It's not all about ROI or COI! Buyers are emotional humans with John Bissett and Calum Kilgour from Slingshot Edge

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:00]:

You know when you have a conversation with someone and you just know that they completely understand and know their subject matter area and you know that what they're talking about is going to be super important to your ability to succeed in selling well. That's what today's episode is going to be like for many. John Bissett and Callum Gilgore are the founders of Slingshot Edge. They are both experienced sellers and also, more recently, really valued sales consultants and trainers. And in our world, in cybersecurity, they've helped some well-known companies transform how they sell. Over the years, I found them to be thoughtful and insightful about the whole area around the dynamics of a seller working with a buyer. Some of the things they talk about go against the common wisdom out there, such as selling with ROI will hurt your deals. And they also back it up with science and real-life examples. If you're wondering right now about how best to work with buyers and champions, how to get deals done in the current economic climate, or how to get people off the status quo, you won't want to miss this episode. Welcome to the Cybersecurity Startup Revenue Podcast, where we help cybersecurity startups grow revenue faster. I am your host, Andrew Monaghan. Our guests, plural, today are John Bissett and Calum Kilgore from Slingshot Edge. Gents, welcome to the podcast.

John Bissett [00:01:37]:

Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure.

Calum Kilgour [00:01:38]:

Thank you, Andrew. It's good to be here.

John Bissett [00:01:40]:

Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan [00:01:40]:

I'm looking forward to this episode, guys. So the audience won't hear it yet, but you've got awesome Scottish accents, and those who have been listening for a while, will know that I was born and bred in Edinburgh, and it's really fun getting to chat with folks from back home. For me, they say home is where the heart is, and for me, that's Edinburgh in a place called North Barrick, which you guys know, but others may not. But it's just outside Edinburgh. So this is talking with people from my hometown, and I love doing that, right? And I remember, actually, back in the day, the reason I first came across you guys a few years back was something popped up on LinkedIn, like a video thing, and I almost scrolled past and I looked closely and went, I think that's Edinburgh in the video. So I stopped and then that was it. I was kind of hooked from then on, as you guys were kind of doing these really great videos in different parts of Edinburgh. There's one, I think, in the graveyards. Graveyard. There's one in one of the closest in the old town. And, yeah, I was like, okay, what are these guys all about? So I was kind of interested in that. But I got to tell you, I'm a little bit nervous about one thing, because in the work that I do, whenever I come across someone who's trying to explain something and it's way too complicated, my standard go-to line is, Bill, one thing you have to know about me is I'm from Scotland. We're simple people. You need to make that more simple for me so I can understand it. And the reason I'm nervous is I think you guys are going to show today that not everyone in Scotland is simple and you're deeper thinkers about interacting with people in sales than perhaps I am. And people are going to realize that maybe the only simple person from Scotland is me. So I'm a little nervous about that, but I'm looking forward to the conversation that we're going to get into today. Well, let's get on to the business side of, you know, I mentioned in my preamble a couple of videos. I saw the gray fire's graveyard in the Old Town, things like that. You also have two up there that caught my eye, and one is titled ROI Could Be Hurting Your Deals. And the other one was titled Using ROI Will Kill Your Deals. So, John, I'll ask you, what's with this war on ROI?

John Bissett [00:03:54]:

Good question. So, yeah, I'm not sure it's a war, but I think there's definitely an issue with how it's been used in sales motions. And part of this is backed by data. So if you look at some of the data out there, particularly from the guys like Gong, who've analyzed millions of conversations between buyers and sellers, they've found a really strong correlation between leading with ROI-style messaging and your increased likelihood of losing. So there's a correlation with win rates when you start to lead with ROI-style logical messages. Here's our solution. Here's the efficiency savings, here's the cost savings, here's the ROI. The data unequivocally shows that sellers lose more deals. So I think that's where it stems from. Kind of a hard data perspective is actually harming sellers, and sellers are encouraged to sell the ROI. That's conventional wisdom, and it's always been the case since I was a young seller as well. So I'm not saying there's not I mean, there are probably quite a few people listening to this podcast thinking, surely ROI is important. The business case has to stack up now more than ever in this economic period that we're in. And I would agree, at some point the numbers do have to stack up. If you want to get the CFO to sign a deal off or you want to try and get the business case approved by the exec, the numbers have to make logical sense. But leading with ROI, the problem there is that's not the right way to engage or build a champion. Initially, we can go into this in more detail, but when you start to unpack what's going on in people's heads and look at their minds, we can talk about the different types of mind, the emotional thinking mind, and the logical, analytical thinking mind. Leading with ROI too early just engages the wrong part of the brain or your prospect's brain.

