The homework that turns technical pain into business value for cybersecurity sellers - Mark van Oppen, CRO @ SecureAuth

Andrew Monaghan (00:01.392)
Well, Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Mark van Oppen (00:05.772)
Thank you very much, happy to be here.

Andrew Monaghan (00:08.21)
Yeah, looking forward to our discussion today. You're in an interesting spot. You just joined SecureAuth as their CRO. And I'm always fascinated by someone who's just got into the company, got into the new role and what they're set out to do and how it's different from what they were doing before, things like that. So think we're going to get into good discussion today about all of that. But I guess, first of all, you're how long into the new role and what have you seen that surprised you and what have you seen that has not surprised you?

Mark van Oppen (00:36.666)
The end of this week will be 90 days. So the first 90 days have been certainly a learning experience. The overused metaphor is drinking from a fire hose, but I feel that deeply over these first 90 days. So I've learned a lot, right? First and foremost, the go-to-market motion at SecureAuth is fundamentally different than where I've spent the previous four years. So in my previous company, we were a developer-led

product, meaning that it wasn't product led growth, it was developer led, meaning they would download and tinker with the product, but nobody self-serve their way to production scale. It definitely required sales support and work here. It's kind of the inverse where, where we don't allow a free download of the product. We rely on somebody having some form of hand raise or, or outreach motion that catches you where you feel the pain. And then we can.

present how we show up in your unique environment. But it's not developer led, it's more business outcome.

Andrew Monaghan (01:40.334)
And it sounds more of the traditional enterprise sales lad growth inside a company as opposed to something else,

Mark van Oppen (01:47.555)
Yeah, exactly. So our customer profile historically has been really Fortune 1000 customers, large scale, pretty dramatic end user populations and workforce user populations. And we have fully built out support for many of the standards of all the security and identity protocols that are out there. And that's a lot of the capability of these really large enterprises require. Whereas in

in a down market or a kind of mid market or SMB motion, you may be perfectly acceptable to have a minimum viable capability that is a very incomplete deployment of a specific spec. That's not to say it's bad. It's just a different sort of threshold you have to reach when approaching these different users and markets.

Andrew Monaghan (02:35.023)
And what does that mean for how people deploy SecureAuth then? Is it a big, long eval process? Is it a long lead-in and implementation? I imagine it's very different than before.

Mark van Oppen (02:47.574)
Yeah, sometimes it is a big long eval process and often with these bigger companies and bigger average transaction values, there is a long winded eval and very structured procurement motion. But one thing that's changed the game for us is the arrival of AI as this actor in your critical path systems, right? This concept of a user population that is spun up by individual users that you've actually hired and vetted.

and then they're delegating decisions to AI users. And that's created a really urgent timeline among many of the customers we're talking to around how do we solve this problem? And that's accelerated our sales motion in a lot of ways because we need to be able to deal with this new type of user out there. And so that's impacted our go-to-market positioning, our sort of content motion. It's impacted the sales play and the language our reps need to use in a pretty significant way.

Andrew Monaghan (03:45.751)
Yeah, you know, I've never sold identity myself in my career, but I always imagined it was one of these things you kind of have to get right. Yeah, it's not something you test in one little pilot somewhere and, you know, just see how it goes and you deal with the slings and arrows from the users, right? This has to be done properly.

Mark van Oppen (04:04.682)
Exactly. So I refer to identity as a non-optional problem, right? The humans aren't going anywhere when it comes to the employees you hire, the customers you interact with, and you can't afford to forego the intelligence you get from customer identity, where the end user is purchasing your product or logging into your system or interacting with your service in some way. You have to attribute every action they take to that user so you can serve a customized user experience or whatever.

So the humans aren't going anywhere. And in an era of ever more connected user experiences, you have to be able to span all these different behavior patterns, whether you're buying a pair of jeans on the internet or you're logging into a bank, and being able to cover a wide surface area like Sakurov can, that's really what led me to join. We have a really strong approach to these AI workloads. We have a first-class approach tested at Fortune 10 scale.

in the workforce and the SIAM side and the spectrum that we can solve for is massive. And I fundamentally believe that that market is actually collapsing. And so what I've been talking to my team about is how do you do discovery in a very tech sensitive way so that you understand how this sort of evolution, these macro trends are showing up in your customer's business. And then you're sitting on the same side of the table as them.

talking about the business problem and how it shows up in their unique scenario. And if you do that right, then we're an extension of their team in this critical non-optional problem statement we've talked

Andrew Monaghan (05:44.116)
How do you do that right then? How do you do that discovery the right way?

