Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 89: Jeff Lauer CRO at Standard Custody on why CROs don't last longer

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89: Jeff Lauer CRO at Standard Custody on why CROs don't last longer · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Bite Size Sales Podcast, where we believe that sales at B2B startups should be easier than we often make it, and that it's plain wrong that sales teams at startups don't get the help to succeed like sales teams at their bigger and more well-known competitors do.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a seller or sales leader at a B2B startup, especially if it's in the cybersecurity space, you are in the right place today.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: So welcome to episode 89.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Today's guest is Jeff Lauer, who's the chief revenue officer at Standard Custody.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Andrew.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Jeff, welcome.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Good to have you on the call.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Before we get going, let me just do a quick readout of our sponsor today, which is Promonio.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Promonio.com, P-R-E-M-O-N-I-O.com.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: And Promonio uh helps when you're at a startup, especially, and you're doing a lot of sales and go-to-market planning.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: What we often do is use our own homegrown spreadsheets to do that.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Either someone brings a spreadsheet from a different role and we have to adapt it to the one we're in right now, or we start from scratch and build out a model, which is good in terms of just getting going.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's sometimes less useful though because it's prone to human error in calculations.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: We sometimes miss out factors that we should be taking care of.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And when we really want to get accurate and we're taking numbers to the board, it doesn't go into enough depth in terms of what we really should be standing behind as sales leaders.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where Promonio comes in.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: What Proponio have done is built a tool that allows us to rely on their calculations, which have built up over many years, their models that we can adapt for our business, and basically get to the point where we can do what-if analysis, we can do cool hard analysis, we can change things in the model and have it immediately reflect and show what the impacts of those changes would be.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a forward-looking tool based on assumptions as opposed to something that just sits on top of Salesforce and analyzes the history.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're in the world of looking at your planning for in 2022, I'm recording this right now, the middle of November and 2021.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: If you're looking at planning for next year and you're looking for a more robust and reliable way to look at your sales planning, Premonio could well be the place to go.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that's P-R-E-M-O-N-I-O.com.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, Jeff, when I do a quick look at LinkedIn to look at your career, you've got a lot of experience in sales over the years.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: You start off in the storied uh boiler room of PTC in the 90s.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh a lot of great sales leaders came out of PTC in those days.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: They've gone on to lead very well-known companies at scale and have big exits and really make a big difference, frankly, in how sales happens in the technology world.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: From there you went on to Cognos, IBM.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: I guess you were there when Cognos got bought by IBM, is that right?
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_02: Just prior to the purchase.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: From there you went to Altiris before they got acquired by Symantec as well?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was there through the acquisition by Symantec.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: Awesome.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: So four years there, then to Venify for seven years.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: You ended up being the VP of sales there.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: Went to Ubico for two and a half years, and you ended up running, it looks like most of sales, VP of the sales of East Financial and the public sector, from Ubico to Blue Lava, where you were the head of sales there, the VP Global Sales.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And now you're at a small company called Standard Custody, where you're the chief revenue officer.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Have I got all that just about right?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Spot on, yes.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: That is perfect.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: Spot on.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: So some great names in the security world, but also in in BI and in and obviously PTC as well.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean I've I've just had a great career.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very blessed, and I've had the opportunity to be part of about three unicorns.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Ubico is well on its way to becoming a unicorn there, and I helped them stand up their financial service at vertical and helped get them into the crypto space back in 2017.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of good sales experience there.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that caught my eye was you went to undergrad at University of Wisconsin and you majored in geology and business, which my first thought was that's truly, I don't see moron, geology and business, but maybe I got that wrong.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was searching for a major in college.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: I started off in music performance, and I ended up going through five or six different majors, and I had to pick something before I graduated, and the sciences were interesting, but I ended up not using that.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: So do you keep up on any geology things at all?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: No, not really.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: Not really.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: A friend of mine uh graduated a year in front of me.