Andrew Monaghan [00:05:45]:

But I think you bring up something important there, which is like, you guys, I've been in this world for a while and everything we were ever taught was the logical ROI, right? You've got to get that business case figured out. You have to get payback in so many months. You've got to get the percentages. Work like this and deals will happen. And as you say right now, it seems like everyone's talking about how important that is. So we're kind of going against what we've been told and taught for so many years. And I'm wondering, have we just been missing the mark completely for many years or is it just that we've kind of understood more recently about how buyers' minds work?

John Bissett [00:06:23]:

Well, I'm not sure how recent it is. And I'm going to go back to one of your comments right at the start of the conversation, which was we are from Scotland and we're simple people. One very smart Scotsman from a couple of hundred years ago, and maybe this was the first video that you saw us, and we spoke about David Hume. David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher from the 18th century really lit up the world with his thinking, right? And one of the first things that Hume published, and it's one of his famous quotes, this was back in the 17 hundreds was the reason is and ought only to be a slave to the passions. And what they were basically saying 200 years ago was, look, we are emotional thinkers. We are not the logical, rational thinkers. We are so I think we've known about this for some time. And certainly, if you look at B to C, B to C, business-to-consumer advertising is fantastic at aligning and tapping into human emotions. And for some reason in the world of B to B, we seem to forget that. And I think intuitively, we know people buy an emotion, they make decisions based on emotion and then justify them with logic. But for some reason, that doesn't seem to have translated into a lot of B-to-B sales motions and messaging. And listen, look at the data is there as well. The evidence has been here for decades. Look at typical enterprise funnel conversion rates. Six in ten opportunities or something like that end up in no decision. So we've not been getting it wrong for a short period of time. We've been getting it wrong for a long period of time.

Andrew Monaghan [00:07:59]:

Calum let me ask you then, so we've been getting it wrong, but as John says, there has been this notion kicking around in our world for a while about people buying with emotion and justifying with logic. And people kind of nod along to that. But it seems like the nodding along to then actually saying and doing things that attach to that at the seller's level seems to not be there. Am I seeing that right or are you guys seeing something a little bit different?

Calum Kilgour [00:08:26]:

I think that is right. If you said to any seller, that human beings buy on emotion and justify with logic, they would say, yeah, of course. But then if you said, okay, how does that manifest itself in your conversations, or perhaps your first conversation with your buyer? They go, Right, hold on a second. They might struggle a bit to pull that out. And if you are trying to encourage them to use emotion, I think you might get some pushback with them saying things like, So am I supposed to ask my buyer all about their feelings, how they are today, what their philosophy is on life? And of course, the answer to that is no, that's not what you do. So there's a disconnect between the overarching statement of, sure, buyers buy with emotion, you justify with logic, and how that manifests itself in individual conversations.

Andrew Monaghan [00:09:30]:

And I've seen in your guy's work, you talk about this idea of in the buyer's mind, there's this chimp that sits there and it governs a lot about how they act and what they do. Tell us more about that concept because I think that might be a relatively new one for this audience.

Calum Kilgour [00:09:47]:

Sure. Well, I guess kind of trying to bridge that gap that I just spoke about right there. For human beings to ingest information and then process that and then turn that into actions, that sort of path has to be very concrete. If it's abstract in any way, it's hard. This chimp human model comes from a guy called Professor Stephen Peters, who is a psychiatrist, and a sports psychologist as well. He's helped the British Olympic cycling team go from almost zero gold medals to lots and lots of gold medals by helping them get what he calls this chimp under control in their minds. His book is called The Chimp Paradox. He's got this model where the chimp represents your emotional mind and the human represents your rational mind. And just doing that in itself, having that model, suddenly makes this idea of emotional logic a little bit more concrete because the reason he uses that model is, well, a real chimp gets frightened easily. It is in black and white. It's very, very strong. These are some of the attributes of a human being's emotional mind, there's lots more attributes, but they all play a part in sales conversations.

John Bissett [00:11:21]:

No, I was just going to interject and say I think what we like about the book as well, the Chimp human model, is it aligns with we've got two Bibles, really, that we refer to quite a lot in our work. One of them is the Chimp paradox, the other bible, which really is the bible when it comes to understanding human heuristics and cognitive biases, is Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for his work in prospect theory. And I think Callum told me this a few weeks ago. It holds the record for being the book that's been started the most number of times but never finished. It's quite an in-depth corpus of work. But Kanaman talks about System One and System Two as well. And system one is this fast-thinking brain. It's your automatic pilot and it's continually scanning the room looking for threats and opportunities and it aligns very nicely to the chimp model as well. So the two books are probably our biggest resources and reference guides and I think if you want to understand the human mind and these two parts of the brain, those are probably the two best books to dive into.

