Selling as a technical founder with Vincent Berk, Chief Strategy Officer, Quantum Xchange

[00:00:00] Hey, it's Andrew here. Just quickly before we start the episode, I want to tell you about one of my favorite newsletters. It's called Strategy of Security. If you want to understand the company's ideas and trends shaping cybersecurity and its sub markets, you should take a look.

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[00:00:54] I just simply enjoy what Cole is publishing. Check it out at strategy of security dot com. Now on with this episode. One of the toughest things for a very technical person to do is to go and become a salesperson in the early stages of a company.

[00:01:12] That's exactly what a technical founder is expected to do. They can't and probably shouldn't hire a sales team too early. So it's up to them to go out there and be the salesperson. Now some are naturals, but unfortunately most are not.

[00:01:27] So I thought it'd be kind of fun and interesting to talk to someone who has had to do that before, who has made the mistakes as a technical person trying to be the salesperson.

[00:01:37] And along the way learned a lot about how to do this and how to sell before bringing on a sales team. That's why I'm excited to introduce you to Vince Burke. Vince actually got a PhD in AI 20 years ago, long before AI was cool and interesting.

[00:01:53] He founded a cyber security company called Flowtrack about 10 years ago and ran it for seven years. And recently he was the CTO and chief architect at Riverbed. So here's a very technical person.

[00:02:05] And now he's in the leadership team at Quantum Exchange, which is in the super technical area of post quantum cryptography.

[00:02:13] So we use his experiences along the way, both at Flowtrack and also Quantum Exchange to advise John Jeffrey, the technical founder of Cyber Donut, about how to win those first early customers before he brings on a sales team.

[00:02:30] I'm Andrew Monahan and this is the Cyber Security Go To Market podcast where we tackle the question, how can cyber security companies grow sales faster? Well, Vince, I'm looking forward to our discussion today. This is going to go off in a couple of different directions.

[00:02:55] You and I actually, before we get into it, share a little bit of a common thing in that my first ever role selling a cyber security product, it wasn't called cyber security back in those days, but a security product was in 1998.

[00:03:11] And I was selling PGP encryption in Europe in 1998. I joined a company to do that. Yeah, that's amazing. I remember actually in the old days of encryption, what we used to do is you actually manually encrypted your emails before you sent them. Remember that?

[00:03:27] You have to choose to press the button and then you have to choose the right key to use and PGP to make sure it was the right person, the whole thing.

[00:03:35] And you had to share the keys, the public key yourself, right? Like you emailed it to people. I remember that.

[00:03:42] In fact, before my time, but I think they used to back in the super early days, they even had like parties to share the public keys. Like, oh, here's my public key and here's your public key and things like that.

[00:03:51] Yeah. And we got public key servers and people. Yeah, this is the entire infrastructure that exists around that right now. So like evolved from that. And I still have key files from people from 25 years ago, to be honest. Wow. Wow. What do you do with it?

[00:04:07] Just like everything hard drives, hard drive capacity by far has outpaced my need for storage. So I have all the old stuff. I should take a look and see if my PGP keys are kicking around somewhere in the, uh, the ecoverse out there.

[00:04:20] Well, let's the conversation today, Vince is around. We're trying to answer the question today is how does a technical person, a technical founder who doesn't have a sales background and sales training and all this

[00:04:36] stuff that we all go through as sales teams and marketing's out there. How does one of these people successfully sell in the very early stages of the company?

[00:04:45] And you've got an interesting background in that you have the technical background. In fact, before quantum exchange, you were the CTO at Riverbed. Right. That is not a sales title carrying a quota working for two or three layers of management. So that's an interesting different take right there.

[00:05:02] So you got the background and you're the founder of FlowTrack. So, you know, founder selling was part of your, your, your experiences from 10 years ago. So you got a unique background to bring to this. So let me go right back. You know, you find a FlowTrack.

[00:05:16] Take us back to that moment where you're sitting there and you say, okay, now I need to go do some selling. What did it feel like to you? What were your impressions as you were going into it?

[00:05:26] Okay, so you start out starting a business because I had been working on this highly scalable, you know, back end database system that could be used for machine learning and behavioral anomaly detection technology on network traffic.

[00:05:43] And you are interested in it because you're a geek, right? Like I loved it. And I loved how it was scaling and I saw and there were some people, you know, potential future customers, friends

[00:05:55] that I was talking to say, oh, you should really sell this thing. So that's, that's where it starts. So then you start wondering, well, selling while you first have to advertise.

