Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 81: Differentiate by being human with Mark Small, multiple time VP of Sales

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81: Differentiate by being human with Mark Small, multiple time VP of Sales · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to episode number 81 of the Bite-Size Sales Podcast.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Andrew Monahan, and I'm joined today by one of the OGs of the cybersecurity sales world.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Someone has been in sales leadership positions at cybersecurity companies for over 20 years.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that is Mark Small.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Andrew, and thanks for having me.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to do a full intro for you in a second, but first of all, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our sponsor today.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: And our sponsor is Premonial.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: For those of us that have been in sales leadership roles at startups, we know that much of the sales planning at startups is done on homegrown spreadsheets.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: We kind of build models, we build hiring forecasts and impact of adding in more headcount.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: We look at deal size changes and what that means as we're kind of trying to grow the business and scale the business.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: And we make a whole bunch of assumptions on these things to try and build the model so we can see what it's going to take to try and grow the business as we look for the next round of funding.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: But when we do it ourselves, it's obviously going to be prone to any errors that we have.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: The you know, people like me building spreadsheets, I'm dangerous, but I'm not that dangerous.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I probably don't do it in depth enough, as a real expert will do.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'll probably not take into account all the factors to the real degree they should be.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really hard to do all this when you're thinking about analyzing and then looking forward as well.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And this is where Promonio comes in.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think of it as a revenue growth architecting approach.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what some people might do is put a BI tool on top of Salesforce and look at historical data.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: What Promonio does is help you look forward and help you do a whole bunch of planning and what ifs based on your go-to-market strategy, your tiers of reps and channels and lead sources and things like that.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, imagine you knew exactly where your bookings were coming from next quarter.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: You knew where to invest going forward to hit the goals that you've either created or being given by the board, uh, and you knew how to build the team and which areas that's going to have the highest impact.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's essentially what Primonio does.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's built by Johannes, who's a two or three time CMO, very friendly to sales CMO.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he's helping startups right now with their modeling and their forecasting into next year.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Really interesting insights as you work with Johannes.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a big fan of what he's doing.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Him and his team are building.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you can check them out at Premonio.com, P-R-E-M-O-N-I-O.com.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: I would imagine, Mark, as you think back, Premonio might have been something that uh you wish you had back in various roles you've had over time.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and actually Johannes and I I had the privilege of working with Johannes at Spirion and know that he's much better at spreadsheets and cohorts and models than I am.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's lovely to think that he's got that uh now into uh a digestible UX that even uh a salesperson could use or a sales leader.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know I used to work together.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's really cool.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh good news.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And but speaking of where he used to work, let's go through this quickly.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: So if I look at this on your profile, some real big names in security and also in tech.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's Oracle McAfee, obviously well known.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Startup world in terms of Code Green, one of the early pioneers in DLP.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then I see ForcePoint on there.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: Was that WebSense and then ForcePoint?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Web Sense at that time, yes.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Top ups is in there, and then proof point, another big name, obviously, in the cyber world.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then laterally at Cofense, which many of us might know is FishMe back in the day as well.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I look at that and go, someone who's been in sales and sales leadership at a lot of really well-known and and the quite storied companies.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's put that to one side just now, though.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of interested in more about Mark the person to start with.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me, uh, seven-year-old Mark, where in the world were you and and what were you caring about?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: What was part of your life then?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: So seven years old, goodness gracious.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in Philadelphia.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: My mother was in art school, and I was living the seven-year-old dream of baseball, running around, sliding down the hill in the snow.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And on those days, as children, we benefited from, let's call it, parental neglect, though it was certainly not malicious.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I was in a neighborhood with lots of other kids and a stingray bicycle, and I could run around and and be a kid.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And and dream of being an astronaut, I think, uh never thought I'd end up uh in sales.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think I don't think any of us put that on our little, so what do you want to do be when you grow up?
