Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 149: A break down of two more companies’ answers to “What We Do” and how they could improve them

Transcript

149: A break down of two more companies’ answers to “What We Do” and how they could improve them · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Two more cybersecurity companies were asked recently to explain what they do in 30 seconds or less.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Find out which companies were in this batch, what they said, and my recommendations for how they could have improved what they said in this episode.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity companies it's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird gives you tips, tricks, experience, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who know a thing or ten about selling and also building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And last week's episode I really enjoyed, which was two companies and breakdown of how they answer the question, what do you do?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I got some nice feedback from people as well.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: So thanks for that.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna do it again.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: We got two more companies to look at this week from the same badge.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So if you enjoy this episode, please don't forget to subscribe in your favorite podcast player.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: But also go on to salesbloobird.com slash reviews and on our wall of love, leave a review, a testimonial, feedback, whatever you want up there.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: It helps grow the podcast, it helps attract great guests when people are saying good things about us.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So please go ahead and do that.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: So as I said, this is the third episode on answering the question, what does your company do?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: The first one was going through a framework so we can capture people's attention, we capture their head, their heart.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: We want to make them lean in and say, tell me more, rather than lean away and walk away.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: The first one episode we did last week was Vitiro and Conveyor.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the third week.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Now, two more companies coming up.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Once again, thank you to David Spark and his SISO series podcast network.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: He gave me permission to use some of the audio from his episodes around Capture the SISO, which was essentially like a shark tank, but it was SISO's listening to the pitches from the vendors.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: David has an awesome series of podcasts and YouTube live streams, things like that, and I highly encourage you to go listen to that and everything that he produces.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: By the way, it's not a coincidence that this series will go out and run up to Black Hat.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: I just love it if companies who go to Black Cat get some more pipeline and more productive conversations with people because they do a better job of answering the most common question they'll get there, which is what does your company do?
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And also if you listen to this episode and think, you know, I'd really love for my team to get better and get some help around this.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Book some time with me at talktoandy.com and we can talk about have an initial chat about what's going on and what you're experiencing.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And if there's anything I can do to help, we'll figure that out as well.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So that's talktoandy.com.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the first company up today is Torque.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's T-O-RQ.com.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let me start there, Audio now.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: When you manage an information security program at an enterprise, it inherently means that you have to deal with a lot of incoming events.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm not only talking about, you know, the traditional world of incident response, reacting to detection system.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'm talking about vulnerability reports, cloud security posture findings, threat intel feeds, many, many more things, each and every one of them requiring follow-up action items from some security practitioner, in many cases, even whole processes that may cross the boundary of our security teams and connect to developers, DevOps, IT people, and more.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: As we become more digital, variety and intensity of these increases.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: What do we do?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: How do we deal with it?
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Trying to apply traditional automation tools, and we all know that such exists, is usually quite costly, requires engineering talent, and it impacts on this having a really slow velocity.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of time and cost, not too many automations.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: At Torque, we try to change that paradigm by offering every security professional visual, no-code automation through which they can express their processes, any process within minutes.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: That was the person from Torque explaining that.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of goodness in what he did there.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, first of all, a lot of the focus was on the problem.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: He was doing the thing which we encourage, which is evangelize the problem, have empathy for the problem, and really show someone you're talking to that you know, you understand their world really, really well.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: He talked about it being costly.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: He talked about it taking engineering talent and there not being, at the end of the day, much automation.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was quite prescriptive of what they do, right?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: So he said we have a visual no-code automation tool to express processes.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I think halfway through that it's for security professionals.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: So some good stuff there, naming the people, talking about the problem and having a very clear description about what Torque actually does.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So how could he improve this?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I would state up front that this is something for security professionals.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, just think about the conversation, right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the question marks in someone's mind is what does this do for me, right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And for me.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: So they're one of the things they try to figure out is what does this company do and is this relevant for me or someone like me, right?
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So if you could say, look, you know, this is for you know anyone in a sock or a head of a sock or instant response or whatever it might be, then you've helped me just narrow it down a little bit.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: You've taken a question mark out my mind right at the start.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And if it is me, if it's someone like me, then I'm I'm more tuned in.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: If it's not me, that might be thinking, okay, I know the team at my company that does that, right?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I would just say up front, something about this is for security professionals.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now I would question whether that can be narrowed down a little bit.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Security professionals is basically everyone.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm wondering if there's a way to get a bit more focus around that.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: One thing I would do is, you know, whilst I love that so much of it was about the problem, it might need a little bit of rebalancing.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: So to give you an idea, he did go a lot longer than the 30 seconds that he was given.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was a minute and seven seconds that he talked for.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And 56 of those were on the problem, right?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a huge, I don't know what the percentages are, but probably around about 90% was just talking about the problem and teeing up the problems like that.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: Can be a little bit too much, right?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think it just needs a bit more balance, maybe.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Although I'd probably rather you erred on the side of more about the problem rather than less.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one thing I think that's true is that what he expressed was very logical expressions of the problem, right?
