How to WOW prospects at your cybersecurity startup (and the story of how it worked with Bill Gates)

[00:00:00] Hey, it's Andrew. And just quickly before we start this episode, I want to tell you about one of my favorite podcasts is the Bear Knuckles and Brass Tax podcast. Not only does it have

[00:00:10] a great name, it also has a really good format that's interesting. The two hosts are both named George. That's not what's interesting about it. It's that George K is on the vendor side and George A is a sysso on the customer side. And they have real conversations sometimes

[00:00:26] with guests about the world of vendor customer interactions. They're not afraid to call a bad behavior on both sides and talk about the weird and wonderful nature of this world of ours in cybersecurity. Recent favors of mine are the one about building trust called taking

[00:00:43] a flamethrower to FOD and buzzword mumbo jumbo, and also the one with someone who's a field sysso and advisor to startups called How Security Buyers Think and Go-To-Market strategies for young companies. I'm not getting paid for this promo, I just really enjoy the show

[00:00:58] that two George has put on. Check it out. It's the Bear Knuckles and Brass Tax podcast. Now on with this episode. Welcome to the Cybersecurity Startup Revenue Podcast where we help cybersecurity companies grow revenue faster. I'm your host Andrew Monaghan and today we're talking about

[00:01:25] differentiation and one thing you can do to help stand up. So tell me if you've been through this before, imagine most of you have. You get on a call, you run the call first call

[00:01:37] with a prospect and the end of it you come off and you think of yourself I'm not really sure they got it. I'm not sure they understood why we were different. I'm not sure they understood quite what we do for them. They're asking weird questions that didn't seem

[00:01:51] to really be in line with the start questions you'd ask if you truly understood our unique take on this market and what we do. It happens a lot. In fact, if you ask buyers there's

[00:02:03] been research that's done where they say that many times they can't really tell much difference to the vendors that they talked to. They seem like much of a muchness. They seem pretty similar. When those situations come around they end up just choosing

[00:02:17] ones because of other reasons. They're easier to do business with, there'd be prices of factor, maybe pricing models of factor, things like that but it's not because there was a natural front runner that was a much better fit for them and what they're trying to

[00:02:31] achieve. Now I bet you if you asked the companies in these situations they would say well hold on a minute we're very different to all these companies right? But for some reason the differentiation is being lost and buyers and executives are not

[00:02:45] understanding the differences in different vendors out there in the marketplace. There's 3,400 vendors right now probably more up to 35 right now and they're all climbing for attention. There's lots and lots of overlap between different submarkets right now and cyber so I guess it's natural there's

[00:03:03] going to be a lot of confusion out there. I want to tell you a quick story about something that I experienced a while back. This was somewhere 2014. I was working for a company called Ionic Security. We joined pre-product

[00:03:18] release so we were at their evangelizing what we were doing and it was one of these things where if we pulled it off it was going to be a big impact right? What we were able to do was switch on and off access to

[00:03:31] data no matter where in the world it was based on policy changes right? And when we talked to the CISOs and they could ask what we did it was you know most of them were like yeah this if you guys can pull this off it was pretty

[00:03:43] groundbreaking right? So we're in that environment where we were getting good validation from people and the product was being built and then along the way this was summer 2014 Adam Getty our founder our CTO founder at the time he

[00:03:58] was asked by the team at Kleiner Perkins who are one of our VCs to come into the office because Bill Gates was coming in and I guess at the time I don't know if he still does it Bill would go to something

[00:04:10] Kleiner Perkins if maybe a couple other VCs and say hey why don't you bring in two or three of your most groundbreaking startups I'd love to learn the technology and maybe there's a fit at Microsoft that I can make an

[00:04:22] intro for. So Adam went out to Sandhill Road and went in the meeting room and I think he probably had like 15 minutes or so with Bill and what he did was he went straight to the demo of the product and he showed

[00:04:35] Bill you know let's give you access to some data let's switch off access to data in real time now try and open up again now let's make the policy change based on when there's an iPad or a phone or a laptop you know he was doing

