Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 155: Evangelize the problem, not your product
Transcript
- 0:42SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity companies it is hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
- 0:51SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who know a thing or ten about selling and building great startups.
- 1:01SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
- 1:03SPEAKER_00: And today we're talking about evangelizing the problem, not evangelizing the solution.
- 1:09SPEAKER_00: And this is a concept that I think if you listen to people talk about differentiation and positioning of a company is something they talk about a lot.
- 1:16SPEAKER_00: But the question is, well, how do we do that at the sales team level?
- 1:20SPEAKER_00: How's our narrative that we can use that's going to allow us to think about the problem and not just the solution?
- 1:26SPEAKER_00: Now, too many companies get this wrong, but if you get it right, it can revolutionize your approach to the market.
- 1:33SPEAKER_00: And in this episode, we'll explain why and how to go about doing it.
- 1:36SPEAKER_00: This will change how your company could go to market if done well.
- 1:40SPEAKER_00: How you market, how you sell what you have, and its effects on working with prospects will be important, and you'll see the difference in how they respond when you get this right.
- 1:51SPEAKER_00: Prospects want us to not just be an expert on our product, but also be an expert on the problems in the market, the problems that they're experiencing, what's held holding them back.
- 2:01SPEAKER_00: It's not just about the product expertise that we have to have.
- 2:04SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, when people believe that you completely get the problem and the problems they're experiencing, they're more likely to believe that you have the right solution for them.
- 2:15SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, the vast majority of companies don't do this.
- 2:18SPEAKER_00: They don't get this right.
- 2:19SPEAKER_00: And what they do essentially is evangelize their own product.
- 2:24SPEAKER_00: You just have to look at a whole bunch of websites in our sector and cybersecurity to see that this is true.
- 2:30SPEAKER_00: It's all very me, me, I, I, we, we, we have this and we have that, and what this company does is this and what we do is that, and things like that, right?
- 2:39SPEAKER_00: It's all very centered around the product and what it does.
- 2:43SPEAKER_00: And I think that's indicative of companies that believe if we just tell people about the whiz-bang innovation that we have, that they'll get it and they'll want to buy.
- 2:53SPEAKER_00: But the thing is, the harsh reality is that solutions don't exist in a vacuum, at least not ones that people actually buy.
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: There has to be a problem for a solution, right?
- 3:04SPEAKER_00: And we need to find people that believe that that problem was worth solving to therefore make the solution relevant.
- 3:11SPEAKER_00: And what's tough from our side as salespeople is we're surrounded by everything at the company and what we're told and the orientation of the company is around product.
- 3:21SPEAKER_00: You know, we're we're trained from a product orientation.
- 3:24SPEAKER_00: We've got a new version coming out.
- 3:26SPEAKER_00: Let's train you in the product.
- 3:27SPEAKER_00: There's probably something on training agendas about product training, where someone comes and tells us about how great our new product is.
- 3:34SPEAKER_00: Businesses, the companies themselves are planned around products.
- 3:38SPEAKER_00: Releases are planned around products.
- 3:40SPEAKER_00: You know, the excitement internally happens when new products or new innovations or new features are shipped all around the product.
- 3:48SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's understandable, right?
- 3:50SPEAKER_00: The big innovation for companies is not their go-to-market or anything like that.
- 3:54SPEAKER_00: The big innovation is the product, and therefore it's the temptation to be excited, which is okay, then tell everyone about that excitement.
- 4:01SPEAKER_00: But what often happens is left up to the sales team to translate that, because we can't just go out there and start just blurbing and blabbing about product.
- 4:10SPEAKER_00: We're the ones that have to translate that into a way of working and going to market with people one-to-one that is not all about the product, but about the prospect and the problems they're having and the challenges, things like that.
- 4:22SPEAKER_00: The good news is with just a little bit of brainstorming internally, perhaps a few drinks, an open mind, and some courage to be different, we can change this.
- 4:32SPEAKER_00: You can change this in terms of how you go to market, your team goes to market.
- 4:37SPEAKER_00: So come along on this quick journey with me as I explain what this is all about.
- 4:40SPEAKER_00: So the first thing that we need to do, and it sounds a little bit trite, but we need to agree on the problem.
- 4:45SPEAKER_00: Now, yeah, a lot of customers have a bunch of problems.
- 4:48SPEAKER_00: No doubt we can brainstorm away and come up with all problems that we've heard about that people have, and we could probably, you know, surmise some ourselves, and that's a little bit dangerous where we start guessing at what the problems might be.
- 5:00SPEAKER_00: But the fact is that without having a problem to go after, nothing else matters.
