124: Pipeline generation tips #5 with Joe Mara, AVP, North American SLED & Canada at Elastic

Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which is this because at cybersecurity startups, it's hard to get go-to-market fit, grow revenue, and scale the sales effect. Sales Bluebird provides tips, tricks, experiences, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who've been doing this for many years and at many companies. I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and this episode is part of a series of podcast episodes on pipeline generation. It will be no surprise to listeners that the number one challenge right now for sellers in cybersecurity is generating pipeline. And in these episodes will be sales leaders, individual contributors, demand generation practitioners, and experts whose business is all about generating pipeline. We want you to have fresh ideas, approaches, and tips that you can use to transform your pipeline either as a sales leader or as an individual contributor. The contributor to this week's pipeline generation episode is Joe Mara. Joe is the AVP of North America's Lad and also of Canada at Elastic. And Joe is a longtime cybersecurity seller and sales leader. He's experienced and he's successful. And anyone who's worked with Joe knows that he's truly a salesperson, salesperson, and a sales leader, sales leader. He knows what it's all about. He gets it. And he's passionate about helping his team succeed each and every day. And when it comes to pipeline generation, what he's doing on this episode is actually sharing what his team is doing to be successful with pipeline generation right now.

The last two years have been rough years with no one being in the office. Everyone was at their home office. So you know, you're calling and leaving voice messages that they're not receiving anymore, and you're sending emails and they're getting hundreds and hundreds of emails and they're deleting them because they're just overrun with all this information that's coming to them. So what we we go old school, and it's about utilizing your current ecosystem. So number one is we go to our existing customer base and we ask them for referrals. We look at different customers that we would like to get introduced to, and we find out which customers have friends or know people in that organization. And you can do a quick internet search to find out on LinkedIn if people are people are connected and who's who. So as long as you're helping that customer solve big problems, a lot of times they are willing to make that warm introduction. So many people don't do this, and I don't understand why. It's so much better to have a warm introduction with someone than it is not having that when it's a cold when it's typically really a cold call. So I mean, I can uh come up with one example where um we had one customer who was utilizing our software, and um they actually came to us. We were doing such a great job for them that they said, hey, this is I think that other um states would be able to utilize this technology. We're happy to do a um a webinar, we're happy to do whatever we can, we're willing to be a reference, um, just let us know. And of course, we took them up on that because it's not very often, you know, when customers are when they're willing to do that, we have to make sure that we maximize that um those type of intros. So um next is we look at our community. We are an open source uh company, so if we need introductions, have questions, we do go to the community and try and use those. We also we do go to seminars, and there's a lot of great ones out there where you can have a warm introduction at a CIO roundtable. For instance, we went to one in December, and um, from that CIO round table, we actually got seven executive meetings because I think they finally figure out we we don't breathe fire, we don't have two heads, you know. We're we are normal people just trying to help them solve big problems for their for their organization. You know, again, these guys get hundreds of emails a day. It's delete, delete, delete. Um, you know, you have to do something that's gonna separate you from everyone else. So that moves me to my third point, and that is do your research. In the SLED space, most of the states have to put out a strategic plan. I make sure that every rep that works for me goes through that strategic plan before they ever call the customer. I say, do not waste their time. They're very valuable, they don't want to get on, and you ask them what keeps you up at night. If you do, they're probably gonna hang up on you. You should already know what's important to them so that when you get on that call, you're able to walk them through. Here's what we can do, this is the problem that we see that you're having, here's some of the people that are already utilizing it, and it's much better than um, you know, again, wasting their time. Customers are starting to see people, so it's so much better to be in front of them than it is on Zoom. So they may not meet you in the office, but maybe ask them if they can have a cup of coffee or even ask them if they want to go out for breakfast. Something, you know, get in front of them. It will help you build rapport so much faster. So those are my three things. Utilize uh existing customers and um use cases, work with your community, go to trade shows and events, the good ones, and make sure you do your research before you talk to any customer. So thanks a lot. Really appreciate the time today. Have a good one.

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