Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 171: Outbound is Broken

Transcript

171: Outbound is Broken · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird Podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you are a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, we give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and today we're talking about, well, frankly, a bit of a rant about outreach.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of months ago, the CISO at LinkedIn, Jeff Bellknapp, put a post on LinkedIn, funnily enough, and it went something like this.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much noise and so much outreach that sales teams have little hope of getting through to CISOs and other security leaders.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Similarly, security leaders have little hope of hearing about up-and-coming solutions that might be great for what we need.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: The only thing that many of my peers and I agree reliably works to break through the noise is warm referrals andor hearing about something new from a peer.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: So again, that was Jeff Bellnet, the sister at LinkedIn, and I think he went on to kind of cut off his ability to take meetings from vendors where they reached out to him.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he's gone down a different path of setting up half-hour briefings and then posting about them on LinkedIn.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: But it kind of raises the underlying issue here about this problem.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think any of us that have been on either side of this for any length of time can attest that things have not got any better, in fact, much worse in the last few years.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like there's a real clash going on right now.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: So, how has this come around?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, right now, there are legitimately 3,000 vendors in cybersecurity alone.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's vendors, that's not including resellers and consulting companies and bigger integrators and things like that.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is just people that build stuff, build software, and some cases hardware.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's only the people that do that.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: 3,000.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is that it's easier to build products these days than it's ever been before.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know what the number is, but I bet you 20 years ago, you know, may have been a hundred, a couple hundred maybe vendors in cybersecurity.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And uh there's literally a 10x number of that.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: But with this flip, with this uh change, what's happened is a flip in our ability to sell them.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you're one of a hundred vendors 20 years ago, trying to get attention in the marketplace was relatively easy, right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: There wasn't so many people competing with you for attention of prospects.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So nowadays, these days, with that flip, it's much harder to sell them these days.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's harder to get your fair share of attention.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's much harder, no matter what sort of product you have, to stand above the noise.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, our response in the market as go-to-market teams, more often than not, is to do more.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do more calls, make more calls, let's call it many more times many more times in the day.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: Let's try early, let's try late, let's call, call, call, let's send more emails.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: What happens if we send multiple emails over multiple days?
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then we try all sorts of tricks to get these emails read.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do more webinars, more virtual events.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: Let's add more headcount to the team.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's add not just more AEs, but let's do SDRs as well, whose only job it is, is to do more, more calls, more emails, right?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like our response has been, as things have been more difficult, is more, more, more.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: And compounding that, there's tools to help us do more, right?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: The rise of the sales engagement tools, the outreaches and sales loft, and the many, many other tools are in that space now, make it easier for us to send more stuff to people and do it more consistently, right?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's power dialers right now out there, and their job is to make sure we can have more conversations with people, just dial more numbers again and again.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, there's data tools that give us all the data that we need to go find the people we need to call and then call them, email them, tweet them, lengthen, message them, whatever it might be.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: The data tools are there to help us.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it's created this whole world where it's become the default, right?
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Put it on the shoulders of AEs and SDRs to do more of this stuff to get out there.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and and I'm sure there are companies that have are do something a little bit differently, but I think it's hard to argue that by far the predominance in the market is let's go with AEs and SDRs, let's back them up with some marketing, but let's make sure we're we're doing all that we can.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And when things are going well, the answer is, well, let's just do more, right?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do more.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And as the yield of the sales team comes down, still the response from CEOs and from the board is let's add more heads or let's add more things to do more of this stuff.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: We get people to come in, we hire them, we train them on the value prop, we give them a sales and engagement tool, a list to go after, and let them go.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And this is especially true with SDRs, right?
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately for the SDRs, you know, they've got an incredibly tough job.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Usually they're more junior, and there's a mismatch between someone very junior calling on very senior people in a security team.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: I just kind of wonder, you know, how good must our training and hiring of people be so that it's at all realistic and sensible to say someone who's been in the sales world for six months or a year should be calling on someone who's been in the security world for 20 years and somehow have a valuable conversation with them.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think too often and more often than not, that's not a very fair situation to put uh our people into.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what happens when this is going on is there's a lack of discipline or frankly, experiencing experience on messaging.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: Very lame emails go out, right?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's not much thought about it.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Again, in the in the spirit of doing more, the emails become lamer and less thought goes into them because very few of them are being read.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Why craft an email if so few are being read?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why really think through how to handle a co-call if so many so few of your calls are actually going to be answered and you're gonna have a conversation with someone?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this has resulted, frankly, in an uptick in the number of security people who are posting on LinkedIn, right?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: You know, recently I saw one, uh David Sterling, the CISO at Zion's Bank.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: You know, weird situation came around and he he posted it.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: He said, there's actually another David Sterling, who's the founder of a company called Deuterra, an essential oils company, also in Utah.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, this is a fail in two aspects.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: One was on the merge, the data merge, and the second was on the email.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll read out the email.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: David posted this on LinkedIn, and the email that he was sent, and he was the I think EVP and CISO at Zion's Bank, right?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: A decent-sized bank, uh regional bank, right?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hi David, I understand you are executive vice president and chief information security officer at Duterra-essential oils, overseeing security strategy and architecture.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: It would be great to meet and explore how we might partner.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Our team is available in coming weeks and can share times if that might work.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Are you available this week for 20 minutes to sync up regards and then it signed off, right?