- 5:05SPEAKER_00: So the question is, well, how do you narrow it down, right?
- 5:08SPEAKER_00: You can't talk about solving 15 problems.
- 5:10SPEAKER_00: You have to think about one or two that are the big ones or the higher level problems that we're solving that we're doing a little bit differently.
- 5:16SPEAKER_00: I think the starting point is to actually, you know, it sounds a little bit obvious, but listen to customers, listen to prospects.
- 5:22SPEAKER_00: How do they describe what they're experiencing?
- 5:25SPEAKER_00: What are the words they're using, both maybe at middle management level, but also senior exec level.
- 5:31SPEAKER_00: And when you ask them about their problems that they're experiencing, the challenges, what's holding them back, what needs to be fixed, things like that, in there usually is a rich seam of words, descriptions, sometimes passions about what's so bad that they're experiencing, that we can start thinking about the words they use to describe it, and then thinking about how we uh lift up the problem.
- 5:53SPEAKER_00: So it's not 15 small ones, but it's summarized in one or two big ones.
- 5:57SPEAKER_00: And it's important to do that.
- 5:58SPEAKER_00: It's important to raise the problems to a higher level one, something that people can rally around and really kind of get.
- 6:05SPEAKER_00: If you're tinkering around in terms of features and widgets, and you know, this one area is a little bit slow, then it's not a high enough level problem often to be focused on.
- 6:14SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's indicative of a higher level problem that you want to understand.
- 6:18SPEAKER_00: The other thing you don't want to do is shoehorn in your view of the problem.
- 6:21SPEAKER_00: You don't want to translate their words into our words.
- 6:25SPEAKER_00: You know, we don't want to vendor splain uh what they're trying to tell us.
- 6:29SPEAKER_00: We want to be true to what the feedback is.
- 6:32SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that Andy Raskin, who was on the podcast a few weeks back, talked about was thinking about shifts in the market, right?
- 6:39SPEAKER_00: So sometimes big shifts happen where suddenly, you know, what we thought was true and real and okay, you know, a year or two ago, there's been a shift in the market and suddenly there's a problem that exists or people are not catching up or keeping up with what that shift is.
- 6:53SPEAKER_00: So having clarity around that problem that we're trying to solve is important.
- 6:57SPEAKER_00: Think bigger about it, think higher level, think about the impacts of the problem, use the words from customers and prospects when you're thinking about how to really articulate what that problem is.
- 7:06SPEAKER_00: The second step is then to think about, well, now that we know that, how do we evangelize the problem with the prospects that we're working with at the sales level, right?
- 7:17SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I'm gonna give you a quick little structure here.
- 7:19SPEAKER_00: Now, you might not say this exactly this structure, but knowing what these building blocks are is often gonna give you a lot of foundations for how you talk to people, ask questions of people when you're trying to really understand what's going on.
- 7:33SPEAKER_00: Just a quick list here.
- 7:34SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, when you're evangelizing, you start with a problem.
- 7:38SPEAKER_00: You think about how you can reframe the problem in the prospect's mind so that they're thinking about it the way that we want them to think about it.
- 7:46SPEAKER_00: We want to make them understand or help them understand that perhaps the problem is a bigger one than they thought.
- 7:51SPEAKER_00: We want to talk about why other ways of approaching this are failed or are not working.
- 7:55SPEAKER_00: We then want to be able to talk about the new way, the new approach that's not going to fall into those traps.
- 8:01SPEAKER_00: Think about big value props, you know, big outcomes, not features, and then at the end lead to a naming of the new way of doing it or what we do and how we do it.
- 8:12SPEAKER_00: So, you know, a lot to dig into there.
- 8:14SPEAKER_00: But let me break down a structure here with something that might be more real for you.
- 8:19SPEAKER_00: I cast my mind back about 10 years or so, I think, and thought about the change that happened in the endpoint protection business as the kind of older way of doing endpoint protection was not working and then the rise of the new, what was called the next gen antivirus companies products came out.
- 8:36SPEAKER_00: And you know, I gave this like 15 minutes of thought, jot down some notes about if I was back in that time, how would I use this structure to work with someone to help them understand how we're thinking about the problem and how to solve it?
- 8:49SPEAKER_00: And you know, if you were in the world of endpoint protection, you were in, you know, whoever the players were about those days, Silence, Crystrike, and all the other players, maybe S1 was around as well.
- 8:59SPEAKER_00: You may argue with some of my points, but go more with the structure that I'm trying to convey here and how I go about doing it.
