Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 168: Tom Miller, sales leader and author of Call Your Shots - knowing your value

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168: Tom Miller, sales leader and author of Call Your Shots - knowing your value · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Sales Blue Board Podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Whether you are a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, we give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: I am your host, Andrew Monahan.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_01: Our guest today is Tom Miller, Chief Gravity Officer at Human Security.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, Andrew.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be here.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation, Tom, because this is not going to be in the usual mold of interviews that I do.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: You've got a long and storied history in cybersecurity operations and sales and running companies, but also you wrote a book recently, and uh we're gonna talk about that.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: So there's gonna be some interesting and you know, from reading the book, very different takes on some key components to building companies in in any space, but you know, in our space and cybersecurity.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking forward to to getting your perspective on a few things from the the topics you wrote about in the book.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: However, before we get to the business end of this, let's get to know you a little bit better.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: Tom, I have, I believe are not 35 questions on my list here.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: The good news is I'm not going through 35.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you to randomly pick three numbers between one and 35, and I'll read out the question that corresponds to.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with Lucky Seven.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Lucky seven is apples or oranges?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Apples.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Any particular reason?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tough one because I went to Syracuse University where the orange men, but um yeah, apples are uh more of my go-to snack.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, same for me, but you know, when I was growing up, when I was a little kid, probably seven, six, seven years old, uh, one side of my my gr uh family and the grandparents, they had an apple tree in their backyard.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: And because I was the smallest kid in the in all the cousins, I was the one that got sent up the tree to shake the branches and let the let all the apples fall down.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I could have a love, love-hate relationship with apples.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, apples go with you know other other uh tasty items, you know.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: So apples and peanut butter or cheese, it's uh a little more versatile.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: True, true.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's got more gravity.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Next number.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let's double it up.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: 14.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: 14.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: One song that you could listen to for the rest of your life.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Pink Floyd Money.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, oh, okay.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, any particular reason for money?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh mostly, I think the song speaks to what was true 10,000 years ago and is probably going to be true 10,000 years from now.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, timeless kind of elements to it, right?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I, you know, uh for a long time I wasn't really into Pink Floyd.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: A couple of years ago, uh, I got really into it, and then I dropped off.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, just a couple of couple weeks ago, I somewhere on my YouTube feed, you know, popped, you know, comfortably numb from Pompeii or whatever, and I'm back in to the Pink Floyd.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I was at a Roger Waters concert about four weeks ago.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm still plugged in.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Where about oh, it was great.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was great.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And where was the concert?
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: At uh Madison Square Garden.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was delayed for two years because of COVID.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: But um yeah.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: All right, all right.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Last number between one and thirty-five.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go with 30.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Favorite season.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Favorite season, summer.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Don't like the cold.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: But where do you live right now?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: I live in New Jersey, and um my wife loves the fall and the winter, and for me, I'd I'd I'd sit in Las Vegas or Phoenix or what you know, 115 is right up my alley.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I just uh I'm ready, I'm ready to uh give up on New York, New Jersey winters.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I bet.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: I live in Colorado, so winter, yeah, winters in Colorado are not as bad as people think, but you know, it does obviously get cold.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but I was born and grew up in Scotland, so uh I don't do the the 115-degree heat all that well, and I certainly don't do humidity at that level very very well at all.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I love Colorado, and um I ski.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: A Vale is my favorite place, and uh, you know, when you're skiing, you're typically not cold.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: So um Right.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it doesn't I don't consider Colorado cold only because every time I go there, I'm on a pair of skis.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it's uh it's expensive.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: We have an unwritten unwritten rule in Colorado is you don't tell people how the winter's not as bad as people think it is.