Mark van Oppen (05:47.489)
Yeah, first and foremost, every sales rep needs to be quite technical. The idea of a sales rep that's there for the relationships, I think is dead in this space. Think about the role of identity versus, a monitoring tool. Right? The critical path means that if identity is broken, you are dead in the water. Your customers can't access your service. There is a cost per minute in lost revenue and

sort of foregone contract obligations that likely has an SLA impact for your customer to their customers. So you're asking somebody to take a leap of faith and my sales team needs to demonstrate confidence at every step of the product specification. That's obviously critical for the sales engineer, but I think it's very critical in that first impression with an account executive. If they can't speak intelligently about

how this product shows up or how this problem statement shows up in a variety of use cases and speak fluently about it, you're starting off with a level of trepidation from the customer's perspective that is just untenable. When you're asking somebody to bet their business operations on you, they need to be super technical. So we obviously use a methodology in our sales process. In this case, it's kind of a hybrid between MedPic and

like command the message ideas where you really want to tailor the pain as it shows up for that specific customer and then make sure you can present back their own information to them so that you nail the right proposal, the right scale, the right technical solution to solve the

Andrew Monaghan (07:36.056)
Now you said two things there that some might think might be in opposition. So one was it has to be quite a technical discovery. You have to be able to show credibility and build trust by the technical side. But I you also said that you have to have another eye on the business outcomes about what this really means for the company. Finding salespeople who are really good at both of those things, some might say it might be quite difficult.

Mark van Oppen (08:02.442)
It is. Let me know if you know any because we need more on a perpetual basis. I think this is a bias that comes from my early career because I worked for a company called Blue Box for a founder named Jesse Proudman who was always willing to just swan dive into the deepest technical problem with customers. But he would be supporting tech that was

well beyond what we were providing for that given customer. And that always ingratiated an incredible relationship with that customer. It was a willingness to understand how that technical nuance showed up in that customer's environment. And I've tried to emulate that kind of attitude in a customer service mindset through my whole career. And I've tried to instill the same thing with our sales reps, where first you need to understand

why we're in the room together, right? What is the pain that brought them to the table to talk to you in the first place? And how is it affecting them? Like you are putting yourselves in that customer's perspective and that is usually in this space, a very technical problem. You could also have, you know, an incumbent mentor that's price gouging, but that's kind of simple, right? And what is wrong with the status quo that's brought them here today? And then once you understand that,

then you can start talking about, well, our approach to the problem and our commercial posture and how that will drive a beneficial outcome for you, but it comes from a place of technical discovery and then how that meets the business outcome that they're impacted by, right? Where does this transition from technical pain to dollars costing you as a business? And how can I make sure I draw that through line for you and support you in building a business case to take action on our behalf?

Andrew Monaghan (09:56.42)
It's that bit there that's the bit that I found people struggle with. It's the people honestly, as sales and on the prospect side, much more comfortable talking the middle, right? The technical pain, what's happening, what I call the situational problems that are happening surface level. And then both sides seem to struggle a little bit when you say, well, what's the impact? How far does this go? Let's go three levels deep into why this really matters. I'm wondering if you got any tips for you might give your team or other teams about this is how you just

take that one step into the impact side and then keep going.

Mark van Oppen (10:28.14)
Yeah. The training exercise that I've encouraged sales reps do in the past is not something I'd say you should present to a customer right away because it takes some iteration to do it without looking kind of silly. But if it's a publicly traded company, you have a wealth of available information, especially when earnings reports and things are broken out by product category or product set. And if you're doing business to support a specific product set,

you have something that says, here's the total annual revenue that comes from this product. That means you can calculate a cost per minute, a cost per hour, a cost per hour, or a revenue per minute, revenue per hour kind of model. And you can also usually go look at the company information and find out roughly the number of employees they have and then roughly the number of employees they have by department.