- 9:06SPEAKER_00: And we'll debrief afterwards.
- 9:07SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I'm gonna go through this.
- 9:09SPEAKER_00: It's not perfect, but uh it is decent, let's say.
- 9:12SPEAKER_00: So if I was to try to give my team, the company, a North Star around this, it might go something like this.
- 9:18SPEAKER_00: So detection rates on AV products are just bad.
- 9:22SPEAKER_00: And they have been for many years.
- 9:24SPEAKER_00: Those that are in the know about doing all the testing in the third-party organizations out there will tell you that the efficacy rates of AV tools has been going down and down.
- 9:34SPEAKER_00: It's just a terrible state right now.
- 9:35SPEAKER_00: What this means is that people are frustrated that they just had to accept this for a long time, right?
- 9:40SPEAKER_00: It's been going on for years and years.
- 9:43SPEAKER_00: What it means for organizations is that there's been more outbreaks than there should have been, and security teams have wasted a whole ton of time cleaning up machines and environments as they've had outbreaks that should not have happened in the first place with tools that were supposed to do a good job to catch malware, but have not.
- 10:01SPEAKER_00: And frankly, the response from the vendors so far has been pretty weak.
- 10:05SPEAKER_00: It's been to tweak their way of detecting bad things, tweak their signatures, offer more policies, and even to add in things like heuristics and checks of huge databases in the cloud of known bad things.
- 10:18SPEAKER_00: They've tried all these things to try and do a better job of detection accuracy, and still the efficacy is poor and getting worse.
- 10:27SPEAKER_00: It's put a huge strain on security teams as they try to keep machines up to date, and then the cleanup takes a long time when inevitably there are big outbreaks.
- 10:36SPEAKER_00: And you know what's interesting is the problem is not the current AV tools themselves.
- 10:41SPEAKER_00: It's that they're all built on a model that was designed in the early 90s and just doesn't work today.
- 10:49SPEAKER_00: Back then, the idea was we'd identify known bad things and then stop them from doing anything by writing signatures to detect them.
- 10:58SPEAKER_00: You know, totally cool and made a ton of sense when there was a hundred viruses out there as there was in the early 90s, but just completely out of date and out of touch when there are hundreds of millions of pieces of infected code or malware out there that we need to be aware of.
- 11:13SPEAKER_00: And by the way, it's not getting easier, right?
- 11:16SPEAKER_00: More every day there are thousands of new viruses, new pieces of malware that we need to be thinking about.
- 11:22SPEAKER_00: You know, the system and the way of doing it is broken, and something just needs to change.
- 11:27SPEAKER_00: What's cool though is that modern compute ideas, such as trying to use the cloud, such as ideas like machine learning and AI, gives us the chance to completely change the accepted way to do things.
- 11:42SPEAKER_00: It's possible now to use these more modern technologies to do away with the idea of signatures and scanning for vulnerabilities and viruses, and all the things are ineffective and slow right now.
- 11:54SPEAKER_00: We are now able to make decisions at a speed and a scale with huge advancements in accuracy and with a little load on the endpoints.
- 12:03SPEAKER_00: The result is an order of magnitude better detection accuracy, a similar reduction outbreaks, and far fewer demands of the security team and the operations team to keep it all working and then do cleanups.
- 12:17SPEAKER_00: We call this and the industry calls this next generation antivirus, next gen AV.
- 12:23SPEAKER_00: All right.
- 12:24SPEAKER_00: That was a bit of a mouthful right there.
- 12:26SPEAKER_00: I went through a lot, right?
- 12:27SPEAKER_00: As I said, you know, this doesn't need to be a lecture that uh needs to be delivered as this, but it gives us a North Star when we're thinking about our positioning and and how we want to think about engaging with prospects.
- 12:39SPEAKER_00: So let me break this down a little bit.
- 12:41SPEAKER_00: So we start with the problem, right?
- 12:43SPEAKER_00: Detection rates on AV products are bad and have been for ages.
- 12:46SPEAKER_00: You know, this is one of those areas where you want to be confident enough to be as bold as you can be.
- 12:52SPEAKER_00: You don't want to say detection rates are not great or they're a little bit poor right now, or we're not detecting as many viruses as we should do, right?
- 12:59SPEAKER_00: You want to be bold, right?
- 13:00SPEAKER_00: This thing just sucks and it's terrible.
- 13:04SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, you must be experiencing this and you're probably heartbroken and dejected about how crappy things are, right?
- 13:10SPEAKER_00: That's the sort of way to start it off, right?
- 13:12SPEAKER_00: And I went into a little bit of examples there.