[00:06:04] So that was my entire belief, right? Like you put your brand out there, you tell some story about how you have the best security in the world and now everybody will show up and you know, you hang your, your sign outside the door and nothing happens.

[00:06:18] Nobody cares. And I had to, I had to learn, right? I had to learn because in the end, right, like the greatest technology means absolutely nothing if it doesn't solve a problem that somebody can identify and put a name to and have, right?

[00:06:32] And so I went through years of trying, you know, I recognized I had a deficiency in terms of I had no idea how to do tech selling to enterprise or, or even the market.

[00:06:42] And I found people that could help me with marketing, understand marketing, market research, understand how people buy purchase, you know, cycles, how people adopt solutions, how to talk about problems that play in the enterprise, all the way to the level where

[00:06:58] the VP of sales that I ended up hiring says, look, before you understand what I do, you should just take some Sandler training. Right? Like, so I went through just boot camps and things like that, just to learn the basics of selling and understanding.

[00:07:12] And, you know, Floatrack, we ran that company for the better part of seven years. And it was, it was a tremendous, I mean, it was like, it was, it had to be zero to 60 for me, right?

[00:07:21] It was a tremendous amount of learning I had to do, even though the selling, right? Like the motions account management, I did not necessarily go through myself all that much.

[00:07:34] But certainly in the early days as the sort of, you know, the inventor of the technology, you are the company sales engineer. Right. And you have to understand how to, how to talk about it.

[00:07:46] You know, you can't jump on a call and start talking for 45 minutes about how fantastic the solution is. Right. You do that the first time and then you wonder why you don't have a next call. And yeah, so those were a lot of hard lessons to learn.

[00:08:00] And that's how I rolled into it. Well, let's try and make this more specific, this conversation. So we've been talking about this amazing startup called Cyber Donut. And we're actually going to rewind the clock a little bit in Cyber Donut back to its early days two years ago.

[00:08:16] The founder, John Jeffrey is a technical founder and obviously he's not an SDR. He's not a salesperson. He doesn't carry the bag. Never had a quota before. And in his development, he's exhausted his network, let's say, right?

[00:08:30] He's told all his friends and family and his friendlies out there in the industry and, you know, got to maybe a few of them on board. But he's not in his stomach now because he's thinking, OK, now I need to kind of get those next few.

[00:08:41] I don't really want to hire a head of sales yet. I don't even really know what I'm doing if I was even to hire a salesperson. I'm going to keep going a little bit longer with this just me being that founder seller. Let's give him some pointers.

[00:08:55] What should he do next to find his next few sales opportunities? Yeah, so the very first question I have for you is John is recognizing that he perhaps does not have the sales acumen. Yeah, he knows it's not his thing, right?

[00:09:12] But he knows he can't afford to go hire people quite yet. So has John already recognized that there is a common thread in the people that he has managed to sell to? Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:24] Let's say he's got four or five early adopters, design partners and go, oh, there's two or three use cases I'm seeing again. So the very first thing that John needs to know is that he needs to absolutely focus on that early nascent vertical market that he has.

[00:09:43] And I can't say that enough because a number of reasons and most of your listeners will already know this, right? If your solution is solving a problem in a small vertical, even though it could be applied theoretically everywhere,

[00:09:58] you are starting to learn how to talk about the specific problems in that vertical, right? That the cybersecurity solution, right? There's going to be, you know, the smorgasbord of different cybersecurity solutions is enormous. We all go to RSA. We all see 800 exhibitors.

[00:10:13] We all have a we all walk away confused if you need one of them or all 800, right? So if you have a vertical in which your solution works and you are starting to learn how to talk about your solution in the problems in that particular

[00:10:27] vertical, and that vertical could be as simple as an industry like finance or manufacturing or large scale industry, you know, whatever the case may be. Or it can be as simple as a technology layer, right?

[00:10:41] Like, for instance, focusing on a technology like, you know, like like flow track focused on net flow. There's people that focus on packets and people focus on what have you.

[00:10:52] That focus also helps because the people that use your solution there, they move to other companies in the space. Say you work for a defense contractor and you're doing something in the IT space.

[00:11:04] It's not unlikely that your next job is going to be again in defense contracting in the IT space. You might move from one to the other. If you worked with a great solution in one of those, then you might bring it along to your next place.

[00:11:16] So focusing on the vertical where you have your early success on the market, where you have your early success is going to be the best thing John can do to find the next few customers. And then what I'm saying here is that is a word of mouth effect.