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was all very factual.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is what happens, and all the rest of it.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the downside is the cost and the time it takes, things like that.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, as we've talked about, and as I think you know we all know, people tend to buy and make decisions either consciously or subconsciously with their emotional side, not just a logical side.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the classic phrase that you'll hear is people buy with emotion and justify with logic.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't think that what was talked about here really tapped into that emotional side all that well.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, if you want to get some ideas from more emotional words to use and what that really means, it might freak you out a little bit that I'm talking about being emotional, but uh, it's actually quite simple.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want to get some ideas, if you go to the website, salesbluebird.com, and then go down to the footer, there's a link there, and I think it's titled Emotional Words for Sales Situations, something like that.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: You'll see that in the footer.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: Click on that, and there's a PDF.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think you have to enter an email or anything.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: You'll just get straight to the page and you can download that and have a look at it.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then the other thing as well at the end was he said what they do, but it was kind of implied that that was a good thing.
• 8:10
  unknown: Right?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: There was no explicit benefits, there was no explicit, and this is what it means for someone like you or the other people we talked about at the end.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna come on to a little structure to use that sometimes is is quite effective to do that.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I would probably improve if I was to put this in my own words, and again, bearing in mind I've listened to what the speaker said, I've looked at the website, I don't really know any more than that.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm guessing a little bit at some of this, but go with the structure and the intent behind it.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Even if you're from Torque, you're going, wow, he doesn't quite understand what we do.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: I get it.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: So this is how I might do something if I was to describe or my version of Torque.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: It might go something like this.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, as any security professional knows, we are inundated with incoming events from all sides.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: Not just incidents, but vulnerabilities, cloud security misconfigurations, threat feeds, all sorts of things these days are coming at us.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we are overloaded, and it just seems to get more demanding of us every year.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in the past, the natural thing was just to automate processes.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the tools that have been around for a while haven't helped that much, frankly.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: You've got to be a skilled programmer to create and manage them, which is expensive and slow.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of time and costs, not much has been actually automated.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: What Tort does is it provides every security professional with visual, no code automation of any existing or future process.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: So whereas before you needed a programmer, now any security professional can create automations.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas before the process was slow, now automations can be created in minutes.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And whereas the reality was lots of time and costs and little automation, we've actually flipped that completely on its head.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Little time and little cost equals lots of automation.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm curious, actually just thinking about yourselves, how are you approaching automation today?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so that was my version of that.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I cut down the focus on the length of time spent on the problem.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I put in more kind of emotional words, so overloaded, more demanding of us, things like that were in there as well.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if I'm in that world and I'm feeling a little bit overloaded, I'm feeling like there's a lot of demands coming at me, that's going to resonate with me.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've used a lot of his words around the problem, right?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, automation today needs a programmer and slow and expensive and all the rest of it.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then I used a little tool at the end there.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: I said, whereas before, and then now.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a good way if you're trying to draw a contrast with something and you're trying to remind someone, this is a really good tool to do.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's whereas before, you know, things were slow and expensive.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're fast and cheap, or whatever the contrast is you want to make, right?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I maybe slightly overdid it, but I wanted to get that third one in because I really liked how he put that.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: So whereas before the reality was lots of time and lots of cost, but at the end of the day, a little automation, right, which is not a good thing.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we've completely flipped that in our head, and now it's actually little time and little cost and lots of automation, right?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know, someone might just remember that little word phrasing that we used right there.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And then I finished up the question, right?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So how are you approaching automation today?
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my version.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I probably you know misstated some of the things that the torque does, but that's how I might rebalance it a little bit.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: All right, so our next one is LightSpin, and we've got Vladi Sandler, the CEO at Lightspin, describing what he does.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the main unique value propositions are click to prioritize, click to remediate.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: LightSpean is a contextual-based cloud security platform that uses graph algorithms to highlight only the your cloud environment's critical pattern issues.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: And LightSpeed, we actually believe in offensive approach, the attacker's perspective approach that helps you to reduce the noise often generated by security platforms to present only the critical risks and also help you to remediate them using our own technology developed for you the infrastructure of the code.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that was Vladdy talking about uh what they did.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it was good.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: It was a good description of what they actually do, right?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: The physics or the not the physics, but you get the idea of the software of what it actually does.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that was to me quite clear.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I actually kind of like what he did.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So he clearly this idea of click to prioritize, click to remediate is something that they're honing in on.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you want to get that out right at the start.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think that might be quite a good way to just catch someone's attention because it's it opens up a loop, right?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Opens up a story loop about whoa, what does that mean?
