Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 186: From awful to awesome: a cybersecurity company’s transformation of their first meeting deck

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186: From awful to awesome: a cybersecurity company’s transformation of their first meeting deck · 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 companies grow sales faster.
• 0:48
  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 10 by building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we're talking about, again, that sales deck we use in first meetings.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm honestly a little bit too excited about this episode.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it's been a little bit in the making and coming together.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: And took me a bit of hunting around the internet to find a couple of things and then to go through about go through the process of building this content.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of interested to get your feedback about how useful this is.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: One that I used to work at and used in my own selling activities quite a few years ago, frankly.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: One deck was from, I think, around about 2009, 2010, and the other one was probably in the 11, 2011-2012 uh area.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Same company but different decks.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to compare the two decks and break down uh what they're all about and why they worked or didn't work importantly for each of them.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: One of them, I'll tell you, is is frankly pretty poor.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first one I'll go through.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the other one is really strong and drove a lot of revenue for McAfee back in the day.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: I remember talking to one of my friends two, three years ago, and his words were, yeah, I remember that deck.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: It made me a lot of money.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that was true for quite a few of us back then, some of the messages that were in the deck.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: I actually remember we had uh one of our strongest, if not strongest, enterprise salesperson.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: He was on the East Coast of the US.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think I don't think Tom really ever did deals less than two or three million dollars, right?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: He worked with a small number of big companies and he got promoted, which was good, but he got promoted to run a team of mid-market sellers.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: These were companies that uh were less than 5,000 employees, I think, at the time.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: And he inherited a team that were, you know, a little bit junior.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: They hadn't been trained all that well.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them actually came from the channel sales site and they were trying to sell direct.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: So he got put in a tough situation.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember at the start of the year, he said, you know, I did my first forecast call with my team, and I think my biggest deal was$80,000.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, by the end of that year, using this deck and with a little bit of training that we did for the team to get them more comfortable working with senior people, I think everyone in that team made club uh under Tom, and I'm pretty sure they'd had three or four plus million dollar deals.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that was driven by really strong leadership from him, strong salespeople who were trained properly, but also using this second deck, which I'm gonna take you through.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it worked really well.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: But um, first of all, what I'm gonna do is contrast it to the the deck we had beforehand.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm gonna do actually is share my screen here.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: So for those of you who are on audio only, I'll try and explain what I'm looking at so that you can get it.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um if you want to, you can dip over to the Sales Bluebird YouTube channel and you'll see you know the slides and everything that I'm showing actually on that screen.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: What I would say at this point, though, just to be clear, is uh I found both these techs after a lot of hunting around in the internet.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're both publicly available.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not not getting them from any secret source, and they're they're a long way out of date, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh McAfee as it was then simply does not exist anymore.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the products mentioned and the things that we did and all the rest of it, I don't think exist anymore.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think the there's McAfee's been sold and resold and bought and carved up and changed so much over the last 10 years.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's absolutely nothing that you would deem proprietary in any of these decks.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think at the time we didn't ask for an NDA to deliver them either.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: So for all intents and purposes, these are publicly available, talking about things which are in no way confidential or um should be perceived to be proprietary.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: So let me share my screen.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So this is uh this is deck number one.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's go back in time.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: 2009, I think.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: 2009, maybe 10, maybe eight, in that area anyway.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh McAfee had made a lot of acquisitions in the previous few years.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and if you've been in that environment, really what happens is you wake up one morning and there's an announcement saying we bought another company, and then you usually get told how it's going to be sold in the short term, then how it's going to be integrated into the suites and whatever else you're selling.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so you get an understanding of what it means for you.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: The good thing is you got another product to sell in some form.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the bad thing is, of course, is you get product you get quota increase or some sort of thing about quota comes with it.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: You can't just get uh all that uh new product to sell and not get uh expectations to go with it.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um but what it meant for us at the time is we ended up being a very product heavy company.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how you measure you know product by product, but you know, if you look at even like mid-level categories, we had something like, I don't know, 30 to 40 different products that we were selling at the time.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot there, all in cybersecurity, but it was um it was all over the place in terms of what we had.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And just a couple of years before this, new leadership had come in.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so they would be in place for a couple of years.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Dave DeWalt was the CEO.