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: So dream of being an astronaut were sports part of your were you a sports person?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: We moved around a lot, and and so, but yeah, I played a lot of street basketball.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: We ended up in California.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I never played sort of winter sports, but just spent a lot of time playing basketball, and my knees and fingers all and elbows are are what I remember on a rainy day from from all that good fun that I had pounding that hard asphalt.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: And were you a teenager in California then?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: I was.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And tell me about your memories of any hustles or your first jobs as a teenager.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: My first job was cleaning.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: There was this little bulletin board, I think, at our high school, and you know, odd jobs.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I ended up up in the Berkeley Hills cleaning uh the brush around some very wealthy men's.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the great thing is that after I was covered in brambles and all of that, he had a lovely pool.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was I was allowed to to swim in that.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing I remember it was a long time ago, and it was it was an A-frame, not what you think about when you're out, you know, camping kind of A-frame, but an architectural A-frame.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And in the middle of the main great room, he had a rope hanging down there that you could you could climb if you were so inclined.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So um kind of barty farty, I guess.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: He had a rope in his living room.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: I bet that was kind of unique even back then, right?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: Even back then.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_01: And any other hustles that you were doing in your teenage years to try and make money or save money?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was a feld dishwasher at a Polish restaurant called Varszawa.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I uh was told it was bad luck when this thing stopped up and all the all the water flowed on the floor.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And other than that, just did the typical kind of odd jobs.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't work at McDonald's, thankfully, but was always kind of working and summer jobs and and the rest of that.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and by the time I got to college, I had figured out the dishwashing and I got to be the principal dishwasher in our dormitory.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, it's a natural career progression to go from dishwashing into sales.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: How did you start off in your sales career?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, the same way that I think most people do, quite accidentally.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: I remember when I was in college, I had a professor, and everybody, of course, was focused on their careers.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh she said life is like a pinball machine that you sort of just kind of keep bouncing off of different things and you end up in different places.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: So I had answered an ad for a company called Lexus Nexus these days, and they were looking for a trainer, and so my first job was training lawyers and uh reporters for the Nexus piece of that.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I quickly realized that the salespeople made a whole heck of a lot more money than the trainers.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I had product knowledge, so I moved to Los Angeles for my first sales job and uh doubled my income in a year.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought to myself, see, I don't have to go to law school, I can just sell.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I was on my way.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: And do you remember your first customer, the first deal you won, anything like that?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, I remember.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: We all remember our first deal I won.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: So there I was in Los Angeles, and I had a lead, and it was to go to um Hollywood for somebody that wrote tax, a tax lawyer wrote was writing tax books.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I hopped in my car, very excited, headed out there, and got to an apartment building.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: And look, nobody worked from home back in those days.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I was immediately kind of put off by that.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then I walked into this little apartment where this woman had uh a little puppy who, uh, a little poodle who sat on my lap.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: I was in a blue suit.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: We all dressed in suits back in that day, shedding on me.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I had my terminal that I had to plug into her lamp, which was her phone, and I did a demo for her and was sitting there with a dog on my lap and my my acoustic coupler into the lamp and saying, this isn't any where this isn't at all what I thought sales would be like.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I got back uh to the office and had a message.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: She was gonna go ahead and buy.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was pretty excited about that, got to ring the bell.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out that she was a well-known author of tax publications, people who actually write books about taxes and stuff like that, and obviously a dog lover as well.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, and after that, I found myself in more professional situations and law firms and and so forth, but it was quite uh memorable.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Let's fast forward then to what looks like your first really early stage role leading sales at Code Green Networks, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: Code Green Networks?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, early, early DLP pioneer.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: When you look back, winning your first customers, getting that going, what are your learnings from that whole period at Code Green?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So at the time that I went to Code Green, I was moving on from McAfee, where I was a senior vice president and had organizations up to I think maybe 200 people working for me.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: But I had all my friends in the Bay Area saying to me that I was a wussy because uh I hadn't done a startup.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I was introduced to um a well-funded startup in the DLP space, came on board, got some customers, did a lot of things, I had a lot of fun.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And after about nine or 10 months, the the company went back into stealth mode because the product apparent wasn't quite ready.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I got a t-shirt and uh it said, Don't call me a wussy, I've done a startup, and it had little tears in it and other sorts of forms of duress and distress.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of a learning experience, and a learning experience is sometimes what you get when you don't get what you really want.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: I had the opportunity to do everything from building compensation plans to the go-to-market to uh being involved in the product development.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And uh unfortunately, uh, we were just um a little bit ahead of the market at that point in time.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't, I couldn't code, so I couldn't I couldn't help them in in regards to uh uh getting the product a little bit uh more ready for market.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's only so much you can do if the product's just not ready yet, right?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's one of the things that really needs to be in place to be able to succeed.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And when we sort of get into my lessons and and I start talking about the foundations, what I call the bar store stool theory, the the key one is that you have to have a product.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: And what's great if that product is also differentiated in some way to use the cliche that you should never use game-changing technology.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: But DLP certainly held that promise.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the other lessons that I learned is something that Gartner has um done a very good job of memorializing, and that's the hype curve.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: The hype curve?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: The hype curve.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And on the other side of the hype curve, the the unrealistic expectations is the plateau of realistic expectation expectations or something.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a journey to get there, and um sometimes you can join or or be involved in a market that's early, and sometimes that market just um disappears, it you know, or gets subsumed into something else.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And or sometimes, in the case of DLP, I feel like I've lived long enough that data security has come back around now, and the technologies and the cloud make some of the things that we were trying to do back in the day, technically um, you know, able to do that at scale.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: That was the time when other DLP players were coming out as well.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: How do you recommend someone stands out?
