure you're really honest about whether or not you need that really sophisticated security specialist salesperson.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then two, if you can spend the time on enablement and have your more senior folks, whether or not it's your product marketing team, your founder, or you know, maybe your CTO, help buffer some of that technical gap at the beginning, then I think you have a much broader capability to go hunt for sales reps outside of the security space.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, much we get cool at that point, right?
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 100%.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Changing gears a little bit.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: So looking in from the outside into the MSSP space, it seems to me that there's a whole bunch of people who are claiming to be MSSPs or some variations on that.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: How do you handle that differentiation conversation?
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is, Andrew, I'm really glad you asked this because it it's one of my probably biggest frustrations, and it's something we talk about incessantly, which is if everybody can call themselves an MSSP, which it feels like everybody does call themselves an MSSP, how do you get cut through in such a noisy, crazy, noisy space?
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what we're thinking, and you can tell us if we're being silly or would love your feedback.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: But we try to focus really hard on the outcome of the customer and in theory pulling through our brand and the MSSP moniker, if you will.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so to give you an example, an outcome that a customer has to have is signing their cyber insurance, right?
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got two options.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: We could either allow customers to go try to solve that problem themselves, we can try to help them solve it, or we can guess three options, or we can just continue to push this, you know, our brand around being a modern MSSP.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, modern MSSP, you know, the whole game about SEO and pay-per-click, and I mean it's just that's that's a crazy area in the world right now.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so you say, well, how about if we look at an outcome that a customer has, which is I would really like to get insurance at a competitive, reasonable price.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: So we spend more time than I think most companies on what we call outcome-based marketing or outcome-based outbound, which would be something along the lines of, hey, would you like to save up to 30% on your cyber insurance?
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to us, we're happy to help.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or it could be something along the lines of there could be a compliance need that's needed.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: There could be something around SEC or FINRA um regulations that are sort of changing right now.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: There could be something around, like we do a lot of work in Silicon Valley.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: So series B, series C companies that that seem to be very interested.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_00: So what we do is we spend a lot less time on focusing on us and try to spend a lot more time focusing on what could be very, what we hope is something that's top of mind for them.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then if they're interested, we'll talk about being a modern MSSP.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think in our particular space, it's just crazy noisy.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy noisy, it's very confusing.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so we try to sort of get around that by getting ahead of what the outcomes are and then figure out can we impact those for them?
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I use I I know I've talked about insurance a couple of times, but just it's this thing that's top of mind, which is we started this six months ago because I was like, man, if I were if I were a mid-market customer, the thing that I'd really care about right now is getting my cyber insurance at a decent price.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, how do we help them solve that problem?
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we went off and spent a ton of time trying to solve that problem on just trying to get somebody to say, if they're using our stuff, will you give them a discount?
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And finally we found a TRA broker or TRA um underwriter who's like, absolutely, 100%.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_00: So now we just go to our customers and say, hey, by the way, if you have an insurance renewal coming up, because you're using our stuff, we we can get you a 30% discount.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, that's unbelievable.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's stuff like that where we're trying to really be in their head about what they care about, and unless about does anybody care what a modern MSSP is?
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can I can tell you in six months if it works or not.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: No, I like that.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think I think the other side of it is that when it is so noisy and there are lots of people playing at it, that you know, the satisfaction kind of goes hand in hand with that.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: And if you are the company that rises above it and delivers more than you say you will and and you know gets that reputation, then over time, it's not the quick fix, right?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: But over time you're gonna be the one that's uh above the rest when people are looking around for the right players to partner with.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: To your point, I mean, there's there's at least 3,500 vendors in cybersecurity right now.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's using the same buzzwords in a slightly different order, then starting their trademark phrase that they're calling something else.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the industry is trying out for people like like Soul Cyber to make sense of all this for people.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: It needs that layer of rational thinking about how should someone approach this.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go back to bare bones and say, look, you don't need to care so much about this stuff, you need to care that you get your cyber insurance through a premium you can afford, and by the way, that they even accept you, then you know getting the outcomes that you actually want, not whether you've got the right endpoint protection product or not.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: Andrew, that is that is, I mean, you you hit it perfectly on the head.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna say I steal this term from a CISO friend of mine, which he goes, security that matters.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: He he that's his term.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_00: Is he goes, there's so much security out there that's needed if you're in certain types of niche or you're super big and you've got the and you've got the time, the resources, and you got these unique little problems.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, but for most people, they just need security that matters, right?
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: That just like actually looks at the kill chain and says, This is how the bad guys get in.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make sure we cover all those things.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you're in a really good spot.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then how do we how do we take that and make it a much more approachable conversation?
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, as I said before, an approachable business model.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'll wrap up the quick story.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: I remember I was at MacAcfe, so well, you were at Semantic, I was at MacAPe, and I I remember uh we used to hear about Riptek and their you know semantics MSSP product and how as much we didn't have anything, right?
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it was it was something that was held against us.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that was our experience of it.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: So we were always kind of longing for how we don't have a service like that.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember that the second slide in our company, our our first meeting deck that we used was a series of logos, and the kind of main point was even this was 2009, let's say 10, maybe, you know, even then, it's not whether you can get the right tool to protect you somehow.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's is can you even have the resources and the capability to understand which one to buy and then be able to actually use it effectively, right?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that was 14 years ago.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: So these days, you know, the logos is expanded exponentially, and trying to make sense of all is so tough.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you know you're in the right spot trying to make sense of it for these.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: And that's that's it.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because even if you get all this stuff, if you go out and buy it, we tell everybody like we'll tell you exactly what we do, you can go do it yourself.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: We think we're about 30 to 40 percent cheaper, but then you gotta get it deployed, make sure it's deployed properly.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh there's a story I tell about like phishing.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: Phishing simulation is super common, but if you do it quarterly, you get like a 50 to 60 percent improvement in your overall scores from your employees, than if you do it once a year.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: Most companies do it once a year because they they have a person they have to do it.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's these little things that you just try to do that make their lives easier and actually increase their security, overall security effectiveness.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is Scott, I really enjoyed this conversation.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: If someone wants to reach out to you and talk more or even talk about employment, I'm sure you're hiring when you said already said you're hiring.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: How would they go about getting in touch?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: Super easy.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, SoulCyber.com, S-O-L-C-Y-B-E-R.com, Scott at SoulCyber.com, anybody can uh email me.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: And we're hiring, we work out at university, so if you have a university crowd, we hire for SOC employees, analysts, developers, marketing, and of course, sales, which is your primary goal.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we're in the market and happy to talk with anyone.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: And final question for you is there a sales saying question phrase that you just can't stand and wish was dispatched into the far reaches of the universe, never to be heard again?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is it is something along this line, but insert your tech.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let me tell you how amazing our machine learning in AI is and how that's gonna make your life better.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like nobody knows what that means.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no value like in in that resonates in somebody's head when you hear it.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: So um, I would say putting in that tech acronym, like if you can just if you can limit that, you're gonna be in a better spot as a salesperson.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, I love that.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's so true.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's say I really enjoyed the conversation.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: Andrew, appreciate it.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: Look forward to doing it again.