Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 180: Learn how an SMB sales team is being successful with Brian Penney, VP of Sales at Blumira

Transcript

180: Learn how an SMB sales team is being successful with Brian Penney, VP of Sales at Blumira · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Hi everyone.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, today we're in for a treat where what we do is we talk to the head of sales at a cybersecurity company that targets only SMB.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And before you hang up thinking, oh, we target enterprise, I'm not interested.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'd encourage you to listen for the things that what Brian talks about in this episode are very similar in terms of the process that enterprise focused team might go after.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: There's definitely differences, but there's definitely some similarities as well.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, uh, this is Brian Penny, the head of sales and VP of sales at Blue Mira.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird Podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you're a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, we give tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Brian Penny, VP of Sales at Blue Mira.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Brian, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, Andrew.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation because you guys are targeting a segment of the market that most cybersecurity companies don't go after, and that's the SMB.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm really interested to learn more about how you're going about doing that, things you learn along the way, and also given you've got a background in more in enterprise sales, how you see the differences between the two different sectors.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm in learning mode today about this whole difference in learnings from SMB.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: But Brian, before we get there, let's talk about you.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've got a list of questions here, and I'm gonna ask you to give me three random numbers to do more than 35, and I'll read out the corresponding question.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds fun.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do that.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with um 17.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: 17.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: What's your favorite season?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man, fall this season right now.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely hoodie season.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wearing a Blumero hoodie right now.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not sure where you're located, Andrew, but here in Michigan, hoodie season is the perfect weather where you can wear shorts and a hoodie at the same time.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's not too cold.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need the down jacket or things like that, but uh enough sunshine to get by with a pair of shorts and a decent hoodie on the windy days.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh the best time of the year.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Sun's perfect, in fact.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm actually in Colorado, so I I I we had the same sort of concept.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: Although today is is is cold and windy.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: So uh not our usual nice fall day today, but uh anyway.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: All right, one more number over team, one in 35.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do 12.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: 12 is oh, here's one.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when we die?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, man.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I am a firm believer in an afterlife.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um actually went to school to be a pastor, so yeah, so firm believer in an afterlife.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I guess I'll I'll leave it at that.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: But that's I believe there's something more to after just being here.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm kind of intrigued that you went to school to be a pastor and then you took a turn to be in sales.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: Just quickly, what what happened there?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I did.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: I went to school to be a pastor.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and nothing wrong with pastors.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm very involved in our community and our church.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: I actually sit on the board of a nonprofit.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very much involved in those things.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: But uh for me, I knew that I could not be a pastor.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and the responsibility and the weight that that carries, and all of the counseling and dealing with people.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I find myself to be a great sales leader and a coach and helping people um elevate their sales skills and business.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I could be responsible for that on a general life and spiritual side.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's not who I am.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: There must have been the things though that you could translate from working in pastoral care to helping the needy salespeople that we all are.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, yes, very much so.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of overlap there.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Good, good.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: One more number, team one in 35.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, let's do seven.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Seven.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Suite of the four seasons or a cabin in the woods.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm definitely a four seasons guy.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Probably because I'm allergic to everything that grows, but uh, I'm not the outdoorsman.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I much prefer a day in downtown Chicago and you know, getting some fine dining and and things like that versus uh a cabin in the woods for sure.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Just what you give your pastoral care went into sales then, if your preference is four seasons.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And if you watch the movies, people die in cabins in the woods.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a good idea.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's all sorts of risks.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's great.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's uh let's go back to early life.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: How did you first make money as a kid, Brian?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great question.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: My mom would probably have a different answer than than I do.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: The earliest thing I remember in terms of making money is I wanted a paper route, but we lived in sort of this very rural area, this suburb that was like away from the rest of our town.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there was already like one or two paper route people in our area, so I could never get a paper route.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: That said, the first way I ended up making money was I think with maybe 11 or 12 years old, and I started mowing lawns in our neighborhood.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: We had some uh some elderly folks and some nuns who lived on our street and things like that, and and uh true story, mowed several lawns that summer to uh save up.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was I was going into eighth grade and I saved up enough money to buy um my first pair of Nike airs.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a big deal for me, and I kept those shoes as pristine as possible as long as possible.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it was, yeah, that was my goal for the summer was to make enough money to buy a pair of Nike Air flights.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I can remember them down to the color to this day.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's awesome.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I love that though when you're younger and you you you don't work because you feel like it's your it's your mission to go work.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: You work because you want to get some money to go get something, you know, I want to go buy those things.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a motivation, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like my daughter a couple of years ago, she wanted to get she was into um starting to get into competitive cheer, and she wanted to get one of these air tracks uh for the basement so she could do her tumbling and stuff.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And uh it was about a thousand dollars, I think, to get one.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I was like, well, I'm just gonna buy it, right?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: So she started a candle business and uh with the sole goal to sell enough candles so she could afford to buy an air track.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: And uh good for her, right?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: She set off on the on the goal and went out there and did it.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: And uh thank you to everyone, by the way, who bought some candles from her.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh appreciate this the family support.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was fun for her to see her achieve that.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So that was your first way to make money.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: What was your first real job?
