Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 177: How to think bigger, bolder and clearer when differentiating

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177: How to think bigger, bolder and clearer when differentiating · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Last week I went on a bit of a rant about Outbound.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And today, what we have is a plea for differentiation.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And more specifically, a plea for being bigger and bolder and clearer about differentiation.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll warn you now at the towards the end of this episode, I'll use real live cybersecurity companies as examples of companies that are doing differentiation, some good, some not so good.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get to the heart of the matter here.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: So 3,000 companies in cybersecurity and very crowded submarkets.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at the breakdown on some of the big categories or even the small categories in cybersecurity, there's just tons and tons of companies that are all fighting for the same piece of the market.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And when we go and talk to prospects, or when prospects come across us when they're doing their research, their first question they'll ask themselves is, what does this company do?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the second question they'll ask themselves is, and how are they different to, and they'll think about a company they already know.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're in the endpoint security space, they'll say, How are you different to CrowdStrike or Sentinel One?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in the cloud security space, how are you different to Wiz or Orca or Equa?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting is the common feedback when you talk to security leaders is that at the end of the day, their belief is that lots of these companies are just not that different.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I talked to CISO literally last week, and he talked me through his process for buying the last piece of technology that he bought.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he said when it came down to it, the last three companies, they couldn't really tell much difference between them.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then they just chose the one that's the pricey model.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not the price, but the pricey model was the one that uh seemed to be a best fit for how big they were and how they were scaling.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the three companies that are left in the game at the end, they just weren't that different, according to him and his team.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: So somewhere between going on a dream and saying we're gonna create a big, innovative, and groundbreaking product and company that deserves our time, our sweat, our blood, our tears, the investment dollars of sophisticated investors, somewhere between that and what the customer hears, things are being lost, right?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when we go on that journey to build a company, it's not to be a little bit better than someone else, right?
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's to do things differently and have a point of view and have a big way to change the industry.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it's just not ending up as something that our prospects and our customers are hearing.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, let's be pretty clear about this.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: If you are in a spot where you, if you're honest with yourself, you've ended up not being that differentiated, right?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: So you start off with a dream and you're building something amazing, but everyone else caught up or is around you and filled the gaps, and suddenly you're at a point where in a spot where you're not differentiated, then know about selling, marketing, differentiation, you know, trying to change things is really gonna help you, right?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be really, really hard to make a big impact.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: You might well brute force the market and get a few customers and feel like you're making headway.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, unless there isn't a differentiated offering, you're gonna struggle to get momentum and break out.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that happens a lot as we're striving for ways to be different is we go down into the weeds.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: We get into our own heads, we believe our own BS, we look it down at the feature level and say, our feature over here is something that they can't do.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: We're faster in this one way that we do this, and they can't do that, right?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And this becomes worse because what we do is we invest in product development, we invest in new features, and we do it for good reasons, and we sell the company, sells the sell the sell team, sell the marketing team on how they're so important.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: But often they're not, and they are just in minor ways different to what's out there in the market.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So what we have to do is think about ways to drag ourselves back up and think about much bigger things to differentiate on.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one place to start is to look for themes as you see ways that you're different.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I bet you if you sat down in the company and said, let's come up with all the ways that were different to other people in the market, you'll probably come up with a pretty decent sized list.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, 10, 20, 30 things that you think you you do different, right?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: The trick is to figure out how do we translate that into a short message built around a theme.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if 15 of the 30 things you wrote down are all about helping the analyst be quicker to finding a resolution, then you have to kind of drag it all the way up into thinking about the theme around time to resolution, right?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Something that I think is probably pretty obvious to most of us.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: What's important though at that point, if we want to really kind of start thinking about how we make an impact for our customers, is to answer the so what question for each theme that you come up with.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the way I think to think about this is imagine your champion who you're working with at your prospect has to go then convince a business-minded CISO that has a limited budget, which frankly that's most of them, right?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: How are they gonna go to them and convince them that this is an investment worth making?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna do that and say it's gonna be different than these other companies because of some feature they have.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna say it's gonna be based on business impact.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're gonna say this company right here is gonna be the best position to help us and then you know fill in the impact, right?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is it reduced risk in a measurable way?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is it gonna be uh increase efficiencies, reduce cost, things like that?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or, and this is a good question to ask your champion, how can they tie it to big initiatives inside the company?