- 13:14SPEAKER_00: I'd use some emotional words to describe it.
- 13:16SPEAKER_00: And now I got to the reframe, right?
- 13:18SPEAKER_00: If you remember what I said was the problem is not the current AV products themselves, right?
- 13:23SPEAKER_00: So the reframe in this one is that it's not that we need to just add more features and tweak the products and make them a little bit better.
- 13:31SPEAKER_00: It's the fact that the whole way they work is just broken and for a bygone era, right?
- 13:36SPEAKER_00: So I said it's not the product products themselves, it's they're built on a model that was designed in the early 90s, which is true.
- 13:42SPEAKER_00: That was the original way of doing antivirus in the 90s, went straight through into the early aughts and beyond.
- 13:48SPEAKER_00: So I said it just doesn't work.
- 13:49SPEAKER_00: It was built for a time where there was a hundred viruses, not the millions that are hundreds of millions that are there right now, right?
- 13:54SPEAKER_00: So that's the reframe, right?
- 13:56SPEAKER_00: And then the bit where I said, let's not forget how it's going to change and get worse going forward, is I said, uh it's not getting easier, right?
- 14:04SPEAKER_00: There's thousands of new viruses every day, the system's broken and something needs to change.
- 14:09SPEAKER_00: And the why do others fail, I mean, I had that up top, right?
- 14:12SPEAKER_00: It's all based on a system that doesn't work, an old way of working, an old model.
- 14:16SPEAKER_00: And then when I changed into the solution, what I didn't do is say, well, what we have is, what my company has is, or our product's called this, and here's what it does.
- 14:25SPEAKER_00: I didn't do that, right?
- 14:27SPEAKER_00: I still kept it up at a philosophical level where I talked about modern compute ideas.
- 14:32SPEAKER_00: Now, one of the things I didn't like about what I did was, you know, I threw in some buzzwords.
- 14:36SPEAKER_00: There's, you know, nowadays for sure, people are fed up with hearing about machine learning and AI.
- 14:40SPEAKER_00: Maybe back then it wasn't quite so tiresome.
- 14:43SPEAKER_00: If I was to redo this, I might think about how do I do that without throwing in buzzwords right there.
- 14:48SPEAKER_00: But I want to give the idea that, you know, there's been a shift in compute.
- 14:52SPEAKER_00: There's been a shift in the viability of technology, which has allowed us to use these new ways of working to completely change the model.
- 15:01SPEAKER_00: That's the bit I wanted to get to, right?
- 15:03SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't talking about us and our product.
- 15:05SPEAKER_00: I was just talking about a shift in new ways of working and new technologies, things like that.
- 15:09SPEAKER_00: I said, you know, it's possible now to use those modern technologies to do away with the old way, right?
- 15:14SPEAKER_00: Do away with the idea of signatures and scanning for viruses and things like that.
- 15:18SPEAKER_00: And I put a benefit in there.
- 15:20SPEAKER_00: We're now able to, you know, at speed and scale with huge advancements in accuracy, things like that, right?
- 15:25SPEAKER_00: And I added more, you know, order of magnitude, better detection accuracy, assimilar deduction and outbreaks, reduction and outbreaks, things like that.
- 15:32SPEAKER_00: And then right at the end, I kind of named it, right?
- 15:35SPEAKER_00: I said, you know, this is called or we call this next gen AV.
- 15:39SPEAKER_00: I'm sure they didn't do that at the time, but um, if we're thinking about categories and naming a new way of working, you do that at the end, not the beginning, I guess was the point, right?
- 15:48SPEAKER_00: So anytime that you've got something that's like uh you're trying to name something or you've got a buzzword, if your technology, you've called it something, don't lead with that because it's just gonna confuse.
- 15:58SPEAKER_00: What you want to do is name it at the end, right?
- 16:01SPEAKER_00: You claim, frame, and name, right?
- 16:03SPEAKER_00: So you're gonna frame the problem, claim the new way of doing it, and then name it at the end, not the other way around.
- 16:09SPEAKER_00: So that's why I might have done 10 years ago, plus in the next gen AV world, is they were trying to position this new way of doing AV that was much more effective than the old way.
- 16:19SPEAKER_00: You know, if you look at the breakdown on this, I think two-thirds of the my talk track was about the problem.
- 16:25SPEAKER_00: I was evangelizing the problem, I was talking about the problem, I was empathizing with my listener about the problems they're experiencing.
- 16:33SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 16:33SPEAKER_00: I talked about people being fed up, I think.
- 16:36SPEAKER_00: I talked about frustrations, things like that, all to do with the problem at the start.