[00:11:29] So he should go back to his friendlies and say, OK, I'm showing you some value. You're getting some use out of it. Who else in your network? Who else do you know when you're, let's call it manufacturing?

[00:11:42] People who use Cisco and manufacturing and therefore have NetFlow enabled, let's say. And they'll know those people probably. They'll know each other. Yeah, I think word of mouth is probably the most powerful initial sales engine because it is, and I think this has been proven, right?

[00:11:58] Like when I am perceived to have some gain in selling you something, you will weigh my words. You will adjust the way you assign to my words. Someone who doesn't appear to have anything to gain by talking about your solution will be

[00:12:13] believed five times more than you ever could yourself. Right. So word of mouth is extremely important. Vertical focus is extremely important initially. And then the other thing, and this is a topic that I've had to deal with a number of times.

[00:12:30] If you are if you're operating in a vertical that is new, there's no established large players yet. Or it's a new industry, right? Like right now we're in quantum safe encryption, right? Like people are just starting to think about that, right? That is not an established space.

[00:12:50] The number one most important thing is to put your thought leadership out there. And if I look back at my flow track days, that's the best thing John can do. I think the biggest customers came because they would read my ramblings on places like

[00:13:05] dark reading or at some point I spoke to a reporter at the New York Times about something that was bothering me and she wrote up an article about it, right? Like that sort of thought leadership, how you're thinking about the problem helps

[00:13:20] people realize what the problem is, how they perhaps should be thinking about it. They might have more questions. And today it's easier than ever to get in touch with a founder and people can

[00:13:28] connect on LinkedIn and say like, I read your article in on dark reading and you were talking about data governance and I hadn't actually thought about it. But I probably also have data scattered around all over the place. That is a huge liability.

[00:13:42] Now, what do you think I should do about it? Or I disagree with how you talk about it. Here's how I think, etc. Right. So that is now easier than it ever was. So John should absolutely be out there.

[00:13:52] It's better for him to write a blog than to buy ads on Google or what have you. So one of the things I've heard from or I sense as well, actually, from earlier stage companies, people is the passion about what they're building.

[00:14:06] But there's also this, I don't know what it is, lack of confidence as well a little bit, right? They want to hold back. We're not quite there yet. I don't, I don't want to say things because it's not quite a rounded

[00:14:14] product or we're not quite at the point where whatever, right? They're frightened a little bit to make that step. What encourage when you give to John to say, look, you just have to start and

[00:14:24] you have to put your thought leadership out there as opposed to hold back too long. Well, you, you already said it right. Like because so, and I have this tendency as a technical person as well. Right?

[00:14:35] Like you don't really want to go out and confidently make statements until you know, absolutely sure you're right. Well, you know, here's a surprise. Like the vast majority of people out there don't know a 10th of what they

[00:14:48] need to be knowing in order to talk about anything, right? Like the reality is you just, there's only so much you can know. At some point you have to be out there, trust that what you're saying is based on the best of your knowledge today.

[00:15:00] And yeah, people are going to show up and it says that, well, you know, you have no idea what you're talking about. There are solutions that address this. You know, here's how the world has been doing it for ages. Right? And then, and that's fine. Right?

[00:15:14] Like that's perhaps how you learn or perhaps you disagree with that. Right? There's in this world room for a lot of different opinions and a lot of different products that fit those opinions. Right? So the only way you're going to, to become better is to, you know,

[00:15:29] bite back that embarrassment and go and do it. Write a blog, do something. I love that you said that Vince. I interviewed Eric Olden who is the CEO at Strata Identity. And Strata is Eric's third founding of a company.

[00:15:46] He sold the first two to RSA and their identity companies. And he had a rule up to, I think, Series A, which was no one at this company makes a cold call or sends a cold email.

[00:15:58] What we're going to do is we're going to go out there and make some content. We're going to ruffle some feathers and get our viewpoint across. And the right people will be attracted to us. And he'll tell you that they got their first many customers by having

[00:16:12] that approach before they got to Series B or whatever and hired a proper, you know, bigger sales team. Yeah. I think, I mean, I think it absolutely is right. You know, like the, the world is also a probability distribution or, or some distribution of different beliefs, right?