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_02: He came back from his first year out doing mudlogging, basically geology on an oil derrick, and his description of that job encouraged me to figure out how I could sell something, anything but geology.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's funny, I'm based in Colorado, and our current senator, John Hickenlooper, he was actually a geology student as well.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he did.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think he started off in geology out of college, quickly realized that wasn't his thing, and actually started buying buildings and starting up pubs and restaurants in what's now Lodo here in Denver, Lower Downtown, helped transform the whole area, and then got into a life in politics where he was mayor of Denver, then the governor of Colorado, and now one of our state senators.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, same thing, you know, he spent a little bit of time in geology and then realized that maybe business was more his thing than that.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was an interesting moment of time that passed quickly.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, not your usual hotbed of sales leaders coming out.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: No, it wasn't like a Stanford MBA or something in business or tech.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's fantastic.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, I'm interested in your time at PTC because that is that formative time.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you remember from those days that uh you still apply and use these days?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, daily.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: It was one of the best sales organizations that I've ever had a chance to be part of.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: It was a really difficult sales organization if you weren't on the top of your game.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: But if you had good natural instincts, you worked very, very hard and you listened and saluted, yes, sir, a lot, you did fine.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_02: It was a spectacular product.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: So that combined with a great sales organization.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: Just uh we did 36 consecutive quarters above plan as a public company, and we went as we went out as a public company really early, and it was an amazing run.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the time when the whole Medic framework was was birthed, is that right?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_02: Medic was invented at PTC, yeah.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: And now it's become MedPIC and MedPix, and there's in uh innumerable uh derivations of it, but yeah, it was a good solid framework, and that was the Bible by which you did account reviews, and you were measured by it.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: It was great training.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I bet.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's go back a bit further then.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, seven-year-old Jeff, where in the world were you and what were your interests as a kid?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, Kenosha, Wisconsin, one of six kids, and so a large family.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: My father was a laborer, and so you kind of did what you did on your own.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: And at the end of the day, it was like, okay, do we have all the kids back in the house?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: Great, it's been a good day.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: So uh a little story.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: I was a I was actually twice that age, I was 14, and I learned how to fly on my own and didn't tell my parents that I was actually going to the airport.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: I would bike up to the airport, work as a line boy, and then I would get flying time for my work at the airport.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so I soloed before my parents, I put my yellow solo certificate in front of my mom and said, Would you sign this?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: She said, What is it?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: She goes, It's my license to fly by myself.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: And she was like, What?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: Was it the you know, ask for forgiveness, not for permission, right?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: Precisely, yeah.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: She was wondering why this light little airplane was buzzing the house all the time.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Well, that was me.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: You must have scared her to death.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: I did, yeah.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was probably not such a nice young man at that point for my mom.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: In your teenage years, then apart from hustling around the airport, uh, what else were you doing in terms of jobs and hustles?
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: I always had typical low-income family, always had a job or two, and then just always trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up and went to University of Wisconsin and graduated from Milwaukee.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: So just nothing remarkable, just a lot of hard work, and I learned the value of hustle and putting your back into it.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: And if you didn't succeed, well, that must mean you we weren't trying hard enough, so just keep pushing hard.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: So that worked out well at PTC, you know, that sort of drive combined with some good sales tutelage.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: The foundation of hard work, maybe from your dad, right?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: My dad and my mom, yeah.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, my mom uh had six kids at home.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: She babysat two other kids, and then she took in ironing.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like, I don't know how she got the energy.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: God bless her, huh?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's great.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: So now there is no better way to find out about the real Jeff than by using one of those bullshit LinkedIn polls that we see all the time coming through.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I've picked three here to give you to answer.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: First one is from Avi Shek Jana.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: According to you, which is the most important trait that inclusive leaders must possess?
