Hey, it looks like we have maybe 20 or so people in the call. So for those of you who I don’t know, and there are some new names here, my name is Megan Dubofsky. I am an Operating Partner and CMO at Ten Eleven Ventures. And my favorite part of my job is to meet the people at the companies we’ve invested in and help them get answers to some of the challenges that they’re facing as they grow these awesome companies.

So today, we’re going to speak with Mark Vachon, who is a sales leader who’s been at a bunch of enterprise software providers, including SuccessFactors and ServiceMax. We’re here to talk today about how to make these really hard deals go a little bit faster. I know it’s something that almost every company we’ve invested in struggles with.

And so today is just meant to be a forum to hear some ideas from Mark, and then hopefully open up into a conversation about some of the specific things that people are facing, and just have a really open forum to maybe problem solving some of those together and benefiting from the shared experience. We have a bunch of pre- submitted questions, which are great. And I think Mark has incorporated those into his presentation. But if other things come up, just please jump in and let’s just make it as much of a conversation as possible.

If you don’t mind, if it’s easy putting your company name in the thing that says on Zoom, like your name, and then in Parent Company, that would be great. If that’s hard to do, maybe just say it when you ask the question, just so we have the background.

Awesome.

OK, thanks, Mark. Does that sound good? Can we get started?

That sounds great. What screen can you guys see? I told everybody I know how to display screens perfectly, and I’m having some challenges. So which screen can you see?

It looks good, Mark.

All right, we’re good?

Awesome.

Well, I appreciate everybody joining today. Please make this interactive. I’m not going to spend 10 minutes beating my chest, telling everybody about all the great deals I’ve done over the last 35 years selling enterprise software. What I can tell you is that my expertise is definitely in enterprise selling. And when you talk to young companies, a lot of the time, I have this thing to the left that you see, the founders are always focused on this complex application that they have, right?

And they’re just like, oh, just go call the account and do a demo. And they said they’re interested, and they’re just going to buy it, right? And I think they lose sight that there’s a lot of things that happen in enterprise selling, and it’s really a company effort. So what I’m going to try to do is dig into some of that. I’m not going to go through all those things that you see to the right. But what I try to tell early stage founders is there’s a lot of steps that can or can’t happen in enterprise selling, and there’s a lot of people involved.

And it is probably, in many ways, in some cases, more complex than your product. So it at least gets a couple of people’s eyes to open up. The next screen is, I’m not going to touch on all this today, but I think I told the folks earlier today, I graduated college with marketing. And I remember I sat down one day after I graduated. My dad said, what did you learn in school? And I said, well, I learned the four P’s of marketing, price, product, place, and promotion. And he goes, that’s interesting. I goes, what does that mean?

I go, don’t worry about it. He goes, OK. I go, I’m going to go sell something, right? So I did start out selling a consumer good products for the first few years of my career. And I came home one day, and I said, boy, these guys next door to me, if they get home early, and they drive nicer cars, so I better start to go sell software. So I moved from CPG to software.

And this diagram really is to talk about all the different things or different areas that happen. And I’m gonna dig into these for maybe some older folks on the phone, you might go, wow, that kind of looks like the Star Trek spaceship.

That tells you how old I am.

But I really believe that a big part of what happens, it’s around people. I’ve seen really good people sell not so great products in really competitive environments and do super well.

I’ve seen not so great people try to sell really great products and not do so well.

And the other really key thing is it’s a company effort today, right?

I mean, in the old days, the person would go out, they’d meet with somebody, they’d do a couple presentations, they’d bring another buyer and they’d make a decision. Today, there’s lots of ways that people interact with your organization. Most, all the studies will tell you, at least 60% of companies are gonna do their own research. They’ve used another solution before. They have existing relationships. So there’s a lot of different things that need to happen inside the organization.

I’m not gonna touch all those to the right.

And a lot of those are centered around good marketing, right? And sales and marketing need to be really, really tightly aligned, particularly in enterprise.

But I am gonna focus on people. So I’m gonna talk a little bit about people.

I’m gonna talk about politics quite a bit because I think a lot of deals are lost in politics.

And I’m gonna talk about process.

Won’t touch on product much.

So those are kind of the four areas that I’m really, really gonna try to get into at a high level.

So this is a little bit of a simpler view.

I think at the highest level, people need to tailor their processes and they need to understand what the process is to who they’re selling to, right?

And I think people forget that. I get on a lot of calls and people say, oh yeah, they told me this is the next step, right? Well, you’re following their sales process at that point, right? You’re not really driving the process. So you need to have your own process and then align it.

You need to understand what the evaluation criteria is.

There’s a lot of unhidden evaluation criteria and there’s different groups of people, okay, that have different use cases and who see different things. You get on the phone and I’m gonna talk a little bit about that as you talk about multi- threading and having multiple relationships across the organization. Because you’re always triangulating that, trying to figure out, are these stories lining up, right? Do they make sense? Because generally speaking, an enterprise is gonna touch multiple groups and people.

I would say, as I look back, I think politics is probably one of the things I’ve seen kill more deals and it’s a lot of unwritten things. It’s conversations in the hallways.

It’s the relationships that you have between the executives or the people making the decision.

Sometimes it’s just interdepartmental friction that’s going on.

So I think it’s really, really important in today’s world to understand and think about politics.

So this is kind of what I would call at a very, very high level. I don’t have a lot of time today to get into a bunch of detail. But at a very high level, I would say, what are some of the things I wanna think about as I try to put together an enterprise practice?

And what I’m not gonna do today is tell you, oh, these are all the steps that you should do to sell your products.

No, you guys need to figure that out. But what I am gonna talk about is what are some of the areas or things that happen and what are the things that we need to do?

So first of all, you need to be consultative in solution selling.