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So go past the usual business drivers and say that the company right now, the biggest thing they've got going on is they're expanding their whole supply chain into Asia Pacific.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: And with that comes needs from IT, and with that comes needs from IT security.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, there's a need to tie investments back to that.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: When you think about helping your champion tie things back to that, that's where you see what the business impact might be off your differentiators.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the aha is I think that's good hygiene to do that, but how can you make this punchy?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this might sound a little bit clickbaity, it might be headlines and you know, flashy things like that.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways, that's what it is, because you know, those things, clickbaity things, headlines and magazines and newspapers, they grab attention for a reason, right?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's things about them that means that a human being is gonna stop and at least look and try and understand what's going on.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what we have to do when we're thinking about how we communicate our differentiation is think about how it can be punchy, how it can be pithy, how it can be to the point.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, headlines and grabbers on a piece of paper or come out of someone's mouth should make someone stop and listen.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: It should make them sit there and say, Oh, I get what they're saying, and I'm kind of intrigued for some reason.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I get what they're saying, I get it, and I'm intrigued.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So one example might be fixed 95% of vulnerabilities in one day with no increase in headcut.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of to the point.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: I might want to make it a bit shorter.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I remember back in the day when Tanium first broke out, one of the things that they that that was their kind of uh line that hit home and was a real uh grabber for them was the idea of getting visibility in 15 seconds or less, right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that you within 15 seconds understand what's going on on all your endpoints across the organization, right?
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: That was a short thing that people latched onto.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the way to think about this kind of headline or this uh way to express your differentiation or in what you do is to say, this is what you want to be known for, right?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I think about it, I get it and I'm intrigued.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then imagine that's gonna stick in someone's head and say, that's the company to do that.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I was intrigued because of how they describe this, right?
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you want to be known for.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is what how we need to think about this.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: So as we think about this, we need to be big, we need to be bold, we can't lie or mislead, right?
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we want to definitely make bold statements, but they can't be quickly torn apart by the first person that digs a little bit deeper.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what we don't want to do is fall into the trap that many medium to large large companies do when they're going through this exercise is don't put it to a committee.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Don't allow everyone to wordsmith it and water it down and add in their buzzwords and say, can't go out there without this phrase in here and that thing in there.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're missing this or missing that, right?
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: That's where you end up with complete nonsense in what you're talking about.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one way to have a think about this and to understand clearly how a company is differentiated and how they're thinking about differentiation, I find, is to first of all look at their website.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I I get it, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: What says on the website and what a salesperson says to another human in a meeting, it won't be exactly the same, but it should be on a theme, right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: It should be, you shouldn't have someone's on the website saying we're red, and someone goes into a meeting and says, no, no, we're blue, right?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's got to be the same sort of message, but just delivered in a certain way.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: First example that I think back to was when CrowdStrike first started getting traction.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, if you if anyone remembers, their strapline was a very simple we stop breaches.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Three words.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it was.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: We stop breaches, right?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't the leading endpoint solution that helps you mitigate the risk from being breached.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Or it wasn't we use AI and ML together with great synergy and threat intelligence to deliver next generation anti-malware, right?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't anything like that.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and quite frankly, it wasn't what they have up there today, which right now on their website at the start of November 2022, it says when we are number one, our customers win.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Christrike is recognized as a market and technology leader by independent analyst firms and third-party testing organizations, all right?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: A mouthful, right?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I for me, the we stop breaches grabs my attention.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's clear what you're trying to do.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm intrigued a little bit to find out well, what the heck does that mean?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: How do they do that?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what I would do is compare we stop breaches to currently right now, BlackBerry on their website, it says cybersecurity for all, critical event management, secure embedded systems.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Blackberry is intelligent security everywhere.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: So when I read that and I look at it, I go, I have no idea.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: I just got no idea what they do.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, cybersecurity for all, you know, it's the old thing.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you're for everyone, you're for no one, right?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: But critical event management, I don't know, secure embedded systems, all right.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: BlackBerry is intelligent security, no idea what that means.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: And everywhere, really?
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Everywhere, I don't know.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: Networks, endpoints, cloud, uh, phones, I don't know.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: Is it everywhere?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I don't know.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: When I look at that and I think about the sniff test, which what what do we say it was?