[00:16:27] The early adopters are going to be the ones that most closely align with how you see the world, right? Like for instance, and I'll give you this example, right? Like I started FlowTrack because I had a very firm belief that the approach

[00:16:41] that people were taking in the late, you know, 2010, you know, time frame, right, or around 2010, I guess was, you know, security is a really good firewalls. Like you got to lock the door, right? Like build your walls, you know, build your defenses.

[00:16:56] And my belief is like, that's not enough. Like if we look at kinematic, you know, warfare, I know, you know, I'm not a military man, but like we notice very much that, you know, when

[00:17:06] you build a castle, you put up a wall and then you go and stand on that wall with your binoculars because the moment you build a wall, the adversary is going to find a way to climb over it or dig under it.

[00:17:16] And that's why we stand there with the binoculars, because then we can see what they're doing and we can change our defenses based on it, right? Another way to put it is that the firewall changes the terrain, right?

[00:17:29] That, you know, you look at the weak spots of the terrain, you put up the firewall or, you know, the access control, you know, whatever static ish defense that we're talking about. And it changes the landscape and it forces the attacker to do or change tactics, right?

[00:17:45] They have to do something different. They can't walk in the front door. I have to do something different now. And that consequence of that's going to be that they might do something that becomes more observable. So my whole premise at FlowTrack was why aren't we looking, right?

[00:17:58] Like, you know, packets, net flow, right? Like people will do, oh, I'm looking at packets with my intrusion detection system. Now, what you're doing is you're looking for signatures of known bad stuff in your packets that doesn't mean you're actually looking at what the packets are doing. Right?

[00:18:13] Like you're not keeping a forensic record. You're not keeping a record and going back and trying to identify. My entire point was, and my belief was it is, you know, security is achieved not only by static defenses, it's achieved through visibility as well.

[00:18:27] And we have a, we have a, it is not, you know, the spending is disproportionate. People need to spend more on visibility tools, especially visibility tools to give them a forensic record. And we can talk about why I believe that is the case, but that was, that

[00:18:41] is what I believe then I still believe to this day, we don't have that because we still don't know today what we need to be looking at tomorrow. And that's why forensically accurate visibility tools is so important in computer networks.

[00:18:52] And I put that opinion out there to whomever would listen. And there were plenty of people that said that that was a load bullshit. Right? And I did not think that. So by putting that opinion out there, the people that saw something in that

[00:19:06] gravitated towards me and they told their friends about it was a strong opinion. Right? And so, so I absolutely agree with that. And I think it's the most important thing to do now, if you do put your opinion out there and nobody gravitates to probably that's an, that's

[00:19:19] a message too, right? Like maybe think about what are you need to rethink? No data point to take in. No, I love that. You have the confidence to do it. And, and listen, I guess part of it is, is you want to hear what people were,

[00:19:32] how they respond. If no one responds, you know, something, if everyone says you're mad, you know, well take that as a data point as well. But I think go through the process is a great learning experience for everyone. Vince, let's learn a little bit more about you personally.

[00:19:48] As usual, I have my list of 49 questions here, and I am going to use a next-gen AI orientated random number generator to pick three questions up my list completely at random. We actually use, as you might imagine, advanced quantum cryptography

[00:20:07] to protect our algorithm because it is so unique and it does do a good job of generating these questions randomly. So if you're ready to go, I'm going to spin the wheel and, and get the right question here for you. You run it. All right.

[00:20:26] Question 41, how did you first make money as a kid? Oh guys, um, you know, I've done a variety of jobs, but, uh, but I started out as a paper boy, bringing newspapers around. Now there's a job that you don't see too much anymore. No.

[00:20:42] And that was, that was, I lived, you know, I was, I grew up in the Netherlands, right in Europe. So the Netherlands has 200 rainy days a year. So with, as a paper boy, bring newspapers around in the rain. That's, you know, you learn.

[00:20:56] You better really want to have that money at that point, right? Well, I had to buy a computer. Oh, the edge of motivation. That's the thing, right? You know, it's funny. My, uh, so I grew up in Scotland.

[00:21:05] I'm not from, originally from the U S um, my, my cousin, my oldest cousin Gordon, he had a paper around as well when he was a teenager, and I want to say at the age of 14, 15, he was off at four

[00:21:16] in the morning delivering papers around his part of town. You imagine these days saying, yeah, it's okay that a 14 year old or a 15 year old be off the dark gloomy mornings in Scotland to go and do that. On a bicycle. Yeah, I know. I don't know.

[00:21:29] No, I think, I mean, if I think back on the job where, where selling became the first, you know, like truly part of the job is at some point. I had a summer job in a supermarket behind the cash register.