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone might start moving here.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, I'm recording this.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm actually up in Breckenridge right now, uh, away for a few days.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I pop up here for I'm doing some deep work on things.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'll come up and uh get focused for longer days than I do or able to at home anyway.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where I'm recording this from.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a beautiful blue sky day here in Breck, which is uh which is nice.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Let me ask you what might seem like a weird question, Tom.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: What is a kabuki dancer?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, a kabuki dancer is um is is is is uh in contrast to uh the book I wrote, which is Call Your Shots.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if you're not a shot caller, sort of by default, you're a kabuki dancer.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the basic definition of a kabuki dancer can be framed by um sort of a saying that um seemed rather appropriate to me as I thought a lot about how companies get off track.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And um it and and the saying is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and mostly what kabuki dancers are are very well-intentioned, smart people who unfortunately have been either taught or learned or tricked in some sense into believing that uh certain things that uh qualify as causal when we think about these relationships between our behaviors, activities, and strategies and whether or not we get rewarded from them, the belief systems that uh exist um are um either mostly incomplete.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know that any of them are completely broken, but it's in their incompleteness that um these good intention people get way off track.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: And but if unless there's some sort of roadmap uh back to to um the right track, you know, generally the um there's there's there's kind of the inertia of the status quo kicks in and they keep performing um in ways that uh that that nearly in many cases doom them.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um but then they develop a belief system that actually many people have high conviction around, but um, but it doesn't help you win.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And um and uh that's honestly, you know, the thesis of my book was based on the idea.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, wow, you know, Andrew, it's it just seemed backwards to me that winning is so rare that when you achieve it, they call you a unicorn.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And failure is the norm, and we just accept that that's the paradigm we all have to live by.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, as someone like you and all the other sales and marketing and go-to-market, uh, I mean, it's it's everyone in business, but you you know, my am cut from the cloth of the of the go-to-market people, and um, they're so intrepid and hardworking, and I admire them so much.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I just had I've ex I've experienced both ends of the spectrum between uh uh high levels of success and sort of abject levels of what the hell actually happened.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why didn't uh all of this energy, activity, behavior, resource, investment, why didn't it get rewarded?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then as the person generally in the hot seat, having to explain this to teams of people, investors, boards, CEOs, and C-level executives, it um became too painful to bear.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's when I embarked on the journey to try to track the code and answer the question about what separates the unicorns from everyone else.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately that's what my book is about.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that information and your experiences are built up over the last 20 years.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: If I look at your your LinkedIn profile, you're president at Trend Micro for quite a while, you're head of sales at Zscaler in the early teens, uh, SVP sales at Malware Bytes, CRO at emailed, and now you're the the chief gravity officer at at um human security.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: So um let's lead into some of the concepts in the book by asking you what the heck is a chief gravity officer?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I I get that question a lot.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm the only one in the world.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you're the only one in the world.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, it it's I sort of landed on the title a bit as um a little bit of almost uh a joke with the CEO of um of Human Security.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And um I began helping this company uh as a consultant.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: I was uh at some level you know trying to um wind down, maybe consult and do a little bit of board work and focus on trying to help companies with the frameworks outlined in the book.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was very tempted by the amount of gravity this company can create.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I agreed to join as an operator and uh under what well in one of the conditions, and again it was almost jokingly, that I could be the chief gravity officer.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: But the CEO uh really leaned into our framework and he said, I love it, let's do it.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one of um one what one of the principal realities, um, and this this will answer the gravity question, but what one of the principal realities is in um our understanding of the relationship from the full spectrum of innovation to cash at the very beginning of the understanding of that relationship is a kind of a pretty simple concept.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what's the value of our innovation in the first place?
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean how well is it packaged and how many salespeople we have.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I just mean stuck in a basement, you know, someone or some group of people innovated something that um innately could be perceived of either low or high value.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and that that simple idea is you know, is is um something we can all easily grasp.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: What what tool did we build?
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: What job are we trying to get customers, uh help customers get done?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and then how powerful is the tool we built?