I listen to a lot of calls and I hear a lot of, I this, I that.

It’s very, very product- focused.

It’s not really trying to solve a problem and it’s not consultative in nature.

It’s very one way.

So I think that that’s something that’s super, super important.

You need to be account- based selling.

It needs to be personalized.

You need to do research. You get on a lot of calls and hear people go, what do you guys do?

What’s your role?

How do you do it?

Versus saying, hey, we spent a little time learning about your business. You know, we think these things, we heard and read this, is that right? Right, because it just makes people feel like you understand who they are and you can personalize the relationship.

I’m gonna talk about team selling.

You know, every Christmas when I’m selling out gifts to people, the last gift that I’m sending somebody to is the salesperson that did a really good job this last year because they made a ton of money, but who I am generally sending gifts to is the EDR or the BDR, or I’m sending a gift to the SE, right?

The SE in my mind in complex selling is that person.

That’s the individual who can make a very large difference in your sales cycle.

Continuous discovery. You have to be continually asking questions. You know, every time you’re going through these sales cycles new people show up. Oh, we need to show it to this person.

Oh, I want, you know, I want to get these people involved.

And we forget to build relationships with those people. We forget to ask what’s important to them.

Bill, Mary told us this, so we just keep cruising down the road thinking that’s what’s important and it’s not gonna be. It needs to be data- driven, right?

They need facts, figures.

They need to understand, you know, who else you’ve worked with, what results you’ve had. You need to do some good storytelling to make them feel comfortable, particularly if you’re a small company.

I’ve worked around a lot of organizations, and I won’t try to tell any tool war stories, but I do remember 20- plus years ago when I first worked at this little company called SuccessFactors that ultimately got bought for $ 3 billion when we called big companies and we said, oh, we have an HR product that’s in the cloud. They laughed at us. They literally laughed at us and said, if you think we’re ever going to put our HR data in the cloud, you definitely live in California. You are higher than a kite, okay?

We were calling big enterprise customers, so it’s really, really important that you do good storytelling. They’ll feel comfortable about your company.

You need to have strategic account managing process, whether it’s account reviews, it’s in Salesforce, but it needs to be at a strategic level, not a tactical level, and it is about value selling, okay? So I’m going to go into some more of these in a little detail. You guys can see everything to the right. I’m not going to go through each and every one of those. I think it aligns a lot of things I just talked about, but one of the things I will continue to talk about is you need to hire the right people.

When somebody looks through that web meeting or you’re there in person, it needs to be somebody that’s credible. They feel like they’re going to buy from people, buy from people they like, people they trust, people that think you’re going to help their business, and ultimately people think you’re going to help them.

And I see a lot of mismatch in the kind of people they hire to the people they’re selling, okay?

And you need to get to the right level, right?

I think everybody understands that in enterprise because there’s lots of different layers. Any questions from the group on this particular slide before I start to dig into a little bit more detail?

Yeah, I had to just jump in, guys. I know there’s a lot of experience on this call, too, so we definitely respect that and want to all learn from each other, so if anyone…

Mark, one of the things that we’re seeing a lot is that, you know, this is all great, by the way. I really like it. But the prospecting has become massively challenging in that CISOs and people in the organization are just bombarded, and they’re just completely tuning out. No responses to emails, phone calls, some success with LinkedIn, but not a lot. Any ideas there?

Yeah, so I think some of it is going back to some of the traditional modes. I mean, everybody I talk to, response rates are down. I am hearing people say, oh, we should cut back our SDR, BDR, EDR, whatever you call them.

I do not encourage that. I do think you need to get more creative, personalize the voice messages. I think you need to call people more times.

So I would keep the calling. I wouldn’t get rid of that.

But I am seeing people go back to some traditional method, and that is trade shows, right, where they can try to get in front of people.

So I’ve seen the mix of trade shows go up a little bit.

I’ve also seen a few companies do some direct mail pieces, some simple direct mail pieces. The other thing I’ve seen some success in is trying to go find who supports that individual, and what I called in the old days, the secretary, so it’s a bad term. But the person that supports them, who is that person?

But I do believe, you know, it’s funny, this morning, my phone rang, and I was upstairs. My wife goes, your phone’s ringing.

I go, oh, because I was doing a personal call last night.

I didn’t have my ringer on.

I don’t answer any call, right? I don’t think most of us do anymore. So I would go back to some of the traditional tactics.

Maybe it’s direct mail.

And then I think I would also use your network, right? So I think that’s the other thing I would suggest is, you know, how do you internetwork with people? I don’t know if that helps, but yeah.

This is Dave with Device Authority. I think events, I can trace every major deal I’ve done in the past 30 years to an event somewhere. So I don’t, I think those are still well worth the investment if you choose the right one. The other thing, which might be dated, but I still think it works, and it’s worked for us, is getting a customer on a webinar, right? And putting maybe a partner with them so that you’re not directly selling, but you’re able to talk about a use case using your solution. People go to webinars when there’s a customer on them.

They always do.

They will. That’s a great idea.

Yeah, customer webinars are good. I’ve seen those drop off a lot, but I do think customer webinars are definitely a good one. Partners are a good one, right?

If you’ve got partners that have relationships, I mean, I don’t know where everybody is in their maturity curve. The other thing is local regional events. So if you’re at some point, I don’t know where everybody is in their inflection point, but if you have enough local regional customers, right, and you can get a prospect event. A lot of them we did off of other shows or events that we were at.

So we would try to leverage it because we knew the people were there, but I think those are also helpful. But I haven’t seen, the webinars have dropped off the last couple of quarters big time, was what I’ve seen.

One thing I would add on the cyber side is: join in a cyber security community wherever you can like. Sign it with Robert Rodriguez. We’ve been very successful with that, being warmly introduced to see, so’s he does a good job of introducing startups to the big guys. So, yeah, something to think about there.