Andrew Monaghan [00:12:25]:

Well, let's try and make it real for a seller, right? Imagine we've got a startup in cybersecurity, we got a team of five to ten sellers on board already they're out there trying to get some attention, trying to get meetings with the buyers and the influencers and the deals and get going inside companies, right? How can they, in reality, in their day-to-day jobs use some of these concepts? Have you got a couple of examples that you can draw on to say this is more what we're thinking about as opposed to the conventional wisdom is something completely different?

Calum Kilgour [00:12:59]:

Yeah, sure. Well, the first thing they need to understand is well, a couple of rules. There are seven big rules in sales that relate to the chimp and there are three dimensions that don't know if we'll get a chance to unpack all of that. But one of the big things about the chimp is well, first of all, in the human mind, when a message goes into your mind, whether you're reading something or whether you're talking to someone, the first part of the human mind that that message hits is the chimp. So it gets the first chance to do something with that message, maybe to reject or get the human involved or react in some way. One of the things about the chimp, people talk about a 6th sense when firemen walk into buildings and they just somehow know that the building is about to collapse so they get out of there. So that 6th sense comes from the chimp in that it's a fantastic pattern recognizer. So it stores a model of the world that is constantly updated and anytime that something bad has happened in the past it remembers the pattern involved with that bad situation. And unfortunately, because of all the bad salespeople not necessarily the ones that are watching your podcast or listening to your podcast, but because of all the bad salespeople who have been pushy slimy trying to trap their buyers into doing certain things. The chimp holds a model, a bias in its mind called a stereotype bias before a salesperson even opens their mouth. If that person believes that another person is in the sales world, they automatically get their guard up and want them to go away. So that's the first thing, just be aware that you as an individual, at the start of your conversations are and.

John Bissett [00:15:00]:

Sorry, just to interject on that one as well, Callum, because I think that's a sort of valid point. When we started the conversation, you were asking about ROI-style messaging. The sellers don't come to the table with this trust established. That stereotype bias. Unfortunately, because buyers have been trapped into saying yes for decades or duped or hoodwinked or they've had pretty poor experiences with salespeople, that stereo bias exists. And so when sellers turn up early and start promising the ROI that prospect, their chimp doesn't trust you, it doesn't trust these numbers. You've not earned the right to have that conversation yet. And that's one of the reasons ROI fails. The other reason is this chimp is an emotional thinker and ROI is a language it doesn't understand. So there's a lot of work to be done by sellers to establish trust before and earn the right to have that business case conversation. Were you going to give a couple of examples, Callum, around some of the contrast and approach?

Calum Kilgour [00:16:05]:

Yeah. Typically, again, it's not the seller's fault when they join a company they've got, especially in a small startup type of organization, that you may get involved with part of your business. Andrew the founder is totally passionate about whatever product that they have invented, and the founders probably had some success and they've hired their first salesperson. And the founder wants to transfer some of that enthusiasm, or as much of that enthusiasm and passion as possible about their product and offering to that individual. So the founder will maybe rave on about all these amazing things that his or her technology does and try and train that person in what all these.

Andrew Monaghan [00:16:52]:

Things are so calm that never happens, just so you know.

John Bissett [00:16:58]:

I don't know what companies you've worked with. No.

Andrew Monaghan [00:17:02]:

But you're dead on.

John Bissett [00:17:03]:

Sorry, go on.

Calum Kilgour [00:17:06]:

In the founder's mind, the way that they have sold their stuff is by raving on about all these great features and products, even though that's probably not what has happened, but that's what they think has happened. So they train their seller to rave on about all these products and of course, this chimp that's first of all, having this conversation with this person that they know is a seller, they've been annoyed and bored hundreds of times before by other sellers that have raved on about their products and services. So as soon as it hears that, it just wants to maybe give you the smallest possible answers to your questions and get away from you as quickly as possible. So maybe lesson number one is don't talk about your product tall because the chimp doesn't know about your product, it doesn't care about your product, and you're just sounding like everyone else out there.

Andrew Monaghan [00:18:02]:

So what's the alternative, then? What I've seen, if you look at, again, conventional wisdom, is you ask some questions and what I've seen is these questions are very logical questions. What do you have? How many do you have? How many people are doing that? How long is it now? As you're going through diagnosis or discovery you get these very logical questions. So what's the alternative to that that you think might work better?