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: And there was no real way to um quantify that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: We we we we we might say you know, we we might imagine based on the quality of the tool, the size of the market, that the reward for that innovation could be of a certain size.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that never really explained who would ultimately get rewarded.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: In cybersecurity, for instance, there are 5,000 cybersecurity companies.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: 20,000 um companies, cybersecurity companies have been funded.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Only 20 went public in the last 20 years.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're talking about one-tenth of one percent, one one-hundredth of one percent of my math is right.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: So this abysmal uh success rate and this massive failure rate.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and I had been in charge of uh building products through one of my roles at Trend Micro.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: I owned a roadmap.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: I had to think about where the market was moving, where cybersecurity was moving, and what innovations we could create that could get rewarded.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: So this concept of the quality of um the initial innovation seemed to be um a big part of what would ultimately determine or separate the winners from the losers.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, as a go-to-market person, you know, the reality is that these technologies, and we hear it all the time, the best technology doesn't always win.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's the idea of how we get closer to customers and how customers perceive our offer.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a really important idea that people just have to accept that value is not real.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely ephemeral.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: It only exists in the minds of human beings.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: It can only be perceived.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: The moment it's not perceived, it literally does not exist.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And the good part of accepting that reality is that you can also accept that if it's only perceived, then it can be altered in the way it's perceived.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: And these alterations of perception occur on aspects of um the way value perception gets deconstructed into its uh fundamental elements.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: And this is another concept that's not that complicated.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Value can only be perceived as a combination of functional and emotional aspects, and then this um compensating factor, which sometimes we call economic value, but I prefer to think of as the worthiness effect.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So a tool that can offer me certain amounts of function that make me feel a certain way, will be rationalized in my brain as ultimately um being worth it or not.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so these exchange of value ideas really started to um come to light to me as a way to imagine, well, who's winning and losing?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And um just because I geek out a lot on a show called How the Universe Works, I sort of became an amateur um, you know, physicist.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, the formula for gravity is pretty pretty straightforward.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's more or less mass and proximity.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: The moon orbits the earth because the earth is bigger and at that distance it's perfectly aligned and it orbits the same way uh the earth orbits the sun.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you altered the proximity of those objects, um those forces would change, and the closer two objects are to each other, the more gravity it creates.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, okay, that's a pretty useful um construct, but it didn't go far enough because there were always other forces at work.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like, why the hell is it so hard to win?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it became really clear to me after managing teams and teams of people, especially that were responsible for customer success or renewal teams, that in cybersecurity, even a bad enterprise security product gets renewed 85% of the time.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: And a good product gets renewed 95% of the time.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not enough to have a lot of mass and achieve proximity to your customer because your customer is held in place by the gravity of alternatives, the perceived gravity of alternatives, and that creates this third force, which allows you to imagine that you could weaken the grip on your customer's perception of existing solutions or other alternatives.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I liked about what you said, Tom, was that uh you know, the probably one of the strongest uh gravitational forces is the do nothing, the status quo.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we've all experienced that, right?
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Where we think we've got some compelling, you know, really strong reason to make a change and do something different.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we believe, and yet, you know, many times the prospect goes, eh, you know, I think we're just gonna stick with what we're doing, and we kind of scratch our heads going, what the heck just happened, right?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the dreaded, well, that's interesting.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there's there's there's there's a very specific trigger that happens in the brain known as transference.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: When someone's emotional state changes from interest to desire, and you can architect that outcome.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a cool framework that is known as challenger selling, and it describes these ideas of creating tension, which you release, which drive the emotional state of transference, and um provide this unassailing rationality around your promise of impact.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And specifically allowed for, I mean, we're all trained not to bash our competition, but it's not bashing your competition to weaken the gravity of their position.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: In a unit of, and I call this third form of gravity anti-gravity, and a unit of anti-gravity is just as powerful as a unit of positive gravity.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: But think about how much time and energy go into developing a product.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, any technology product and cybersecurity is at least two years of development time, another year of product market fit testing in the market.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, you it a company could easily be$50 or$100 million in to uh to the launch or release of a significant new product based on a certain um innovation.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And um you compare the cost of that$50 or$100 million innovation, you think about the gravity it creates because of how much mass went into it.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then to imagine that um your customer seems apathetic to it, and instead of you know spending another$50 million to try to alter the quality of the product for virtually uh at virtually no cost or little cost, if we concentrate on understanding the job the customer is trying to get done, the outcomes they value, in ways in which the uniqueness of your tool, which I refer to as the inner core, this is where most perceived value lives, is in this idea of what makes your offer unique.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: By positioning your product correctly and using some effective anti-gravity to weaken the gravity of alternatives, many times, um, and this has been my experience, in putting my framework into practice, you know, many times I can jumpstart or turbocharge the effectiveness of a go-to-market strategy, a sales team, and turn something that's you know kind of low growth into um, you know, 2x, 3x kinds of um outcomes without altering the product at all.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about something that you you mentioned a bit ago that um it tweaked my thought process.