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: My first real job with a legitimate paycheck.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: I must have been 14.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I would have been 14, and I started umpiring for Little League Baseball in our in my hometown.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I would do probably two or three games a week that I would umpire Little League and uh worked for a guy named Abel Martinez who ran the Little League program and got a legitimate W-2 that year, and you know, had to fill out uh my dad made me fill out the 1040 easy tax form and you know, with pen and everything.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the yeah, that's the my earliest recollection of a paycheck was was doing uh umpiring little league baseball.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that was fun.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the parents weren't fun, even back then.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: You let yourself in for all sorts of stuff.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh boy.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh finally, do you remember the first deal that was won or you won when you joined Blomira a few months back?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: The first deal, no, you know, I don't remember exactly what the first deal was.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: We had a bevy of deals come through um in the first, you know, three to six weeks that I was here.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: I I feel like I was signing contracts sort of left and right in in sort of a blur.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: I do remember one significant deal though, which was uh a municipality.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um we work with several municipalities, and uh one of our partners had um been working with them on some of their security posture stuff, and um they had a breach.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And um they are you know our partner said, Man, you guys should really take a look at Blumera.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: They probably could have prevented this breach, but absolutely could help you remediate it, you should call them.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so we got a call from these folks.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: They reached out to us, and within probably two or three days, we got them into a proof of concept or a trial of Blumera operational and inside of their organization there.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say within a few hours of being up, we found some gaps in their security posture and some remnants of that breach still active and helped remediate those, remediate those sort of immediately.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: And um, they were ecstatic that we we were able to find some things that were left behind and help remediate those and shore up their security posture.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: They didn't really have budget for it.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't planned.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was, you know, man, this happened and it it sucks that it happened, but you know, what do we do now?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so we had some back and forth negotiation and said, guys, you know, this is what it costs.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: We we're helping you as much as we can, but this is what it's gonna cost to protect you guys.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, obviously, you know, we can help you.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: We've remediated and it's been great.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they were like, you're you're absolutely right.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so they were able to procure some budget from other departments and and push it through, which is great.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're a great customer, they're fully protected now and uh are on a way their way to a great security posture, but it was a very quick turnaround for them, and it was it was not what I would consider monumental for us, but it was very indicative of our proof of concept process here.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: There are some competitors in our space that won't even offer a trial or proof of concept to folks in the SMB space because the resources, et cetera, it takes to set that up.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so one of the benefits of Blue Mira as a cloud sim and threat detection and response solution is that it takes us, you know, 15 minutes to an hour to set up and configure inside someone's environment.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: So we can get those things done relatively quickly.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a high resource train for us, and uh, we can prove out our proof of concept relatively quickly in an organization like that who has an ongoing threat or a need.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's definitely an advantage for us, I would say.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love that story.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it is funny how the how a breach uh rebalances priorities and budgets and headcount and resources.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we've seen it over the years many, many times.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I talk a lot with with my clients with the idea that many people are in a state of reasonable satisfaction or dissatisfaction with what they're doing.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you need something to change to cause them to be looking for something, some bright light in the future, or to realize they're in a lot worse position than they they actually uh thought they were before.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the breach is the classic example, right?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: The the seesaw gets very imbalanced very quickly when a breach happens.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: So it's funny how that happens.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: But um, well, let's let's Brian, let's let's say I was uh, I don't know, head of IT at a company with three or four hundred people in the company, and I I I met you at a at a trade show or on the on the plane or something like that, and I I said to you, so what does Blumira do for someone like me?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: How would you answer that question?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think uh very concisely, you know, Blumira is a cloud sim uh with threat detection and response built in, and we're strategically built for small teams to provide a fantastic security posture and protect their organization from real threats in real time.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the typical question we get in, for instance, a trade show format is well, what do you mean by small?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because, you know, a lot of folks at the enterprise level think a small team is, you know, 20 CISSPs.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, like that's a small team for us.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, literally, we have folks with one IT person supporting 150 employees that are utilizing Blue Mirror very successfully, right?