Those are guts, a great piece of advice, right? So then on LinkedIn, any kind of groups that you have, right to get coverage, you know you should be at least in those groups. People should be managing and monitoring those and it shouldn’t be all about selling, right, you need to add value. Right, you need to be having, you know, your, your demand, Jen, needs to be value- added demand, Jen, not just pure product.

Right, things are gonna learn and listen and get value from, whether it’s, you know, digitization, webinar, whatever you do, I think a mark product century.

Hey, mark, this is Dan with Blackbird AI, manage our business development. I’m just curious if there’s any kind of stories from your SAP success factors days around when you were kind of running into that challenge of like, hey, you guys are crazy for trying to move HR data into the cloud. Similar, different kind of scenario here. Right, we don’t have a ton of public customer success stories we can go to right now and kind of use that social proof element.

We have a great bench of clients, but not necessarily ones we can talk about openly and email and outbound and things that we want in writing and things like that, right. So I’m just curious if there’s any kind of insight you can provide from your, from your experience, from SAP days and just wherever right just around, how to leverage that storytelling, social proof, reference selling piece. There you have, like when your early day is kind of developing out, yeah, processes, yeah.

So I don’t know how early you are.

So a couple questions I would ask is: if you’re very early where you don’t have a lot of great customers and you can’t measure success, then sell the company hard, bring in more of the internal team and make them feel super comfortable about you right in your business and who you are. So I can tell you early days it whether it was service max and, by the way, success factors. I was employee like 40, right. So almost every company I’ve worked at I’ve been less than 100 employee 150. Okay. So it just depends on where you are.

If you don’t have good references yet, then sell the company and sell them hard, right, and sell the product- sorry to say that product- figure out who your competition is, figure out those two or three or three or four things that you know you’re better at right and and find people who align to those three or four things and drive those home right.

Yeah, so we did it: success factors and we drove it home.

We said: make SAP come in, make him show you this- you told us that was important.

You think that’s really great. Make him show you that no, slide work right.

So, yeah, I think that’s what I would do, it very early on, gosh, I wouldn’t say we’re that early on, but I mean it definitely resonates for sure where we need to kind of think that approach. But and if you don’t have pub, yeah, if you don’t have public customers, like you can’t use their name- is what I think I hear you saying they use some anecdotal. You know, have a slider to this anecdotal about.

You know, have your customer base, maybe not with the logos, if you know they don’t want you sharing because you’re in security.

But you anecdotally talk about.

Here are the things that we’ve helped solve for organizations and here are the areas right.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Appreciate it.

Any other questions before I move on. Alright, so let’s talk about people a little bit. So so one of the big decision, the big mistake areas I think I see right now is: you know ICP and personas, right. So- and I’ve seen this like time and time and time again, especially if we’re trying to build top- of- the- line funnel with SDRs, BDRs, or we’re using partners that are out there trying to get meetings for us, and I strongly encourage that, if you have a great partner network, they’ve got a bunch of companies.

You know that. They know is you got to go spend time with them to figure out how they can get you. You know, you know in front of those people, right.

But but think very, think very carefully about who are your personas and then what tier are they right? So in some cases- like I’m working with a company right now that this tier four would probably be their first tier- they’re gonna get more traction and juice out of talking to those people than they are talking to people to the left. I worked at other companies where they don’t want to talk to the fourth tier at all.

So just think about who are these people and think about across, across the different areas that you might touch- whether it’s an end- user, whether it’s a business level person, executive, IT, whoever it might be- and get those really straight and make sure that people are focused on those folks.

Okay, I don’t think there’s one decision maker.

So if everybody’s going up to the see- saw, well, everybody, their cousins, going after the see- saw.

I

So, you know, it’s gonna be super, super hard. So, you know, you’ll hear me talk a lot about multi- threading today, right? You need to have multiple people you’re going after so that you can find a way to get into the account versus, oh, let me just call the CEO. Yeah, it sounds interesting, but hard to do. Let me pause on this one for a second. Any questions on that?

We see it sometimes where if someone’s starting with a tier three or four, but then they need to bring in a decision maker, you know, the economic decision maker to get it over the line. Like any suggestion on that? I think some companies have interesting plays on starting with, you know, the user, but then when they’re bringing in the economic decision maker or whatever to get the budget for the bigger contract, there’s some, it slows. Any suggestions on that?

It slows in the sense of the person, so the question you have to ask yourself is why does it slow? Is it slow because they don’t see the strategic value? And so the values at the end user level, it doesn’t align with some of the more corporate initiatives. I need to understand more about that. Here’s what I would say in general, is that I think one of the mistakes that salespeople make a lot of the time is they go, they do a meeting, and then they latch on to Bill, Mary, or Bob, right?

Because, you know, they’ve been designated as the person who’s going to evaluate or run this. And then they have a series of other meetings that people come in and they just keep latching on to Bill, Mary, or Bob. So, you know, once these other people come in, you need to go one- on- one and build relationships with those people outside of those meetings. I think one of the things I have seen as a big mistake is we’ve become very groupied. So we’re always getting on these group calls, right?

And I think that good salespeople are gonna go off and build two or three other relationships on a one- on- one basis away from that group, and they’re not gonna ask for permission, okay?

That’s really interesting.

They showed up to a meeting, they showed up to a meeting, they were there, they had an interest, and good salespeople will call that person out. They’ll look down the list and go, oh, I know who’s here, and they’re going through an area that they know is important. They’ll go, hey, Bill, how do you feel about that? Hey, Mary, would that help you? And by them doing that, they just gave themselves a license to go talk to them.

That’s helpful, thank you.