[00:04:47] all this on and off access to data in real time as the product that was designed to do right and that's just what he did for Bill and at the end of it apparently you know Bill Gates turned to his team and said

[00:05:00] you know we should investigate this more and that was his very understated way of being impressed apparently you know you rarely would jump around and say this is amazing but that was his way of saying you know there's something in

[00:05:11] this let's let's look at this some more and Adam was you know naturally pretty pleased with how things went he got you know someone a very sophisticated technology person to get what we did in a short period of time

[00:05:24] in an impactful way you know the dirty little secret was that that's how we did our demos anyway right when we got SISOs and and heads of security at different companies on a call when we

[00:05:37] were doing a demo that's how we did the demo we went straight to the point where we say okay let's let's show you switching on and off data let's change policies in real time let's do all this right there and then

[00:05:50] and what happened was that almost without fail the the prospect we were talking to would say well hold on a second how are you doing that right how's this working tell me more about the

[00:06:00] architecture tell me more about the the way this is going to work inside my organization right so they were they were enamored they were captured by the way that we did the demo so that

[00:06:12] then wanted to find out a lot more and they were engaged at that point right they got what we did they realized it was there was nothing else in the market at all they would do something like this

[00:06:22] and they wanted to learn more about how it all worked so from that standpoint you know it worked very well now let's contrast that if we'd done a standard let's call a standard vendor

[00:06:34] demo I know there's no such thing but you know you might recognize the format as I could have walked through this right if we're doing a standard demo what we might have done was put up the console the dashboard right and said okay

[00:06:46] here's our dashboard it's got six different components to it here's what each one does over here in the left hand side is we got the policy part of the dashboard why don't we dig into that and show you how we create

[00:06:56] policies here's the eight different ways the eight different factors where it comes to policy look you can make it into groups and you can group people in different parts of world in different ways you can you know sign policy based on their

[00:07:08] uh their id based on location you know you go through all that and then we say you know it's important that we connect to your existing systems let's imagine you have octa let's do an indication octa look how

[00:07:19] simple that was that happened really quickly right now here's where we can look at your devices and data let's say we need to find out something about you know this device right here look at all the cool information

[00:07:30] that we got about the device uh in this dashboard right here and so it would go on and on and on and be blah blah blah right and eventually what we would do is get to the point and say okay now we

[00:07:41] establish all these kind of you know ground rules as it were let's show you how we can switch on and off data in real time the trouble is by that time the audience would be bored

[00:07:52] they would have been half asleep they might have been doing email or text messaging or are thinking about lunchtime we're really good for lunch right they would have been off in different la la land trying to figure out well what's the big deal about all this stuff

[00:08:06] that these guys are showing us and the aha moment I think to take from this is that you know most companies most cyber security vendors most products that you're selling there's something about them that is unique it's different it's a secret sauce

[00:08:21] right and what we have to do is you have to engineer these wow moments so that the prospect gets it and gets it quickly and understands how we're going to be different than everyone else they've seen in the market and you have to take control of that

[00:08:35] process and make sure that it hits them between the eyes and they get it right there can be any doubt in their mind that a this is different and could be really amazing and be where the only ones are doing it in this manner

[00:08:50] so this is something that is when done well is truly impactful it goes against some of the the sales advice is that you should only demo things that solve problems that the customer came up with right you know if you got something that truly is going to

[00:09:05] you know change the market and you can't be doing it only showing that if someone says they have the problem right you need to open their minds to this somehow and that's something that Adam and the the s easily work with

[00:09:16] are very good at doing right they're using the demo to do that but if you want to engineer these wow moments for yourself what's some tips to do that i've got about five here to give you the first one is fundamental

[00:09:28] which is be very clear what your wild moment is or what your wild moments are and i'll tell you not every company i work with has obvious wow moments right it's things that well you ask them how they're different it's in reality it's just a teeny tiny bit

[00:09:43] better different than whoever else does it but you'd be hard pressed to say that's groundbreaking right so this is not work if when you show to people they can I shrug their shoulders