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the four options that she gave were humility, decisiveness, emotional resilience, and charisma.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_01: Those are my options?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: Those are your options.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, because I like empathy.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: I like drive and empathy.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: So drive and empathy.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: You put that in kind of humility, and I don't know.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I I guess humility would be a good one.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in her results, the top one was humility at 33%, and then emotional resilience was second at 31%.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And interestingly enough, charisma was last at 13.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what to make of that, really.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I guess as an inclusive leader, you have to have a sense of humility and empathy rather than be the big charismatic leader, I guess, is probably where that's going.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So that's poll number one.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Poll number two from Thomas Riley.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: What type of zoomer are you?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Not boomer.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: What type of zoomer are you?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: The one who just woke up, the one without the camera?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: The one who always talks?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Or the one doing funny faces all the time?
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know that I'm any of those.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: I like uh What are you more like then?
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_02: Which one's more like?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: I'm paid to talk about what I sell and how I sell, so I'm probably more falling on that realm than some of the others.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: That's probably about right.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um the highest answer was the one without the camera on.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: 51%.
• 12:21
  unknown: Yeah.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: How do you handle that, Jeff?
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: When you get on a call in inside the company or in the team and someone doesn't have the camera on, do you just let that go or do you try and set the standard that uh it should be on?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think it starts with the executive team.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_02: And if and you can have the candid discussion with the executive team.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you're in a meeting, be present.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, if you were face to face, you wouldn't be flipping through your other materials and on your computer and not paying attention.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_02: So if you're in a meeting and it's virtual, be present, have your camera on.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then people follow the lead that you set.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: So if your camera's off all of the time, they're just gonna assume that that's okay behavior.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a tough one.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes there's valid reasons, I guess, why people don't have their camera on and you don't want to embarrass anyone.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've got to turn the camera off, turn the sound off, and but then as soon as I'm back at the desk, I'll flip the camera back on.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: And then the final one from Alex McNaughton, a serious one this one, actually.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: What is the biggest gap in yours or your sales team's capability right now?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Four options again.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: First one, effective qualification, compelling presentation, handling objections, or negotiation and closing deals.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: I think handling um objections is typically one where sales organizations struggle, and I think that's that's just part of that struggle as a salesperson because you get trained on all of the features and functions of your product, and when it comes to objections, it's really trying to find out what the truth is.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: At PTC, we used to call sales the art of getting to the truth.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: And an objection to me is just simply a way to uncover what's that individual really thinking about.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: And then there's some really good sales techniques to use, you know, like a negative reversal from Sandler, where, or just a simple reversal, where if they say, Yeah, I think we're gonna go with the competition, oh well, yeah, okay, that's probably a good thing to do.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_02: And see what happens.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: So it's being good at uh handling objections and really trying to understand where they're coming from is a difficult skill.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: That's typically something that only the best salespeople master.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think you're right.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think we all handle objections because we get these questions.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: Call them questions, call them objections, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone says, yes, I I handle them, I answer them, I deal with them, whatever it might be.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: But whether you're operating it at the highest level is really the question.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think sometimes people find it a little bit tough to give that reversal, a negative reversal, right?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, the worst thing for a salesperson who's, let's say, not confident in what they're selling or how they're selling it is if they hear some rejection, like no, the sales has stopped.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_02: And really a big part of being an effective salesperson, in my opinion, is that you're able to figure out when to fire your customer.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: And not that that's in a negative way, but just saying, hey, you know what?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: I don't have what you need.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: This is not a good fit.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: So it's best that we just stop our discussions and even let me recommend a solution I think might work for you.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: Because then you're gonna free up your time for those opportunities that you really have a better chance at winning.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a good point.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: We probably think we're better at handling these things than we actually are sometimes.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So let's get to the topic for today.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, two of the most in-peril roles there are the head of sales and the head of security.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So CISO, CRO, or VP of security, VP of sales.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think uh last time I found some research on this and CSO Insights said that the average CRO tenure is 18 months.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe that the average CISO tenure right now is either 17 or 19 months.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: So we're right there in the same ballpark.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: The kind of irony is that we're on either either side of the same fence, I guess, from uh the sales side in what we do.