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Dave went on to be the CEO at FireEye, and I believe now he's he's basically an investor.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: He's got his own fund called Night Dragon, and I think he heads up a uh a cybersecurity investment uh bank called Momentum as well.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Mike De Caesar uh had joined.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: He was the head of sales for I think a while, and then he got moved up to be the president or the CEO of the company.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Mike right now is the CEO at Exabeam.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Joe Suxton was our sales leader, uh, the legendary one and only Joe Suxton.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: He went on to lead sales at Dynamics and helped take them public, and then has been on various boards and semi-retired for a while.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then also a key player at that time was Mike Faye.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Mike might had a bunch of roles at the company.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: He seemed to get promoted every six weeks at one point.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but uh right now Mike is the CEO at Island, which is probably one of the hottest, if not the hottest, uh cybersecurity company at the moment.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so these we had really strong leadership, right?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it did feel like further down that some parts of the company were moving faster than others.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously in sales, there was probably over a thousand salespeople at the time.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: We were all trying to make pretty aggressive numbers and make some money for ourselves.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_00: So the the new debt comes out, right?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and anyone who's been in a situation like that, it always happens with a bit of trepidation out there in the field.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, which person with SVP or a C in their title dreamt this up from their ivory tower with very little attachment to the reality of what the sales team is facing out there in the field.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the nature of it, right?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're kind of sitting there and go, here we go.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what's going to come at us now?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And usually what happens is that you know the deck comes out, first thing the sales team is looks at it and starts tearing it apart and wondering what the heck does that mean?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And where's this slide that I really liked last time?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, things like that.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And uh commonly what happens is it gets uh split up and sellers actually either use their own slides or they um uh kind of bastardize what they've been given and change it to more their way, right?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which is good because it makes them comfortable, but bad because you dilute the message of the company and everyone starts saying different things, things like that.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but in this situation, there was actually higher stakes.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, one was because we'd had all these companies uh be acquired, it was actually quite important.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: We felt like as a sales team, you know, we kind of need a stronger mass.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: We need a way to bring all this together under something that we can take to our prospects and our customers that makes sense.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that was one.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing, though, and the stakes were high, was that Joe Sexton, the sales leader, wanted everyone in sales, no matter what your role was, to be certified on delivering this deck.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you had to learn it and you had to deliver it live to someone who scored you on a bunch of different scales about how well you delivered it.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you failed it, you had to do it again and again until you passed it.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there was very, very, very little of the idea, oh, don't worry, you know, John's been here six years, he knows all this stuff, just give him a pass, right?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: I heard about that a couple of times, but that was absolutely no way the norm.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Joe was 100% behind this, and his leadership team was as well.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: And there was very, very little room for excuses about why you were not going to do it.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there was an expectation that came from this.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, what Joe did is he withheld some of your base pay every quarter, uh, and what he called the training bonus.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you had to pass a certification every quarter to get your training bonus, um, which was it wasn't a whole ton of the base, but it was enough that you're like, okay, I kind of want that money.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the other thing he said was, you know, at the end of the day, we are measured on our results in terms of bookings.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's what you're gonna be measured on.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want to move up in this company and take on bigger roles and leadership, things like that, you better take this seriously.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it was it was important to him that this was done properly.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it was taken seriously by the team.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we had this deck, whatever it came out, we had to go through the certification process with it.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and this was the first deck that I remembered having to go through.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's some takeaways looking at this?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, first of all, I'm gonna scroll down the left-hand side here.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna see that this is a long deck.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: You can see in the slide sort of left-hand side, I'm down to slide number, it's slide number 550.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: 50 slides.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's the end slide and there's a header slide, so really it's 48 real fucking slides.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: 48 slides.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I don't care what sort of deck it is, but 48 slides immediately is a huge red flag.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: That this something wrong here, right?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you need 48 slides to explain something, you know, like a sales deck or explain why someone should buy or whatever it is you're using it for, uh, you've missed the mark already.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's just nuts, right?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, you know, frankly, people who put together 48 slide decks to give to sales teams don't understand sales, in my opinion.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: But then uh that that's one thing.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is, and this is gonna be hard to believe in this day and age, but it's true.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The first real slide actually has a picture of our headquarters building on it.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: So for many years, McAfee was headquartered on Freedom Circle in Santa Clara in California in Silicon Valley.