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Usually when we in the sales and marketing world think about value, um, the thing that we we go to is business value, economic value in your in your parlance in the book, right?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And what stood out to me was that you also taught, though, about how important it was to understand functional value and also emotional value.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: What are functional and emotional value in the context of building a cybersecurity product for someone?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a great question.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: The your promise of the the the first the the first key to the answer, and and again, and again, this this was um I just felt I had to write my own book to get the answers I couldn't find anywhere else.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because the key to unlocking perceived value is to first understand that the preponderance of it will come from this thing I call the inner core.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I write a little story about Tiger Woods, and you know, it it was um it was um Tiger Woods um as a thought exercise.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um there's this little parable which says Tiger Woods as a brand is uh creates a billion dollars worth of revenue.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: But as a golfer, he wins$10 million in prize money.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: And every morning, Tiger Woods has to wake up and like roll it back 10 years when he was still a very active golfer.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: But every morning he has to wake up and decide, do I drive to the office or to the practice range?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: At the office, a billion-dollar business is unfolding.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And at the practice range, he's honing his skill to only win$10 million.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the trap, of course, is to imagine the best place for Tiger Woods is the office.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not what creates the value of the brand.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: The value of the brand is that he's the best golfer in the world.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's his superpower.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of the concept of your inner core.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's this thing that makes you so unique, it ignites some superpower that allows for unique differentiation.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that unique differentiation, that superpower, is what bestows upon you the privilege of making certain promises of impact to the marketplace.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, those promises, and the first thing, sort of your inner core, I like this, I always say that you don't pick your inner core.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Your inner core picks you.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Michael Jordan tried to pick baseball at some point.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know, his body reminded him that his inner core was basketball.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so find your superpower and then understand what it is.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: And in the case of Tiger Woods, his superpower is completely functional.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's a physical thing to be able to do what he does.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, he might have he might have um amazing uh discipline and tremendous emotional control, but ultimately, you know, golf is a game measured by getting a ball in a hole in as few strokes as possible.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: And um the person that's the best at that is simply best at that.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: But it's there's a cool thing known as the value triangle, which is typically drawn as it's taught as a triangle of equal sizes where functional, emotional, and economic value are all contributing evenly to overall perceived value.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_00: But in the in reality, that's the wrong way to think about um value perception, which is which leads to what I call value stacking.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: You have to understand that your inner core, and in the case of the Tiger Woods story, it's 70% of perceived value will come from the value element that represents your uniqueness and your superpower.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we'll call it our secret sauce.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's how you want to represent your brand to the marketplace.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: First and foremost, Tiger Woods has to be the most functionally proficient golfer in the world.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: So think of that triangle as having one really long side of at least 70% of your value being packaged and brought to market with a shortcut to the preponderance of value.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually my definition of brand.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's the shortcut to your primary promise of impact.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you have about 30% of remaining value to then decide how to fill out your value stack.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, um, there's another relationship between economic and emotional value, which has to be accounted for as companies think about creating a value stack and as they imagine which value elements to bring forward, people exchange value primarily because they want to feel, and there are many emotions that humans are possible of.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of value exchange, there are two primary emotions that drive the vast majority of all value exchange events.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're either buying the product despite the price.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants the second best heart surgeon, nobody wants the second best airline pilot, nobody wants the second best luxury good, nobody wants the second best cybersecurity.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's a it's fine if we get hacked a little bit.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you will buy a product largely despite the price, because the job you're trying to get done requires that your brain rationalize the exchange of value based on a feeling.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Humans do not buy based on rationality, they rationalize an emotion and uh the emotion they seek.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: You, me, or buyer, anyone, uh, the emotional state they seek is the feeling of superiority.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: If I believe that exchanging value with this party will result in a superior outcome compared to all alternatives, then the exchange of value will happen.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: If not, the exchange of value won't happen.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_00: So we have to understand the market we're in, we have to understand the what job our customers are trying to get done, and then we have to understand, in a sense, what ultimately they will need to feel in order for value exchange to occur.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: If the nature of your product isn't that the customer needs to feel that the exchange of value will create an emotional state superior to any other um outcome, then the emotional state that the buyer is um is is is is is it needs to experience simply the state of satisfaction.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's these are the products where good enough is good enough.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is how this is how if I go to Home Depot and I need a screwdriver, I don't need the$25 screwdriver, the$5 screwdriver looks just as good to me.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm only trying to get a job done.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't require that the tool make me feel superior, that this tool is providing me a superior function compared to all alternatives.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if I'm in you you you live in Colorado, if I if I if I if I need to roll down the slopes of Breckenridge at high speed, well, I want the best tool under my feet, and I'm going to look for something that's very high performance, despite the price, and I will want to feel like, in that case, this pair of skis will perform better than any possible alternatives.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so the relationship between functional and emotional value is first, what's my inner core?