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about this.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that so low?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at a standard enterprise sales cycle these these days is six to twelve months, new CRO comes in, you got a few weeks or a month or two to get your feet under the desk and get things going, you don't have much time to make a difference.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And yet very quickly it's decided that you are or are not the right sort of person.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: What's your experience there?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, yeah, because I mean I dealt with CISOs for most of my career, and that's a difficult job.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Because you have responsibility for the outcome, the secure outcome of all things that happen at the company.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: Oftentimes you're reporting to the board.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_02: So there's enormous pressure for the CISO to be right 100% of the time, and they have responsibility for everything, but they have control of very little.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's some reasonably good parallels to a CRO is that you have responsibility for all revenue, but you don't really have control of much of the means of delivering the revenue.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: You don't have control of the product, you don't have control of the market.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you let's say you do have control of the marketing, but oftentimes there the biggest disconnect that exists between the board and the CRO is the forecast.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And let's say the company has has been formed for a year or two, there's oftentimes this board expectation and investor expectation, excuse me, that how can we get to a billion-dollar valuation?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: And the common formula that I've seen for getting to a billion-dollar valuation is 3x, 3x, 2x, 2x.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: So revenue growth year over year, a 3x, and then another 3x, and then a 2x, a 2x, and you have a billion-dollar valuation because you have somewhere around$100 million in net revenues.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's like a formula that's just kind of out there now in the industry, right?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's expected to be on the right trajectory.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the number should be.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there are MBAs that get hired by the VC firms that look at every single startup, what the revenue is, less about the earnings, more about what's the average ASP, what is the retention rate, and there's formulas that they plug in.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're above the radar, if you're above a certain line, you're on their radar and you're a cool company and they want to invest in you.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: If you're below that line, it's uh much more difficult to get a really strong valuation.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a tremendous amount of impact if you're growing at a very high rate.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then the expectation is that's just going to be the growth that we expect, and your job is to figure out how to get there, as opposed to a thumbs-up forecast about what here's where we're at, and here's what we think we can do with current investment and current pipeline, etc.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, precisely.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm I'm over-generalizing, but it's been my experience that that's more prevalent than less prevalent, and getting more that way, that there's a greater expectation that there's going to be spectacular growth, or I should say, strong growth on a predictable basis.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you're a CRO and you're coming into an organization and the board and the new investors have these expectations, and as they all do, and because they want a strong return on their investment, they're going to be expecting that there's going to be certain revenue that's going to be coming in over time.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: And for a CRO to put together a forecast and to prove out the forecast is actually math cannot, sometimes it's not your friend because one of the big problems in putting together an accurate forecast is this thing called cohorting, or the ability to time sequence when certain revenues are going to come in.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: Because you've got, you know, it's easy to say X number of deals times X average sales price gives me revenue.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so each quarter you say, okay, we're going to get 20 deals in, and each deal is$100,000, and here's our revenue.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: And next quarter that's going to grow by 20%, and then the quarter after that, another 20%.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: So you build this forecast.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: But what isn't accommodated into that is an accurate view of how much time does it take to hire and ramp up your salespeople?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: How much time does it take to ramp up the marketing efforts?
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_02: Whether it's organic search, paid search, whether it's social media, figuring out what ad words to buy, who to target, what to message, that takes time.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: What's the time to close for a typical deal?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: That's probably the easiest thing to look at.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_02: But then what's the time to success?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: How long does it take the customer to be successful with your solution, which then sets you up for the upsell?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: And all of these times, I've seen forecasts off by 40 or 50%, which is a huge number, just simply because time isn't taken into account in a in any sort of uh significant or meaningful way.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: So what does the head of sales do with that then?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is it a case of being a bit more rigorous in all that analysis, or is it better?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: Is it they got the data, but they they're not taking it to the board in the right manner?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's it's tough actually to put this data together because this is a fairly complex set of math problems, and it's spreadsheets can only go so far.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I've in the past used specialists to help put together the appropriate model to model out the revenue over time.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's most important that it's not that you want to be precise, it's that you want to be directionally correct.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: So you want to say, well, okay, so based on these assumption sets, here's where we're going to be over time, as opposed to here's where we're going to be.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: And if you have a a fairly decent model put together, you can express that fairly clearly.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess then if you have a better model than You can take the top-down allocation of the triple, triple, double, double, double, right?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: And just then backward plan to make sure that you know you it's all based on real reality as much as it can be and the right assumptions.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: You can you can take the top-down model, you can do a bottoms up.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you have a good math model, then you should be able to provide for your team, marketing and sales, specific numbers which say, here's what our KPIs are on a weekly basis, how many impressions do we need to get?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: How many MQLs do we need to have?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: How many SALs, SQLs, how many opportunities on a weekly basis?