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we have teams that have five to ten folks in IT and one or two people who are cyber focused or security focused and they're using Blue Mirror to manage their organization, right?
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we have folks working with an organization right now, 6,000 employees, and they have five people in their IT department.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Five for six thousand employees.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: And you just think about that, right?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's just how do you even expect your IT team to succeed when there's only five?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: They're clearly outnumbered, right?
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's just on a general IT front.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: How much worse can their cybersecurity posture be in today's sort of cyber threat world, right?
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like they're uh an organization that is like in need of a ton of help, but also very aware of how much help they need.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it's, you know, we we have a bevy of organizations across the range there, for you know, very small and and what might be considered very large mid-market organizations, but just what we're focused on are those teams that are under-resourced, just don't have the resources to manage things on their own, and Blumera is is brought in to do the heavy lifting.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in those situations, is it the person who's the you figuratively heads up IT that is the buyer, or do you end up having to deal with the CFO or the CO who's the real buyer in those circumstances?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it depends on the organization.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: What we've found is that a lot of the um larger mid-market organizations, some of those IT directors or you know, a VP of IT, for instance, they have some budget authority and they can say, yeah, I you know, I can make a purchase up to X amount, and it doesn't have to go through layers of approval.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: What's interesting is a lot of the smaller organizations, the 100, 200, 300 employee organizations with just a few people, one to three people sort of in the IT department, that does typically layer up to a CIO or a CFO or someone at that level.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we do, we do have to get alignment with that buyer from a vision and strategic standpoint of where do you see the organization going from a cybersecurity posture?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: What are your goals long-term?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: What are you trying to accomplish in your cybersecurity posture?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And does Blumera meet that need not just now from a functionality requirement and you know, compliance requirement, et cetera, but also where you plan to go in the future.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Is there alignment with the vision of what we're developing towards and where we're going and what you're hoping to achieve down the road and what your plans and goals are as an organization?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And typically what we see is when we have that alignment and we have that understanding at that level, it's a smart purchase for them.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: When we can obtain that alignment, what we see oftentimes has been, well, it does more than check the box for the cyber insurance requirement, but it's more than the cost of this other solution that would also check the box.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna go with this one because they really don't want the automation or the the truth at detection and response.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: They don't have a desire to remediate.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're not really looking to secure their security posture.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking simply to check a box off on that cyber insurance requirement, and that's it.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: When there's more than just uh the check the box for the cyber insurance requirement, what are the drivers?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Why suddenly now are they trying to take security seriously and work with you guys?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's different for a lot of organizations, right?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them, like with uh the municipality I mentioned earlier, it's because there's a legitimate threat, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, if you read the most recent IBM report, I think it's what is it, like$4.4 million is the cost of the average breach these days.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's just an astronomical amount.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And those are the type of things that put businesses out to pasture that can close a small business down.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh matter of fact, I you may have seen the article on Lincoln University earlier this summer.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: They had a breach ransomware, actually.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's about 4,000 students at this university.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: All their data is locked down, couldn't transfer records, couldn't they shut the school down and been around since the late 1800s.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_00: Just this historic institution without any way to protect themselves and ransomware shut the entire school down.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's horrible stories like that.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's, you know, that's exactly what Blue Mira was built for.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: But to your question, I think it's different drivers for different organizations.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: We have some folks who come to us um because they are looking for their compliance measurements, you know, whether it's CMMC or NIST protocols or cyber insurance or different compliance protocols, like the FTC has a new sort of regulation going into place for dealerships across the nation on December 9th.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Blumera helps check some of those boxes off.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: So we've we've seen an uptick on that side of our business.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: So that's definitely a driver.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, there are some organizations that just have a great mindset around their cyber posture and they want to be proactive rather than reactive because they're seeing other organizations be reactive and have detrimental aspects to their business impacted due to the fact that a breach happens or so many resources are being spent trying to remediate threats in their environment versus proactively attacking them and making sure that they don't have threats to begin with.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we get them all across the spectrum.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think the easier ones to move are the ones who are driven by a threat.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: When they know a threat is there, is active, or they've experienced that, whether you call it the FUD aspect, the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or if it's just a man, we can't afford to do this again.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a driver behind it, those folks tend to move very quickly.