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: What is my inner core value type?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: If it's functional, let me communicate why it's functionally unique and let me convince the customer that they will feel a certain way.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then the last element of value stacking, and we're all taught to perceive economic value, but really what's happening in your brain is the calculus between function and emotion at a price point.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And largely, you know, if there's two pairs of skis and one costs$500 and one costs$1,000, your brain starts imagining is the$1,000, is the$500 of extra performance, is it worth it?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_00: And guess what?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not, except in the way it makes you feel.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: And if it makes you feel that much more confident, if it makes you enjoy your day that much more, then$500 is a small price to pay to achieve that feeling.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the idea that functional value will be evaluated for its rational elements, but you will ultimately conclude worthiness based on this feeling.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there are really only two feelings you ever have to account for.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: Does the buyer need to feel emotionally superior or is good enough uh truly good enough?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in one case, you're buying the product despite the price, in the other case, you're buying the product because of the price.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: And once you understand that that basic brain hack is available to all of us, it becomes significantly easier to take whatever your innovation was, and again, in terms of gravity, this thing that has mass, how do we position it in the mind of the buyer for its maximum value?
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the whole uh relationship between value, value type, and value stacking.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's how that works.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: So let's uh let's bring in cybersecurity then to that concept.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, as you say, you know, there's three to five thousand companies out there right now.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how many how many rocket ships are truly rocket ships right now?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't know, less than 50, I don't know, less than 20 of those three to five thousand are really truly on a on the trajectory.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of rocket ships, despite what people say, they're sitting on the launch pad, still trying to find the right uh ability to take off, right?
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, how much of that is because do you think because people don't understand that you know the they believe that they have the best thing in the market, but don't believe don't understand that actually very few people care about that.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: There seems to be a mismatch sometimes, right?
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: Am I picking up on this right?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: You you are, and here's the trap that um that um in cyber that we don't the world does not need 5,000 cybersecurity companies.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's cool that that there's funding and venture capital, and um it's a it's it's it's it's a constantly renewed um industry because of the criminal element and and the hackers you know driving innovation, whether we like it or not.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a thesis through a framework known as jobs to be done theory.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the thesis is pretty simple.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Products are tools to help customers get jobs done.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what's at the highest level, what's the job of the cybersecurity professional?
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: To minimize the likelihood of a severely negative cybersecurity event impacting my business.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, that falls into a broad taxonomy capable of berthing 5,000 companies, all delivering thousands, tens of thousands of promises of impact, all pretty much saying the same thing: buy my product or die.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so how do you cut through the noise and um what separates the winners from the losers?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, within that question is a basic reality.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: What job is the customer trying to get done, and how important is that job?
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's trap number one.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of products get built because someone, probably a kabuki dancer, believed something that wasn't true and extrapolated an understanding or or an expectation of a marketplace that simply wasn't there.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you, I mean, I've been in rooms with really smart venture capitalists and bankers and Harvard MBAs, and and the disagreements just on what seem like simple questions hey, what's the addressable market for this job?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are order of magnitude level disagreements in what should be a very simple question.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that people can't read a spreadsheet or do math, it's simply that our perception of how important a job is to get done varies wildly, creating wildly different um expectations of whether or not a tool to help get that job done will ultimately result in a reward.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: So to that point, then, um, there's lots of things that are broken, right, are not working great inside an IT or infra or cybersecurity organization.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: The real question is, is it worth fixing them?
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is the effort to fix this thing actually worth it compared to the other 350 things that could be fixed as well?