But if it’s just a groupie call, and then one person comes in, and they just come in, don’t say much, and they leave, then you’re stuck. And then, you know, anyway, okay. Sorry, I could talk about that one for quite a while. So enterprise selling, velocity, and execution. I keep saying that everywhere, right? Because the problem is, is as we all know, enterprise deals are very lumpy, right? You can talk to somebody, the thing can go dead for quite a while. They didn’t get budget.

You know, sometimes you may come back a quarter or two, a year or two later, okay? And then they pick that deal up, right? Which isn’t ideal, but you know, the reality is they had their own time, and they had their own timing. The true enterprise level, if they don’t have a compelling event, and the right people aren’t involved, the reality is you’re probably gonna buy on their timeline, not yours, okay? Probably, right?

Because, you know, many times these go through very succinct, you know, financial reviews, you know, I don’t know what you guys are seeing in the market, but I’m seeing, you know, anything over 500K- ish, depending on the size of the company, may go in front of the board today, right? They’ll at least push it by the board. So, have a formal account process. These are two snippets from a formal account plan. It’s using the MEDIC, okay? Using the MEDPIC sales process, and you can see it’s people in politics process.

But, you know, this is one of the areas that I really like to hone in on is, okay, who are the people? We always ask, well, who’s the coach or the champion, or who’s the mole, or who’s the economic buyer? Whatever terms you use. So, they go, oh, it’s Bill, Mary, or Bob. Great, okay. What influence do they have? Oh, it’s Heidi of, great. Have you ever talked to them? No.

No.

That’s the part we’d miss, right?

What are our interactions like? Right, we have to, and I’m gonna just beat this to death today, we have to make sure we’re interacting with multiple people.

No person makes a decision for the company anymore. There’s lots of consensus, right? Lots of consensus that’s happening.

So- Can you talk a little bit more about like not asking for permission? Like, do you think there’s hesitation because they have a relationship with the primary and they don’t wanna go around that person or?

Yeah, and I think they had to realize this. I think you just have to have a mentality that, hey, I just did a meeting, Bill set it up or Mary set it up. It was a great call. We had eight or 10 people there.

So somebody needs to make sure we’re capturing all those people. Somebody needs to make sure that we’re following up with all those people.

And then you just need to ask, you need to engage, right? If they’re highly engaged, don’t worry about it. But if Bill or Mary’s there and you look at their LinkedIn profile and you know they’re super important, but they haven’t said a word, right?

Then have a question that you’re gonna ask them during that call.

You’ve now interacted with them.

You now have the ability to talk to them. You don’t need to go back and ask that person.

If they slap you, great. But if you don’t try on your own, then I think you’re missing a huge opportunity, especially if you’re a young company. Because the challenge in a young company is you’re probably dealing with some bigger competitors and they have multiple relationships already.

They already have a contract in place. So you have to figure out how to spawn in that account. And it’s the least disruptive path to just, oh, they have a process.

They’re setting up the next meeting. They said this is what they’re gonna do next. Well, that’s great. If you go through that process and do what everybody else does, how are you gonna stick out and be different?

You’re just following their process. I’m gonna respect their process, but I may not follow it 100%.

Didn’t that sound bad?

Super helpful.

Okay, any questions on this piece? So it all just gets back to how much influence do they have? And if the salespeople can’t answer that, and how much interactions have you had, then they can’t tell you that they’ve had interactions with multiple people, you probably know you’re in trouble. And then how many meetings have you had? We’ve all been there where somebody goes, oh, we just talked to this account. They’re gonna buy this quarter.

I’m gonna get to some more detail in a minute.

How many demos have we done? Oh, we’re just setting the demo up next week. How many told me, oh, we had a great discovery call? Like, ah, really? Probably not, right?

And then this bottom one, the purchase process.

You start asking those questions and figure out how do they really buy, and in many times it gets hazy fast. Okay, so what are some of the roles that people play? Obviously the salesperson, we got that part figured out. The SE, right? I don’t know how many people have SEs or don’t have SEs. Maybe your salespeople are doing full cycle because that’s what makes sense from an economic or the type of product that you sell.

But if you have an SE and you utilize an SE and they have that technical skills, they’re doing the demos, you have to make sure those are professional SEs. They’re salespeople at heart. You’re giving them tasks. They’re calling people, figuring out data, right? They’re building a relationship that’s separate from yours, right? So that you are kind of multi- threading on your own with another person.

So I’ll stop there for a minute. Does anybody have any comments or thoughts on that train of thought?

Yeah, hi, this is Ryan here from Valtry. On the solutions engineering side, we probably had most of the challenges in that space trying to find really good solutions engineers in general and that are very technical, but also have that capability from a sales standpoint to talk the right language. So any tips, any tricks you have in the space to look out for the right SEs would be very helpful.

So I don’t know your guys’ space very well, so I’m not gonna try to say that I do, but I would give you a couple of hints at least. Terms of people, finding people, I’m assuming that security is super tight, it’s hard to find good people.

The technical aspect is more important than the sales side.

So then take that individual and put them through some of the training sessions that you have internally. So if you have an enablement person or partner them with one of your successful enterprise salespeople and give them tasks and help them, don’t try to make it overly complex, give them simple things. You say, hey, Mary, I want you to call Joe, he was on the call, the guy was asking some really deep questions, can you call and ask him these three things? And just kind of get them to get used to it.

Most of them don’t wanna be salespeople, but I think once they start to do it.

Okay. So, yeah, sure. So SDR, BDR, right.

So I think that you know this is a tough role.

We have a lot of turnover. You know I’d encourage people, if you can, to have, on the enterprise side, have more mature SDRs and BDRs. You know people have done the job more than you know- six months, and it’s their first time out of college and they’re gonna be gone in six months anyway. So you know, I’ve tried in the enterprise side to spend more money and hire people who have more maturity, who will stay with that account right and who will continue to sell them stuff. You know, one of the phenomena is- I did see an inner several times.