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's imagine we've got a listener who's joining a company early stage, maybe in the first 10 or 15 sales reps.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Hugely noisy market out there right now, a thousand, two thousand cybersecurity vendors.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you recommend they think about standing out?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I think the mistake that the not a mistake, but the my naivete back in the day is that if you're in a hot space with uh hot technology, the market, and and there appears to be a market, that the market will come to you.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then my my experience of having a large brand and being able to just go out and execute informed my perspective, maybe my cognitive bias, actually.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what I would say to anybody that's at that point is congratulations.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: You have a product, you have a market, and you're ready to go to market.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: You've checked the box, product market fit, target addressable market la-di da.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll say congratulation.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now, to your point, Andrew, the bad news.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Last I checked, there's 1,800 cybersecurity companies, most of them very small, a couple more every week, and a couple of big ones.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: What I also know from my experience is that you're in an enterprise, however, you define an enterprise, let's say maybe 5,000 users or seats and above, they have a hundred security tools.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them are shelfware, some of them are a process of being integrated.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: But in any case, they're all kind of looking at those products and saying, hmm, maybe we need to rationalize or reduce the number and reduce the noise.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you have a like, hey, we're going to go through the channel and work with my friends in the channel.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you were at a big company like I was, and you were in the top one, two, or three on their line card.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're now number 55 and uh you're not standing out.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you stand out, rise above the noise, get invited to the party, if you will?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: I hate to say it, it's not your game-changing technology.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Even in the best of circumstances, if you have something that is truly remarkable, all that does is remind me of a cartoon that I've shared and used over and over again in some of the presentations that I've done.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know where it came from.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully there's nobody Atlantic magazine or something that's going to come after me for copyright infringement.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it's a cartoon of a of a king leaving his little medieval tent with his sword in hand.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he says, I don't have time uh to see any crazy salesmen.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: I have a battle to fight.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: And standing next to him is a poor salesperson uh with his minions pointing at him with a machine gun.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so, why did that happen?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it is because uh people are too busy, but there's also this thing about humans that if you have a claim that's too grand, just unbelievable, if you will, it's viewed with suspicion.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can't just come in there and and show your shiny penny and your your new invention and uh tell people quite glibly that this is gonna change your life, it's game-changing, et cetera, et cetera.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: You actually have to go out there and do the hard grind work of being a human, earning their trust, and uh building that relationship.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that is probably what we uh are going to talk about uh in more detail, how you go about and do that.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, tell me about cats and dogs.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so if you think about, and people are not animals, but and animals are not people, but we I like to anthropomorphosize if I can say such uh a big uh word with so many syllables.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: People, your sales prox uh prospects are more like cats than they are dogs.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: So if you say, come here, rover, a dog may respond to that command, a well-trained dog, or if you hold up a piece of, I don't know, a treat, a dog treat.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty much every dog in the neighborhood's coming coming to you.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: But humans and people that are being sold to are much more like cats.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna be wary, they're gonna be standoffish, and it's gonna take you time to earn their trust.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's uh that's my animal cracker analogy, if you will.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it kind of resonated with me.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: So let's go back to the idea that this is a human-to-human interaction that we need to really do well on.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: What thoughts or what advice do you have for someone around that?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just say that, and this is just a declarative statement, but the way that you earn trust is by being human.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean in terms of how do you be human?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're authentic for one thing.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: You take the time to come across as somebody that's actually really interested and cares about the person that you are talking to.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't treat them like a bulk email.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: One of the stories uh my daughter ended up along the way in her uh journey from an opera singer to a salesperson as a BDR and SDR.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we just talked uh talked about uh the difference between, let's say, the wide net and the target.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, the way I'm successful is I take the time to learn about the people that I'm talking to and make sure that they understand at the other end of it that I'm a human being as well.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so, how do you connect to other human beings?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think we all do it differently and in different ways.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you also know what I'm talking about, about a human connection.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: You better not be reading from a script, you not better not be talking in cliches.