178: How to be valuable on a sales call with Amanda Carvalho, Sales Director at Gytpol

We're in such a competitive space and prospects are so bombarded these days that doing things different and going the extra mile and thinking where the value you bring to your prospect can make the difference. In this episode, Amanda Carvalho, a longtime cybersecurity seller, details her research process so she can be valuable for a prospect right from the start. Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster. Whether you're a seller, marketer, leader, or founder, to give you tips, tricks, experiences, examples, ideas, and inspiration from people who know a thing or ten about building great cybersecurity companies. I am your host, Andrew Moaghan. Our guest today is Armando Carvalho, longtime security sales pioneer and seller. Amanda, welcome to Sales Bluebird. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation because it's going to be a little bit different than our usual ones. So that's always good. And it gets the heart of a challenge these days, which is as a seller, how do we make sure when we go meet people that we're doing all the right things to be ready for that call to have the highest impact, have the most meaningful discussion, and show them that uh dealing with us is going to be better and different than working with other people. So this is going to be a really interesting conversation for me and I hopefully for the audience as well. But Amanda, before we get to the business side of this, let's learn a little bit about you. Believe it or not, I have 35 questions on a list here. The good thing is I'm not going to ask you all 35. I'm going to ask you to pick three random numbers, team one and 35, and I'll read out the questions.

Sounds good. We'll go with my lucky number, 14.

14. Favorite band.

Oh, that's a tough one. That's a really, really tough one. I'm going to say Muse is probably one of my favorites. Their concert is absolutely phenomenal out of this world. It's on my bucket list. Also, see them live in Europe, anywhere in Europe. So I'll go with them.

Yeah, I I heard I'm a fan of Muse as well, and I've heard the concert is just nuts. It's uh oh, it's fun. Riot.

Highly recommend. They just came out with a new album, so they should be touring soon.

Love that. All right. Next number.

Uh let's go with 17.

17. One thing that you own that you should really throw out.

Oh gosh.

You've just moved, so you've probably done this already.

Yeah. Luckily, I did a lot of early spring cleaning with the move, but um, unboxing things, I unearthed a lot of things that I should definitely have thrown away. But for some reason, I'm still keeping them around. I have the most comfortable fuzzy pants since high school. They still fit me since high school. I love them so much. But those things are not as fuzzy as they used to be. So I should definitely think about getting new ones.

Yeah, I should refresh them somehow, right? All right. Last number to more than 35.

Three.

Which cybersecurity startup do you admire right now?

Ooh, I'm going to say that's a really tough one, too. Um, I've been recently doing a lot of research on startups, especially in cybersecurity. That's my niche. I've been doing cybersecurity for 12 years now. I'm gonna say Git poll. It's not super well known yet, but they have a phenomenal solution.

Tell me more about their solution.

So a lot of concerns these days from CISOs that I've talked about is that a lot of security solutions, anything in cyber, they create tons of alerts that are non-actionable. So they're creating a lot more tasks for their admins. And visibility is not always amazing if you don't know what you're seeing and how to fix it. So GitPul comes in and they fix what they see that has been misconfigured and get you to actually fully use all the services that you currently have deployed to its full potential and make sure that you don't lose out on anything because of misconfiguration.

Yeah. Anything that uh reduces workload on security teams right now when uh it's so hard to hire great people and keep them is always important for leaders, right? Amanda, how did you first make money as a kid?

I I've always been somewhat of an entrepreneur. When I was little, I always played with my toys and I would like line them up and you know pretend that I am big time CEO. So kind of became really savvy young on how to sell things. I had a huge collection of Barbies, and my Barbies were beautiful. I never cut their hair, I never did anything to just perish them. So I had this beautiful collection of Barbies. At 10 years old, you don't play with Barbies so much. And then at that point, I wanted more money for candy and a Nintendo. So I went to my aunt's house, well, apartment building. And once you're in the building, you have access to over a hundred apartments. It's a huge building. So I just went door knocking up and down every single area of that building. And I sold all my Barbies and I made a ton of money. Some of them I actually made more money than what my mom paid for for them. So yeah, that was my first selling experience.