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: That said, the folks who are looking for compliance or just a cyber insurance checkbox marked off, those tend to move very slowly and you know appear to be very contentious when it comes to price.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, yes, I understand you provide this and additional value and do all of these things, but we only want this.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a tendency to walk away from those deals as quickly as possible.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so this must be one area uh of many where there's a real difference between enterprise selling and SMB selling.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: So as you as you got into this world, Brian, and you kind of ruined your enterprise experiences and roots, I'm wondering what the learnings were as you as you really got into it to see the real differences between the two.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of differences.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think some of the most important ones are just the way the organizations buy.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we've touched on this earlier, you know, in terms of who has budget authority, et cetera.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: But in the enterprise space, it's almost everything is purchased by committee, right?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's not one stakeholder in the organization that's impacted by an enterprise solution that's going in place.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's you have to bring together three, four, five different stakeholders across the organization and understand how their business will change and how they'll be impacted in each of those departments by the solution you're putting in place, and then provide a agreeable, if not very beneficial, change management plan in place to help them and their employees adopt and utilize that solution moving forward.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: That was always my experience as, you know, it really came down to that committee understanding what the change management plan was and saying, you know, this is going to impact thousands of employees.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: How do we manage this process?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big, it's a heavy lift, right?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what's that timeline look like?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is it a multi-phase rollout?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because we can't just flip the switch and make a change, right?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the SMB space, that's not the case, right?
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's especially in the organizations that are, you know, a thousand employees or less, you can flip a switch, especially with a cyber tool that 90% of those employees will never interact with directly, right?
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have a handful of people who are logging into Blumera utilizing its tools and resources.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not one of those things that impacts an organization on the surface where everyone is impacted by it.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it's now something I have to get around or something I have to log into to utilize other tools and utilities, right?
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's not like an MFA or you know, an Okta or a duo, or now I have a gatekeeper to getting none of those things come into play here, right?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: It is very much so a behind-the-scenes sort of operation where we can say we can impact you on your full scale on day one, and it that's not going to impact your employees.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: So no change management process has to go in place.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: So when it comes to the purchase by committee, it's not convincing how to adopt and how to utilize, it's convincing the value to cost ratio, right?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: What is the long-term value of this to your organization?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: How does it help moving forward?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And do we align with your strategic goals?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the buying process.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: What about on the product itself?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is there a different standard or different way to approach building a product for SMB versus enterprise?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes and no.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I've been in some great organizations where the sales process, the business process are just pristine, right?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And some very well respected brands where you're not going to get fired if you bought, right?
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: However, what I also saw in some of those organizations was poor change management process, poor adoption, poor utilization of the software, right?
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people who got frustrated just um through that adoption process because the The customer experience was just lackluster, right?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think in maybe it's this is true across startups, whether it's enterprise or SMB, is that these days we're so product focused, and we are a product-led growth company.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, our product actually does what we say it does, which is you know a phenomenal idea if you want to sell a software, make it actually do what you say it does.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it's one of those things where we're continuously developing to the needs of our customers.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: And um, we have this great thing built into our website where people can actually submit feature requests and say, hey, we're utilizing your product.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: We would love it to do this as well.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so we adopt all of those ideas and we take all of them in, we talk about them on a regular basis from an organizational standpoint and mapping out our roadmap and taking things into consideration.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: But we're very much a focused company from a product standpoint in meeting the needs of our customer base and ensuring that we can meet their needs as they continue to scale.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because even though we serve an SMB market, we don't expect those companies to stay SMBs forever.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we're continuously adapting the product to scale along with them.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been an interesting journey in my time here just to see.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have phenomenal CSAT scores, 100% month over month, quarter over quarter.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: People actually love our customer support team and they love our product.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, our ratings on G2 and Captera sort of prove that it's interesting to see how folks interact with different parts of your organization when your product actually lives up to the hype.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of enterprise organizations can't say that.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you mentioned before about uh the POC process.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's talk about selling and and and how you go about doing it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: The thing in my mind was that if I'm selling to SMB, my deal value is going to be a lot lower.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't want a three-month, 10-call sales cycle, right?