Calum Kilgour [00:18:27]:

Sure. Do you want to go on this John, or I keep going, it's up to you.

John Bissett [00:18:32]:

Yeah, I can interject and you can have a stab as well. So if you look at most of our customers and what we've probably done in our careers as well is if you can craft some kind of perspective or point of view that you can bring into the conversation that is essentially a storyline that they can potentially see themselves in. So another sizable can look at this story that you're potentially sharing. It's not a monologue per se, but it's a conversational framework turning up with a point of view that speaks to the pain there are a few dimensions of pain we can talk about and desires and there are again probably three dimensions of desire we can talk about. If you get these narratives right, these conversational perspectives right, and it's firmly focused on the persona, your chief persona, who's potentially your champion on an opportunity. If you go in with that perspective and it talks to the right pains and the right desires, you can trigger that emotional response. So the way that our customers use these things is they'll use it as a straw man for discovery. They'll go in with that perspective. It's a storyline. It follows a very particular choreography that the customer can see themselves in that storyline as the hero, and it talks to their struggles, it talks to their desires, it talks to their goals. And if you get that perspective right and you start to layer in questions, it sort of naturally pulls the prospect into a conversation because they can see themselves in it, and it talks to their pains, it talks to their worries or concerns, and it talks to their aspirations as well. So it's not just about going in and interrogating prospects and asking lots of questions. It's turning up and showing them very clearly that you understand their world. And that in itself is a 180-degree flip from most sellers who turn up and say here's our portfolio, here's all the solutions and as soon as you do that prospects chimp goes into a coma. If you turn up with a narrative, a point of view, hypothesis, perspective, call it what you will, that you can use as a conversational aid and it's firmly framed around the world with the prospect, then that becomes a very different conversation and there are ways you can start to construct these perspectives. It's maybe worth touching on. I mentioned there are multiple dimensions of pain and value. So we talk about three dimensions of pain, the dimensions of desire, and essentially the gap in between or the contrast is three dimensions of value. So, the dimensions we talk about, we talk about business pain, which most sellers try and talk about you're losing money, or here's the threat to the business, or here's how you get more efficient, here's how you increase market share and profitability. There's professional value or professional pain, which is really when you think about your target persona, who's trying to get the job done, and how much stress and hassle they have trying to do their job. Where are the inefficiencies? And if you can talk to that, that's going to resonate. But the interesting thing and this was a study by CEB who are now part of Gartner, they looked at both of those dimensions of value, if you like business value, professional value, but the third dimension was the one that they found really shifted the dial when it comes to developing and building champions. So if you want to get someone to advocate and drive change in an organization, you have to talk to that third dimension. And they called that identity value. And that's where you so if business value is how you help the organization win, and professional value is how you help the persona do a better job, more efficiently, with less stress, less hassle, identity value is how do you speak to that personal sense of value that Sizo has? And that's really the Chimp, right? So the chimp cares deeply about its reputation, it cares deeply about its status, and how other people perceive it. And if you can align with that and help them improve that identity value, their personal sense of identity, improve their profile within the organization, help them get more recognition, then Gartner found that's the only dimension that correlates with someone's likelihood to advocate and drive change. So that speaks to the chimp first again. So how do you help the person with their role? You're looking for Pragmatic examples as well, so it's really useful to understand how your personas are measured. So if they are sitting down at the end of the year with their boss, how do they know that they've done a good job? So they'll have particular KPIs, personal KPIs they're focused on. So if you can align with those things and help them win individually, that's something sellers probably don't do. They'll speak to business value, they might even speak to some professional value, but you need to get right into the heart of that identity value as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:23:42]:

John and Calum, let's learn a little bit more about you. I've got a list of 35 questions here. The good news is I'm not going to ask each of you 35 questions. I'm going to ask you to pick one number each between one and 35. And I'll read out the question that it corresponds to. Calum, do you want to go first?

Calum Kilgour [00:23:58]:

Twelve.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:01]:

What is one thing you own that you should really throw up?

Calum Kilgour [00:24:06]:

Well, I love coffee, so much that every time on Amazon, which seems to know my mind, it pops up all sorts of fantastic of these little Italian coffee percolators. So the result is I've got about five of them, all different colors and nice. They make nice coffee, but I don't need five, so I should throw at least one of them out.

