Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, where we help cybersecurity startups grow sales faster. I am your host Andrew Monaghan and today we're talking about finding and confirming if your prospect is an innovator. There’s nothing worse than putting in all the work on a deal to get someone on board with our philosophy, thinking about the world the way we think about them, getting through the motions of a demo and a POC, only to find that the company you're dealing with really doesn't buy from early stage startups. Or maybe it's the person that you're talking to, the group that you're talking to just doesn't buy from early stage startups. So you're wasting a whole bunch of time and effort by doing things with someone who isn't able to buy at the end of the day.

In this episode, we're going to cover one way to qualify someone to see if they're an innovator and able to work with us and avoid a whole bunch of wasted time. So you can figure out if you're dealing with a company and person who could buy from you just by asking a couple of simple questions. So let's take the situation. You got a first meeting, it goes for 45 minutes, let's say. And in the arc of the meeting, what we've done is we've done some qualification about use cases and the problems they're facing and things like that.

It sounds like they've got some of the challenges that we think we can solve. We talk about our vision, our philosophy, the big things that we want to achieve and the outcomes we want to deliver for them. Maybe it's a talk track, maybe it's a deck, maybe even a quick demo, right? And what we've done is we've kind of got a philosophical match with someone and the excitement is pretty high, right? You can see that they're leaning in, you can see that they're interested in taking the next step with us.

This is the point where we want to get in and ask a couple of crucial questions. It's almost like hitting the brakes a little bit on the excitement levels, a little bit of coming back to reality in terms of the conversation that you're having with someone. But here's what I've seen work really well, so at this point, what you could do is say, look, it sounds like we're both aligned on how to tackle some of the problems. It seemed like to me, as we were showing you stuff, you were kind of leaning in and something. You want to take that next step with us, right?

And then you want to say, let me ask you, though, an early stage company like us isn't for everyone. Is your company used to working with innovative startups, bringing fresh technology to market and then shut up, right? See what comes back. And sometimes they'll say, not really, or I don't know. Or sometimes they'll say, yeah, we've done this, right?

You really get someone that says, oh, absolutely, we do all the time. But sometimes you get people that say, yeah, we do this right. And then what you want to do is to ask them, when was the last time? Can you give me an example? I'm curious of an example where that's happened recently.

What you're doing is just say, okay, you said you are, but let me just qualify it and trust but verify that you've got some history, the company's got some history, right? At this point, what you're doing is talking about the company's ability. So you're not asking them yet. You're saying, is your company a company who buys from innovative startups? All right, so that's one thing.

And as I said, you'll get different answers coming back and you want to question again, and you'll say, oh yeah, last year we did this, last year we did that. Right. And then the next question, if you get that far, is say, well, what about you? Not everyone's in a situation where they're able to work with an innovative company such as ours with fresher technology. What's your ability to do this?

It could get a little bit awkward, but if you do it the right tone, you're not challenging them in any way. You're not using them. You're just basically asking, is this something that you're able to pull off? And there's lots of reasons why they could say no, right? Maybe they're just new to the company and you just don't know yet if they got the political capital and the budget and the wherewithal to pull this off.

Maybe they've been there a long time and they're just trying to retire. Maybe they're even leaving the company and they're not just willing to take it on. There's no reason why they would say no. And then the other thing is, some people will say yes again, right? They'll say, yeah, I do it from time to time.

I've done it before. Did it last year. Yes, just recently we brought in whatever right? And you want to ask for that example again. If they give you a security example in the first one, just say, was it you that led the spearheaded the bringing in X Company you talked about before?

If it wasn't, you can say, well, what's an example recently where you did that and then maybe digging a little bit more. How did it go? What roadblocks did you have to get around to get it through? Maybe read the room a little bit, but understand that maybe there's some depth there you can dig into once you got someone talking. So that's a simple way to do it, simple approach.

Do it with empathy, do it with the right tone. You're just being very mature of fact that some people can and some people can. And that's just the way the world is right now. Importantly, you do this in the first or second meeting, right? You don't want to get into long demos bringing in resources from our side.

You certainly don't want to be in Pocs until this conversation is done and you're comfortable with what the answers were back. And some of you will be uneasy listening to this going, wait a minute, I've got someone who's excited and I'm going to start worrying about and accusing them of and things like that, right? The reality is, is they're going to know very quickly as you get into the sales cycle that you are a startup, right? They're just going to know, they're going to ask around, has anyone heard of this company? No.

They're going to dig in, look at LinkedIn and say, oh, they've got 21 employees, they were started 18 months ago, they're going to figure all this out, right? So all you're doing is bringing forward a conversation that's going to happen. The worst thing is the conversation happens internally at their end without your knowledge. And the best thing is you bring it forward and you get up front and you show you're someone to be trusted, someone who understands how all this works and someone that they want to work with. And the other thing in terms of the flow, don't ask too early.

You need to get them wanting to at least take the next step with you, right? You want them excited to do that next thing and that's where you just kind of put the brakes on a little bit. And I've heard all sorts of things as reactions to this. We've talked about the, no, we're not really like that. I'm not really like that.

I got things going on. I've been in meetings where someone said, honestly, I should think about leaving the company soon. For this reason. We've had people kind of call up afterwards and start asking the head of sales and the CEO for a job because they really liked what they're saying. But they're just a company where they can't get advancement.

It's really interesting, once you've built up a little bit of trust and excitement around it, what the answers are that you get back. So that's one big step to do, another step to do. And this one you probably want to wait a little bit, get into towards POC, maybe just before POC or during the POC, you want to have a conversation with your champion, with your buyer, especially if they're in, let's say, older, more established or even regulated environments, more controlled environments. You want to have a conversation about purchasing, right? And it's not about what's the process, things like that.

You want to have a one on one conversation and you want to say, john, one thing I'm thinking about is purchasing is going to come back to you and they're going to have questions about working with a company like ours. How are you going to handle that? And again, shut up, right? You basically ask it, what's your plan to deal with purchasing, legal, whoever it might be, coming in saying, are you sure this company's got 21 employees? They've barely been around.

Is this something we really want to do? Who's approved this? Who's on board? They're going to have these questions, right? And in some environments, purchasing has no power to do that, and that's just the way it is.

But in a lot of companies, especially bigger, more established, and regulators have talked about they do have that power, they can come back and say, is this the right thing for the business? And in fact, in some environments, they're expected to do it, right? So having the conversation with your champion to say, when this comes up, how are you going to deal with it? Right? And sometimes you'll get people to say, look, I get it.

Don't worry though, right? We work hand in hand together. We're all on the same page. There's no surprises here. I'm going to brief them beforehand.

I'll make sure the CISO is on board, the CIO, whoever it might be. We'll get this brief, right? And then sometimes they'll say, I haven't thought about that, or what do you mean? Or whatever. And that's where you want to start coaching, right?

You want to start digging a little bit. We're going to ask you about this. What do you think the best way to handle that is? What if you approach it like this, right? You kind of go into coach mode at that point to help them, right?

To have the conversation because you don't want your deal killed just because someone came and asked some tough questions and there weren't great answers. So that's the type of conversations you want to have to a two step process. You want to qualify early whether they can, and then qualify a little bit later to say when someone comes in to say, are you sure there's a good answer, a good way to handle it? So if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the podcast and your favorite player and leave a review at salesbluebird.com/R, the letter R.

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