[00:21:42] And there is where you learn that people interactions is what it's all about, right? And selling, right. And it's nice because there you get those, those are the days when you still got the whole, the money, right? There was no electronic transactions.

[00:21:55] And I guess I'm dating myself right now. Good lessons to learn for sure. Let's spin the wheel for the next completely random question. Let's do it. All right. Number six, what's an embarrassing or memorable moment, funny moment in your career that always stands out for you?

[00:22:16] Oh gosh, there, there are so many, so many embarrassing moments, um, to think about. Uh, first of all, let's say I, in that same supermarket that we just talked about, I also worked in the tobacco on the liquor store, which is by in and

[00:22:34] of itself talk about children that have jobs where we wouldn't accept that anymore. I mean, I must've been like 15, 16, and I was slinging tobacco, if you will, right? And then, and I, I very clearly remember that I was, you know, so

[00:22:49] I, I would, you know, the local people would come and they would buy. And this was right around new years. And I think you probably remember it is from Scotland as well. New years can be like absolutely crazy, right?

[00:23:00] Um, the, uh, the, you know, in terms of like how big the party is and the amount of fireworks that happens. So later that day, so I, you know, I, you interact with people all the time when you're, when you're, when you're a seller, right?

[00:23:12] And you don't, especially at that level, right? You don't remember. And, um, I remember coming in after my shift, coming into the local fireworks place, preparing for new years. And there were these people sitting there and they were all smoking all between the fireworks, which was exceptionally right.

[00:23:30] There's a thing about scary there. And I walked in and I was picking some fires and I said, I, you were from the supermarket. I'm like, what did I do? And they gave me this, they gave me everything.

[00:23:41] I walked out with three bags of fireworks just because it was, it was, yeah, there's no recollection when these people wore it. They must've been in the store. Yeah. Sometimes you get paid in money and sometimes you get paid in fireworks. It seems like, that's so funny.

[00:23:56] But yeah, no, that was, I think especially the most embarrassing aspect about, uh, about that to me personally was that I was always, I consider myself a computer guy. I liked my computer. I didn't think that being in front of people was something

[00:24:12] that I would be good at. And the day, you know, so summer jobs, right? You sent your, your application and they said, okay, yeah, show up that day. So what are you gonna be at the cash register?

[00:24:21] I'm like, no, I don't think I'm going to be at the cash register. Yeah. You're going to be at the cash register. So, um, that was embarrassing for me. That was hard. That's great though. All right. Last question. Let me spin the wheel one last time. Oh, number 37.

[00:24:39] What is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity? So, so actually my background is in machine learning. I have a, I have a PhD in AI actually. And the problem was that 20 years ago, people thought that AI was just like an academic novelty, right?

[00:25:00] So you ended up with, with people thinking that neural networks were just a curiosity, curious thing that academics would do. You could go to train these things and then you'll make it. Nobody thought it was going to do what we're seeing today.

[00:25:14] And so when you study machine learning, what that really meant was you're either going to be an academic or you'd have to find a place to apply that. And, um, at the time cybersecurity was a growing and budding space and I had an interest in it.

[00:25:26] So I went into cybersecurity as a, as a way to apply machine learning technology, which I know today that's what everybody says they're doing. But 20 years ago, it was sort of like, I saw that kind of as the only path.

[00:25:40] So you were ahead of the curve then way ahead of the curve 20 years when goodness sake, I know I should have stuck with it. Stayed out of these quantum computers. So let me ask you though. So, uh, you go through all those years and then suddenly December 22 hits

[00:25:54] and the world discovers my goodness. There's this thing called chat GPT that uses this thing called AI. That's fantastic. And you said, well, what are we doing for last 20 years? No, actually what I thought is like, oh my gosh, this is going to be a

[00:26:07] tremendously bursting bubble and there's going to be a lot of fallout. You still think that? Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll come onto that maybe in a minute. Sure. Let's go back to John though. So John, he's put his, uh, he's taught leadership out there.

[00:26:23] He's got some, so his first few non-friendly meetings booked, right? These are people he doesn't know. What surprised you most about those, those first sales calls with people you'd never met before, uh, back in the day? Um, the lessons I learned is what surprised me most. Right.

[00:26:41] So, and, and I really, and in fact, I ended up from those early, because the first sales meeting you have, you show up and you're like, well, I got this product. Okay. Well, okay, good. Let me see it.