If it's a private company, you're doing these very much a top line estimate numbers, but it gives you sort of a directional signal on the private side. But on the public side, you have a lot of this data readily available and you can go through and say, okay, I'm going to estimate the average engineer has a fully loaded cost of $200,000 a year, whatever it is, Salary plus 25 % or so overhead to run that business. So I know what per engineer costs. And I know that there's roughly

200 people on this product category, I can estimate that 40 % of those are engineers or something like that based on this product. And then I can say, based on this motion, you've told me it actually saves your team 10 % of the time. Then I contribute that and say, okay, this team might be 10 engineers. 10 % of the time is one full-time engineer. Right away, I can anchor to the cost in people and time that you remove.

just backing into numbers and you can walk the customer through the data and you're not going to be right, but you're going to be in the right ballpark and that helps build a lot of credibility with that customer. Then you can also talk about the revenue side, right? If you have a significant amount of revenue associated with that, you can present back the cost per minute of downtime, the cost per hour of downtime, the cost avoidance. If you can say, hey, buying this thing will remove X likely outage events or

Mark van Oppen (12:48.398)
Even if it removes one outage event that takes five hours, that's what that would cost and the cost avoidance becomes your friend. So doing a little bit of research on public data points and then presenting that back to a technical audience, most of the time that technical audience is not close enough to the finance side. And that's gold when they need to make a pitch to justify buying a product and you can build it for them. I mean, it doesn't take long, especially with Claude.

Andrew Monaghan (13:15.485)
Yeah, it's interesting the go through the process right there. How do you coach your team about how to present those numbers though? You said the start, you might not do it initially. Like help us understand that.

Mark van Oppen (13:24.75)
Yeah. So this is part of the deal review. So when I'm in one-on-one deal review meetings with members of my team, I often have this conversation and I'll have them, I'll poke at them and say, well, who are the end users in this scenario? What are they trying to accomplish? What's the business purpose that they're engaging with the customer? And usually there's some stumbling because they've focused on some of the technical pain, but they haven't actually connected that to the business pain. And I want the AE to be able to articulate it.

And then I'll have them do a little bit of research and start presenting it back to me in the next one on one or maybe one the next day around, okay, what's the top line impact of these numbers in the company? And can you start to draw a line of technical pain to dollars that affect the company that's plausible and reasonable? You're not going to be quite right. There will be internal data points that skew it pretty dramatically. But when you can start to point to magnitude of like, hey,

dollars spent here could save $10 over here. Even if it's $5 or $50, you can start to draw a line to a significantly valuable ROI model. And not everybody's going to be able to do that from the jump. do not expect sales reps to be able to do this from, the first meeting, but with a little bit of coaching, they can actually present a story that's way more powerful because there's deference to the technology and deference to the business outcome that ultimately pays your end customer.

their salary and if it will usually technical leaders like it when they can tie a technical problem to a business outcome. And if you can help do that for them and arm them to present internally, that's a high visibility thing for them to do too.

Andrew Monaghan (15:08.701)
gives them credibility internally as well, Now what you described there seems to me maybe a little bit luxury for Securoft where you can draw that direct line to cost or to revenue. Maybe this is the non-critical path aspect to this. In my experience, a lot of security technologies, you can't do that. It's a very fuzzy, you have to squint very hard and maybe if things go well, you might impact some revenue or cost, right?

Mark van Oppen (15:10.134)
Absolutely.

Andrew Monaghan (15:35.378)
Have you got any experience about how you do that in a non-critical past sales environment where it actually has some credibility at their end?

Mark van Oppen (15:41.591)
Yeah, so that's the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that you're selling against. You're basically saying, well, if you don't protect this, what if something were to happen? And you're kind of hand-waving. It's the boogeyman. It's this unknown potential threat that you're selling against. And that's a lot harder to quantify. But depending on the critical nature of who you're selling to, that has real risk, whether it's laws that have grown up.

that company was founded and started operating, things like GDPR, which 30 years ago weren't really in existence. And now you have data isolation, data sovereignty by user in different EU companies or countries. That's a problem that didn't happen and they have to solve it technically, have to grow up with the sort of evolving model. I look at this and say, that's one of the reasons I like selling Critical Path.

because I want to be that closest concentric circle of partner to my customer that feels like an extension of their team solving that non-optional problem. Once you move to an accessory or an add-on, might look cool, but you are very clearly in a vendor relationship. You are not in the boat with the customer in the critical path.

I think my whole career has basically been anchored to that critical path motion. So I don't personally have a lot of deep experience selling something that is not an extension of that non-optional problem for customers.

Andrew Monaghan (17:14.49)
Yeah, I think it's a tough space to be in if you're doing that. think most of the security is there is that they definitely help the security team do a better job. It's what I call departmental value. It's really good security stuff and you can impact KPIs in the security team, like that. At end of the day, you can't say very much about how it's impacting the expansion of company into some whole new business. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, right? And maybe that's the art of finding the right champion who knows how to thread that needle internally.