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is can I say I get it and I'm intrigued?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I look at this and I don't get it, and I'm certainly not intrigued.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Great phrase from from Donald Miller in uh the story bred world is if you confuse, you lose.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: This to me is confusing, frankly.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's a big company.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's been running for a while.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's had different pivots for various reasons, as we all know.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: A very young company that's still finding its way in the cloud security space is a company called Daz.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh on their website it says, fix at the root, go fast, remediation that scales with your cloud.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: When I read it, first of all, I thought it was a little weird.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't, it's using words fix at the root.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's some very technical term that maybe everyone else understands and I don't, but fix at the root seemed interesting.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Go fast, do I go fast?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Do they go fast?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Who goes fast?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of people say they're fast.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And remediation that scales with your cloud.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was an interesting phrase I I was kind of confused a little bit about.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I look at this and I go, okay, so remediation in there, and I think they want to be the remediation company with cloud security, I think.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of look at this and go, well, I it's sort of kind of there, but it seemed like just some phrases thrown up there, frankly.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if they could have got some inspiration from CrownStrike and simply just said, I don't know, something like re-remediate the issues the others find, or re-remediate the issues that other tools give you or tell you about, or something like that, right?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, something like that might be a little bit clearer about what they actually do.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that it's it sounds like it's almost uh alongside other tools might be the intriguing bit to me if I read that, right?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's compare this to another company in cloud security, which is Aqua.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Aqua Security.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Their website right now says, we stop attacks on cloud native workloads, we guarantee it.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's run that through our quick little rubric here.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I get it and I'm intrigued.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do I get it?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I get it, right?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: They stop attacks on cloud native workloads.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right, I get it, right?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that intrigues me is the very bold statement, we guarantee it.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, anyone who's been around security for a while knows that absolutes are not what it's all about.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone that says they got 100% security, you kind of laugh a bit at, right?
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm kind of a little bit intrigued by the we guarantee it.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: We guarantee it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: How do they guarantee it?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to learn more about that, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of those, that's not like a hook to me to say, tell me exactly how you guarantee it, which is maybe what they want to do.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: So for this one, Aqua, that's to me, that's very clear.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: We stop attacks on cloud native workloads, we guarantee it.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Another space to look at is actually the source space, the security orchestration, automation, response space.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a bunch of competitors in there, and anyone who knows this space for a while knows that in the past, it's been plagued by complexity.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's been so hard for people in SOX to try and do SOAR.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: They have to be developers almost, to write the code, write the processes, write the scripts to then do SOAR in any sort of effective way.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that's been the bang of the SOAR industry for a while.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what's emerged recently is like the next generation companies in SOAR.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And what they've all done is rallied around the idea of no code or low code.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if I look at two companies in the space who are doing really well right now, one is Tines, and their thing is no code automation for security teams.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Another one is Torque, and their one is no code security automation.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I call this out because I kind of think it's interesting, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Is that uh in two of the leading companies immediately went to no code, no code, right?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Another company in this space is called Revelstoke.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they took a slightly different approach.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: And their three words on their website right at the top is radically simple SOAR.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Radically simple SOAR.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then they got a little graphic or an image, a GIF, I don't know what it is, where you see things moving around, you know, almost like building things right there and then.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: And in their text below, it says Revelstoke SOAR is the first low-code, high-speed SOAR platform built on a unified data layer.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: So what I liked about what Revel Stoke is doing is they're not saying, you know, me too.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're not saying immediately no code, low code, right?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: They're not saying, you know, SOAR, but with no code and copying or signing the same as other people that they're competing against.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: They've actually got a very different take.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And frankly, I'll tell you, if you actually follow what Revel Stoke is doing, I don't know who in the company is doing it.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: I had Bob Cruz, the CEO, on the podcast uh a few months back, but uh everything they do is different.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It stands out, it's impactful.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: They say things in a different way, not be confusing, but to be intriguing and just be different to what the you see in other people's websites out there.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I think they're a great example of a very early stage company.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're a Series A, Series A stage company using the few resources they have very effectively to try and stand out in the markets.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I want to call them at radically simple sore.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if I think about takeaways for this, you know, the temptation is to water down our differentiation, right?
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: We want to water it down.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: We maybe don't be so bold.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, once we get into developing the product and we realize how hard it is and complexities and we're not quite delivering everything yet.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: The temptation is let's water it down, right?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let's figure out how we how we say what we need to say, but we don't rock the boat a little bit.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to say something where we got get caught at.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then we start wordsmithing it.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make sure that these people are on board and the founder and the CEO and the marketing folks, the salespeople.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And before you know it, you've got this weird kind of clummet of words that are there.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you want to be different, but you don't want to be boring, right?
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be able to say things that will catch the attention.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be simply said and be intriguing at the same time.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think an important part of that is to get to the essence of what you're about and then boldly explain it.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Figure out how to say it boldly as opposed to saying it in 15 words, 20 words, and use all the buzzwords and things like that.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the the one reminder to the founders and CEOs and executive teams listening to this is when you're doing this, don't lose sight of the big dream, the big why you started building this company in the first place.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Don't lose sight of that, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because that North Star is probably still relevant when you're thinking about how you can boldly say things so you get noticed out there and your differentiation carries through.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: With that, I hope you enjoyed that episode and look forward to seeing you next time.