I’ve seen in enterprises where all of a sudden our pipeline really starts to to accelerate and we’re like: you know what’s going on and what we’re finding out is that you know the salespeople turned over but we had that good SDR that stuck with that account and they kept sending them white papers and they’d send them articles and they- you know they call them once a quarter and just touch base that you know those deals.

That you know we didn’t think there was a deal there, but came back 12 to 18 months later and they came back to the SDR, because that was the person that you know kind of developed that relationship. So you know, that is the, that is the, the front top of the funnel, that’s the spokesperson, if you will, in that first interaction. So you know, just make sure those people you know are well- trained, who who can walk the talk, who who are personable and who are credible. So I think on the enterprise side, that’s really really, really important.

I got a question question about a first meeting, like with a security leader. See, so, yeah, because we go back and forth on this quite a lot, you know they’re very hard to get in front of limited time. Yeah, my view is you got to get quickly in there to tell them that a little bit about the company, but demonstrate value as quickly as possible. Show how you’re unique, show off what we call our constellation dashboard that visually is stunning.

Yes, and my view, we got to do that first meeting, otherwise you know, you’re gonna lose their interest quickly. Thoughts on that 100.

So when anything you have from a reporting or insider dashboard or you know anything that you have, you know, right, it’s gonna catch somebody’s attention because they’re flying high, right, and so they want to see something that’s gonna grab their attention, gets at the front.

Yeah, you can start there and say, look, you know, and then you can go back and work your way back to it.

But, yeah, get it out, get their attention very, very quickly. Yeah, they’re busy people, right, and if you do get him, you need to get their attention. Yeah, great thanks, 100.

So execs, Ryan from Vulcan cyber. Sometimes, though, I see our BDR’s and and a ease want to jump into showing the product before they ask any questions. No, so I’m? Yeah, I agree a hundred percent with what you said there. You know, if you have some shiny object that you need to show them, but shouldn’t you ask enough questions to make it a little bit personal first?

Well, so what he just mentioned to me is: I don’t know if I I mean so.

I think one of the mistakes is that you can show dashboards in a, in a PowerPoint. Okay, you don’t need to open the product to do that. Right, so you can have.

You can have. If you’re doing an intro first me. Yeah, I’m not saying: jump into the product. You want to teach, know about the company.

You don’t have to jump in the product. You can have a dashboard in a PowerPoint, talk to it. As long as they can see it and talk to it, you don’t need to drill into it.

That’s all the more reason why you do want to come back and give them a more in- depth, detailed demo, right, because you know the problem with showing the demo and and not really having the detail and showing what they got. You gave them everything they needed. You didn’t really have a good chance to ask what’s important to them and they’re done. Thank you very much. I saw your product. I don’t think it really meets our needs right now.

Have a great day.

Yeah, we worry that we do that too much sometimes.

Yeah, that’s a real problem, right.

So so you just so. So I’m having a discussion with somebody right now and I I still haven’t won this battle, right. So it’s like: have 10 or 12 good discovery questions- okay, not 50, not a hundred, not suit rich, not too strategic, not overly tactical, but they’re in that middle road. There’s 10 or 12 things and you say, if I know these 10 or 12 things, I can box that prospect in and I have a pretty good gauge right of where they’re at. So you asked a couple of those at the beginning. You asked a couple of those.

After a couple slides you ask a couple of those, so then you can make it a good call.

You know, we have to get out of this habit of like getting somebody on the phone and making an interrogation right for 20 minutes.

That’s just bad.

There’s some, there’s some psychology to those early questions, right like a priming effect almost, I would think, to make that person feel good about the problem they’re solving.

Yeah, well, first of all you have to make them feel like the meetings about them.

What would you like to get out of the call today? That’s one of the first questions I ask people.

Let them tell me, versus me jamming my agenda down their throat.

Right, like what are you worried about most, right? Why did you reach out to us in the first, it’s just to kind of get that centered.

It’s a really good point. Yeah, what keeps you up at night? What would, you know, if we could talk about two or three things today that would help your business, what are those? Because everything else is noise. If they can tell, well, I’m just looking to see what’s out there, then great. Do your song and dance, ask a few questions. But if somebody comes back and tells you two or three very specific things, then, you know, why would I spend time? If I could make your life easier, right?

Yeah. Like in a positive framing.

Right, right. Why would I spend time, you know, focused on things that they don’t care about? Of course, then I know where your uniqueness is, right?

So you need to layer those things back in, right? Because you know what makes you better.

So you’ve always got, I call those tent poles. I didn’t even get into that today, but, you know, every company should have tent, what I call tent poles, right? So what’s a tent pole? Well, you go throw the tent out there and there needs to be six or eight or 10 poles that you know are the things that you wanna make sure that you drill into their head, right?

Or get alignment on them, that that’s important to them because you know that’s your best value prop. That’s a whole nother discussion, but so that you get alignment and you know you’re, you know, that those things make sense to them. But did I answer the one question that came up? Sorry, I got off on a little bit of a tangent there.

This is Dave with device authority. I just need to, I can’t help myself. The best meetings I’ve had, especially with senior execs, have been where you don’t crack the laptop. You just have a conversation with them. Because if you don’t understand their needs, when you walk in the door, they’re just concerned about, can they help me achieve a goal, solve a problem or satisfy a need, right? They don’t care about your technology. They wanna know if you can solve something that’s like you’ve mentioned, keeping them up.

It’s all business problem. It’s all about business problems.

It’s all about what you’re doing.

I don’t care about anything. I have a business problem.

I don’t really care about the tech.

So I’ll tell you a story, great comment.