Mark van Oppen (17:41.165)
Yeah, very much. Although I think you can anchor to metrics that matter, right? And I think the question you ask is, why is this a key performance indicator? Why does this KPI matter? And you're kind of asking your customer, you want to hear them say, well, this impacts the number of logs we're scraping. But anybody that's been in IT for a while or been in tech for a while will know that

the number of logs systems spit out doesn't go down, it just goes up, right? Like, so of course this number is gonna perpetually be going up and to the right. Is that good? Is that bad? Does it correlate to the number of incidents or the number of sort of value insights driven by log inspection? Maybe, maybe not. And that's where I wanna find out, what is this KPI actually intended to measure? And how can we tie that KPI to a business outcome for you?

And that's part of a technical discovery. I'd be very wary of just mapping or selling something toward KPIs that you don't deeply understand at a hierarchical level with your customer.

Andrew Monaghan (18:52.641)
Yeah. So beforehand, you talked about building trust by the way you conduct that technical discovery, you're building up credibility. What are the ways as a secure off-seller have to think about building trust with the prospect?

Mark van Oppen (19:09.41)
think it's first and foremost empathy for the evolving problem statement, right? 15 years ago, you could transact on the internet, you could transact in person, very anonymously. Today, even checking out at a grocery store requires typing in your phone number. And that's a level of customer identity that is just expected today in the world.

And I think one of the easiest ways to gain credibility with our customers technically and gain confidence with our customers is to empathize with the goalposts that have moved. Customer, Andrew, let's say you're in charge of a large end user product. Maybe it's Candy Crush, maybe it's Kroger, maybe it's a SaaS service, maybe it's Wells Fargo, whatever it is. You have a

service you're providing to a series of end customers. It might be quite complicated, might be quite secure, might be quite regulated, or it might not be at all. Either way, your problem statement has evolved dramatically, and if you can start to articulate as a seller that you're aware of how much those goalposts have moved over the last decade, immediately that puts you in a position of like, he gets the pain I've been dealing with. And if you can start to talk about, I saw this too.

I watched this. In fact, this showed up and has changed how we do business with customers. Immediately they're like, yeah, it's been crazy how much this has impacted us. This whole model of data isolation in the EU or the AI has just caused crazy behavior patterns that we were never expecting. We're managing 15 times the number of end users that we expect, and half of them are bots. And there's empathy and agreement around how it's affected them. And it takes a little bit of research to be able to do.

But if our sellers can't empathize with those moving goal posts, then they're not going to earn technical credibility. And that's really step one. Two, putting yourself in the shoes of how it's showing up for your customers. And then what they say and what examples they bring up immediately feed how you present a business outcome to them later.

Andrew Monaghan (21:24.808)
That's so powerful. The phrase I've heard is, if someone believes that you deeply understand their problems, they're more likely to believe that you have the solutions as well. And I've seen that show up in my personal life. I've seen it with clients I work with again and again. If they just believe you get it, then they're much more likely to open up and work with you.

Mark van Oppen (21:37.857)
Absolutely.

Mark van Oppen (21:47.725)
Yeah, I think you nailed it. That's exactly the framing that I want everybody to understand. And I think it's a career limiting move I see with salespeople all the time when they say, I'm not technical. Or they say, I have a tech guy for that. And let me talk to my engineer. I think that immediately truncates their value forever in that relationship with that customer. If you aren't willing to lean in and

and at least make an attempt to articulate the problem and how it's showing up to that customer, you're just the order-taker commercial seller. You're not the confidant or the consignori for this problem. And that's what I want all of us to be. It's the same reason I'm wary of sellers that have jumped dramatically repeatedly in industries.

Right? Or they, you know, maybe all in tech, but there they go from storage tech to networking to identity to monitoring tools. What are you doing here? Do you have a demonstrated success here? Were you just a mercenary and you just were reliant on an SE here? Like, do you have an opinion or a thesis around what you think you can deliver to customers in those spaces? And if you do, great. But I would be, I would want to drill on that in interviews to make sure.

that they can articulate, why they were there, or was it just a pure mercenary, sort highest paid gig job?

Andrew Monaghan (23:20.58)
In that model, do you have to be clear where the line is between the seller and the se? Or do you let them figure out themselves a little bit where they kind of stop and the next one starts?

Mark van Oppen (23:30.146)
Yeah, I want it to be, I want it to be very blurred. In fact, I want there to be in a demo. It should not be the seller goes on mute and disappears for 20 minutes. Right? Like that, that, that implies basically an ineffective motion. I want there to be some give and take, right? There's the example I use that my team will laugh if they, if they listen to this podcast is the alley.