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: I want a one or two call, you know, month-long.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's do our job very well, but let's not you know let this drag out for six, nine months.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Is that where you're trying to get to or is that where you are?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: You're thinking about how to run that sales process.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we are there.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: We I think based on stats we pulled last week, we had uh an internal sales training.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Our average close cycle on the direct side of our business is about 80 days right now.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a handful of calls that go in involved in that.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: We have a very strategic proof of concept process that has four calls for both technical reasons to ensure that we have alignment and the technical needs and meeting the success criteria of the organization, as well as buyer alignment as a part of that process and making sure that we're proving out their needs as an organization and what that means as we move forward with the contract at the culmination of that proof of concept or trial period.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a strategic process.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I would say it's not much different than an enterprise sales process, right?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: There's trust rapport, there's alignment, there's, you know, getting to um the key stakeholders in the organization.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: That said, it's a much shorter process.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not one of those things, again, it doesn't take us a long time to spin up a proof of concept, a matter of minutes, um, less than an hour, guaranteed.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't spend a lot of resources going through building out a proof of concept and long consulting engagements.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: In my past, you know, I would be on site for a week with an organization, just doing interviews and consulting amongst their different, you know, organizations inside, figuring out how these different silos operated and then providing a 27 to you know 50-page report back on all of the gaps in their process and how we could shore that up, right?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that was always a paid consulting prior to even selling software.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that was the enterprise process.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're selling something over the course of nine months to a year or even longer, that's okay.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have time for that in the SMB space, and we don't have time for that as a startup SaaS organization, right?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: We have to move quickly.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: And thankfully, the SMB space seems to want to move just as quickly.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: We've had deals come, we had a deal come through last month, I believe, that uh from first contact to close deal was 21 days.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: They had a need.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_00: We got the proof of concept spun up on, I think, the second or third day.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: They were two weeks into the trial process and said, man, this is meeting all of our needs.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: We absolutely love it.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I told our salesperson, I said, hey, just ask them if they're ready to close, you know, are they ready to go live?
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so he sent the email and a contract, and they signed it that day.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, that was our our quickest direct sale today.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we have a self-service model where people can, you know, utilize the free version of our tool and upgrade to a paid version.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different process altogether.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: But on our direct side of business, that 20, 21 day close was the the quickest sales cycle that we've had.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: We've had some that are, you know, 30 days, 35 days, 40 days, but 21 days was unheard of.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it was it was a pretty exciting day for us.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I bet.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: My goodness.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: And in that POC process and the technical side, is it like a guided POC or do you just let them free to do whatever they want to do?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_00: There is some guiding up front.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that uh first setup and configuration, um, we have a senior solutions engineer who gets on the phone or on a Zoom call, right, with their technical people.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we get Bloomera configured and set up, we get our cloud connectors operational.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: And if they have any on-prem software or things like that that they want to ingest logs from, then we'll get our sensors set up and and try and do those and typically in the first call.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: If there's not enough time in the first call because they only have a half hour or something like that, and you know, they've got multiple sensors to set up, we'll give them homework and say, here's how you go through, here's a PDF, you know, walk you through on how to get these things set up.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most people, um, if they're you know been in IT for five years or more, can get those things done.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're just gonna, you know, implement the VM.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a pretty simple Ubuntu process that they can get it spun up and say, hey, I got these things checked off.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we can see in the product, hey, they've got sensors operational, looks like they got things done.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that sort of triggers us on our side to go, okay, we can reach back out and set up our next call if we hadn't done that already.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it's great inside the product to be able to see what they've accomplished and what they haven't, and if they're responding to threats, if they're remediating those things, it gets us a great indication as to whether they're interacting with the software and if they're ready to move forward and process or not.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: And do you set their expectation of how long that POC is gonna last and how firm are you at the end of it to say, you know, we either we either cut it off or you buy?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we try to be very um upfront with the expectations.