John Bissett [00:24:26]:

You probably should.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:27]:

Five is a lot. I've got a friend, actually, here in Denver, and he leads a sales team in Cybersecurity as well. He probably listens, I'm not sure, but I joke with him. He drinks so much coffee, that he actually has the Breville coffee machine on the subscribe and save setting in Amazon. He has to get one a year because he makes so much coffee. The keeps breaking down.

Calum Kilgour [00:24:48]:

Oh, wow. That's outrageous. And the good news is, for me, my son is well, I suppose it's not good news. I will miss him, but my son is going to university soon, so he is taking one of these machines with him.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:01]:

Well, there you go. That's one that's going to get thrown out, almost, as it were.

Calum Kilgour [00:25:05]:

Right? Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:06]:

John, a number for you between one and 35.

John Bissett [00:25:09]:

I feel a lot of pressure now to pick the right number. 19. That's a lucky number.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:15]:

There you go. Where in the world would you like to live if you had the chance?

John Bissett [00:25:20]:

Oh, I'm going to bore people here. I'm going to upset people. Of all the fantastic places I've visited in the world, my spiritual home is still the Highlands of Scotland, so maybe somewhere on the west coast, maybe the sky, maybe a portrait somewhere up there. And I've traveled around and I've visited many, many beautiful places, but I think there's something very I don't know, very spiritual and very deep about the connection with Scotland. And you probably felt that yourself as well when you came back home.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:47]:

Well, I think the word you use there is what I feel, as well as the spiritual side. Remember 20 years ago, I worked with a guy over here and he and his wife went over on a trip and he came back, he said, there's something about the Highlands that he said spiritual, it's a weird thing. You kind of get there, and it has that essence about it that is very different.

John Bissett [00:26:10]:

It is because we live near Edinburgh as well now, not far from where you used to live, but originally I'm from the Highlands, so I drive back up the A Nine towards Inverness, and as soon as you hit Perth and Can Ross, you start to get the hills and the greenery. You just feel like you're home and there's nowhere else. I think that sort of does that to me, to be fair. So I think I will retire back up there at some point.

Andrew Monaghan [00:26:35]:

Well, it's a great part of the world, it really is. And I did a trip with I took the family back a few years back and we got a couple of camper vans or small RVs and we went up to Skye, Oban, Fort William Mull did the whole little trip out there. It was fantastic. It rained a lot, but apart from that, it was fun.

John Bissett [00:26:54]:

Yeah, you've got to expect that, haven't you? That's a good Scottish summer.

Andrew Monaghan [00:27:01]:

I talked to Andy Raskin last year and if you know, he's one of the kind of godfathers of the, you know, messaging kind of framework, right? And what he talked about was the idea you want people to join a movement. You don't want them to buy a product from another vendor, you want them to join a movement. And that's very powerful. How closely aligned is the idea behind a movement and getting people to really rally behind a movement to the idea of identity value you were talking about? Is it the same or is it a little bit different?

John Bissett [00:27:33]:

It's another strand of identity value. So identity value is how do I improve my reputation, how do I improve my profile? But also I've got philosophies and ideologies and values that I care about, personal values I care deeply about, and that might be a movement I believe in. This is a good example. We spoke to a CRO last year and they had spoken to some other sales trainers and this other sales training organization had qualified this particular CRO. They'd actually qualified out the prospect and the CRO said, look, they missed something. They tried to qualify me on business impact. They were trying to understand the size of the problem from a purely business perspective. What they didn't get was I cared deeply about creating an environment for my sales team that nurtures and develops them. I want to attract good people like these other people on the call, and I want to keep hold of them deeply so that philosophical or ideological desire or movement being part of a movement absolutely speaks to identity value as well. And again, it's not about the hard numbers, it's about what you care about, what you believe in. And if you can tap into and align with that, then again, that's really going to help you drive prospects and motivate prospects to change.

Andrew Monaghan [00:28:57]:

And Callum, you've worked with cybersecurity companies in your work at Slingshot Edge. I'm wondering if you've got any tips or ideas for a seller at a cybersecurity company about how they tap into as John was saying, that identity value of the people that you're working with, is it so important to bring a different POV in a narrative style, or there are other things that the seller should be thinking about to really tap into that.