I’ll tell you a story. First of all, you gotta have the right people who can do that, by the way. Because that takes a lot of, there’s a skill set in that in itself, right?

But anyway, so we were about four years into one company I was at.

I won’t mention any names.

We started to struggle.

We hit some plateaus on scaling. And we just couldn’t scale, right?

So we had McKinsey come in and our CEO, we’re gonna have McKinsey come in. They’re gonna figure it all out for us.

I’m like, okay, great.

You know what McKinsey came back with? It was one piece of paper.

We called a laminate.

And it was two pieces, that was it.

Had a front and a back to it. No laptop, no nothing. We used that for about six months. We had more CEO presentation than we would imagine. That’s all we used, what we called a laminate.

It was effective as hell.

We paid McKinsey a million dollars to come up with it. And after I looked at it, I go, we knew all that. But we didn’t know what to do with it. But you’re right, no laptop at all. Don’t need it.

Yep, so anyway, so this bring your execs in strategically. Everybody has different level executives, okay?

You guys know who you’re dealing with, right?

Some CEOs are great salespeople, some aren’t, right?

That’s okay.

But look through your company, okay? And use those executives where you can, right?

In these bigger deals where you know, right?

Because if you’re smaller, especially in your space, right?

There’s gotta be a lot of confidence in your team and who you are.

So as you go through the sales process, think, you know what? We used to plant a seed for it, actually. We would say, hey, would you like to learn more about this? And of course, somebody would say, yeah, great. We’re gonna set up a call with Bill.

And Bill’s our why.

And he can spend a half hour with whoever’d like to come. And we can talk in great detail about that.

We don’t have time on the call today.

So I just set a trap, did you see that?

I just got my next meeting, okay?

Right on the fly.

Hey Mark, we had an interesting comment here from Brad at Silent Push about having the subject matter expert being part of that coming in. Brad, I don’t know if you wanna talk about your experience at Silent Push a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So, I mean, I certainly agree about the SE is awesome given that’s my background and I’ve been an SE for a long time and managed the team. So, you’re right on there. But a lot of what we found success with around the SME standpoint, given we do a lot around threat intelligence, is to have one of our threat analysts come in.

Yeah, perfect.

And you gotta do it at the right time, obviously. You know, and the selling skills may not be the same, but that SME part really moves things ahead.

Yeah, totally, right? So, as you’re on this topic, right, you’re looking at the people that are there, you realize you got this group, you know that that particular topic is important, then the salesperson needs to say, hey, you know, one of the areas that we’ve spoken to some of our other customers about that they’d like to learn more about how we could help is this. And here’s what we could talk about.

Is there anybody on the call that would be interested in that, because we could bring in our SME, Bill, and we could have a half- hour call over the next couple of weeks. Would anybody be interested in us having that meeting? And there’s gonna be somebody that says yes.

Yeah, and sometimes we do them in parallel or on the side as well. Like you say, you know, you gotta have a different set of ends.

Yeah, I do it in audiences for a reason, right? I do it in audiences for a reason, but yeah, you can do it parallel, you can do it on the side, whatever. The point is you’re doing it.

Hi, it’s Paul from Device Authority. A couple of you were talking about, you know, your solutions engineers and your SEs being the guys that potentially do the selling. And from, I’m a commercial guy, and I’ve always seen great value in the divide and conquer model of having the sales guys do the commercial and the SEs do the technical, and you keep them separate so you build your groups of trust and you can differentiate in calls and you can take multiple directions.

So, I mean, a couple of the smaller organizations, you know, we’re not huge, but you might try and double down and have, you know, one guy do both bits. And I think it’s quite important to differentiate roles within customers because that also shows you as a bigger organization than you potentially are.

Yeah, that’s a great point, right? So make sure that people understand the salespeople try to take over, they try to do the demos and you have an SE there. There’s one company I’m working with right now. I get on half the calls and they have the AE doing the demo and I got an SME there. I’m like, no, the SME’s there, have them do the demo, right? So that people realize the roles, right? Because they don’t, they get confused and they’re gonna talk at a different level. So to the executive piece though, right?

So that I’m bringing on the number four down here. So this is bringing in your team and it’s not just SMEs, it’s your team, right? So, you know, I can tell you one company that we had a lot of success at, you know, we had a good selling CEO. So it’s probably somewhere around sixth or seventh inning of the game, and I would say, hey, you know what? I think it would be good, and this was probably some VP person that you met with Joe. And they go, and I go, Joe is our CEO. And I go, let me tell you why you should meet with Joe.

So I think one of the mistakes a lot of salespeople do is they ask for things, but they forget to tell people to the prospect what they’re gonna get out of it. What’s the value to them? What’s it mean? And I’d say, I want you to meet with Joe because I know that this is a big commitment for you. I think you’re probably a little worried about the size of us. And I think it’s super important that you hear from Joe because he’s gonna commit to you to make sure that we are very successful with you.

So I just told him why I wanted to meet with Joe, didn’t I? Okay, so implementation, I’m gonna slip through that one kind of quickly. Yeah.

There was another question I just want, I know there’s been a lot of questions, which is great, but there was one that was missed and we wanted to bring it back to the top.

Okay.

So Shashi asked two- part question. Can you talk about your thoughts on channel and enterprise sales motion slash go- to- market strategy? How can vendors get channel mindshare and complex long drawn sales cycle?

Yeah. So, you know, that’s a, that’s a long discussion. So I think I had that at the end. So let me try to touch on a couple of things. So the first question I would ask yourself in channel sales in general is, and I don’t know if you mean channel like partner channel. And so we have our own sales team. We have these partners that can help us, you know, get into companies that we can’t, or they represent us.

There’s lots of different flavors there.

But, you know, the biggest thing is you have to ask yourself is what’s in it for the partner. Right.