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Is that kind of where you're going?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's the idea.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_00: So um, and you can score these things.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's it's a very difficult science to apply, but the science exists to score importance.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the next trap people fall into is how higher existing levels of satisfaction.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like just because we had a tool doesn't mean the market hasn't already been significantly either well-served, or in the case of cybersecurity, with 5,000 companies all chasing the same budget, the markets are generally massively overserved.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: And when you start creating the sort of neutralizing effect between levels of importance and levels of existing satisfaction, they kind of cancel each other out.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of the positive gravity created by the mass of your innovation, but it's offset by the negative gravity of um existing alternatives.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's it's it's it's it's so tempting uh to believe that um the market will choose you, but you can't like you can't cheat gravity.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's um it doesn't care what you think.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then you know, once you start comparing these ideas of satisfaction and importance, the the last trap that people fall into is the trap of um pervasiveness.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning, hey, look, you know, we all get tempted when our best customer says, Wow, if you could build this, I'd buy it, and we start extrapolating the idea.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if they need it, the next company in the next industry, in the next vertical, and uh people tend to get drunk on the idea that the job is far more pervasively needed than we ultimately find out that um the reality is that it isn't.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, the companies that go far, they have a lot of mass, they achieve proximity uh to their customer with a value proposition that's effectively stacked.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_00: They're revealing the preponderance of their value in ways that are precise and concise.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_00: They lower the cost of customer thinking as they think about building their brand.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love CrowdStrike's promise of impact.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: We stop breaches.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't get much simpler than that, right?
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: Three words, we stop breaches.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're realistic.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_00: An expert about the relationship between importance, satisfaction, and pervasiveness.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: And they set expectations effectively.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point, you know, this becomes the hallmark of the of a well-run company that's um that's got mass.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: You have to have mass.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you again, you can't cheat gravity.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: At the end of the day, you know, I see a lot of these cybersecurity companies, and generally you conclude like it's not a business.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: You know, maybe it's a product or maybe it's a feature, and uh, but it's but it's not a business.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: And and that's how that's how to think about it.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: Is the tool significant enough to drive high importance in an outcome that's underserved, and is um is um is the need to get that job done within that underserved market.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: Is it pervasive?
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is it global?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: I want to wrap up here with um one bit that stood out to me in the book that I really liked was you had a whole section on value traps.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: So the traps that we get into trying to convince ourselves.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: You talked through some of them just now.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me uh how we can learn from Michelangelo when it comes to uh value traps.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's one of my favorite stories, you know.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um a long time ago I went to um uh the the uh the museum in Florence where the David is um is displayed, uh Michelangelo's David, um, the greatest work of art I had ever seen in my life.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: But in the buildup uh to um walking into that uh section of the museum, you see a number of other Michelangelo sculptures.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then a bunch of them are just like half done.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's just kind of a rock that looks like someone chipped away at it.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: And um, the Tor guide was very, very specific of impressing upon us as we saw those and thought, like, well, why would they display these unfinished pieces?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: And she's and the Tor guide said, no, no, no, no, these are not unfinished.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's no such thing as an unfinished Michelangelo.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because he didn't sculpt, he simply released the masterpiece inside the marble.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if there was no masterpiece, there was nothing to finish.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: So he simply stopped.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: So these are these are depictions of his genius, in the opinion of you know art historians and art experts, that are just as relevant as the fully revealed pieces.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I use that um story as a way to coach people to understand that sometimes it's okay to stop.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: You know, sometimes your innovation, it doesn't have a David inside.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's no masterpiece.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_00: And um, it's kind of just a rock.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a fool's errand to constantly chip away and chip away and chip away and try to reveal something that's not there.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_00: And don't haven't we all had that feeling in business where you know we have a tool, maybe it's pretty good, it's not that important a job to get done, the market's massively oversaturated, and uh we think that by incessantly pounding away at the market, by this constant chipping away, that we will ultimately uh get rewarded.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: It seems like it's a natural human impulse to believe that um you know uh there's there's there's there's um there's goodness you know associated with hard work.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: And um, but the lessons of business are very harsh.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: And again, you can't cheat gravity.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: If if um if that's your reality, um avoid that chipping away.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_00: I call it the chipping away fallacy that the idea that you will ultimately get rewarded is a false god.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Stop, go back to the drawing board, find your inner core, re-innovate, package your value stack effectively, and then re-enter the market with a promise of impact that speaks to its value in ways that cause customers to perceive a sense of urgency because it's of a high importance to get the job done, and then look for opportunities that are underserved, and that's kind of you know um what the best innovators are able to do.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's the finger on the pulse of the marketplace that they seem to have.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: That's that really hit home with me, that this whole idea, Tom, because you know, as you know, in in many markets, not just cybersecurity, the symptom of this is the uh the sales team that gets turned over every 12 to 18 months.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like the sales team is the one that's supposed to uncover the Davids.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: If only you you sold faster, more, harder, told them more stuff, the David would suddenly appear from the go-to-market that we're building.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you don't unveil the David, you get fired and let go.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Let's bring in some new people who know what they're doing, and they keep keep doing the same thing, and then they get fired, and it's just like never-ending uh, you know, really, really good sales leaders and sales teams trying to do the right thing, but at the end of the day, there's they're just not going to uncover the David under the stone, under the rock.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think you know, you know, I talk to sales leaders all the time, and you know, you feel for them, like, and you they can sense it, they know it, that uh they'd be put in us in a spot where they're taking the they're taking it on the chin for things that probably should have been thought about differently, better, more in depth, uh, much earlier on to really know what the right thing is.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, what happens is the board comes in and says, well, we gotta do the triple, triple, double, double, double.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, you're all failures, right?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and now, you know, who knows with uh with Wiz coming in with their hundred million dollar ARR in 18 months, is everyone supposed to do that suddenly?