[00:26:53] And then you dive into your demo and you demo away and you just can't stop talking. And, and you'll only a seasoned sales person notices this, right? The customer, the prospect might ask a question. Can you do this? Yes.

[00:27:08] And we could do this and the other thing and even more, right? Like, no, no, no. Can you solve my problem? Yes. Here's how it's done. Okay. Great. Conversations now finished, right? Um, we've found the problem with qualified. We can handle it. They've qualified. We can handle it.

[00:27:23] Right. The comp, the sale, the sales on its way. Right. And so what surprised me most about those early conversations is how hard that lesson learned was because the feedback loop is she get another call

[00:27:33] or you have, you know, you go to the next stage and I go to a demonstration or a proof of concept. Right. And, and from that, I, the lessons I learned in that have resulted in a

[00:27:45] sort of a document that I've carried with me for my entire life. That, that basically dictates how I believe these conversations need to go. Right? Like if the customer, the prospect isn't talking 50% of the time, you're not having momentum in your conversation.

[00:28:00] If you do not start the call with understanding and letting the customer explain why it is that they're there and what they're hoping to learn, then you don't even have a right to bring out a PowerPoint or to bring out a demonstration of your product.

[00:28:13] It doesn't make a difference because the customer is there to try to figure out if they can solve something that they are struggling with. If you don't understand what it is that they're struggling with, well, what are you doing?

[00:28:24] And you need to qualify early on whether or not you can solve that problem for them. So when I tell early sales engineers or early sales, sales people is it is all about keeping that conversation going. You are on a knowledge discovery mission, even more than the customer

[00:28:40] is because they probably already have an idea of how they want to solve the problem. You need to figure out what that problem is and see if you can solve it better for them. Cause if you can solve it better, you have a competitive, you know,

[00:28:50] angle and the only way you're going to do that is with a thousand questions. So write down those thousand questions before you go on the call. This can go as deep as like, do you have a pack of broker

[00:29:01] infrastructure or do you, do you maintain endpoints or what are those endpoints like all the way to, you know, is risk, is compliance a problem? You know, if they have compromises, how can you be certain of, you know,

[00:29:14] like in debt, those questions are going to tell you and guide you. And that's probably the biggest, biggest, biggest lessons I learned early on. And that's always been with me. So you went from someone who was an expert in your product, obviously,

[00:29:26] to someone who figured out I need something and you got your document that says this is actually what I should be asking about and focusing on not just my, not even my product yet. Right. Yeah, that's kind of the key, right? Like you, when you, you know,

[00:29:40] when you first enter a sales conversation, you're nervous. Oh gosh, I don't, you know, I don't know how this, you know, what am I, what am I supposed to do here? If that's how you're entering a sales conversation, postpone it, right at this point,

[00:29:51] you haven't thought long enough about what you want to achieve in this column because once you know what you want to achieve, yeah, I want to sell something. Yeah, obviously, right. You, in order to sell, you need to understand if you can solve the customer's unique problem.

[00:30:04] And the only way you're going to do that is by knowing more about their problem. If you realize that, then you will have a thousand questions that should be bubbling up and they are, you know, how well does my product match the environment they

[00:30:17] have and the problem they have. If you write those out, you are eager to get on that sales call because you want to start qualifying, right? The moment you feel eager to get onto that call, then you're in the right mindset to go and have a productive

[00:30:28] conversation with the prospect. Yeah, I feel like on that first call, if I was John, right? I would say, I would encourage him to think about his goal being, you know, answer three questions. One is, do they have a problem that we can solve? Second one,

[00:30:43] do they agree it's worth solving? Right? It might be, it might be a number hundred on their priority list, right? Or it might be number three, right? We need to know that. And thirdly, how well can we solve that problem? Right?

[00:30:54] So I would get those three things and get their agreement at that point there, you can get the second meeting, but don't try and go on from there if you don't know what all that is. No, and that's exactly right.

[00:31:05] And each of those questions have a lot of nuance, right? Each of those questions should lead to further discussion. And then only when we all agree that indeed, that the customer always works under the assumption that you're not lying,

[00:31:17] right? Like you're not saying I can solve your problem while you can, right? Diving into product demonstrations only makes sense that the customer is like, yeah, I do believe indeed that you might have something here for me.

