Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 116: Pipeline generation mini-episode #1 with Rick Hill, VP of Sales at Ava Security

Transcript

116: Pipeline generation mini-episode #1 with Rick Hill, VP of Sales at Ava Security · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at cybersecurity startups, it's hard to get go-to-market fit, grow revenue, and scale the sales team.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who've been doing this for many years and at many companies.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and this episode is part of a series of podcast episodes on pipeline generation.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: It will be no surprise to listeners that the number one challenge right now for sellers in cybersecurity is generating pipeline.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: And in these episodes will be sales leaders, individual contributors, demand generation practitioners, and experts whose business is all about generating pipelines.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: We want you to have fresh ideas, approaches, and tips that you can use to transform your pipeline either as a sales leader or as an individual contributor.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, we have Rick Hill, the VP of sales at Ava Security.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Rick led a sales team through all sorts of awareness challenges early on, right through to an acquisition earlier this year.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Andrew, the biggest challenge I think a lot of my peers and I have is pipeline generation.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's just getting enough qualified at bats, right?
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Specifically for an early stage startup where you're struggling with brand recognition in the market.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: That can be absolutely the most challenging thing.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think three things that we did relatively well and kind of the buckets in which we thought about that at Ava, I'll go through those with you real quick.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: One is digital, and it's recognizing that you have to be in control of that digital footprint.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure you're understanding the algorithms, you're creating new and fresh content that's driving your authenticity and credibility scores through the Google engines, making sure you're posting those pillar and cluster pages and you're creating dynamic content that can engage with your customers and audience in a unique way.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of blog posts, a lot of social media tools, a lot of consistent messaging and branding that reaches your potential customers through different channels and multiple channels.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: That was like a foundational approach for us that we could then layer more complex things on, like account-based marketing, content syndication, and working on ways to increase that organic search number and all those things that we tracked very closely month to month, which has helped bring more inbound leads into the machine, into the queue that we were then able to distribute to the right sales resource.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that whole concept around having a plan around digital, right?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Having someone who understands that language and can go build and run that for you was something we got to, quite honestly, much too late in our journey.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And once we started to turn that knob, it's going to take time, right?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to take 60, 90, 120 days from the changes that you make for that to materialize, uh, we started to see an exponential return on that in terms of the cost per lead, you know, the number of fresh eyes that we're able to find, the attendance in our events, brand recognition, industry trade rags, those sort of things really started to change for us.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: So digital is one.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm still a big fan, call it old school, of half the battle is just showing up.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we really thought about event or activity-based marketing and this quick hit kind of guerrilla warfare approach of let's run events at scale, low cost, think happy hours, renting a bay at Top Golf, doing something that's communal, that's outdoors, that's fun, that brings people together.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, very challenging during COVID.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: We still found a way to do this at a smaller uh opportunity.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: But but now that the world has opened back up again, um, doing that, you know, having a bourbon tasting, going to buy cowboy boots, like just doing something unique and different.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the key.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: You find it with yourself, like as a manufacturer, with one of your partners as an integrator, as a sell to channel, and then someone else in that ecosystem, even if it's just another vendor or manufacturer that works with that partner that doesn't compete with you, to where you're each bringing different types of prospects and existing customers together.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that you're bringing a confluence of your customer community together.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: There's multiple value propositions that can resonate, and you have existing customers talking to potential customers.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing that in a in a safe, casual way that's not PowerPoint-centric, that's not in a classroom, that's not just serving them pizza, but that's doing something that creates fellowship and community.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like all day, 100%, we built our business on that methodology for marketing.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: So you have digital, you have in-person events, and then you know the third piece to me really is that that ecosystem.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: We called it the API economy.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: We believe in a very open platform.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was all about how can we partner with other folks to create value for our customers.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And what we found was some of those were platform partners like uh GCP and AWS.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: Some of those were technology partners, maybe like Splunk or other SIMs that we could dump our information into, or Snowflake for that matter, that created value for our customers.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And some are just complementary platforms.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we sell video cameras and they sell access control, right?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they work better together.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: But finding those ecosystem partners that created value for your customer and investing aggressively in those, I mean, we had a formalized program with a dedicated head on our staff that was responsible for the acquisition, nurturing, enablement, and monetization of those partnerships.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And we integrated them into everything we did on both the digital front and the uh the activity piece.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And we held the folks on the team really accountable to that activity and how often we engaged with them.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: They were at our sales kickoffs, we went on joint customer calls together, they were on our um you know weekly and monthly calls, we shared best practices, we did co-development, sponsored booths at trade shows together.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was more than just words on a page, it was a way we went to market.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: So by doing that well and finding an open ecosystem that creates value to your customer, bringing that into a defined digital approach, and then topping that all off with a high-energy activity, you know, um, in-person marketing schedule, like we ended up continuing to not only find more doors that open to us, but a much higher quality level of door that opened to us.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: So that's how we've created pipeline.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with at least one other person and also hit subscribe in your podcast player.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you know someone that you want to hear from on this series of episodes on pipeline generation, let me know, please.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Email me at andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's do at the end.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Andrew at unstoppable.do.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Or you can text me directly on 303 956-0024.