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And there, right there, is our headquarters building.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Unbelievable.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this slide is all about us.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, here we're awesome.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: We got 80% of this, and we got 125 million of that, and we got all these employees, and we win awards, and we're just freaking awesome, right?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this totally sets off any uh sales deck off on the wrong foot.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, look at us, we're great, right?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And and not only that, but it just continues from there, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: The next slide is uh here's some of the logos of our customers, right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes on and on.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, it sets the tone for me for the whole deck.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the whole deck is really just all about us.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what we have, here's how great it is, here are how awesome we are, here's all the amazing things that we've got.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is the tone throughout this whole slide.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, as you as we scroll down the left-hand side, I won't make you go through every last one of these 48 slides, but uh, as you get down to slide number 12, this kicks off a series of slides which goes on for I think nine slides, which has got magic quadrants in it, and then a further 12 slides down here, which is all about products, right?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: You just dip in, and here's one about the endpoint.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: We got something called Virus Scan Enterprise, and it's also got something called anti-spyware enterprise, and here's what they do.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And now we got something called network access control, and now we got something called endpoint encryption, and slide by slide by slide, it just goes down.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then it moves on to the network side.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, by the way, we also have network products, and this one's called network intrusion protection, and and this one's called access control, and this one's called network IPS and network uh DLP and on and on and on.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: So, on in this slide of in this deck of 48 slides, I think 28 of them are just talking about real products with names, with images, with features, all built out one by one.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, um, even if you look at this slide, it's even got pictures of the products, believe it or not.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not only do we say we got something called uh, you know, web and email gateway, we're gonna show you pictures of the appliances because that's so important to show you.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know why.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you don't believe that we have appliances or what, but we're gonna show you pictures of them just to make sure you believe that we have some appliances.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, you know, so many slides all focused on the product.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes on and on.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'd hate to just keep clicking to show you these things.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: As you get towards the end, uh down here.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm on slide number 45.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is the first time it even talks about return on investment or ROI or value or anything like that.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite a technical ROI.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's based on you know FTEs to run McAfee versus run others, but at least it's a return on investment slide in there.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the next slide talks about an example of a customer and how they save money.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Slide 47 is you know the value of optimization.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, right at the end of this, all these slides, we're starting to get to things that actually might a prospect might care about, right?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: What's the value I get?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: How are you gonna optimize me?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that, right?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right at the end to get to that.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, the last slide of the whole deck is one that's titled, Why McAfee?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when you think about it, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: You got a prospect and they they show up to your sales call.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: They've got some questions in their mind, right?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, is this a problem that I want to solve?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is one, right?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have this problem and do I want to solve it?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is do I want to solve it now?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: And the third question they're often asking is, what do these guys do different to everyone else?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why should I choose these guys to solve this problem versus all the other companies that are in the industry, right?
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: One of the absolute key questions.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: How are you different?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is left slide number 48 on the slide deck.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Literally the last, the second last main slide, Hawaii McAfee.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's no real detail to it, it just says higher protection, greater compliance, lower cost.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's a bit more slogan than anything else.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: But at least it's the Hawaii McAfee slide.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it's right at the end.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you've heard me talk before about this, you know, give them dessert first.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Give them the things that matter most at the start and then explain how you do it.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do it the other way around.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: If, God forbid, someone actually delivered this slide, this deck of 48 to 50 slides, I guarantee you that uh the people that you're presenting to at this point are bored, asleep, checking their email, whatever it might be, maybe even just hung up and just dropped off, right?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: No one's gonna pay attention.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can't afford for things like this, the value and the why you're different, things like that, to be so far down the deck.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another thing that kind of completely misses on.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: If I scroll right back up, though, uh, on the left-hand side here, I'm gonna show you slide number four, five, and six.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the cardinal sin of selling cybersecurity companies where you try and sell on fear, right?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Slide number four is cybercrime is altering the threat landscape.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the growth in Trojans right here, right?