Calum Kilgour [00:29:26]:

Yeah, I'd say the POV or story. So even this term POV is a little bit abstract just to try and make it a little bit more concrete. It is a story that people will see themselves in. It is a story that talks about things that are multiple. Individuals care about. So if you imagine that's your objective to try and build one of these, each of these companies, the likes of Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, Orange, Cyber, and Defense, all want to get their customers or get their prospects to join them as part of a movement. And the way they do that is by creating this story. And the way that you create that story if you're in one of these startups is you have to try and imagine your buyer's world. So there's not just going to be one buyer, I'm sure there's a committee of buyers. So step one is to understand who all the players are. Step two understand who has the lion's share of that problem. Understand who suffers the most as a result of doing something in a certain way that you are offering fixes. Step three is to try and model their world before you have your conversation with them. So to try and do that, you want to try and think about the three dimensions of value and predict what they might be that you can bring or your offering might bring. And part of that might be speaking to your existing customers or whoever. It depends on how big your company is. But the crazy thing is whoever built the product that your company sells, whether it's a product team or a founder, has already gone through this exercise either consciously or subconsciously to build a product. They've already thought about who affects what problems it solves and what these different dimensions of value are. And if they haven't done that or if these things aren't apparent, they will never have sold it. So for someone to have bought it, these things must exist. So there's a lot of fantastic knowledge and expertise in your own company that the bigger the company is, generally it gets lost between the product getting created and the sales team going and having conversations. So model these three dimensions of value in advance and then from a discovery point of view and a conversation point of view, you know, in advance the areas that you're looking for.

Andrew Monaghan [00:32:15]:

What I really love about that though is it's three dimensional, not the usual probably single dimension that what I've seen is generally speaking, Maybe I'm being a little bit unfair, is that sellers are very comfortable around the professional value, right? I understand this person gets measured a certain way, they're fed up that the remediation task takes a week rather than a day. They get there pretty quickly. I kind of wonder sometimes how clear we are on business value but certainly identity value. It's something that we as a species of salespeople aren't always that comfortable getting into with people, right? I don't know if you've seen the same thing but it's like a barrier, right? I don't feel like I've earned the right to have that conversation. I don't want to annoy them, I don't want to get into something I don't deserve yet having the narrative, is that the way to kind of overcome that? Because you're not asking weird questions about what drives you and things like that? Is that what that enables us to do?

John Bissett [00:33:20]:

Yeah, absolutely. You're right. I mean, bearing in mind that they don't trust us anyway, right, to start with, buyers don't trust sellers. So going in there and asking deep questions around, what do you care about?

Calum Kilgour [00:33:37]:

Even not deep ones, even what are your business initiatives this year?

John Bissett [00:33:41]:

It takes a lot to build trust. And by the way, why should I tell you my deepest, darkest secrets and desires, right? Because, one, I wouldn't tell that with my mates down the pub, but I'm certainly not going to share that with you, a salesperson. So I think having the narrative works really well is you can talk about the emotional struggles of other people like them. So I'm not saying this is how you feel or this is what you care about. I'm saying, listen, a lot of sizes have come to us, and what they've shared is they feel right now they're being unfairly treated. Because on one hand, they're being tasked with keeping the business secure, but on the other hand. The business wants to move at a pace that it's never done in the, you know, a pace that it's never done in history. It wants to move at a faster pace every year. So on the one hand, you're saying, let's keep the business secure, but on the other hand, we want agility and we want to move at a pace and it feels like an unfair task. Now, I'm not saying that you're saying it's unfair. I'm saying that other people like you have told us that they feel this is an unfair situation and here's what they're trying to juggle and here's some of the problems. Now, you still might not admit to me that you feel like that, but if you do feel like that, and I've labeled it, even though I'm labeling it through some other people, other characters, you're going to think, hang on a second here. Andrew really gets me. He understands me, he understands my world, he understands what I'm going through. He gets me. And that is just going to build a little bit more trust and a little bit more credibility, and you're increasing the likelihood that they do share something because they're not going to feel that it's just them that have these problems. It's like other people have problems like me. Okay, that's good. I feel a bit safer about sharing some of my stuff as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:35:34]:

What happens, though, if you get the hypothesis wrong, right? Other assistants like you tell us this and this, and the guy's sitting there going, that's not me. What happens then?

John Bissett [00:35:46]:

Chris Vosch talks about this. Have you read it? Never split the difference. I think you have, Andrew, right?

Calum Kilgour [00:35:51]:

Yeah.

John Bissett [00:35:52]:

So the calls, what we're talking about here for the audience is the concept of a label. We're trying to label something that's in that person's head, an emotion, a situation. And he also says that it's okay to mislabel, to get it wrong. And that's been my experience as well. If you mislabel and you do get it wrong, people like to correct you. So mislabeling is not that bad a thing, because what happens if you say other people have shared this with us? What I found in my experience is if I get it wrong, they go, it's not quite that way here, John, or that's not quite the truth. That's not what I'm feeling. But then they share what they, you know, so they then reveal what they're thinking and their true situation. So it's okay to mislabel. And if you've done the homework correctly and you've spoken to existing customers and you've really tried to get into the head of the Sizo, you're not going to be that far away. There's going to be things that resonate. There's going to be a big common overlap of emotion and stress and thoughts and problems and challenges that most Sizos encounter.