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's literally a, hey, this is gonna take less than eight hours over the course of the next 30 days for you to prove out Blue Mirror and your organization.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have a little bit of homework on your side, we're gonna have a little bit of homework on our side, we're gonna come together once a week for a 45-minute call and make sure that we're meeting your success criteria that you've defined as a part of this trial process and to ensure that, you know, from a technical standpoint, we're meeting the needs of your organization.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_00: And typically what we find is that it's less than that eight hours.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Folks are, you know, that's sort of the worst case scenario.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing probably on average four to six hours over the course of a month that people are spending inside of our trial process.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: And we uh typically, I'd hate to say that we're very firm about, hey, we're turning this off on day 30.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're pretty flexible with that.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: As long as things are progressing and moving forward and people are like, hey, we we just, you know, this person's out of office.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get them in from an alignment standpoint.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: We'll extend the trial.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a problem.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Prior to me getting here, there were a couple of folks that had been in trial for months.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Just there wasn't an organized standard process around it.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: It was, hey, we want to do a trial and we want to test it out in this environment, and we would sort of let them go through the process on their own.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: So pretty quickly after I arrived, we put together what I call a mutual success plan, which is essentially a mapped-out process of what the trial looks like, what their expectations are, what our expectations are, the success criteria they have, what most of our customers utilize as success criteria, and sort of a process to go through and say, we've checked all of your boxes.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: Does it make sense for us to move forward with a contract at the end of this trial because we've met all of your success criteria?
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that has been, that's proven to help us quite a bit in cutting down those timelines and people who want to linger or don't log in and don't utilize the software, we can see that on our side, right?
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: This we had a conversation uh last week actually with uh my solutions engineer.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Jack, look, we've got two or three of these companies.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_00: We've got 12 companies right now this month in trial.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know, we've got two or three of these that haven't logged in in over two weeks.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: What are we doing here?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, yep, we're gonna move those guys out.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the right time, and you know, we'll we'll engage with them down the road if it becomes the right time.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: So firm is not the right word, but we're we're more stringent now than we used to be in how we utilize and manage our resources.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: But now that we have a very good process in place, we're seeing people utilize that process to meet their need in a more efficient manner.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And what you're describing to me right now, I feels like to me is a slightly shorter, really well-run enterprise POC process, right?
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's you're just trying to collapse the time frame a little bit.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you're you got the success criteria, you're helping them get set up at the start, you have check-in calls.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess the danger with that, so the good thing with that is you're you've got the control and you're helping them succeed in the POC process.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: The danger is, of course, you're putting a lot of resources into something which I would imagine would be a much smaller deal size than an enterprise deal at maybe 250 to 500K a year.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it could be.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and so when we think about that and the 12 trials we have in process right now, on average, again, you know, three to four hours over the course of that trial period per trial.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: So we might have a full week of our solution engineers' time wrapped up in the trial process of the current ongoing trials.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: So when I think of things like that, right, uh, we have four AEs, and so, you know, it's like, okay, where is our time spread out?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, we have introduction calls and demos and things like that that our solutions engineers are responsible for.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, how are we utilizing that time and making sure those resources aren't being spent erroneously?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think we're doing a pretty good job right now.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't seen any of the trials get out of hand because we are setting better expectations up front on what that timeline looks like.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the great thing is too, we try to get our CX team involved in the trial process when we can and say, hey, if you if something pops up, if you don't understand, utilize our CX process.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: Put in a help ticket, right?
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: And people love that, um, you know, because our CX team is fantastic, our technical account managers are the best in the world.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I I don't say that facetiously.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: They their ratings prove it.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um the leader of that side of our organization, Heidi, is a phenomenal leader, and they are built for this.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: So they they are you know eager to interact with the the potential customers and show them exactly how we treat our customers, and they've actually helped us win some deals because of the way they interact with our customer base.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's been pretty good.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, from the seller standpoint, what sort of caliber of AEs are you looking for?