[00:09:54] and go i saw something very similar last week right that this is not going to be a wild moment if if it's just pretty much the same but maybe a different color right you get my idea so you can be

[00:10:04] clear what they are and what they're not and you know if foolish if you try and claim some things a while they make a big deal about something if it's really not right so first of all that's the first step

[00:10:13] be very clear what those are internally the second thing you need to do is in the discovery portion of that first meeting ask a question that's going to help open the prospects mind or eyes to

[00:10:28] the area that you're going to get into when you when you talk about this in the demo right or in the slide deck or how are you do the wild moment right you need to open their minds to be ready to

[00:10:38] be engaged in this area so the concept of a wild moment I think has been running for a while but I remember Bob Tinker who was a CEO at Mobile Iron I saw him write or speak about this where what they realized that Mobile Iron

[00:10:52] very early on was they had a facility they called selective wipe that was where if you had a device that your employee had brought in and you're using mobile iron to manage it you could wipe only the

[00:11:04] corporate data and leave alone the personal data and this may seem a little weird these days but back in those days it was entirely common that if you provisioned your iPhone to work with the company and you left they would actually wipe your whole phone

[00:11:19] with your kids photos your contact list everything had to go because they wanted to take the corporate data off so mobile iron had this facility called mobile uh called selective wipe and what they did is

[00:11:30] they realized that this was a big deal so they put it front and center they made it into a wild moment right and if we're going if we go back to those days perhaps no one was asking for this right because they

[00:11:42] thought it wasn't possible but a question you could have asked might have been you know others are thinking about or resting with how are they going to deal with the situation where all data is being wiped from companies from

[00:11:54] phones that the from employees that leave the company right and I'm curious you know how do you plan to deal with that right so you're starting to open their mind to to think about if they're not already

[00:12:04] doing it that's going to be in their mind if they are already doing it you're gonna get them thinking again about how they thought about doing this so that's the second thing thing tee this up with some good questions

[00:12:14] the third thing is give them dessert first is what I call it right this is not a find any meal with eight courses where the desserts last you want to hit them up front with the dessert first don't lead towards

[00:12:26] this unique differentiation lead with it so that you know while they're paying attention you can hit them between the eyes with it fourth thing is you gotta really tell them that this is different right this is why you're different this is why your customers

[00:12:41] love you and you want to ideally do it before you get to it and after you get to it so what you might do is say you know what I'm going to do is start off with the one of the number one reasons why our

[00:12:53] customers love what we do and why we're different in the market right and then you do the the while moment and the end of that you might remind them right yeah that thing we just talked about for the last two or three

[00:13:03] minutes that is our secret sauce we got a patent pending on how we do that and uh our belief is that nowhere in the market is it coming close to this right now right so that might be a way to to bookend it with telling them

[00:13:15] you know what it is right which leads me to the fifth thing which is to ask them what it would mean for them so going back to Ionic you know once we've shown them this our SES and the sellers we were pretty good at saying

[00:13:29] to them you know you get the chance to digest this a little bit let's imagine you had this in your environment what would it mean for your program what would it mean for your data protection policies what would it mean for your whole risk

[00:13:42] reduction strategies inside the company if you had this control over data right and get them thinking about what it would mean for them how they would use it and what the impact would be to them and their program right so there's five tips about how to think about

[00:13:58] engineering these wild moments done right this is very impactful right and you can really make a difference and capture the hearts and minds of your prospects by doing a wild moment like this you can't leave it the chance right you can't hope that

[00:14:15] in minute 33 of the hour long call the bit you did for 30 seconds that a someone's going to remember it and b know that it was different unless you tee it up properly like this right most people will just they'll move past them

[00:14:30] and you'll lost the chance to catch them like that so don't bury it away somewhere in the meeting right give them dessert first make it powerful and my challenge to you is to think through now how you're doing things in the moment what your wild moment is

[00:14:46] and that how can you engineer using the tips I've just given you to use the tips to make this wild moment really impactful it would mean a lot to me and to the continued growth of the show

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