[00:31:28] Right? And, and then obviously keep enough time to set up next steps. But yeah, I agree with that, right? Those, that's the qualification and you qualify each other. And when you both see the green light in that it's,

[00:31:41] it's worth you have a next step or a next conversation. Well, we talked a little bit about this in terms of cyber donut. We know that quantum exchange is a very technical area. And I think this is common for, for many founders, right? They, the,

[00:31:55] they spend their time building this amazing product and they focus on what the product does. And it's, it's often a technical conversation they're comfortable having, but then a day people buy things to solve business problems.

[00:32:09] So how do you think about balancing the technical discussion with a need to also prove and show that we can help them get some sort of business outcome that they care about? Well, the technical discussion proves that we can meet the aperture,

[00:32:24] the requirements that they have. Right? So for instance, the speed and scale of your solution, how it is able to handle tremendous volumes of data. Cause right. The reality of the matter is you walk the trade show floor, every,

[00:32:40] everybody says they're fast. Everybody says they kind of catch the hacker. The reality is that there will never be a company that says, yeah, we're the slower cybersecurity product. Obviously, right? Like there's, nobody's going to do that.

[00:32:54] What the technical discussion comes out to be is to give the customer the confidence that the claim that you're making actually fits their environment. You may be very, very fast in a particular scenario. You may not be fast in theirs, right?

[00:33:09] You may be able to catch particular patterns, but not in their specific environment because of the way their telemetry is set up. The tech, the technical part of the discussion should only be to qualify that for their particular environment, the problem is also solvable.

[00:33:24] And then how do you, how do you make that connection or help them make that connection though, just some sort of business outcome? Because especially right now, I mean, you may see this, but they, a lot of people experiencing a lot of scrutiny

[00:33:35] around opportunities and deals before the purchase happens. They will, do we have to do it? Do we have to do it now? Why do we have to, can we put out six months? Is there someone that does it 80% as well? You know, 50% cheaper, you know,

[00:33:46] really get into that business outcome discussion is important. I'm wondering what your experiences of helping people realize where they can actually do it at a higher level and just solve the technical problem. Yeah, I think, I think though that's a shift that we've been seeing in the industry

[00:34:00] because or maybe I've been selling more and more expensive things in my, through my career. That could be possible too, that there, that there, that there is more scrutiny. But the, the, the question in cybersecurity is not how do you become 100% secure?

[00:34:16] Right? Like it's not possible. Like if you want to be 100% secure, then have no data, right? Unplug the computers, you have no data. Then you're on a hundred percent secure, right? Like you can't, you can't get hacked because there is no data.

[00:34:27] Unfortunately that's not the reality. We have more and more data. So in order, right? Like it is not realistic to have an infinite spend on cybersecurity. Now we can argue about if the spend for cybersecurity is sufficient or not,

[00:34:42] but the question is the spend that you as an organization has on cybersecurity. Is that appropriate? Right? Is that maximizing the amount of defense you have? Right? And so there, there's a question was, well, I can buy this firewall or I can buy this,

[00:34:56] this access control solution, right? Like which of the two is the better spend? Or can I get 80% of the way by spending a lot less and then buy both solutions? What is that? How does that change that risk landscape?

[00:35:07] For me. And that is going to be specific to the type of organization you have, what kind of data you have, where the data lives, how your people work when it worked from the road, they work from home.

[00:35:19] You know, is your data living in a cloud through remote desktop? Is it, you know, is everybody working from an office? All these things change the landscape and the attack surface significantly. And I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but that's the job of the CISO.

[00:35:33] No CISO should ever look around and say, I'm going to do what my, my friend, the CISO and this other company does cause he, he did a good job there. It doesn't apply. And therefore these qualifying questions from the customer end and the

[00:35:44] justification that comes with it is absolutely valid. I'll give you one statistic, right? And I, I'm sure I'm getting the numbers wrong, right? The spend that we have on cybersecurity is what, is it like 65 billion a year or something? There's some number like that.

[00:36:01] The estimated loss due to cybersecurity event is $12 billion a year. So then there's the question, right? So there's a, if we were to spend, you know, what's double 60, $130 billion a year on cybersecurity. Do we see that 12 billion loss go to six to zero? Right?

[00:36:19] Like, so there is a certain, right? Like, so, so it is like every dollar you spend on additional cybersecurity tooling and people is going to get you like diminishing returns in terms of, of, of risk reduction. Right? And so we have to make sure we qualify that correctly.

[00:36:38] That seems like a big disparity, 65 to 12, even if it's a little bit off. I mean, I may be getting the numbers wrong, but the ratios are right. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Well, you mentioned earlier that you hired a VP of sales at FlowTrack.