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't know.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is where it gets a really, you know, uh the reckoning happens at this point for sales teams.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I like your advice, which is you gotta recognize that that's the the point you're in, and and no amount of brute forcing this is gonna suddenly unveil a David for many of these companies, and you have to decide whether you want to stay or leave.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and it's predictable.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, these are not um these are not uh goose chases.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: You you can you can measure the quality of your innovation, you can test it against questions about how pervasive the need is or how over or underserved the market is.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like and you can run productivity models that um can quite accurately predict the rewards you should expect.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: But um most companies simply don't have an understanding of what the ultimate state looks like.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you're removing the variables about whether you've not found your inner core, you've uh not effectively stacked your value, you've not revealed your value for its maximum extent.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when you're making those mistakes along the way, of course, yeah, it feels like, well, maybe the next person will figure it out.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe the next person will crack the code.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of success gets built on the corpses of hundreds of dead sales and marketing people along the way.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's I think a very unfortunate part.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: One of the reasons I wrote the book was to reduce the pain and suffering for go-to-market people.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because we're the layer that's expendable.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: As companies iterate, you know, essentially, essentially throw, and my, you know, in my view, they kabuki dance their way to throwing a lot of spaghetti on the wall.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: They hope the market figures it out.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then, you know, there's, I think, some of these broken ideas like fail fast.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: How about just let's not fail?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I prefer that one.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, let's do it right the first time.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_00: And truthfully, you know, Andrew, it's just not that hard.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's these understandings of how humans perceive value, um, the capacity to understand the relationship between innovation and value, value and gravity.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then in in my framework, um, strategy is nothing more than the altering of gravity to maximize your chance to reach your objective.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if you understand it, you can create um you can create reasonable objectives that you could expect to achieve.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think that uh let me wrap up by saying that uh, you know, as I got into the book, what I realized was that all things that I'd been taught or learned over the years were, let's say, you know, a couple inches deep.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: And what you did in this book was take it a lot deeper and make sense of things that I think a lot of people kind of scratch their heads at a little bit, not quite sure you know what this means.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, this should be simpler, but it's not.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, where I go from the book was a way to think about all this that actually made a ton of sense to me.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: So uh what I'll say to the audience is you know, call your shots is is on Amazon, because I know that's where I got my my version from, and it's probably other places as well.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: But if this dialogue with Tom you know hits home with you and you're you are in that spot of either trying to bring something to market or you're you're trying to figure out why things are not working, I think going back to the principles that Tom talks about in the book are really going to play out for you.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: So call your shots is the name of the book.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: And Tom, if someone wants to reach out to you directly and have a conversation and and maybe seek some help from you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
• 46:14
  SPEAKER_00: If anyone would like to reach out, uh it's again, it's Tom Miller.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, please feel free to email me at uh gmail, which is TJM, the number two, and then tup at gmail.com.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's tjm2tup at gmail.com.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks everyone.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks Tom for joining us.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: Really enjoyed the conversation.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh really in definitely thoughtfully looking for all I do and encourage you to look for Tom and look too.