Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 165: One powerful tool to improve how you sell and how you get better

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165: One powerful tool to improve how you sell and how you get better · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Blueword Podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sales BlueWeber gives you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration for people who know a thing or ten about selling and building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we are talking about constraints.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't sound all that interesting, right?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: But uh bear with me on this one.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: So in January the 3rd, or on January the 3rd, 1969, the Beatles got together in a actually a film studio just outside London to record an album.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And for them it was quite significant because they hadn't toured for, I believe, about three or four years, and they'd released two or three albums, but the band was, you know, a little bit shaky, let's say, right?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't as together as it was back in the day.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: There'd been, I don't know if it was jealousies or riffs or what, but you know, the Beatles of early 1969 were not the Beatles of 1966, let's say, right?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And what they did is they went into that studio and there were two constraints that they'd put on themselves.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: One was that in three weeks' time, so right about, I think it was the 20th or 21st of January, they were going to do a live TV performance of their new album.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they wanted to do it live because they'd felt, or at least Paul McCartney maybe felt, and he was driving things, it seems like in those days.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: He felt that they spent a lot of time in the studio in the last album and they created these amazing songs and records, but it was all overdubbed and multiple instruments on multi-tracks and all sorts of things, right?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: So they produced great stuff, but it was very complicated to do it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't like they were, you know, going back to their youth, even though they were not old, going back to their youth when it was four guys on a stage making music, right?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: So they said, okay, we're gonna have this live performance in three weeks' time, and it's got to be played live.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we can't have all these overdubs and different instruments on different tracks and things like that.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: So that was constraints, right?
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: It was gonna be in three weeks' time and it was gonna be live.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it put some pressure on them.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Not only because, and this just still blows my mind, is when they walked into the studio the 3rd of January, they basically had nothing.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, you know, I watched the Get Back documentary.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I highly encourage you if you're at all into any sort of music, especially the Beatles, if you're a real Beatle guy, you probably watched it already, or girl.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But um, it's a documentary, it's nine hours, so you know you have to kind of go with it.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it it details that whole month when they were together doing this, right?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: They start that process.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: I want to say the first episode almost, you hear them talking.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say that Paul McCartney turns around to John Lennon and says, you know, what do you got?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: What songs do you have?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have anything to work on?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he goes, Well, nothing.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And Paul McCartney has pretty much nothing.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And George Harrison and Ringo Starr weren't the prime creative drivers, although George Harrison was coming into his four, it seemed at the time.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they basically walked in on the 3rd of January with almost nothing.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: There was no songs pre-written, there was nothing just to practice.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: They had to create something from pretty much nothing.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And in the next uh three weeks, they wrote and recorded a whole album, and it had such tunes as The Two of Us, Let It Be, Long and Winding Road, Get Back, and you know, obviously a few others.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, what you might look at and look at those songs and hear them and say these are some of the, you know, the best Beatles songs ever were written in that three-week period.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what happened was, it was interesting, was that they actually extended it for one more week.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I think they did a live performance on January the 30th.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: So it was what, 27 days after they walked into that first studio.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: However, halfway through that period, and I didn't know this, George Harrison quit the band.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you watch the footage, he was sitting there, and him and Paul McCartney were kind of bickering and arguing a little bit.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And at the end of the day, you know, they said, okay, five o'clock, we're done.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Okay, guys, see you.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm done.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think they said, Yeah, see you tomorrow.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: He said, No, no, I'm done.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not coming back.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that was him.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So they lost him for like three or four days, and they had to, you know, go meet with him and chat about things.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you didn't see some of the behind-the-scenes stuff on the documentary, but they had those three or four days and they eventually got him back to continue working on the album and get the band back together, as it were, right?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the other thing they did was they co-opted a pianist.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: So um, Billy Preston, I believe he was Ray Charles' pianist, and they met him somewhere on the road somewhere.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And he happened to be in London at the time, and I think George Harrison either bumped into him or whatever, and they said, Hey, come into the studio.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he plays piano or keyboard on some of the tracks.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, it was three and a half weeks.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't work weekends, believe it or not.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you look at the the timetable, they would clock off at five o'clock on a Friday night and not get back together in the studio until nine o'clock on the Monday morning.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and they tended to do nine to fives if you look at it.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So this wasn't them, you know, working all night and all weekends and every day trying to chart on an album.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: They're just sitting there trying to work on this album and they're going through a process, a creative process.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Some of it was mucking around, just saying goofy stuff and all the rest of it.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of it, they produced this amazing bit of work.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the final thing on January 30th was they were on the roof of um the Apple Corp office building on German Street in London, and they played the kind of famous rooftop concert, which ended up being their last ever live performance.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that all happened in three or four weeks, which to me is amazing.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: I encourage you if you're at all into music and I'm not, I am into music.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I can play or sing a note, but I encourage you to watch that documentary.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's mind-blowing, and you hear them just mucking around, and suddenly a little riff comes out, and you go, God, that's the first little bit of get back, right?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then you hear Paul McCartney, you know, two hours later in the documentary putting together the first words of Let It Be, right?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And just bringing these songs together, it's amazing.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, this is for me, as I listened to them, it was amazing.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: This band, those, you know, obviously very few can compare to Lennon McCartney, but they put themselves in a situation where they had to deliver and they did, right?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, it was all is a good example of the power of bringing constraints to a situation.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: They could have sat there for six months, right?