[00:36:51] When should John Jeffrey bring on their first sales leader or first sales person in the development at Cyber Donut? As soon as, as, as John recognizes that there is a clustering in a particular type of

[00:37:08] customer. And it could be as simple as we seem to be clustering around enterprise, right? Like we, or we seem to be clustering around the automotive industry, right? Like as soon as you see a grouping in which you can have a repeatable

[00:37:22] success is when you can start looking for people that are sales professionals, because the tent, right? The tent is the same thing as it tends to be, such that those sales professionals, they are proficient in particular areas, right? And then perhaps not in others.

[00:37:36] I mean, you need to make sure that you, you don't want to hire an inside sales guy that then needs to go sell to the big banks because maybe that doesn't work. On the other hand, I've had really, really good luck with cold calling in some scenarios,

[00:37:49] just knowing exactly what the message was and the people I can target is going to remain John's responsibility to understand who to hire and the sales professional will be able to execute on that, you know, on those instructions, if you will.

[00:38:02] And you hired a leader at Float Track first. Is that what you did? Why did you choose to do that? Yeah, I did because I needed education. First of all, I also needed someone who understood both the sales and marketing end

[00:38:18] because there's something that is really important that I think that I think happens in the early startup days. And I'm not saying this has to happen like with a sales leader, but someone who can, who is not just like a wrench turner,

[00:38:32] because what is most important in those early days where John is getting, you know, his early sales for Cyber Donut, right? You have to aggressively, you know, back propagate what you learn from those early customers back to your engineering organization and your messaging, right? Like it is almost,

[00:38:49] and it is one of the most unnatural things to do for someone who's a big technologist, right? Like, I know I wrote the best database. You know, this cyber security thing, that's going to fly. Everybody should love it, right?

[00:38:59] Yeah, OK, that's why we're all using Unix systems today, right? Like there's a, it's not how that goes, right? Like the customer is going to tell you what they liked, what they didn't like, and a good sales leader is able to internalize

[00:39:12] that and effectively become sort of a proxy product manager even and drive the messaging, right? Because that's the other fault that people make early on, right? Like, oh, my product isn't selling. I need to shift my messaging around. Just like hang on a second.

[00:39:26] Typically, your messaging is not focused. You're not focusing it on the group of people that are purchasing it. Two, you're shifting your messaging all the time. These people see or hear about your, you know, about Cyber Donut once every three weeks.

[00:39:41] And if your message changes, you know, from, you know, I solved this problem, I solved that problem, you know, and now I got sprinkles on it, right? Like they are going to be like, I don't really know what this company does yet, right?

[00:39:52] Consistency of messaging and concentrated firepower, laser focus of that messaging is going to be really important. A leader can help you do that, realizes that bigger pattern. Whereas just someone who's executing on instructions is not going to do it.

[00:40:08] And be like, oh, OK, you want me to sell sprinkles now? I'm going to sell sprinkles now, right? Isn't work that way, right? Like you have to recognize you see it every day, all day, right? The prospect does not.

[00:40:18] They hear about you and they have time for you, like a few minutes every couple of weeks, right? So leaders help with that higher level picture. And I recognize back in the day, I didn't have that insight yet. Well, Vince, look, we've talked, believe it or not,

[00:40:32] for almost 40 minutes now. This has been a really good conversation. I think another founder or leaders at early stage companies going to get a lot from your experiences at FlowTrack and also at Quantum.

[00:40:44] If someone wants to get in touch with you, is LinkedIn the best way to do that? Absolutely. I think LinkedIn is the sales tool of choice these days, actually. All right. Well, be sure to put the link to your LinkedIn in the show notes.

[00:40:55] And I want to thank you and wish you the best for 2024 and beyond. Yeah, absolutely been my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much. It would mean a lot to me and to the continued growth of the show if you'd help get the word out.

[00:41:21] So how do you do that easily? There are two ways. Firstly, just simply send a link to a friend, send a link to the show, to this episode. You can email it, text it, Slack it, whatever works for you. And it's easy for you.

[00:41:35] The second way is to leave a super quick rating. And sometimes that can seem complicated. So I've made it as easy for you as I can. You simply have to go to rate this podcast dot com slash cyber.

[00:41:48] That's rate this podcast dot com slash cyber and explains exactly how to do it. Either of these ways will take you less than 30 seconds to do, and it will mean the world to me. So thank you.