Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity startups grow sales faster. I am cybersecurity go to market guy Andrew Monaghan, and today we're talking about telling great customer stories. Put 100 salespeople all together and ask them, do you tell customer stories? And 98% of them will say, yes, absolutely. Tell them all the time.

Dig into your conversation intelligence tool, though, and you'll find that's not always the case. They may tell stories somewhere in the sales cycle, but not always at the right spots. And the stories they tell are often not all that compelling or memorable. Telling great stories actually connects you with your prospect, and it's what they remember. People attach themselves, think about, understand and learn and remember a great story.

They don't tend to remember a collection of facts and logical things like features and things like that, right? And if we want to convert more first meetings into second meetings, more second meetings into POCs, things like that, a story is a very powerful tool with which to do that. A quick break to say that this episode is sponsored by It Harvest. With over 3200 vendors in cybersecurity, it is hard to keep track of all the latest developments, as well as research and analyze categories and subcategories within cyber security, which is where the It Harvest cybersecurity platform comes in. Want to know which subcategories in cloud security are growing the fastest?

You'll get it in a few clicks. Want to know and track everything about your main competitors and keep up with their hiring and use simple search to be done? Want to know the top 20 fastest growing companies based out of Israel? Easy. Just a couple of clicks to get that.

It. Harvest is the first and only research platform dedicated to cybersecurity and it's run by Richard Stiennon, who has done it all in cybersecurity from the VP of Research at Gartner, a CMO at a cybersecurity vendor, a Lecturer on Cybersecurity, advisor to startups, advisory board member at Startups and a main board member as well. The whole lot. Find out more by going to salesbluebird.com/RESEARCH.

That's salesbluebird.com/RESEARCH. Now back to the episode.

Now, often the starting point at a company, in a cybersecurity company is a case study, right? We get some clients at a start up and someone writes up a case study. Usually that case study is two to three to four pages long, and then we're told, well, Sales has the case study, they just need to go and use it, right? We're told to go use it in a sales cycle. In a situation like that, what tends to happen is salesperson will get it and go, great, I've got a customer story.

They'll read it and go, okay, well, I'm going to translate this into how I think this should be told, and I'll maybe practice it once and that's about it. And then I'll reel it out in front of a prospect and that's not a great way to do it. It's kind of understanding. It's understandable, therefore why we're in this spot where we think we tell a lot of great stories. In reality, we don't tell as many as we do.

And those that we do tell are just not all that compelling. So it's no wonder that we're all over the place. So what I thought we would do is actually take a real live case study from a cybersecurity company and dissect it a little bit, see what's there, and then figure out how we turn that into a great story. You could tell in about a minute to 90 seconds in front of our prospect, right? So I went up to my good friends at Axis Security, went on to their website and pulled down they have a case study for a sale they did at Armis, another cyber security company.

So I pulled it down and you can go on their site and pull it down as well and have a look. This is, I think four pages long. It's actually really nicely laid out. It's got some highlights and some quotes called out and lots of things like that. And it goes into a good amount of detail and it's got some of the key components we want to have when we're telling a great story.

So for this one, this is actually quite good because we don't need to go off and ask someone to help us fill in the gaps on this one. So how do you take this four page case study and make it into Story? Well, here's how I would do it. I'm going to tell this story. I don't know this story at all except for what's in the case study.

So I was going to tell it as I see it. If I was to translate it into a 1 minute long story, might be a little bit rough, so bear with me. Right, I'm going to do this in the fly a little bit, but here's how I might tell it. Right, I'd say. In August 2019, Armis appointed Curtis Simpson as their CISO.

And as Curtis came in, there was three things he found with his remote access situation, which he was a little bit frustrated by. The first one was he found there was multiple remote access solutions in place for lots of various different reasons. He was kind of frustrated that response to threats were not fast enough, right. They weren't able to respond fast enough. It was really just too slow in his mind to be really effective.

And the third thing he found was that he was blind into how SAS apps were being used across the remote access VPNs that they had. And this all kind of got to a point where he got frustrated and thought there's going to be a better way. So what he did was he went out to the market and he found access and he decided to implement access. To prove out that there was a better way to do this, he immediately saw three benefits. The first one was a much better user experience.

And as we know, you frustrate end users with security tools and they end up going around them and try to do all sorts of different things. So what he found was a much better user experience where it was basically seamless for users to use the remote access solution and there weren't any complaints about having to use multiple. And the one that we were giving them was actually quite easy to use. The second thing that Curtis found was that his visibility into SAS apps that were being used and by whom, so he could see exactly what was going on and what they were doing, which is a huge win for him. And the third thing that he found was, rather than just a faster way to respond to incidents and threats, he actually really got down to the root cause of what was happening and was able to solve it just by having this better visibility in his remote access tool.

Ultimately, what happened was that Curtis hit two big value drivers. The first one, he actually reduced risk. And the second thing is he saved money by not having to support three or four different solutions. So there's how I might tell a story. Now, if I knew the story better, I might tell it, but differently.

Right. In terms of some of the facts. But just reading the four page document, I got it down to what was that? About a minute to hopefully about 90 seconds or so. A couple of things I want to point out to this on this was I used a story structure which is very powerful.

Half of the most popular Hollywood movies ever made follow this Heroes Journey story. That's what I used. So you think about what I did. I had a character which was a person with a name and a title. So we had courageous with a title.

He worked at a name company, which was Armis. And not always we do that, but in this case we could. And at a point in time, right. So I didn't say in the past or anything like that. I actually said in August 2019.

The first thing someone does when they hear that is they think, Where was I? In August 2019, they start thinking about putting themselves in that story. All right. The second part of the story is the hero has a problem. In this case, he joined the company, he realized there was three problems and I laid them out.

Three problems, one, two and three, right? And I didn't get into solve the problems. I didn't say what he was missing was the next jam, whatever I said, here's what he found in terms of just the problems. Right? So that was what happened there.

The third part of the story is kind of subtle. He meets a guide. In this case, the guide is actually access security. They're not the hero of the story. They're the guide.

They're the ones that enabled Curtis to be the hero of the story. Big trap people fall into is they go and say, what we did was and we showed them and we did this for him. That's when you're putting yourself as the hero of the story, and that's not what we want to do. We want Curtis to be the hero, and we just have to be the person that's enabling him to become the hero of the story. Then he hit a plan.

It was a pretty simple one, right. He found excess and implemented it to try that. Right. If I knew more about the story, I might say, well, he did this and that. He involves a team, whatever it might be.

And the final thing was successful results, right? What transformations outcomes, things like that did we get? And I talked about how he ultimately reduced risk and save money right on top of the other kind of more tactical results around the visibility, the user experience, things like that. The thing that I was missing I didn't get from the story was any personal outcomes. I don't know if he was seen as a big savior or he transformed the view of security because he came in and take away these big problems that the users were experiencing.

I don't know if that happened, but that's one thing that might be missing. All right, so if you go back and listen to what I did, I had the point in time I had to hear the story. I talked about the problems they experienced. He met a guide, which was the vendor in this case, that helped him get results that were impactful and drove value. So that's how I would take a case study, which in itself can be read different ways and varying degrees of detail and power.

Often they're very logical and factual and a little bit boring, frankly, and turned it into a story that I could actually tell in front of someone and feel like I'm going to draw them into that story and really want to take part. So that's how to take that case study and make it into something powerful. You taught it in front of your customers. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe in your favorite podcast player and leave a review@salesbluebird.com/R and that's where you can leave a review.

Thanks for joining me today, and I'll see you next time on Sales Bluebird.