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Next one is again, cybercrime altering the threat landscape.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Look at this.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: Mail traffic, 80% is spam, malware is up here, phishing's up there, data loss is one trillion dollars.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you're trying to scare someone and say, oh my God, I've got to do something, right?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh slide number six is oh, actually, that's more about us.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: We moved from scaring them to saying, look how awesome we are.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: We delivered all this uh all this EPS growth, like our revenue growth, like somehow a prospect would care about that.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we got some logos.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: But we've got two slides in here which sell on fear.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, these days I don't see it too much.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: And even frankly, then that this is a bad move.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that uh the McAfee sales team that I was part of, we didn't go out and just start telling people, did you know that uh threats are rising?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like somehow, one it's news.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly, that somehow scaring them like that is going to make them want to take action.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that's another thing it missed on.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, there are a couple of things that I think they started to do quite well, though.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: One was that uh it starts introducing the idea of a maturity model, right?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: When I scroll down to slide seven, it starts talking about maturity that covers it in like, I don't know, four or five slides though, but it starts giving the idea of um organizational and IT security, uh, maturity that you know when you're thinking about how you deliver a program, there's some phases that you go through, things like that.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it starts talking about optimized or optimization of security.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a couple of themes in there I'm gonna come back to in a minute, um, but it starts talking more about things that are different and that might have more of an impact on our prospects.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that old deck, right?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I want to leave that there.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh uh, as you might have guessed, I'm not a fan.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it doesn't hold up to much scrutiny at all as a good deck to use.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I mean, the one thing I would say is that I I don't actually remember ever delivering this deck to anyone.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm pretty sure I got certified on it, but uh, I'm almost certain I never actually used it, which probably says maybe the rest of the sales team uh were in the same boat or didn't use it very much.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let's hit the fast forward button.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a couple of years, I think just two years fast forward, and another deck comes at.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, same trepidation, right?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Who made this deck?
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: What do they really know about what we're facing out there in the field?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, what's in here, all the rest of it, right?
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: And you're starting to worry about, well, what's gonna be different, better?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, is it real, is it not?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the general feeling of, you know, here we go again, another deck I'm gonna have to learn and be certified on and might never use again, right?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: So let me bring this up.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, first thing to notice about this deck is that real slides, take out the title slide in the last slide, it's 16 slides long, right?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: 16 slides.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, point to note here this is pretty much exactly the same company that two years ago delivered the other deck, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't sell off a bunch of products, we didn't buy a bunch of products, the leadership was all there, same leadership, things like that.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: But it's got a completely different way of doing this.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: If we go from 48 slides down to 16 slides to try and get the message across, right?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, same situation, just whole different way of dealing with how are we going to engage with people and talk to them so that they might actually want to work with us rather than you know, stick needles in their eyes because we take them through such a bad deck.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: So 16 slides to start off with.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, the first four real slides um are addressing uh the concept of there's been a big or there's an external change happening in the market.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's a big shift going on out there.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we want to talk about what that is.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, slide number two, we actually use to drive a conversation with people.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's external forces happening, there's things going on.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if you're facing any of these things.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And at the time they were things like data center transformation, new regulations coming in, the changing endpoint, BYOD was happening.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: This was a way to get a conversation going with someone, right?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we're talking about these external things happening.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which of these is happening to you?
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more about that.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me more.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then slide three and four was this idea that there's actually more to it than we think.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and let me kind of remind you all.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I had Andy Raskin on the podcast uh a few months back.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Andy, he is the guru of uh strategic narrative and using narrative as a way to tell your company's story.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the ways that Andy first made his mark was in 2016, he wrote a post on Medium, uh, I think it was called The Greatest Sales Deck I've Ever Seen or something like that.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it was about the Zuara um deck at the time.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: And in there, he actually writes, and I'll I'll just read out his words word for word, don't kick off a sales presentation by talking about your product, your headquarters location, your investors, your clients, or anything about yourself.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, name the undeniable shift in the world that creates both A, big stakes and B, huge urgency for your prospect.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the strategic narrative idea.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And four years before that, McAfee had delivered this deck that did exactly that, right?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: We kicked off with this idea about there's a new normal, is the words we're using, right?
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: Uh external forces, internal forces, there's a shift going on that's happening.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And let me explain what it is just So you know.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: So before this, you know, in the early 2000s, there weren't that many cybersecurity companies.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the number was, but maybe even less than 100, right?