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: They had all the money in the world, all the time in the world.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: They could have got anyone and everyone to help them produce this album, right?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: They could have brought in as many instruments, players, situations, whatever they had.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: They could have figured it out, they could have brought it in and spent a year on it if they wanted to, but they didn't, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: They wanted to get away from that.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like maybe beforehand there was a bit more of that going on.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: So they didn't go through the abundance, they went through the idea of having constraints.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Too often, I think what we do is we think the constraints are bad.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: You know, constraints might be something that hold me back.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when you start a project, often you think about, well, what are my constraints, right?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: What can't I do?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you think about, well, we can't do this and we can't do that and all the rest of it, right?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the conversation kind of stops there rather than thinking, okay, well, what does that mean?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: What can we do going forward?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, you know, the opposite is true.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: When we give ourselves constraints, we unleash creativity, we unleash new ideas, we're forcing ourselves to think about new ways of doing something rather than the old way.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it got me thinking about well, how can we use constraints in selling and how we go about doing our craft of being sales professionals?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, how can we use constraints to help us succeed?
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna just give you uh, it looks like six ideas here, uh, some of which I use already with my clients, and some of which I I'm gonna use in the future as I was thinking about.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is when I use with my clients.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I think uh if we're honest with ourselves, often we put our prospect through a long and rigorous qualification or discovery process, right?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: We get that first meeting booked and we say, okay, it's a 45 meeting.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say I've got some questions, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I want to learn all about them.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, and probably more times than we would admit, that discovery process turns into what I call death by discovery, right?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's this question followed by that question, followed by another question, and another question, this question, and that question.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the poor prospect sitting there kind of ruling, going, I can't believe another salesperson is asking me all these usually pretty rudimentary questions that aren't uh all that thoughtful.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I wish they would just get to the demo, right?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the challenge from a constraint standpoint was or is, I would say to you, is if you feel like you're doing that, what if you could only ask three questions?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: What if in the next discovery meeting you're going to do, you said to yourself, I'm gonna ask three questions and three questions only.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: If I could only ask three questions, what three would I ask?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I would say, based on having done this a few times with teams, what you'll come to realize is that a lot of the fact-finding type questions, like what do you have and how many do you have, and when's the renewal due, or what other tools do you have, and uh who does this, things like that, you kind of realize how not say unimportant, but they're not as significant as we sometimes want them to be.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if you only had three questions to ask, you'll probably get to more impact type questions and try and cut to the chase a lot more than you're doing right now if you feel like your discovery is asking too long.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one example.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Another one is especially in startup worlds, you know, we've got huge territories, right?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: If you're one of five, ten people who are selling at the company, you're not short of opportunity, right?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not you're not like you're down to a handful of companies to go target.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: You've got too many, right?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: You've got 50, 100, 200, whatever it might be, and wherever you are in the world, that are companies that you perhaps go and target.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Here's a question for you.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you could only target five companies this quarter, only five, and do a good job on five, which five companies would you pick and why?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: It gets you focused on well, I can only spend my time on the ones that are absolutely the highest potential value for me.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: And how do I think about figuring out what those are?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you only target five companies this year, what would they be?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Another one would be, and this is a good one for company, especially in the startup world, right?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone's been in startups, and you ask the founders, CEO, product people, whoever it might be, you know, how are we different?
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: What's our differentiator, right?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: They'll give you the long list.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: They'll go, well, this is better and that's faster, and this is more amazing, and this gives more granular data, and this gives better visibility, and this one is blue versus red.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, the way this integrates with this tool is just the best in the market.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Not be short of ways that what you have is so different and so unique, right?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the challenge that we have as salespeople in that environment is, well, you know, how do we translate that into something that a prospect's gonna remember and latch on to?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: We can't just sit there and list off 15 possible things that we think we're a little bit better at.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a good exercise for internally, is to say, if I could only talk about two differentiators, if there's only two things, when someone asks me the question saying how are you different to the 16 other companies in the space, if I can only talk about two things, what would they be?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a great question to pose to product management or your founders, right?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: If we can only talk about two things, let's say we can only talk about two things and we had to do the total of both of them in less than two minutes, what will we say?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that I guarantee you will drive really interesting thoughts and uh introspection at the startup as they think about that.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: It usually gets a really interesting discussion, you realize there's some misunderstandings, maybe a little bit of conflict.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: But as you go through the process of saying we've only got two things, we can't have two plus three or two plus two A, two B, two C, two D, right?
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's only two things.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: What are those two things and how we say it?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Really interesting exercise to go through.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Another one is if you feel like you're, let's say you you book 45-minute discovery meetings, right?
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Which is a good length of time.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say that for whatever, for whatever reason, you can only book 15-minute discovery meetings.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: How would you handle a 15-minute meeting?