Love that. So that you understood value at that point, right? Is people were paying more than uh the cost to buy in the first place. What was their first real job in sales?

Real job was checkpoint. I was straight out of high school at 18. And that was my first big girl job at an actual, you know, corporation. Learned a ton. That's where I learned the foundation of security. And I learned what is security? What is network security versus cybersecurity? That was awesome. But my first job in sales was as a telemarketer for a company that I don't think is around anymore. They used to be called Direct Buy. And if you're someone who used to remodel homes or you're up at two in the morning during the week and you see infomercials, you might be familiar with them. That was a really tough job. Uh, you're calling people, oftentimes cold. That taught me how to be crafty with my message, get people to engage with you quickly and have really tough skin. Cause there's nothing worse than getting a telemarketer to call you. And I'm not how that feels.

That must be rough. You were like a hard uh interest in the sales right there, right? Let's talk about the topic for today. So let me tee it up like this. I think it's common practice or common uh knowledge these days that you know what we need to do as sellers is do our research on our prospects. You know, you should never walk into a first meeting with someone and almost ask the question, what do you guys do? So that there's always this premium on do your research so that you're relevant for the prospects that you work with, right? And I think uh oftentimes, though, what happens at this point is you know you're left to just figure out what do your research really means. And uh some people's idea of what research is, and other people's idea of research is gonna be very different. And what I loved about uh seeing your approach was how you think about well, if I'm gonna go meet with this company, there's certain things I need to know. I want to build something that I can take to the meeting to show value and really try and be different. I always talk about, you know, in many ways, different is better than better. If you walk in and give them a completely different experience than if they were talking to the 15 other sales reps they could be talking to, they're much more likely to remember what you did for them and how you worked with them on solving their problems. So the purpose for today really is to talk about your process. And rather than talk in the abstract about what Amanda does to research recall, we're actually going to use a real live example, right? So you've picked a company that you've never sold to before, you don't know really all that well, and you've done the research, you're gonna show us how you thought about going about it, how you did it, and what you came out with, right?

Absolutely. So to your point, there are thousands of other companies out there reaching out to the same people I'd be reaching out to. So being prescriptive and making sure that you fully understand, you know, their values, what they're looking for, makes you different than everyone else and really helps you prep for that first meeting. Hopefully you get the first meeting, and this preparation will make you stand out and oftentimes create, you know, champions within the account. You can now speak their language by doing this research.

As we're going through this, we're gonna put this on the YouTube channel, the Sales Bluebird YouTube channel, but we're gonna try and make it as prescriptive as we can for the audio-only podcast as well. But just know that if we're talking about looking at something on the screen, that you can always go in and see on the YouTube channel as well. So, Amanda, I'll kind of hand over to you and let you kick off, you know, how you're how you thought about this whole process.

Absolutely. So I'll share my screen and let me know once you can see it. This is a new process for me. I am broadcasting from an iPad. So bear with me. All right, so for those that are on audio only, what I'm showing right now is something called the Valley Pyramid. And this is a format that I I found to be extremely useful and was taught to me a few years ago at uh Zscaler. They use this quite frequently, and I really appreciate this structure. I wasn't familiar with this before. And once I got the hang of it and how valuable this is, it's not part of my process. And I do this for every company that I target, every company that um fits the customer profile of the solution that I'm selling. And this makes me a lot more comfortable when I speak to a CISO, a CIO, any sort of leader within that organization, because now I fully understand what they're looking for. How do they make decisions for investment? And since I'm selling security, what are some of the challenges that they may have? How do I solve those challenges for them? So the purpose of a value pyramid is to align with the ultimate core provision for that company, what their strategies are, what they view for those strategies, what those strategies create as far as risks and capabilities. And then last but not least, how you align with them. So everything that you create here should support the following line. So you want to be very prescriptive in this approach. You don't want to just find a ton of information out there that kind of aligns with what you're selling and then really dilute your message. In this case, for yellow, I found that their motto right now, their core provision is one journey, one team, one yellow. They are going through a journey of merging their four subsidiaries under the yellow umbrella. So by Q3 of 2023, they have a three-phase approach of bringing all of these subsidiaries together, rebranding and then relaunching them. That is a perfect, perfect use case for what I've sold before, which in that case was a solution that enables companies to do digital transformation by replacing their traditional legacy firewalls as well as VPNs, and bringing a solution as a service approach or security as a service approach that enables companies to consolidate all their technical debt, be better when it comes to securing their users on and off premise. And then one step above that is creating that digital transformation that enables them for the future. So I found that this one journey, one team, one yellow model really aligns with what I was selling.