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: You can track those so that you can look at each of the sources of lead generation and then opportunity conveyance and figure out are you on track based on what the model says or are you off track?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess the it's somebody used the analogy once of it's like a torpedo.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: You want to be able to point the torpedo in about the right direction, and then the torpedo is going to course correct on a very regular basis.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what this establishing your KPIs are on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and then tracking them so that you get a very good sense of and tune the model to where are you making progress, where are you going to see success, and then if the model's connected from the very top of lead generation through revenue production, then there's going to be no surprises come 12 months from now if the revenue is off from what the prediction was.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like that relies heavily on sales and marketing working together on the model.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Notoriously, of course, you know, we don't always work so so well together, and the Kumbaya isn't always there.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_01: Any tips on how to get that coordination and work the same way?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of communication.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly it's going to vary quite a bit depending upon the situation you either inherit or you're able to create.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: If you're able to create the team and you can hire those people, you're going to be hiring folks that are compatible, and potentially even folks you've worked with together before.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's like get the band back together, we know how this is done, let's go.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: But I think the tougher situation is if you're coming into an environment and there's, let's say, you're the CRO and marketing is separate from you, and there's a CMO, and it's can you work together?
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: And that can be a real challenge.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it makes for an interesting discussion that sometimes about what the reality is.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess again, you have the model that you can fall back on, which is more accurate and based on reality, then there's less scope for the arguments about what's right and what's not right.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: You've hit upon that key touchstone, which is if there's a connection between leads that are generated, impressions and leads and MQLs, and then deals that close, if you have a connection top to bottom, then you let the facts speak for themselves.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: And then there should be a natural alignment to the avenues that generate the best types of lead, which converts into the best types of opportunities.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_02: I think that the essence of the problem stems from the fact that if the the marketing department has one set of attributes and measures that they have, and those are disconnected from the sales measurements, that typically can end poorly for both sides.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: We'll come back to that in a second, but I want to pivot a little bit for a lighthearted look at how we in the cybersecurity space call ourselves, how we describe what we do.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: I want to play a little bit of game with you here.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna read out three descriptions of companies from their websites, two of which are real cybersecurity companies, and one of which is made up by me.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to see if you can guess which one is the made up one.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Are you game?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: Alright.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So company A.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: Find your weaknesses before the hackers do.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: The company is on an online, is an online vulnerability scanner to find cybersecurity weaknesses in your digital infrastructure to avoid costly data breaches, receive actionable results prioritized by context, and companies' high-quality reports help you sail through customer security questionnaires and make compliance audits a breeze.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that's A.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: That sounds real.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: B is we attack to protect.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: As the threat from zero days grows, organizations are asking for realistic ways to prepare for them.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: This calls for the ethical use of zero days like the one we discovered in Palo Alto's global protect firewall, affecting 10,000 assets.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And company's black box approach discovers, identifies, and maps your external attack surface.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that's B.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: C.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: The company offers real-time protection for your endpoints using AI to identify and block threats as they occur.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Company's self-notifying and agentless approach means that organizations can quickly and easily get protected.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Combined with anti-malware and encryption, the company provides the first and only total solution for endpoint protection that uses true AI and ML.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: So which is the made-up one, Jeff?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're all both the second and third one are plausible.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: Which one you've made up?
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: I will say the third one, and the only reason that I'm saying the third one is that your voice was a little bit more enthusiastic for that.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: And it was a shorter read.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: I was telling it too much.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what you're saying?