Andrew Monaghan [00:37:00]:

Callum I'm wondering, it puts a lot of importance on doing the research, right? As John says, do the homework to really understand that you can't just come in and go, Well, a lot of sisters are worried about there's lots of breaches these days. It's even worse than stating the obvious, right? So you have to really kind of get into what they're experiencing, what we've seen many times before. How do you encourage a sales team or a seller to really do the homework? What does that involve?

Calum Kilgour [00:37:29]:

Well, step one is really understanding the difference between the three dimensions. Step two, You've got to build this model. One of the ways that we might do it with a client, a customer, so a customer who's building a story for their customers is once we've identified who has the lion's share of the problem, we might get certain people in the selling organization to imagine their buyer in different modalities of thinking. And these different modalities are they're talking in the pub to their friend about their concerns. So that's going to lean more on some more of the emotional stuff, maybe some of the more personal identity value. Another modality might be okay. They want some sort of change to happen that involves bringing this company's product in, and they're now in the boardroom. They have to justify to their boss and other people who might be in the boardroom why they should move ahead and try and imagine the questions that their boss is going to ask them and what the answers to these questions might be. And the third modality, there are a couple of other ones that you might explore, but just to keep it easy. The third one might be a much more analytical, logical one where you're sitting with Sherlock Holmes and your potential buyer of your product, Sherlock Holmes is saying to them, so you're having these struggles. Why do you think you're having these struggles? Exactly? What is it that you're doing that's making these struggles exist? Not only that, how come they're happening right now? Were they happening three years ago? So what's changed in that time? And that type of exploring, these modalities of thinking can really bring out the ingredients for the 3D value model. So that's using human beings. Another possibility is you try and get Chat GPT to imagine that type of thinking from their buyer's point of view and it will act as if it is that person and come up with some of the things that they are suffering from, how they might express that. And essentially that's the ingredients that you're going to use in your story, which will fuel your conversations and questions.

Andrew Monaghan [00:39:59]:

Imagine at that point you then get an experimentation mode a little bit, right? You have the five things that you think are the right ones, but you may start with these two, see how they hit home usually, and then adjust from there. So you'd be in that learning mode as opposed to convincing mode, I guess, as a sales team.

Calum Kilgour [00:40:17]:

Well, this is something you're doing before you're speaking to any customers. You'll maybe start thinking about your offering, and I'm sure it does loads of things. That's one of the biggest problems in sales right now. Sellers will just dump all the millions of great things their offering does, but if you try and narrow that down to no more than three major capabilities and then revenue these capabilities into the problems, that is the fix. And reverse these problems into the three dimensions of value, and then reverse the three dimensions of value into narrative and questions.

Andrew Monaghan [00:40:56]:

John, you were going to say something?

John Bissett [00:40:57]:

No, no. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe just to be clear, when we talk about three dimensions of value, what we're talking about really is three dimensions of pain and three dimensions of desire. So value is just the contrast between those two states, pain and desire. So when you're going through those conversations, the pub conversation and the boardroom conversation, you're really trying to unpack the three dimensions of pain. Why should we change? Because we know the status quo is the biggest enemy to every seller. More than half of a funnel ends up in no decision and even your champion is going to get asked some fairly stringent questions right by the CFO or the CEO. What's wrong with what we're doing? We've been doing it this way for years. Why should I care if we don't change what's going to happen and what has changed? Because we've been doing it this way for three or four years. What has changed? That means the current approach is no longer good enough. So really, when you're going through that thought experiment, the longer that you can spend in the three dimensions of pain the better, because that's going to motivate people to take action and remember to think about three dimensions of desire as well. So if we do take action, if we do change, what's in it for me? How does the business win? How do I personally win? When you're thinking about those dimensions, it's pain and desire.

Andrew Monaghan [00:42:26]:

I really love that construct right there. I hadn't thought of it before. The value is the bit between pain and desire right now. As you said it, I was like, yeah, duh, right? I should have put the two and two together beforehand. It just makes so much sense to me. But you also said something there, John. Let me ask you about, you know, we're working with our right, we're working with the persona. We want to work with the CISO or the VP on something to do with security, who it might be. And we have a one-on-one with them. We work with them. That's our champion. All the rest of it, then that person has to go to the CFO and justify that we're going to spend half a million dollars on this thing. We don't know what their version of all this is. How do we bridge that gap? How do we work with our champion to do that?