You picked the company yellow, which is a real company. And uh how big are they? Do you recall?

They are massive. And so I'll show you quickly how I found a lot of information on them.

Yeah.

So good question. The first thing I do, simple Google search. Let's go on their website. You'll be surprised how much information is on the company's website. And luckily for me, Yellow is a publicly traded company, so they do have a 10K, which I'll show you briefly shortly, but they have a lot of really good information here. They're very transparent on their strategies, what they're currently doing. So you can find a lot of good company information here on the about us. Yellow has about 30,000 employees and they have a massive network of contractors. They are a truckload carrier, they do freight and logistics. So they have a pretty diverse portfolio of services. So they have a pretty big workforce, which is a phenomenal company if you're trying to sell security into. They have, you know, bring your own devices, they have contractors that have multiple locations, and they have an always changing and growing industry, as well as a big merger. Now, how do you help them do that? That's a huge undertaking for a lot of companies today, is to merge, especially four different subsidiaries, and they all have their own infrastructure. How do you bring it under one? So that is a great thing because that is also their corporate vision and ultimately what I'm selling, right? To create that one really proactive infrastructure that enables them to be successful. So the about me, great resource. Go on here, read everything, and just by knowing a little bit about the company goes a long way. You'd be surprised how often I talk to CISO's executives and they're like, wow, how do you know that? Oh my gosh, how do you know our corporate font? And really easy. If you go to investor relations, you can find a lot of their um PowerPoints because they, especially as a publicly traded company, they have to host them. So you can find their font, their company logo, their colors, and now you can use them to present. And a lot of this information that I put together, ultimately, you want your champion to do that internal selling for you. So if your information looks like their information, they're more likely to use it. So keep that in mind.

So I like that. So you take their brand palette and fonts and the rest of it, use those in your what you give them in the deck so that when he shares, he or she shares internally, it looks like it's an internal document almost.

Yes, it looks like they built it themselves. And oftentimes, companies that I've talked to that I've done this exercise with have used all this information that we put together to then discuss it internally and help us make a case for, you know, why do they need the solution that I'm selling? And it really makes you be become a trusted advisor to them and a champion for them as well. So speak their language. Just go through the website everywhere. I mean, the about us is a great place to go, company and vote, but the investor relations page is also a great resource. Here's where you find the 10K. The 10K lines out everything that the company does from their spending, their strategies, their concerns, especially in security. There's a whole entire area of the 10K that talks about their security strategies, even breaches. So if they've had a breach recently, they'll have to discuss it on their 10K. And for yellow, it was pretty easy to find it. They have a resource page under their investor relations, and all I had to do is look for their annual filings, found the latest 10K. The good news about this too, they can download it as a PDF, whatever format you want, and it makes it really easy for you to do your research. And essentially, this is what a 10K looks like. It's a lot of reading, but once you do this a few times, you learned how to um scheme this through pretty quickly and find the information that you need. And sometimes you can find really good tidbits on here that you can just copy and paste onto your Valley Pyramid and even use it for prospecting as well.

So the the 10K is a long document. Which bits do you try and zero in on? Any particular like headings or sections?