- 16:41SPEAKER_00: And the last third was the new way of working.
- 16:44SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe right in the end, I might have mentioned the company name where the product name is irrelevant, but you know, we at this company, um, we call it this, you know, things like that is what I would do right at the end.
- 16:56SPEAKER_00: But to me, that's the much more effective way to do it.
- 16:58SPEAKER_00: Start with the problem and then you know evangelize the solution at the end.
- 17:02SPEAKER_00: And then finally, you know, then you want to name it with your company name or what you've named the technology or the category that you're trying to create around this.
- 17:09SPEAKER_00: So in a sales world, if you think about, you know, you're in the deck or you're having a philosophical discussion with someone pretty senior about what's going on, you can take elements of this, right, and bring it to the force.
- 17:21SPEAKER_00: A classic example might be, you know, you're doing some discovery with someone and they're talking about the we got all these problems, our efficacy is at 70% detection, we're getting false positives all over the shop, our team is getting stretched trying to deal with all this crap.
- 17:35SPEAKER_00: I just wish that these vendors would get their shit together and you know, raise their detection rates and all the rest of it, right?
- 17:41SPEAKER_00: And that's where you might then go just straight to the reframe and say, you know, I totally agree with you.
- 17:45SPEAKER_00: You know, if there's one constellation across the industry, everyone's experiencing this.
- 17:49SPEAKER_00: But I would pull you up on one thing.
- 17:50SPEAKER_00: You know, the problem is not the current A V tools themselves.
- 17:54SPEAKER_00: The problem is that they're all built on a model that was designed for a different time and space, right?
- 18:00SPEAKER_00: So you could pull out the reframe like that, right?
- 18:03SPEAKER_00: And say, you know, I want you to get away from thinking that I just wish my current vendor would just you know tweak their engine or detection methodology a little bit to say, look, there's no point.
- 18:14SPEAKER_00: They're never going to get much better.
- 18:16SPEAKER_00: So you might use a reframe there, right?
- 18:18SPEAKER_00: You might take the ethos of not going full hog into what we do, but thinking much more higher level to thought, think about, you know, you know, imagine the conversation where they're saying, well, what do you think needs to be done?
- 18:31SPEAKER_00: And you say, they might say, well, you know, in an ideal world, what would happen is these tools would modernize and their engines would go so much faster and things like that.
- 18:39SPEAKER_00: And say, well, you know, I think we're at a unique point in time because finally I believe we're at a point where companies such as ours can use more modern ideas to replace these old ways, right?
- 18:49SPEAKER_00: You know, we believe that the cloud and machine learning and AI is at the point where we can use it to deliver real value to people like yourselves who are frustrated.
- 18:58SPEAKER_00: It really gives us the chance to change the accepted way to do things and uh have a whole new era come in that's much more effective, much more accurate, where things can be done at scale.
- 19:09SPEAKER_00: So if they're, you know, we just pulled out the modern commute idea, right?
- 19:12SPEAKER_00: The new way of working.
- 19:14SPEAKER_00: We didn't need to go through all the stuff beforehand to get there.
- 19:16SPEAKER_00: So just two or three examples there about using this in live conversations, once you've done the work to kind of build this up, build out the thinking about how you're gonna position yourselves.
- 19:26SPEAKER_00: And as I say, you know, frankly, you know, if you're a company right now, there's a fair chance that uh the deck you've been given to use, your website, your materials that you've been given are gonna go very, very quickly into how we're so great, and we got this new product called this, and it changes this and it's awesome, and you know, all the rest of it.
- 19:45SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it is, right?
- 19:46SPEAKER_00: But uh it's not necessarily what people want to hear, right?
- 19:49SPEAKER_00: So your job is gonna be translating that into words in a way of going to market and talking with people that's much more human, much more empathetic of what they're thinking about, but also much more effective as you're trying to position what you do.
- 20:03SPEAKER_00: So take my structure there, tweak the words, design your own, right?
- 20:07SPEAKER_00: Bring your own ways in there.
- 20:09SPEAKER_00: But don't lose sight of the structure, don't lose sight of the why, why we do it in a certain order and the big goal that we're trying to achieve.
- 20:16SPEAKER_00: The most impactful companies will be the ones that evangelize the problem and category before they talk about their solution.
- 20:25SPEAKER_00: So those are the ones that are going to be more effective in the marketplace.
- 20:29SPEAKER_00: So, with that, if you enjoyed this episode in your podcast player, just don't forget to hit subscribe so you get these showing up in your podcast player all the time.
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