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: You actually have to communicate, even if it's in Zoom, look them in the in the webcam, and and let them know that you're real, you're you're you're human, you're vulnerable, you're you're you're humble, and you're aware, you're self-aware.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: I would imagine part of that is showing uh interest in them more than you show interest in what you have, right?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I used to say all that people uh so back to this idea of how you stand out in the noise, right?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: So there's these 1800 companies and everything else, but there's also a conga line of salespeople standing outside uh every CISO's door or InfoSec person, all saying, if you had my you know, fill in the blanks, you wouldn't have been breached.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what are the things that you that you do is is relate in sort of some things that are basically human.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: And there's an interesting book out there because I'm gonna steal some ideas or or share some ideas.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: Jay Baer is the author, it's called uh talk triggers, and it's all about word of mouth.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: And when I'm advising startups, my friends that have started companies, and they all say, like, I want to go on social media and amplify my message and all the rest of that, I remind them that those are techniques for amplification, but the things that you want to amplify are things that we all know within our human interactions, things like empathy, people being warm and caring and humanity.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: And some of them are a little less warm and fuzzy, like uh usefulness, the responsiveness.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the key ones is just being a little bit different, a little unique.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: So if you have those, you know, 800 salespeople all saying, next generation, blah, blah, blah, and you come in and remember that really what they care about is what's in it for them.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: They're not being selfish, they're being busy.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you are curious enough to find out what their problems are about, not assume, not tell them, I know what your problems are, Ms.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: CISO.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: I've never been a CISO, I'm a salesperson, but I know what your life looks like.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: You ask and And maybe you've done the research.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: You say I've talked to some of the people on your team, or I've worked with others in similar um industries or with similar problems.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I can help.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that might get somebody interested.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's an interesting area, Mark, because you know, I I think back to when I was working for companies and also now where I'm working with companies as an outsider.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um you think about what happens is that everything around you is all about the company and the product.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's job titles with product and the name of the job title, right?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's product managers, there's product marketing managers, there's product engineers, there's product support people.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: When the CFO and the finance team are doing planning, they're doing planning around product lines and profitability of products and things like that.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Everything about you, around you, in your life as a salesperson inside your company is your product.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: And yet when you go out and talk to people and do your job, they don't care about your product.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you end up being the person who has to somehow translate that into what they want to hear about.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's quite a pressure on the sales team to make that translation, unless there's people in the company that just recognize that that's not how to do things and what and help them with that translation.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you hit you hit the nail on the head.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it's never about the product.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean to say that you shouldn't know your products because your job as a salesperson is to connect the product to outcomes, better outcomes, more optimal outcomes, a better workflow, a happier day for your customer.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: But they it's all aspirational.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: They don't want to hear about your spark plugs and your fuel injection.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: They want to know that it goes really fast, it's red, and people are going to dig in your new sports car, and you'll be more popular, or at least your car will be popular.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I think it's really, really a dangerous trap to fall in to spout acronyms, to talk about your product.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: I call it the home movies, or another way I put it is enough about me, let's talk about me.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess you could change that to enough about my product, let you let me talk about my products.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the great sins of salespeople is they start talking about the product like to a prospect or a customer, like they've just sat through those 45 hours of product training.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: They throw acronyms around, they throw numbers around, and they talk about things in code.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: And that A doesn't build trust.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And B, people aren't generally willing to sort of raise their hand and say, I'm not, I'm sorry, I don't know what manage XDR is versus XDR or all the other terminology.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to really make sure that you don't fall in love with a product-centric point of view.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And uh your baby may be beautiful, but people would rather talk about their babies than your baby.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: In a similar vein, I've heard you say that facts tell, stories sell.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me more about that.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's just sort of we all started, I don't know, around the campfire in the caveman days.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think about before there was written words, how stories were passed along, and how whether it's things like religion or tribal knowledge or whatever was passed along, it was in a story format.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: People told stories, and that is how we are beired to understand things, to to get involved.