Sure. Depending on what I'm looking for, I'll search for. Now let's see if breach comes up. It does very quickly. So security breaches are a concern for them because there is disruption of their supply chain. There's a disruption of their logistics department. It essentially can cripple their entire company. If there is a breach that is sizable enough that takes down their servers, takes down their infrastructure communications. Think about this. They're a freight company. Time is money. Their customers are hiring them for on-timely deliveries and also for doing their own supply chain logistics too. That's another service that they do. Any sort of breach will ultimately, you know, create a pretty bad revenue burden on them. I'm sure they have SLAs for their customers. And so these are all things that they're thinking about. Yeah. Breach is probably the first thing to search for.

So you do us do a search for some keywords that you you're thinking about. So maybe like mergers, whatever it might be, consolidation, transformation, keywords like that, right?

Great one. Yes. Merger is an awesome keyword to use. Consolidation, I mean it all under the same paragraph there. Fantastic keyword. So this is where you'll find a ton of really great information. And because it's such a long document, oftentimes the people that you're competing against are not reading it. So you're getting a lot more information than anyone else out there. So do your homework, it's worth it.

And if I heard you're right, what sometimes you'll do is literally just copy and paste text because it's their words, right? And put that into your value pyramid.

Exactly. So another really great thing that I like to do, instead of using, you know, their company logo or their corporate mission that you find on their website, sometimes I like to actually Google their CIO or CISO. So in this case, their CIO is Jason Ringenberg. And he did a podcast very similar to this one in 2021. I didn't listen to the entire podcast, but something tells me that there are amazing quotes in this podcast that I can use as the court provision. So if I were to present this, I have a meeting with Jason. The court provision here again is one journey, one team, one yellow. That was found in Yellow's website. But if I was presenting this to Jason, I would quote him instead. They love it. They appreciate it. It means that they're being heard. I've done my due diligence and I'm not wasting his time, especially if I'm aligning with something that he has said verbatim that is important to him. And then it aligns with what my product does.

And imagine you use that in prospecting to him as well, not just in the first meeting.

Absolutely. Again, there are 2,000 plus security companies out there. And imagine getting 2,000 emails as a CISO. You're you likely are. So to stand out from everyone else, just that little bit of extra work can help get your emails open, replied to in that meeting. Emails are not the best way to get meetings, you know, these days, because again, everyone's being inundated by them. But I've been able to get quite a few meetings out of, you know, very personalized emails that are prescriptive to that person.

Good. Love it. Let me kind of fill in the blanks here a little bit. So you've you've created this one pager and you've got the information from their website, from their 10K investor relations page, from podcasts or interviews that the people have done, and you basically just filled this out, right? And then how do you use this then? What's your way of using this in a meeting?

Sure. So ultimately, you have to organize all that information you get. Sometimes you strike gold, like in this case, Yellow has a ton of really great information. Their website is full of content. So if you're not careful, you can really get overwhelmed by that information. So you have to be very organized here. So once you understand your business strategies, right? They're doing this merger, it's coming up quickly. Where are they in the process here? Because one of their pages that I found that this merger was supposed to be fully completed in this past summer of 2022, but now it's Q3 of 2023. So what is creating those challenges? So you put that under your risks and critical capabilities. What is delaying that merger? Is it operational efficiency? Is it because you have critical systems that are out of date? So even updating, upgrading those is creating some delays. Can I help them do this a little bit quicker? Aside from those business strategies, what are their strategic initiatives as well? So strategically, they want to create a seamless merger as fast as possible, but it has been delayed. So how do you accelerate that? They also need to enable a network expansion. And one of their um one of the researches that I did, I think was on their website or on LinkedIn, which by the way, the news and media part of the website on LinkedIn has a ton of really great blogs that these companies release. It also has Bloomberg, it has all these other resources that are writing about that company. So you can get a lot of information that they are trying to create an extension because they've lost out a couple of their, I want to say the leadership, but they've been a leader in the freight industry for a long time. There's a ton of competition right now. There are private hires, there are really large customers that used to contract them. They're now doing some of this logistics on their own. So for them to expand not just workforce for services is a strategic initiative. How can I enable them to do that quickly so they can maintain leadership? And everything that you put up here has to also align with the risk. And so everything that the way that you structure how you present this is that you come up with, you know, I understand that yellow is going through this merger. You build that story, you build why those business strategies are so important because strategically they have to act on them. And this is how they're acting on them. But then those actions are resulting into a couple of critical issues because you know they don't have the right infrastructure. They need to support BYOD and work from everywhere now with the pandemic and then with their extension, but their existing infrastructure is not equipped to handle BYOD or different levels of users. And then last but not least, how do you help them? How do you solve these challenges and support their corporate vision, their business strategies, and their strategic initiatives? You align them with what your company does. What is your solution for them? And that's how you present it. Oftentimes, I'll be honest, I don't present this slide because if you present this slide, it just kind of looks wordy, right? You have to build a story. And this slide should be mostly for you to make sure that you have an understanding of what's happening. You don't lose track of your thought and of your pitch. But sometimes I'll also rework the slide to look more presentable. Okay, so I'll break them down into different sections of a slide and then build that story and end it with this is how we help you. And this should be always changing. By the time that you close your deal, this should be completely different than your version one. Every time you get new information by your conversations there, you get better alignment. You understand what your keywords are. Maybe they don't say zero trust, right? They say adaptive trust instead, or they say something else. Once you get more information that is personalized, you change this and then you present it at the end of your deal. And that's how you make the case for why you.