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: You said you got four in place right now.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: What do they look like in terms of experience and tenure?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of went on a hiring spree after coming on board here.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we had one AE when I came here, um, and she's fantastic.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: She had uh she's she's been here for a couple of years now, and she um is a former duo security, and so she's got uh vast experience.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: I hired uh three additional people.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I've hired five people, but uh two of them are SDRs.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: I hired three additional AEs, and none of those AEs had vast cyber experience.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: One had been at Red Hat for a while and had some experience there as an enterprise rep, but the other two weren't cyber background.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: They were, you know, um one was an enterprise salesperson, the other was not an enterprise salesperson.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: And all of them have adapted to our sales motions relatively well.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: They're building great pipelines and several deals and closing motions right now for this month and beyond and this quarter, and they've all came on in the last couple of months.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we've we've grown here pretty quickly.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_00: But it's interesting because their backgrounds are so different, but they understand sales and sales process and sales motion.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the way we have our CRM set up, it's pretty clear as to all right, you're not getting to this stage unless you have buyer alignment.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Who's your buyer?
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: Can you check this box off?
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: Have you had this phone call, right?
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: Have you had that alignment meeting and discussion?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: If not, it's not in that stage.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't go to close, right?
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we're, I think I'm pretty stringent on the process of how we manage the sales motions and what that means from you know a deal timeline standpoint.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So that's new to some of them, but it's also very beneficial because we don't have what I would call unqualified pipeline sitting eight, 10 months into the future going, well, this will really come in next year.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: No, our pipeline is six months out at the most, and you know, everything that's in trial is scheduled to close in in this quarter.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, I tell my reps all the time, I said, guys, if you could just send your quota out to all of your prospects and ask them to close on specific dates, sales would be the easiest thing in the world and everyone would do that, right?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not how this works.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to walk through the process, use the motions, get the alignment that you need so that you can close deals when you need to.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not about us and what we want folks to do, it's about their timeline.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's about understanding their buy process and where they are in that process and making sure that we align our expectations with their by process so that we're not forcing people into, you know, the square peg and the round hole, right?
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're not forcing people to do things they're not ready to do.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: One last quick questionnaire before we wrap up.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've seen, and maybe you're seen this already, is that companies that go and attack the SMB or the mid-market, let's say, what they find is that's their sweet spot, but it's not like there's a one line that, I don't know, 2,500 employees and that's it.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, suddenly your product's not relevant anywhere above that.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, what happens is a lot of verticals above that, what they want is good enough, right?
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: They want, if that works for an SMB for 500 employees and I've got 8,000, but I'm in a certain vertical that doesn't need the sophistication, you know what, that might just work for me.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I'm wondering if you're starting to see that uh coming through now.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, we're seeing a lot of that, especially at the trade shows.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I won't disparage any of the enterprise competitors.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's we get people coming up to us and going, hey, we have this, and we just, man, it's so noisy.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're not seeing any value of it.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, can you sit on top of it?
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can you filter through all the BS that we see and help us out?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the short answer to that is we probably could.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: We just don't want to.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's um, you know, there's there's a lot of things that go into supporting an organization of 50,000 employees on the enterprise scale.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, you know, that's there's an impact to our CX team, there's an impact to all the different areas of our business, both, you know, from a financial aspect as well as a scaling side.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's things that we would have to take into consideration to go that far upstream.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_00: We don't have, like you mentioned, we don't have a hard line on you know how many employees this organization has.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna say no.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: As a matter of fact, had a Zoom call this morning with an organization that has 15,000 plus employees.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, they're not enjoying their current solution and are very interested in us.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked through what that might look like and what a proof of concept could look like and what their timeline currently is.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a great call.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: We learned a lot.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: They would probably be the biggest organization.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, we've got a few right now that are in that, you know, six sort of six to eight thousand range that we're working with.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those don't scare us.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, it's just the impact to our organization is what we really have to consider when we decide to go upstream.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's harder for an enterprise organization or an enterprise geared software to move downstream because they're geared for the enterprise, they're built for the enterprise.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's hard for an SMB to adopt enterprise processes and and internal software.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: The solution doesn't always adapt to the SMB market.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're doing is building something focused for the SMB market that's really easy to use, it's not complex, it's it's quick to configure and set up, and you know, we can move fast like an SMB organization does.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're seeing now is that some of these lower-end enterprise organizations and even some enterprise organizations are coming to us and going, hey, we've seen your webinars, we've seen really good things, or I know I have a friend who uses you guys.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'd love to use you.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, can you come and help us out?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: We have 25,000 plus employees, and we're like, could we?
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Probably.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do we want to?