And it has to be super crystal clear.

Like what are they getting out of it? And does it align to, you know, to the benefits of them? Who else are they partnering with? Right.

I worked with a company, you know, last year where they’re like, Oh, we want to be partners with this, this, and this person.

I’m like, that’s great.

But they already partner with your top three competitors and they have a book, big book of business.

And they’ve got, you know, more than 50 to a hundred people that know how to implement that product. So you’re not going to get a lot of mind share out of them right now because they’ve made it a big investment on that and that other solution with people. And there’s a lot of, you know, there’s just a lot of politics. So, so I think that, you know, on channel side in general, I would say is needs to be crystal clear. What’s the benefit you need to pick the right channel partner.

You know, if you’re midsize, then you may want to go after local, local, regional channel partners who will be more hungry to support you than the big boys.

Right.

For a variety of reasons.

But that’s a tough conversation without me knowing the specifics of the company, but I’m leery of channel partners in some ways because I think we put too much weight on them and you have to realize, are they going to put the emphasis on your business or not? It’s a long game. Can be. All right.

We do see in cyber almost every company having to deal with the channel.

Right.

So I think it’s helpful for us to just hear that perspective.

Yeah. I used to know cyber as well. Sorry. I’m not going to, I told you guys I wouldn’t try to fool anybody.

I know cyber well, I don’t.

So I’m not going to try it. I could probably learn it, but I don’t, I’m not going to fool you that I know that.

So we talked about it. I’m going to move on from that just for time. So we talked a little bit about discovery.

I know somebody asked a question. Just make sure that people are asking questions at all the time.

Every meeting that you go to, if you have three or four meetings, we should have three or four questions. We should always be discovering.

We should always be asking different data. We should call people out.

We should understand what’s the two or three or four things are important, you know, to those various groups of people that are on that call or those individuals.

Right.

You know, I hear, I see people asking questions at the wrong times and just look stupid.

Right. Ask questions at the right time that makes sense to them. Right.

Ask questions that make you believe you care about their business that you’re actually trying to solve a problem and you’re trying to help them.

Right.

Not that the questions are all about how it’s going to help you sell your product.

Okay. So you know, what I try to tell people, like, well, every time I get on a call, I mean, if there’s our third or fourth call, I would, I would ask, you know, I would say, what do you want to give? What do you want to get?

What’s the next step you’re looking for?

And what are the four or five things that you want to learn on that call?

And as we go into that call with the team, whether it’s an SE or the salesperson, whoever it is, we all know what those four or five things are.

Right.

And we try to figure those things out because those are seeds that we’re trying to plant for the next meeting. Or there are things that we’re worried about or there are things we haven’t figured out yet.

Any questions on this slide?

Boring slide.

All right. So, late stage, early stage, I’m not going to have time to go over this in a lot, a lot of detail, but I would ask you to step back, you know, and, and, and understand what are the things that you see your customers or prospects do on a continuous basis before they buy. Okay. This is a collage. You’ve got what, 20, 30 things on here. You’re not going to get to all 30 of them.

But I think, you know, I get really tired of sitting through QBRs or doing deal reviews or weekly forecast calls when, when, you know, somebody says something’s going to close. And I realized that, you know, the car’s at the beginning or the middle of the assembly line, and there’s just no way it’s going to close. Right. And, and also try to help people understand what are the things that you think are going to happen?

How are you preparing for that? You know, are you being proactively managing the sales cycle versus reactively waiting for them to tell you the next.

reactively.

right? You want to try to set the tone on some of it and set up the right meeting so that you’re kind of pushing the step along. So when people start talking about an early stage deal, it’s like, well, what are the business issues, right? What do they have in place today?

What are the problems they’re trying to solve?

Is there a compelling event, right? Do they have, are we kicking tires and learning? Is this something we’re learning or do we actually have a budget and is it identified budget and they are going to spend the money? Who are we competing with? And I don’t know, maybe in cyber, you guys are all over that, but I’m seeing people get a lot lazy in general about competition.

Oh, we have a better product and they’re dismissing competition. I would not dismiss competition. Understand how they do things today and what the problem is.

Do they have a formal set of requirements? Okay. If they don’t try to give them yours. So that’s one of the areas that, you know, I’ve spent time with companies is, you know, if you have a formal set of requirements and they don’t have one, then help them. If you’re doing RFPs, obviously they do. And then who are the decision makers?

Late stage, you know, maybe you do close plans, maybe you don’t, but at least, you know, when they’re going to close, do they need to do an ROI? Yeah, it’s probably not yours, but somewhere they need to go talk to somebody, right? And how do they get that done?

Had they talked to any of your customers?

Have they done a security review? Oh, I mean, so, you know, but I hear people go, Oh yeah, we haven’t done that yet.

Contract.

You know, I hear people talk about, Oh, we’re going to close it this quarter. And I’m like two weeks away. The end of the quarter, it’s in a big enterprise.

If you’re not negotiating the contract four to six weeks prior to the quarter in, in a big company, you’re probably not going to get it done at least four weeks, right? Understand the purchase process, you know?

So, you know, a lot of time, yeah. Well, how are they going to buy?

Well, let me go ask Bill that question. It’s like, well, we should know that.

All right.

I’ll stop here. Cause I mean, this is something, these areas, these are, these are more generic areas you need to ask yourself, but I would try to get people in the mindset of what, where am I in this deal and be, and ask themselves versus, you know, where they trying to tell you they think they are. Okay.

Boring slide. Nobody’s interested in that one.

All right. So, so politics. Okay.

I talked a little bit about interpersonal relationships. I can’t stress that enough. Got to have multiple personal relationships.

Got to understand their roles.

This is an expense system management, you know, this is an expense system management example, right?