I was gonna say that I imagine that one of the things people might be concerned about is at the end of the day, there's only so much you can learn about the company before you go meet them, right? And whether what you're gonna tell them, here's what I've learned, is all wrong. How do you present it or how do you talk about it so that you're not presenting, I know all these facts, let's say. I'm wondering how you what the tone you use.

Sure. I'm very honest. I tell them, look, all this information that I'm getting is published information. It's what I'm finding out there on your website, on LinkedIn. And maybe it doesn't align with what your internal communications are. So please correct me if I'm wrong. But my understanding is that this is your journey. Correction is the best thing you can ask for. If you're going through this conversation with someone and they say, actually, that's not quite right. We did already do that last quarter. Fantastic. That is true. So what is next for you now that this is done? What is phase three, four, five? So you want to be able to create dialogue. So having incorrect information, well, I'm not saying put incorrect information only that it's correct, but if you do have incorrect information here and they correct you, that is totally fine. It creates dialogue, it's interactive, you're paying attention, and it helps you qualify better. What is your follow-up question to that one? They correct you.

Right.

It's all about the dialogue.

Tell me more, right? Yeah. So you're presenting essentially your hypothesis based on externally available information about how we might be able to help them achieve their goals, their strategies, their visions, their initiatives. And I'm guessing that you know, anytime you align to a big corporate initiative or vision, there's going to be money, political capital, teams of people focused on it, you know, things like that internally, right? You're basically aligning to what they themselves are aligning towards. You're not trying to fight against that. Seems like a real outcome from this.

True. And this is also a great tool to build champions. So before you have your new business meeting, right? And that meeting, there's the CIO, the CISO, you have a couple of executives present. You can pull someone from the team, say one of the managers, one of the directors, say, look, I want to make sure that I am very prepared for this meeting. Can you review something with me really quick? I just need 20 minutes of your time. And I'll tell you how often those 20 minutes turn into an hour because this is very refreshing. So I'll pull someone from the team that's going to be part of that ultimate presentation and get their feedback on this. And just be honest. Say, look, I did this research. I want to make sure that I truly understand this. And I don't want to waste your time and I don't want to waste your manager's time. So help me make sure that we have the best use of your time. And they they really appreciate that.

Yeah, I bet they do, right? They want to make sure everything's squared away when they go and talk to the the big titles, right? And then how much time on a given company, how much time does it take you to put this together?

Well, I did this one last night. Uh it took me about an hour. Not too bad. I will say they had a ton of really great information. I didn't have to dig too deep. Sometimes, if I'm targeting a company that is not publicly traded and they are not very avid on social media, it's a little bit tougher. And that's when I started doing my research based on personas. You know, is their CIO, CISO, CTO, anybody in their IT talking podcasts? Are they going to conferences as speakers? Can I get information from some of their speeches and things that they've done? So that can take a little bit longer. But um, yeah, for a lot of these larger companies, it takes about an hour and it's worthwhile.