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Not right now.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's just we have no desire to move that far upstream right now.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not to say that we never will, who knows what the future will hold, you know, five, seven years down the road, but we're really focused on serving this under-resourced, under uh staffed and just part of the market that everyone has in cyber has ignored.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's such a huge need here.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that whole use case of the bigger company dissatisfied with what they have is probably indicative as much as anything else on the fact that they they've got a solution, which is probably overcomplex for what they individually needed, right?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: If they've got a small team and they're trying to do a lot of things, they don't need, in fact, they're just not set up to deal with all the intricacies of setting these systems up.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, they might be good tools if you've got the big team to run it, but if you got a small team and the same demands, you need something a bit more simple.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what a lot of I imagine that takes a lot of discipline when you're, you know, whatever numbers you're staring at this quarter or next quarter, and suddenly this thing comes in that could be, you know, five times your average deal size.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Like, God, I could, I could take out, you know, 10% of my quota with one deal.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it must be must be tempting to say, let's see if we can just take this one, you know.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: I tell my team, and and I did pretty well in my career by doing this myself, never put all your eggs in one basket.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's okay to go elephant hunting once in a while as long as you're sniping deer along the way.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: You gotta continue to feed your family and and and meet the quota.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: And however many analogies you want to throw at it, I've I've always said, you know, it's just as easy to score off of four base hits as it is a home run.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: So take the deals as they come along, and that doesn't mean you can't go hunt the larger deals as they show up.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: We'll definitely engage and have conversation where it makes sense for us as an organization, but don't bet on those to make your number.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's never a great, great way to go.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the one deal.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: If I can just get that one, you know, you'll have a very disappointing year.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, on that note, on that note of discipline and and being experienced enough to know what's good and bad for the company, not just the number.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: Let's uh let's wrap this up, Brian.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoyed the conversation.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: For anyone that wants to reach out to you to talk more, to talk about employment and what opportunities you have, what's the best way to get hold of you?
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: The best way is uh email bpenny at bluemera.com or simply sales at blue mirror.com.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: All of those come to our general sales email email box, and I get all of those as well.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: So happy to have conversations and especially for you folks in the SMB space, would love to help you out.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh with that, Brian, thanks for joining the Sales Bluebird uh community today, and uh look forward to talking to everyone uh next time.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_01: With that, thank you.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Andrew.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that was an interesting conversation for me.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when I first talked to Brian about doing this call, the thing that uh I was thinking about was, you know, the sales process for the SB is completely different to the enterprise process.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, it'd be interesting, but not that useful.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: When in fact, if you kind of listen to what he was saying, you know, it's not hugely different across the board.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's definitely differences, but it's not like a completely alien way to go after a market.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: For me, one of the interesting things were is that their average deal length is 80 days.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's it's short, but it's not too short.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure in enterprise you get deals shortened that as well in the right circumstances.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Their average was 80, but he was saying that I think the fastest maybe around about 20 days, 21 days.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, thinking about what that means, and you know, I always think about these things and say, you know, okay, it's different than enterprise selling, but what can we learn from that that might help us collapse our sales cycles down a little bit?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if we're used to doing six to nine month sales cycles in the enterprise, you know, what can we learn to drag these down just a little bit, either a month or two, uh, so it's not quite so long.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: What I liked about what he was saying was he brought in a discipline around the POC process.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I think he said it was four calls and uh it's eight, it's 30 days with a maximum of eight hours of work across that.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very disciplined and set up POC process.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he says there are always some flexibility, but you know, they don't want the never-ending POC.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: So for them, they have to be very disciplined about that.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I wonder as we work on the enterprise side, if there's ways to learn about that, how we can maybe tighten up our POC process and policies so that we can get ones to execute in a shorter period of time.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: One of my big takeaways was the discipline that he talked about at the end, to be able to say no to deals, right?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I don't know what the covenant of the enterprise is.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: If someone comes at you and they've got potentially a$3 million deal, um, and you're used to doing half a million dollar deals, and you're sitting there going, yeah, but they've got 300,000 employees, and really we don't rescale much past 50 or 100.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: I have the discipline not to say, don't worry, we'll work it out, let's engage with engineering and figure out how we support them, but to actually be able to say to walk away.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: It takes a lot of discipline to do that.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I was really fascinated to hear how they'd be thinking about that and how he was helping the team understand where they need to play with their ICP.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that was my takeaways from it.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: I thought it was a really interesting conversation.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: And uh hope you've got your own takeaways as well.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll talk to you next time.