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had a problem, you had to figure out, well, who can deliver this?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you go hunting around trying to figure out, and then you go, ah, I found someone or I didn't find someone to solve this problem.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it was a challenge, right?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is there something out there that could solve this problem?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, fast forward 10 years, right, to 2012, there's a lot more companies, still a lot less than today, but there's a lot more companies.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And what it meant was that for whatever problem you had, you could go out there and find a solution.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: There was someone somewhere doing something that would solve that for you.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you're a seller at McAfee, that's not a good thing, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because you know, you can't afford to bake off and do POCs against every Tom Dick and Harry competitor out there.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some company in, I don't know, Naples, Florida, just started doing an email gateway, and now you've got to do a bake-off against those guys.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it would just kill you trying to do all these individual bake-offs.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: We wanted to change the whole narrative and say it's not about uh trying to do you know, competing against point products.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's a whole other way to think about it.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that we did that was by saying, um, you know, if whatever problem you might have, it's not about can you find a solution?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are solutions out there all day long.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: You'll find them.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: The real question is, well, how on earth do you do that, given that you've got scarce resources, given that you don't have all the budget in the world to buy all these products, and given that you don't have all the budget in the world to help have all the people you'll need to run them.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: So the conversation has moved from can I do something to how do I do something?
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the big shift that we were talking about.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and again, we're not we weren't really talking about MacAP at this point.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're just talking about their capabilities.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: How are you able to do this?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do you think about doing it?
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Things like that, right?
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that was the first four slides.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, it starts off immediately with that, right?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting, actually, in one of the slides in the speaker's notes, it says in bold at the top, I'll read uh note to presenter.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: This is important.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: The prospect expects you to launch into a product pitch, but McAfee has a different message because we see the bigger picture, right?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: So this is by design, we're not gonna get into a product pitch.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna change the game a little bit and have a different conversation because we see something bigger.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: So this was different, right?
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Very different to how people then were commonly pitching products and frankly doing it these days, right?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: Where they go straight into here's what we do, and here's all the features and capabilities that we have.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: After that, uh into slide six and uh there, we got one slide on the maturity model.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: So remember we had the maturity model in the first deck that it was spread out.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we then went into the maturity model because it supported the idea of how.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: How are we going to deliver all this capability, right?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Are you able to do it?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, talking about where you are in maturity made a whole ton of sense.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one thing about this slide, by the way, is that there was no real science behind this.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't commission some company to deliver a study on, you know, all the different ways to optimize security.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: What we basically did was take a common IT uh model on security, just apply it, an IT maturity model and apply it into security, right?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And what it did for a seller at this point, again, is drive a conversation.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because what we would do is we'd say, you know, here's how we kind of view organizations and how that how they mature over time.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering as you look at this, where you think you fit on this model, right?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: We put it onto them to say, well, how about here, right?
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, then your first question is, well, why did you pick there?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're getting more insights into how they're thinking about their program, how they're thinking about optimization, all these things, right?
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Again, different conversation uh than talking about products.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then slide number seven goes into um, well, next two slides actually kind of go into more tactical things.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, I think slide seven or eight is actually the first time, if you're doing this right, that would the first time you even use the word McAfee, right?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it shouldn't even be tarnishing what you talked about before.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: This might be on seven or eight, the first time you even say, well, here's what we do, right?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it talks about the keys to the how, it talks about a bit more what we do.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then it goes into a couple of slides, and we we thought we were very different on, which was what we called at the time global threat intelligence, and then the security innovation alliance, where we're actually knitting together a whole bunch of companies so that again, supporting the idea of optimize.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wouldn't it be good if a whole bunch of companies had their products working with ours, right?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we would do there.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: The next four slides, I'll skip through them very quickly.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: We're all all about vision and value, right?
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: The journey, where we're going, how we see this playing out, you know, where we'd like you to join us, you know, if you see this similarly.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: There's always ways to check in with them and ask them about their vision and the things that they value and things like that, right?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So there's uh three or four slides on that.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Slide 15 was an absolute killer slide, right?
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So you remember in that previous deck, we had, I think it was 28 slides between the magic quadrants and the product slides explaining what we do.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: This is down to one.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll notice if you look at this deck, is this is the only time in the deck that we even show what you might call a product name, right?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: It says on the left-hand side here, network IPS, sim, mobile, email security, you know, all the way down, right?