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm trying to read the room.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was so proud of my own words that I just got more animated reading them out.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: That's it sounded very plausible.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: So I didn't have much to go by, so I had to read in motion, and I don't know if I'm right or not.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you are right.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I made up the third one.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is a company called Intruder, and the second one is a company called Randori, both in the cybersecurity world.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_02: And well, the third one sounded quite valid.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: I just figure if you throw enough buzzwords into a sentence, then you know, you confuse people enough that someone might believe it's real.
• 29:21
  unknown: Okay.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go back to real life.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that is happening right now is the I guess the acceleration in the sales tech space.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's more and more technology coming to bear to help us be successful, be more effective.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm wondering what when you look at where you are right now, where you've been recently, as you're looking to make investments, where do you think the investments should be made, you know, beyond Salesforce, right?
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Salesforce, what are the tools that you think are gonna have the most impact for early stage companies?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: Well, uh the the sophistication of the marketing technology stack, in my opinion, is years beyond the sales technology stack.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: There's account-based marketing, which seeks to really pinpoint who the potential customer and prospect is when people from that organization are consuming the right sorts of materials so that you can precisely get to them at the right time, and it's really gotten very sophisticated.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: It's oftentimes very difficult to set up a really good ABM marketing program, but there's a whole array of tools, whether they're high-priced or low-priced, to help with the precision and the effectiveness of the marketing effort.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: Sales is, I think, just starting to wake up a little bit, and it's probably a little bit harsh, but from the perspective of, you know, sales has always been here's a bank of numbers, or go to the classic Rolodex and give those people a call.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: And the advent of like conversational AI has really remarkably changed the ability to learn quickly for a sales organization.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_02: You know, sales is kind of this tribal knowledge of you've got these really good salespeople and they go out and they do it solo.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it's that single hunter.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it tends not to be a group effort because it's done one-on-one, or there's the salesperson, and so it's having a new salesperson get in lockstep and be the shadow of an experienced salesperson is quite difficult because there's not practice runs.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: There's real life, and you better be good at it.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: And you don't want a whole gang of people descending upon your call, especially if it's in person.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so with conversational AI, I think it was helped dramatically by COVID because so many people got on the virtual path, and the ability to have a good sales call vis-a-vis a video conference was accepted.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: And then so the advent of conversational AI, where you record the video, you analyze it, and then you take the analysis and you seek to improve your rank and improve upon the results that you're seeing from your sales team.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_02: And then, as a training tool, the ability to take snippets of the best and the worst, and then to share those with people.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: And on a virtual call, it's like you're being there and you're experiencing everything from almost a first-person perspective, just like that experienced salesperson was.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: And that's remarkable because it takes it from tribal knowledge to more institutional knowledge.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that those tools are really in their infancy.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: And so I would think that if most organizations, uh, unless you have a customer base that is extraordinarily secretive and sensitive to sharing even the most basic information, that a conversational AI tool would be, in my opinion, as important as a CRM would be.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you need a CRM, and then you need, I would think for most organizations, I would have a conversational AI tool.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: And um So what would you say to a sales leader that early stage, let's say a team of five or ten getting going, but is resistant because you know, I don't need to do coaching calls with my team, right?
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: This is not about did they ask the right question or whatever.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're a different stage than that, or I only hire people with 15 years experience, they know how to sell, I don't need to be on their back.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: What would be your response to those?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: My response would be I'm happy to talk to your successor.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, because if the industry averages apply, that person's gonna be gone in a year and five months.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I don't mean to sound so so draconian about it.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's kind of it's just basic.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you can you if you can ramp up your sales team in half the time or a quarter of the time, and if the the people that have 15 years of experience have one year of experience 15 times, you know, you you want to be able to know that and then help them improve, and or if you have some really good salespeople, allow the less experienced salespeople to come up to that same level or close to that same level in a very short period of time.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so it just it would be to me, it's silly not to deploy something like that.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: I mean provided, of course, that your customers, you yeah, you're not dealing with the CIA and every conversation has to be super secret.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some companies that are known for you gotta switch that stuff off, right?