Yeah, it seems to me that uh an hour per meeting, per first meeting, let's say, is gonna make that meeting much more effective all around and very powerful, right? I mean, if you if you're having, let's say you're in a great situation, you're having, I don't know, five to ten first meetings a week. I'm not saying that many teams are getting that far right now, but if you are, even then you still got time to put the work in to be ready for each meeting using this type of tool, right?

Absolutely. I mean, once you you do like two or three of these, you become a pro. You know how to kind of expedite the process. And if the solution that you're selling doesn't have a pretty big portfolio of services, then sometimes your alignment here doesn't really have to change, right? If your solution does one thing, then that's the one thing you have to do. And if it helps them solve for all these risks, capabilities, and supports, you know, their strategies, then great, it's a very well qualified deal and you can have a great conversation, or it can help you qualify out something very quickly too. If your solution doesn't align with anything else, but yeah, so the last part you're the alignment, you you can almost leave it as is, depending on you know, portfolio services and how it aligns with everything else. So that can you know accelerate the process. You do want to personalize the alignment whenever possible. But yeah, if you're lucky to have 10 meetings a week, you you gotta be a little quicker.

Well, uh an hour of research, you can stand out compared to all the other sellers that are out there trying to do the same thing as you, which is get attention. An hour's worth of research is going to enable you to figuratively walk into a call these days and be able to have a conversation a much more strategic level than if you walk in thinking, well, you know, my thing does this thing faster. How do I figure out if they got a problem with speed? Um, and you know, the way that I think about it, Amanda is anytime uh you align to big company initiatives, usually deal sizes are bigger, things go faster, more people, more senior people are involved, political capital is involved. People want you to succeed because you're actually helping them succeed on how they're being measured and how the company is trying to um develop and advance as well. It's uh such a powerful way to do that. So I appreciate you joining us today.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. And this is a great exercise.

Yeah, it is, it truly is. I'm so thankful that you went through an example. You picked a real company and uh went through an example like that to show it. If someone wants to reach out to you for a reason and just uh maybe ask some more questions, what's the best way to get hold of you?

Sure. Go on my LinkedIn, Amanda Carvalho. Um, send me a request or a message. I'm always happy to share some of my experience. Um, give any recommendations or advice. Feel free to reach out.

And Carvalho is C-A-R-V-A-L-H-O, right? Correct.

Great spelling.

All right. Well, Amanda, thanks a lot. Good to connect with you and wish you all the best.

Thank you so much, Ezra. Have a great day.

Well, that was a great conversation with Amanda. You know, she's been doing this for quite a while and really got our process done, Pat. For me, there were three takeaways. First one was that at the start, is it might take a little bit of time to do this, right? You're not gonna be in the flow, you're gonna be learning as you go along a little bit. Maybe it might take you an hour or two to put together one of these slides for your prospect, but it will come down, right? As you get into the process and done it a few times, your time taking will come down. And maybe after a while you've done to you know under an hour, maybe you've done to around 30 minutes or so. So that's kind of important. Second thing was that uh it starts with what's relevant to the prospect, right? Once we know a little bit what's what they've got going on, we find out there are big projects, big initiatives, what the company is trying to do and attach to that, that's where political capital is, that's where budget is, that's where you're actually saying to the company, I want to help you, but I want to help you in ways that are really meaningful for you as well. And the third thing was that uh it was okay to be corrected. That's what Amanda said, right? End of the day, what we're doing is taking publicly available information, forming an idea or a hypothesis about what we can do to help them, and then taking it to them as a hypothesis, right? So we're not trying to claim that we've done all this research in the company and know all inside out. There's some things that we just don't know and won't be publicly available. But uh, we've at least gone to the effort of trying to figure out what we think we can do to help and looking for some feedback and some ideas about how we can adjust that and maybe help them in different ways than we realize at the start. So those would be my three takeaways. I'm curious to what yours are. And with that, uh I hope you enjoyed the episode. And I'll talk to you next time.