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the only time that we even mention some of the actual products that we do.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: But this slide was powerful because, you know, anytime that uh someone offers you a suite or a combined offering or things like that, uh, the downside is they might have one or two strong products, but uh, you know, there's a whole bunch of crap in there, right?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: If I if I go in with this one vendor, my concern is that uh I'm gonna have to deal with their crap, uh, even though I might save some money.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a CIO or a CISO, you don't want to have to go back to your team and say, good news, guys, I saved a bunch of money.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Bad news is, yeah, we've got a bunch of crap to use.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sorry, that's just the way it is, right?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: So there's always that concern.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm a point product competitor of McAfee at the time, that's why I'd be saying, right?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're not, they're not fully behind, I don't know, email security.
• 28:58
  unknown: Right?
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're not, they're not fully behind it, right?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: They've got some gaps in their offering.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it's not very powerful.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, don't be distracted by this idea of you know doing a big ELA with McAfee when you're gonna lose that and all this key functionality and stuff on the actual product side, right?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I would be doing if I was them.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And what this slide did is it basically said, you know, like it or not, Gartner is a trusted source industry.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they've put us in the in the uh leader's quadrant, you know I think eight of the ten uh quadrants that we play in.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: And the other two are really new quadrants, so we're not even even uh rated yet in them.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, in interestingly enough, the way that I would spin this at the time was I'd say, you know, even the point product competitors that you expect to be strong are deemed by Gartner to be weaker than us in terms of you know our capabilities and all the rest of it.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: So this was a very strong slide, but it meant that you didn't have products you know sprinkled throughout the whole presentation.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: This was the one area where it even kind of goes into any sort of detail at all, which is not much, about the different product areas that we do.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this one was very powerful.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, slide number 16, the last two slides.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh slide 16 was a way to bring it back together to say, look, we talked about a lot.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm curious though, you know, what are your, as you listen to all this, what's your big challenges, what are you working on?
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is basically the way to ask, you know, where do you want to start with us?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: You've seen all this cool stuff.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we gonna start working together?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the final slide was just looking at some next steps.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that was the slide deck right there.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was short, shorter than the previous one anyway, still probably a little bit long compared to uh what we might expect these days, but it told a very coherent story.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: As I say, you know, when we were going in and working with CISOs and CIOs and talking about the effectiveness of building an effective and optimized program and thinking about how they could do it in a way that was uh deliverable with their budget, this was very powerful.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: And if you remember back actually in 2010 through 12, that was when a recession was happening.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: The lot of organizations were thinking about how do I save money and walking in with a message to say, look, you know, we can do it at ELA where we save you money and not just save you money, optimize your security, you'll be in a better position by saving money and optimizing your security at the same time.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was very powerful.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this deck is not perfect.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: And um, what I'm gonna do actually is in the in the interest of time, in the Sales Bluebird newsletter, I'm gonna uh put out a newsletter in the next couple of weeks that actually details a couple of areas where this one could still be improved.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're interested in knowing what those areas are, I encourage you to go over to salesbluebird.com and um and looking at uh there's a yellow box there where you can actually just put your your personal email in and your name and subscribe to the newsletter.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll put that in there for you.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: So as a summary, you know, there you are.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Two decks, right?
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially the same company, same products.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, from that side, not much had changed, but very different experiences from the prospect side.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: The prospect would get a very different message.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: Their experience of going through it is very different on each of these decks.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_00: One drove very little revenue, and one made lots of salespeople lots of money.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I know which one I would rather try and emulate and copy.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a feeling that your deck needs a makeover, at least someone to check it over and figure out, you know, where are the gaps, um, kind of like between these two, right?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: And you want to move it from missing the mark into something that actually might drive revenue, go over to firstmeetingdeck.com.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you like what you see over there, hit me up and we'll set up a time to chat and see if there's a way that can help you do that.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there you go.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe in the in your favorite podcast player, podcast app, and leave a review at salesbluebird.com slash r.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Just one letter, the letter R, so salesbluebird.com slash r.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, thanks for joining me today, and I'll see you next time on Sales Bluebird.