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think what I've seen, I don't know if you have the same experience, is that in the security world, often they're okay with it, right?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: And as long as you're up front and you disclose, they kind of go along with it, it seems to be much more uh acceptable than we sometimes think it might be.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for like the first, second, third call.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_02: Now, when let's say there's some sort of an incident and you want to provide your opinion based on the incident and things, that's kind of off limits.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, most of the most of the work of a sales team is to cull out the opportunities to get down to the ones that are truly viable.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_02: And and so that culling process to to go through the initial stages of the opportunity funnel as quickly as possible, right?
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_02: That type of conversational AI tool is is really good for that initial that the early part of the sales process.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And going back to what you were saying about the ability to get better, you know, one of the things I've seen is almost without exception, so let's say 90% of the time of the best sellers that I work with, they have an inherent desire to get better.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they just know they can get better, right?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: They don't sit in there going, I've been doing this for 10 years, I'm the guy or I'm the girl, just watch me work, right?
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: They tend to be ones that want ideas, they want tips, they want to take on things that's gonna make their life easier or make them more successful.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the ones that uh are less secure, let's say, in their abilities and less secure in what they're actually doing on a day-to-day basis that seem to be the ones that are more resistant.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's when not to beat the conversational airdrom too hard here, but it's humbling to see yourself and to say, wow, okay, I that wasn't very good.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_02: I I need to improve.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_02: But to your point, if you have an innate desire, curiosity to be better and to always improve, then it's a very enabling technology.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't want to see that mirror, then that's yeah, you want to stay away from that.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you that comes to mind about after Salesforce and after a CI tool, what would come next for you?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, there's all sorts of tools that help to understand what behaviors a prospect is exhibiting.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's super important to really do a good job of looking at your verticals and your sub-verticals and what's the messaging, who are the who's the target audience, and reaching out to those.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_02: And the same, and the same, at the same time, it's good to have some, there's a series of there's a number of different tools that allow you to see who is consuming what type of material.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's akin to account-based marketing for the sales side.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, who at what account is consuming this type of material, and that generally you generally want to correlate that to campaigns and outreach efforts to see who's responding, and then yeah, you want to provide a direct contact to those folks and an opportunity for them to engage directly with you.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, what what 80% of the investigation that people do is on their own, and increasingly less and less of the sales process is education, and more of it is making sure that there's a good fit, and then if there's anything unique that needs to be brought forward that can't be consumed from websites and word of mouth, the sales role is changing, and you know, it's less about education and more about finding people when they're ready to consume.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, speaking about things that are changing, when I used to sell crypto, but when I sold crypto, it was PGP email encryption back in the 90s.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Cryptographic keys.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: That was public key infrastructure, PKIs, yeah, it was all that stuff.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, crypto these days means something completely different.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And this is the world that you're operating in right now.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm kind of keen just to quickly understand you know, what is it about all that area that excites you right now?
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, what are you seeing that uh really catches your eye?