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're just spouting a bunch of numbers and facts why those why those may support something, nobody wants a presentation, everybody wants a conversation.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody responds, or I don't think very many people respond to dry numbers and and acronyms as much as they tell to a great story.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: And a great story for a salesperson to me goes something like this.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've done the research, I've talked to your organization, I've looked at the market, I'm coming in to tell you uh a story about somebody similar to you, maybe somebody you actually know, and and excuse me, and and how how we help them.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think the most powerful sales story is not about you trying to sell them, but to say, how would you like to talk to one of my fans, somebody who's lived the same outcome uh or or have the same problems that you've had, and and how we help them.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: And there all of a sudden you end up turning your customers into your fans, and they have much more credibility than than you do.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: So tell those stories, tell something that's relatable, uh that they can say, yeah, I, you know, I'm also uh a logistics transportation company.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: So yes, tell me how you help this trucking company or this shipping company uh protect their supply chain.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because in all likelihood, if somebody's supply chain is under attack, it it is a horizontal uh impact upon anybody else that has the same kind of extended supply chain.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that gets interesting.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: That gets them to sort of perk up and say, okay, that's an interesting story.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me a little bit more.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm a I'm a huge fan of the power of telling good stories.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: I know I think every salesperson tells stories, some more effective and more hard-hitting and memorable than others, but stories definitely are such a great tool to use, especially when you can make your customer be the hero and then allow the prospect to feel like they could be the hero of the story as well.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Such a powerful tool.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I've I've enjoyed, Mark, this afternoon hearing your stories and taking us through some of these.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: If I was to think back, a few takeaways from me.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: One is dishwashing is the natural starting point for a great career in sales.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what can we learn from that experience?
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, secondly, while a hot market is good, it's not enough, right?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: We need to have uh sales execution, need to also have product execution to support that that hot market.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: I really love the whole concept of cats and dogs and thinking about prospects as cats, not as dogs.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think probably my my biggest takeaway though from what you're saying, is it's so important when you're thinking about connecting with prospects and really engaging with them in a way they want to be engaged, is to be human so that they trust you.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_01: So the two go hand in hand.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: I really like how you how you brought that in there.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you would add to my takeaways from this?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I just when you think about what people want to hear about if they don't know about your product and they're not an expert, and maybe they know a little bit because they went and did their research, it's really about what I call better outcomes related to the real problems that you've taken the time to or asked the question and been curious enough to uncover.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we'd all like to hear a fairy tale where uh we get to live happily ever after at the end of that.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and that is if it's within reason, if it's not too grandiose, kind of where you want to take that to.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then also remember that the person that you're talking to has their own agenda, they have their own things.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so rather than maybe making it about their company, think about how you help them personally have a better outcome.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: How do you help their career get better?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: How do you make sure that they get to go home at the end of the day and be with their family as opposed to having to manually do something?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: So those better outcomes related to real problems that you uncovered, weaved into compelling stories, all of that kind of comes together and coalesces around this idea of being a real person in a conversation with somebody, and you're not PowerPointing them, you're not presentation, nobody, we've all seen enough presentations.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: We want a conversation, and we wanted a conversation that's helpful, that's credible, and uh maybe something that we can find out or learn something about that we didn't know about before we began that conversation.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that perspective.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And finally, speaking about credibility, if you could ban a sales questioner or sales saying that's overused and dispatch it into the depths of space to never be used ever again by a salesperson, what saying or question would you banish?
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I've heard salespeople do this and it's cringeworthy.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: I know what keeps you up at night, or this is what keeps you up at night, or this is what keeps SISOs up at night.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: And as one CISO who I think I had speaking in in an auditorium of 500 attendative salespeople said, I don't need to be told what keeps me up at night.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know what keeps me up at night.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: Love it.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: All right, Mark, if someone wants to get a hold of you and and connect with you, how do you want them to do that?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Profile is wide open on LinkedIn.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if you'd also uh want to reach me, you can reach me uh on my personal email, Mark Small262 at gmail.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: Mark, thanks so much for your time this afternoon.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed it.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Andrew.