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of like that.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm still kind of wrestling about my head with it.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Often I feel like that's something you leap towards rather than you throw out front because they can just be thinking about the words a little bit.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I wonder if that works quite well.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they tested it out about when to put that into the talk track.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's what they did well.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's missing some things, frankly.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, the first one is for who?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the person, who's the persona, who's gonna love this, who's gonna want to buy this, who's gonna need this.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think he really covered anything about problems.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe they're implied a little bit in places, but as we said before, you know, and something as important as that, they can't be implied.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: They've got to be explicit.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then I didn't see anything like how we do it differently or anything like that.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there was no real outcomes in there.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there was missing a few key points in there.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if I was to do this, what might this sound like?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I apologize to Vladdy for maybe screwing up some of this in terms of the mechanics, but here's maybe the structure I might use.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I might go with something like this.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So right now it is really hard for cloud security people to respond when they find issue in their cloud environments.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: There are lots of things they could be working on, but they struggle to prioritize them and then actually do the remediation.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It takes time and it takes high caliber, highly qualified people to go and do this.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Light spin takes the viewpoint of the attacker to identify and prioritize your critical paths and the issues that are in your environment.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: We do this using graph algorithms because it needs to be done at speed and scale to respond quickly enough in such a fast moving environment.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Our customers love that they can respond faster and their need for more expensive, highly skilled people is reduced.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: With LightSpin, they can do one-click prioritization and one click remediation.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm curious, what do you think would be the impact on your cloud security program if you were able to make things as straightforward and quick as this?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's my version.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So let me kind of break it apart a little bit, right?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I started at the start with cloud security professionals.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that's a narrow enough group for light spin.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's really hard.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: They struggle.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Are you struggle in there as well somewhere?
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked about the problems.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to just read between the lines a little bit on this.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: So there's lots of things they could prioritize working on, but it's really hard to do that.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: It takes time and it takes you know high caliber expense of people to do it.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think that might be the number the problem.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then I used a lot of his stuff here.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Light spin takes the viewpoint of the attacker to identify critical paths and issues.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: We do this using a graph algorithm because it needs to be done at speed and scale.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if that is the real benefit of that, but I'm assuming it is.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe this is uh this is a differentiation for LightSpin, right?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that they got this graph algorithms that are doing this at such speed and scale.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking that's what it is.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: I could be wrong.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, I was trying to introduce that, not just to say we have this technology, but then to add in maybe a little bit about why it might be a little bit different and the benefit that you get from that.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then I added in, you know, uh with LightSpin, you can do one click prioritization and one click remediation.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: I moved that further down the top track.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then I finished off with a question, right?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we're trying to draw someone in.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, in this question I did, this is about the future.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think, you know, in these situations, there's two types of questions.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: One you ask about, well, how does this compare to what you're doing right now, or what do you have going on right now, or are you experiencing these problems right now?
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the other type of question is ask them to take a step into the future.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if you had this thing that we just talked about, what would it mean for you?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: What would the impact for your team?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: What would be the impact on how you do, in this case, cloud security at all?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you're asking them to take a one step in the future and imagine if you had this, what does it mean, right?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I think these are the two types of good questions to really ask when you're looking for that validation or to continue the conversation.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that was my version.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in both of these, you may well have better versions than me.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm open to how you would have changed mine, for example, if anyone wants to have a go at that.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's lots of things that you could try in these examples and see what flows nicely and see what really hits home.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, but again, I love that these companies put themselves out there and are doing this.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're doing what they can to try and stand out in this hugely crowded cybersecurity marketplace and really make a difference for their customers.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: To me, they're they're already explaining what they do pretty well.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think it just needs a little bit of tweaking, and hopefully, you know, if anyone from these companies listens, they might take them on board.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: But maybe the real thing is, you know, for you, are you doing some of the things that they're doing, and perhaps there's some ways to improve using the suggestions that I talked about.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, if you're intrigued about taking this to your own team or to your company, I want to have an initial conversation about what that might mean.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hit me up, go to talktoandy.com, book some, I think it's just a half-hour intro call, strategy call to figure out what we can do and we can take things from there.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, when you explain what you do clearly in a compelling way, you vastly increase the chances of your prospect understanding it and also remembering it.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.