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, uh first off, quick shameless plug for standard custody.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: So, standard custody is the next generation institutional custodian for digital assets.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that means the folks that are responsible for like hedge funds and large investments, these institutional organizations, are getting into digital assets in a very, very big way.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: And they they need this next generation custodian, so the ability to store these digital assets so they can utilize them and keep them safely stored.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: So that's the world that I'm in.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: And this is Dan Charney, who is the president of Cowan Company, has said numerous times that this is a once in a multi-generational shift of our financial infrastructure.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so if we think about the financial infrastructure since a long, long time ago, it's based on a centralized ledger, a centralized organization of the data.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_02: Whether that data is kept on paper and pen or whether it's kept digitally, it's a centralized way to organize the information and control access to it.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_02: And blockchain is a decentralized ledger.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's a fundamental shift at where the information is stored, how to control the information.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_02: Someone said that what blockchain does is it replaces trust, i.e., trust in the people that are involved in the process, with truth.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the truth is you have you have a decentralized ledger that can't be overwritten.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: You write to it and it's there permanently.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_02: And so if ownership of a property, for instance, is on the ledger, well, that's what it is.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_02: We don't need any intermediaries to tell us that this organization owns this property.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's right there.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: So it's the truth as opposed to trusting a number of intermediaries.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_02: So there's a great deal of shift, shifting that's going to occur in who does what within our financial infrastructure.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that this is a tectonic shift, and it's very, very cool to watch it firsthand and and to have some small part to play in it.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it's it's very cool.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's and and now people are getting into non-fungible tokens and the metaverse.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_02: There'll be social tokens that'll follow after that, and it's really marrying our digital universe with currency and the ability to have truth.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: Here it is, it's it's on the blockchain, that's what it is, done.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it's exploding right now, expanding at just an insane rate.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very exciting if you like new stuff.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see a role for I don't know, blockchain in the traditional cybersecurity world?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Is it coming into play in any of these areas that we're we're used to working in?
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, I do think it will be utilized in those areas.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_02: There's different blockchain projects, and you know, just uh blockchain is is a tool, and so in some cases it's going to serve as a really good tool.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_02: Like for finance, it serves as a very good distributed ledger.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_02: And for security, there's probably going to be certain aspects of security that a blockchain would serve very well in.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_02: There's going to be some others where it doesn't.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: And it's going to find its own level set.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I mean, I think it's going, it's blockchains are going to be part of it's going to be a standard component of the fabric that we weave in the future.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: Are you hiring right now as standard custody, Jeff?
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: I am hiring experienced financial people that have been in financial sales and understand fight the deeper finance vehicles as well as crypto.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm hiring a team of salespeople right now and some other folks as well.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_02: And how does someone get hold of you if they want to have a conversation about that?
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_02: Reach out to me.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_02: You can go to a standard custody website or you can reach me.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_02: LinkedIn is a good way to reach me, Jeff Lauer, L-A-U-E-R, at Standard Custody.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_02: And my standard custody address is Jeff.lauer at standardcustody.com.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: Second sponsor for today's episode is Sales Bluebird.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: Be greater at sales and leading sales teams by getting an email weekly with bite-sized tips and big ideas for sellers and sales leaders at cybersecurity companies.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's practical, it's weekly, and it's for free, and that's salesbluebird.com.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: Finally, Jeff, is there a sales question or a sales saying which just grinds you when you hear it that you you wish you could dispatch into the outer reaches of space than never hear again?
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's just there's one little, there's one thing.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's a win-win.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_02: That was used in the 90s.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, let's create a win-win situation here.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_02: It just doesn't seem genuine to me.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_02: Let's say you strike a friendship up with the customer, and on a personal level, yeah, you care that it's good for everybody.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: But really, what we're here as salespeople is we're here to deliver value for our customers.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: So if the customer wins, then by default we win.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it's in my opinion, it's all about helping the customer win.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: And they don't need to know that we win too.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, that just seems redundant.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it but it's all about the customer.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: How can we help them?
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: And what sort of objectives do they have to meet, and when do they have to meet them?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, as long as we're pushing toward what the customer objectives are, life is going to be fine.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: To be serious, though, I like that kind of sense of it's all about the customer, right?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're trying to do.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: We're trying to help them avoid big losses or achieve great wins, either personally or in the companies.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if we do a good job, then you know our rewards come afterwards.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: As someone once said, companies don't spend big money to solve small problems, they spend big money to solve big problems and get big outcomes.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: And as long as we're working uh on solving their big problems and giving them big outcomes, our rewards come at the back end of that, right?
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well said.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: I like that thought.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: All right, with that, Jeff, it's been a pleasure having you on the podcast this week.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're at a great spot right now where you're on the epicenter of a lot of change going on.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: As you say, multi-generational change in our financial infrastructure.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like you're sitting there right at the center of all with what you're doing in standard custody.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: So best of luck with that, and I look forward to hearing about your success in the coming months and years.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's been a pleasure.