But you know, if you’re, if it’s something that’s very detailed SME and there’s somebody up here who’s relying on these people to make that decision. And there’s a couple of those people that really make a difference and maybe they are lower level than those, the ones you go sell. Right. But yeah, you try to develop a relationship here. You don’t try to put all your eggs in this basket here, knowing that these people are really the ones cause it’s detailed stuff. Bring those two things together. Right. Have both. Right.

So yeah, I remember sitting in a meeting one time. It was about our 10th meeting there. I said to the rep, I’m like, what the hell are we doing here again? He goes, Oh, they’re about ready to make a decision. More and more people, more meetings, more discussion. This one gal stood up and she had a clipboard in her hand. I’m like, okay.

And she asked like the stupidest question I could imagine.

Right.

And most salespeople probably would have like, like looked at her, like you’re an idiot. Of course I jumped in. I go, well, why is that important to you? I go, she goes, blah, blah, blah. And I go, if we solve that problem, would that be important? She goes, would that help you? She goes, Oh my gosh, it’d help us so much. I go, okay, here’s how we do that. Should we have a conversation?

She goes, sure.

We can do that. Great. Well, I learned from the director about two weeks later, they go, everybody looks up to that gal.

If you would not have treated her with respect and answered that question, you probably wouldn’t have won the deal.

So the point to that matter is know who your buyers are, know what areas they influence. You know, I see people glom to, Oh, they’re BP. I’m going to go over there. They’re going to make the decision.

I don’t know about that. You know, a lot of the work could be still make decisions.

Awesome. Mark, we’ve got about five minutes left. I know you put all the pre- submitted questions in a slide near the end. If you want to move on over there.

I want to just stop here for a second so people can identify or look at this. Think about this as you look at your, as you look across why you’re losing deals, you know, look across, find yours. Okay. And then make sure that you’re talking to those about your people, why you’re losing deals. A lot of the time it’s behavioral things.

It’s not the product.

Okay.

It’s behavioral things. It’s the way we’re managing it.

Okay.

Question. Somehow I lost my.

How to convert existing friend relationships to sales conversations. I’m assuming this is somebody in your network, is what I’m assuming. I think you just be upfront about it. You don’t try to beat around the bush. If you’ve got people you know can help, you call them. You say, I called two people this morning actually, and I said, hey, Mark. The guy’s name was Mark. I haven’t talked to you in a year and a half. I go, I’m looking for some help. I really would like your perspective. I think maybe this might be useful to you. I’d love to get your input.

Can you take a look at it? Just be upfront. The channel, that’s such a hard one for me to answer at the highest level. I need to understand the type of product, what channel the involvement is, how much of the sales cycle do they involve, or is it just more referral channel, or is it an SI partner where they’re doing the implementations? But in general, I would say at the end of the day is, who else are you competing with for that channel’s mindshare? Do you have the economics properly aligned where they’re going to spend time?

Is it super clear to that channel partner how they’re going to benefit? Generally speaking, the more complex the products are, the harder it is for the channel partner to be effective because they need. Go educate those people. If they’re going to give you the bandwidth, go meet with their key people in their organization who can influence the company, not just the partner guy inside the company. BDRs, should they be in sales or marketing, typo? Depends, I would say. Depends on where you are stage.

In general, I’m more of a fan of the SDR BDRs being in sales. For enterprise, if it’s high volume, low value, and there’s lots of care and feeding, and a lot of repetitiveness, then I think they should be in marketing for sure. I think regardless of where they sit, marketing and sales need to work super close together on the scripts, the ICP, the personas, the touch points, all those things are important. I think sales and marketing need to work really closely on that.

I think in enterprise, it’s harder for marketing to manage that than it is in high- velocity stuff that’s more metric- driven.

How to manage dysfunctional between the sales, marketing, and legal? That I didn’t really know if I understood the question, so if somebody wants to, I know we’re getting really super close to time.

Enterprise pros versus a mid- market pros?

Is Paul from Device Authority? Yeah, I think he just dropped, unfortunately.

Okay. So yeah, let’s go with that one. So is there much of a difference between sales pros, mid- enterprise market? I think there’s a huge difference. Once again, it depends. Depends on if it’s upper mid- market. So it’s all about how they behave. It’s all about, do you see the same type of process? Do they get level? The biggest difference I’ve seen lately in mid- market is CEO gets more involved in some of these decisions. The higher- ups are more involved in the background, so go get to them, right?

They are making more of the decision than they are at the enterprise, where maybe you stop at a VP level.

I think that’s a good takeaway for today, for sure, and get to them.

I mean, if I look back like the last three or four years and I think about mid- market, I’d say seven out of 10 CEOs got involved, but we were reaching out to the CEO and trying to build a relationship with them. Even though, but we didn’t go, oh, we’ve talked to Mary and she told us this, or we talked, oh, I talked to Bill the other day. We don’t say any of that. We call Bill and talk to him. We don’t mention it to anybody, right? They don’t need to know, right?

How to manage deal velocity around the sales price initial main demo, we talked a little bit about that. And I think we talked about the technical stuff as well. All right, we’re there.

Great.

Awesome, thanks so much, guys. There’s a poll that popped up on the Zoom. If you guys have two seconds just to let us know, just feedback and how it’s helping. I would also say as part of the Ten Eleven portal, you can sign up and do a one- on- one call with Mark if that’s helpful. For the CROs on the call, we are gonna start to pop up a CRO monthly round table just to experience share. We’ve done it for the CMOs and it feels like there’s enough CROs who are interested in doing it. So I’ll be in touch on that. But generally just thanks everyone for being on.

Again, it’s just Megan at Ten Eleven BC. If there are things you wanna talk about with the group or experience share in the portfolio, I’d love to hear more about it. We’re here to help if we can.

We’re here to help if we can.