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: How can you do it in a manner that you can get what you want and learn a little bit about what's going on, but also give them what they want or what you want them to latch on to so they want to take the second meeting?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes what I hear from people is, well, if I only have 15 minutes, we just do discovery and they'll move the demo or whatever to the second meeting.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: You're assuming, therefore, that that person will somehow want to take the second meeting, right?
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you had a first meeting from someone who doesn't really remember why they took the meeting and therefore isn't naturally motivated to go through your process, what would you do and say and ask and show or whatever in 15 minutes that will give you an idea, this is ideal you want to work on?
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly, it's going to give them a good reason to want to have that second meeting.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, what about that constraint for you?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: The final two I've done uh with teens before, you'll understand why.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is very common, which is yeah, we've got our first meeting deck, we've got our discovery deck, we've got our corporate pitch deck, whatever you want to call it, right?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: We've got some sort of deck that is being created by commonly, I don't know, uh CMO, maybe CRO, CEO, founders, whatever it might be, right?
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, lo and behold, it's uh 25 slides long.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, some of these slides were used to pitch investors to try and get some uh investment, right?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So they're not naturally set up for talking with prospects.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you got this long slide deck, and of course, you know, whoever creates it will tell you how it's all so important and there's all these nuances, and people need to understand, you know, A, B, C, X, Y, Z, 1, 2, 3, because this is all you know amazing, and they would just won't realize how awesome we are unless we go through it all.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I do in the situation like that is I say, okay, that's awesome and all, right?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: But what if you could only use three slides and there's a maximum of 30 words total across those three slides?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: What would the slides be and what would you say?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: A really interesting exercise, uh, guarantee it, right?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: It forces people to think about what's most important.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: It forces them to think about the prospect that you're working with and what they want to get out of it, what's important to them, not what they might find interesting, but you know, we're really trying to figure out how we hit home here.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: We gotta be pretty sure that what's what we talk about and what's there is gonna be maximum value both for them and for us.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So three slides in 30 words, what would that slide deck look like as opposed to what's more common, which is the 20 slides and more like 500 words across those 20 slides, right?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great exercise to go through internally.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, uh, a little bit different.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the things I do with teams, and when we have a good deck to use, is we say, well, okay, let's make sure everyone's up to speed and how to use this deck in their own words and their own style most effectively.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I've all every team I work with is always one or two that are just naturally more wordy people, right?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they might have, let's say, eight to ten slides in the deck.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: They want to talk for like three or four or five minutes per slide, right?
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: And in situations like that, I say to them, okay, so you know, you master the long version, but we don't always have the long version.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Let's keep these eight slides, let's say it was eight slides, but I want to time you out.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: You got one minute per slide maximum.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: On each of these slides, what is the point of the slide that's most important that we need to zero in on and in as few words as possible, high impact way, you know, drive that conversation, make the point we want to make, ask the question we want to ask, whatever it might be, right?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: You got one minute per slide.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's fascinating when you see people trying to respond to that.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Some people just do it really easily, some people are naturally more wordy and more detailed, and it's a challenge for them, frankly.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: I did it with one team recently, and one person just fight out told me it was impossible to do it in just one minute per slide.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really interesting when you kind of you know go through that.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: And as I said to that person, let's just fast forward a little bit.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And let's say you're you've got a CISO meeting, and the person says, Look, I I want to see your deck, but I've only got you know seven minutes to do it.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: Take me through it.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: What are you gonna do?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Just show them the title slide and talk for five minutes.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's just not how it's gonna work out.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to figure out how to do this effectively, right?
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: And really challenge yourself.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: As I say to people, it's not like suddenly these constraints mean that's the way you do it, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's more the exercise that you go through thinking about constraints like that that drives a deeper, better, more imaginative, more flexible way of thinking than if you've got abundance, right?
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got three hours to meet with a prospect, your 25 slide deck is entirely appropriate, but you're gonna bore the crap out of them and lose them and you lose control about what they remember and all sorts of things, right?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: So having these constraints is just so powerful.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, what I would say to you is to think about what are you doing now that might be improved by thinking about how do you constrain this?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is it something you're doing?
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: Is it something the team's doing?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you're the leader, is there exercises you could do at QBRs or kickoffs coming up in early next year?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're all about let's deliver some constraints and see how we get to a better place and some challenging parts of our business.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great way to do problem solving, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: If one of your problems is, I don't know, not enough meetings convert from first to second.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: When you're going through an exercise to figure out, well, what's the root cause and what do we do about it?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Think about how you might bring constraints to the answer to that.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: What's going to drive a different way of thinking like that?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I encourage you to go through these exercises as much as you can.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: I guarantee you'll get to something different and often much better place in terms of what you're trying to do when you apply constraints to what you're doing.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: With that, uh, thanks so much for joining me today.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you like what you hear, please uh subscribe in your favorite uh podcast player and recommend this to a friend, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Send this to a friend or colleague or your boss or your team or whoever it might be and ask them how they think about this and whether this constraint thinking might actually be a good tool to use as you keep going and getting better.