John Bissett [00:43:13]:

I think you can, again, preempt a lot of this because when you think about your champion and you think about their identity value, that's fair enough. If you think about the business value, which your champion will be aware of, that business value often becomes the identity value of someone further up the chain. So if the business value is we attract more customers, we increase profit, we increase EBITDA, or we increase our brand and reputation, or we increase NPS or whatever it may be, that business value often aligns with the KPIs and goals of other people like the CFO or the COO or the CEO. So often even just. And a lot of this is really reliant on good discovery, right? I mean, we've spoken a lot about bringing a narrative to the table here, which is a best-fit perspective based on our understanding you as a vendor have sold to hundreds of organizations or maybe even a small number. So you've got a fairly good understanding of what this hypothesis or point of view looks like. But that doesn't mean you're not going in there and making good discoveries. And part of that discovery, if you truly have a champion, and that's another question because I think champion gets bandied about all the time by sellers. And half of these so-called champions aren't champions. But if you really have a champion, they should work with you, right? There's now a level of trust established. They know what's in it for themselves. They want to drive and advocate change internally. They like you. So I think it's reasonable to start working with your champion to unpack those other things that this what does that buy-in group look like? Who are the key decision-makers? What do they care about? Because you're going in with a model initially, but, yeah, now you're in a specific situation with a specific organization if you've got a champion, and that's step one, I think, again, selling with ROI, just bypasses the champion. They don't see what's in it for them. So you're trying to sell to the business, but businesses are just a collection of human beings. You've got to get a champion first once you've got that champion. Yeah. Now let's work out what this looks like, Who do we have to convince? Who's going to kill the deal? What do they care about? So, with working with your champion, it becomes really important to understand that buying landscape and what these key players, these key decision makers, care about as well. And some of that will align with business value because that's how the CFO gets measured. He gets measured on profitability or whatever. But, yeah, it now becomes really important to do that deeper discovery with your champion, to understand the decision-making landscape, if you like.

Andrew Monaghan [00:45:54]:

Well, I hate to say it because I could talk about this for a lot longer, but we're running out of time here. I think this is a super important conversation for sales teams to be having right now in cybersecurity. Certainly, right now, there are a lot of companies that are stretching away trying to build pipe and get some deals in and some are struggling, and some are doing very well, but it's not an easy time. And I think anything that really looks at how to do this properly, do it differently, be more effective, is something that we can look towards ourselves and say, let's try things a little bit differently, because sure as heck, the old ways from 510 years ago are not working that well right now. I love the fresh perspective that you guys bring to this. It seems to be much more thoughtful than many of the things that we've learned over the years and some of the concepts you've brought to bear, I understand a little bit about it and I want to understand more. So thanks so much for joining us today. If someone wants to continue the conversation with you, John, and Callum, what's the best way for them to do that?

Calum Kilgour [00:47:00]:

Well, LinkedIn is we're quite active in LinkedIn, particularly. John publishes something called the Chimp Strip every couple of weeks, which is a little sample of these concepts inside real sales conversations in cartoon format. You can digest it in a minute or two. So follow John or come to our website. And that is slingshotedge.com.

John Bissett [00:47:28]:

And can I give a shameless plug? So, we have just launched a new online course. If sellers want to invest in themselves or sales leaders want to invest in their teams, we've just launched a new course which looks at a very specific problem. It looks at how to beat the status quo, how to kill the maybe, and it looks at two very specific problems how to generate more motivation, to sort of lessen people's grip on the status quo. But the biggest deal killer is people are scared of change and the risk associated with change. So, yeah, I don't like my status quo. I'm not happy here. However, if I keep my head below the parapet, I don't get fired, even though I'm in a very uncomfortable frying pan right now. And if you can shine a light on the elephant in the room very early in sales conversations and do that in the right way and deconstruct the fear again, you're going to win back more of that no decision. So, our new course, again, if you go to the website, you'll see where that is, but it tackles that problem specifically and gives a very good introduction to the chimp as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:48:37]:

I love that talking to sales teams is probably why you're doing it, right? It's one of the big questions right now is how do we get past that status quo that seems to exist right now? So, yeah, I encourage everyone listening to go to Slingshot Edge and look for that course. The content that John and Callum do is awesome and I back it 100% and love the way you guys are approaching this. So thanks for joining us today and look forward to keeping in touch over the next months and years.