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there you've got a situation where in the clamor to do more, we're losing control over what's actually going out the door, right?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: The the merge didn't happen properly, the assumptions that were made weren't weren't that good, the email itself is pretty weak, no reason at all to meet with this person, nothing to intrigue David or anything to say, yeah, I'm interested in that.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: And not surprisingly, it ended up being a fail, but you know, David posted it, not I don't he didn't name the vendor or the person that said it.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: He just said, you know, here's a fail that happened with the mail merch, right?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's an example of what's going on out there.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, as as they struggle more and as these misses happen, the answer, of course, is well, let's do more.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do do more and more of these things.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: Recently, Luke Jackson, the information security team lead at Ellis Dawn, don't know how big that company is, but I think they're in um I think they're in Canada, he wrote on LinkedIn, beyond identity, it looks like an interesting solution, but any chance they ever had of developing a positive relationship with me went out the door thanks to their predatory sales tactics.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: On one day, I received five calls from their sales team in less than an hour while I was in a meeting making a presentation.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Before and since then, I received anywhere from two to six calls a day from Beyond Identity, despite expressing that I was not interested in their product.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: So here's a situation where I don't know Luke Jackson, I'm sure he's a reasonable person, but he got so frustrated he felt like he had to post on LinkedIn and call at this.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in many ways, I don't blame him.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I usually fall on the side of salespeople trying to do their jobs and doing it right, but somehow in the mix at the this company, I don't know whether it was the same person making all these calls or whether multiple people got told on their list to call this one person, but yeah, that's a lot of calls.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's getting bombarded, and that's not a good loot at all.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, with all this going on, what's to do?
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I know I don't have any easy answers, but I don't know if these are great answers either.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: But in many ways, what I've got at the end of this is a bit of a call, call to action for us all.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think if the company strategy right now is, well, how do we sort of do the same sort of thing but different?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I would do is uh go searching for the idea that's out there right now of demand creation.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: There's someone called Chris Walker at Refined Labs, which advocates for this idea, and he's built a very successful marketing agency in just three years working with high-tech companies, SaaS companies on doing demand creation.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the idea that as a company initiative, there's someone who's vocal and prominent out there, commonly the CEO, but maybe it's a CTO, an evangelist, something like that.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's out there in all shapes and forms, whether it's on LinkedIn or speaking at conferences or all the above and more, advocating and evangelizing for the bigger problem that your company is trying to tackle, right?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about going out there and just saying, we're awesome, we're awesome.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's really about going there and advocating for the problem, right?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Talking in depth about the problem, making sure people understand what the real problem is.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think honestly, these days, if you don't have someone doing this at the company, this is a big mess.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not, it's not the easy answer, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is, you know, you don't go and stand on a stage a couple of times and suddenly your team's inundated with inbound, right?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is something that builds up over time.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: When you have someone out there in whatever shape or form they can do, just always talking about the real problem that's out there.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then the unsaid thing is that you guys have the solution to the real problem.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: So that's that's one thing I would definitely do.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think many cybersecurity security companies are really doing this well, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: You need to find that person in the company with a pretty big job title if it's not the CEO, has the ability and the personality and the command of the market and the message to be able to go out there and really be that person and evangelizes.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one thing I would do.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing I would do, and this I think many people might disagree with me on this, is I would just uh severely restrict or stop SDRs doing outbound.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just call outbound.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there are, again, I'm sure there's companies where this works, but everyone that I talk to and really kind of get through to, the results are nowhere near what they were a while back, a few years back, right?
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: So SDRs can do other things though, right?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: They can have them have them supporting other activities, have them supporting inbound, supporting events, campaigns, account-based marketing initiatives, things like that.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: With the AEs, you can have them focused on accounts and making sure they're methodically researching and creating value-based messages and personalized and tailored messages for account by account by account and doing things like that.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, if these things are all working, then you might have a role for SDRs handling inbound.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: But it seems to me that the idea of training uh an SDR for a week or so, give them a list and a few value prop messages and tell them to get the phones doesn't seem to be working very well at all.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what's happening right now is there's a lot of earlier stage companies scratching their head, going, wow, we're burning through our funding right now.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: We hired some SCRs and AEs and it's just not working.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And suddenly what they'll do is say, sales doesn't work, right?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sales has got a problem.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I don't think that's the right conclusion from this at all.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: So that's if we're going to continue doing largely the same sorts of things that we've been doing.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: But I think there has to be something different.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think the industry, I think we all need to think about some very different way of tackling this, some way of changing it up.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, at the end of the day, it's not that these people, it's not the AEs, the SDRs, the sales leaders, the CEOs, and all the tools that I talked about.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that these tools are bad and the jobs that everyone is doing is bad.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that they're not solving the right problem.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think things have shifted.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Right now, security teams largely do want to know what's new and innovative in the marketplace.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: They want to keep tabs on what is going on and where the the new initiatives are and what's um what's going to change their security program that wasn't here five years ago.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: They want to know that, right?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And there are quite a few great products and companies in the mix right now, but they're struggling to get heard, right?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And for the vendor side, we want to have more meaningful conversations, we want to have more qualified conversations.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: It makes no sense to put all this work in with so little results, right?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we're just gonna come to the same conclusion at some point, but that conclusion is there's gotta be a better way.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: We just need to have a better way of connecting these two ideas because both of them are very valid ideas.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, need to have a better way to think around this going forward.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm open to all ideas.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a couple that I'm working on myself just to figure out if they're sensible and viable.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, if you've been thinking about this, you know someone that has, and it is a different way to approach the market, I'd love to connect with you and hear about what your ideas are.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to join me in this idea that it has to be a different way, but let's talk about it, let's work in it, and let's uh figure out what it is, you can hit me up.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Best way to reach me is uh text me on my cell phone 303-956-0024.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: And look at that.