If you're not alluping each other repeatedly in the conversation, then you're not jointly presenting. If you're not chiming in and say, hey, Matt, I want you to talk about this on this side because they mentioned to me in a previous call that this shows up this way in their experience. Can you bring that up? he or she may say, actually, I'm gonna get to that in about 10 minutes. So let me just go through this piece first.

Thanks for the context. Like that does two things. One, it warns the SE that this is a point that you want to talk about. Two, it shows you were listening. And three, it makes sure that it ties back in some custom way versus a generic harbor tour. And that ongoing alley-oop motion is just about the most critical part of a really successful AEN SE model.

Andrew Monaghan (24:51.215)
Do you look for pairs? Do you look for SEs and AEs together?

Mark van Oppen (24:54.382)
I've always dreamed of hiring a pair that way. I have never once in my career hired an existing AESC pair. The closest thing I've done is actually just recently I hired a month apart an AE and an SE that had worked together in the past and they knew each other, but they had it for the previous year, year and change. They hadn't worked together. they're common, they know each other, but they weren't hired as a unit.

Andrew Monaghan (25:23.15)
You mentioned there also about hiring in general. You know, have quite a tight focus of who you're looking for, it sounds like, digging into why they've jumped around a little bit by one thing. What else are you thinking about as you get an A coming to you? What are you looking out for?

Mark van Oppen (25:24.366)
I would love to be part of it.

Mark van Oppen (25:42.169)
Sounds like you're teeing me up to give my hiring criteria because I'm going to give it to you. And this was shamelessly taken from a dear friend and mentor of mine who was a head of HR at one point, but it's the three E's. So it's energy, excellence, and experience in that order. And the critical piece on the energy side, you can't replace enthusiasm, willingness to dive in, the sort of curious, eager,

energy that somebody shows up with that that's kind of intrinsic to who they are as a person and you need to have that level of energy tier one excellence you need to delivered and demonstrated excellence in some way shape or form in your past if it's a junior career i don't care if this is somebody who's a D1 athlete maybe they're concert level violinist or or they've done a sterling job in a series of other other gigs that might not be related but they're trying to break into this new field but if they have energy

and they have excellence and they've demonstrated a pursuit of excellence repeatedly in their past, great. Experience is the only one of these that just comes with time and it comes with training and it comes with exposure. Certainly fantastic if somebody walks in the door with excellent experience or a high level of experience, but they have to also have the energy and that pursuit of excellence. So for me, it's energy, excellence, experience, and

If you can demonstrate those three things, I can help train you the nuances of our product, who we're talking to specifically, but you have to be able to nail those three and then apply that to methodology or the tools, the training or the market that we're talking about. All of those other things come with a little bit of education, but those three traits are really the top criteria for me.

Andrew Monaghan (27:31.755)
That's someone myself who is maybe a long-hand experience. Do you ever find that the experience and energy is in inverse proportions?

Mark van Oppen (27:39.439)
Yes and no. think I'm going to use an example of LeBron James. So LeBron James is what playing his 22nd or 23rd year in the NBA this coming season. I mean, he's far and away the longest career and longest at this production level. And he's nowhere near as much the Energizer Bunny as he was in first.

15 years of his career, right? He's in this piece, but he's just about the most wily operator on the court. And his mind is as sharp as ever, in fact, probably sharper because he's trained by his time and context. And so I look at this and think, okay, if somebody can come in, has been there, done that, has the professional playbook, knows how to do this, but is still willing to learn, then fantastic. I mean, experience is great. What closes that off?

is a sort of shoulder shrug, well, no, I do it this way. I'm not willing to learn with the evolution. And then it's like, OK, well, you're putting yourself on a dead end, right? The market's gone this direction. The industry's gone this direction. Sure, you can bring experience, but you need to be able to recognize a forward-looking perspective, not just say, I've been doing the same motion for 25, 30 years, and I will not be changed. That's career limiting.

Andrew Monaghan (29:07.901)
Yeah, that's a whole interesting area for me. I work with sales teams all the time and maybe a little bit unfair to say this, but the ones who have the experience are the ones that are usually less coachable than the ones that don't have the experience, let's say. They do have that, I get it, right? You've been doing this for 20 years and you've been successful. You've you kind of got your way of doing things, right? It's an interesting thing that how you, in the interview process, you...

You've got that someone who's long and experienced, maybe their energy's good, but they're still coachable, they're still gonna take things on and do it the secure off way versus the way they did it 10 years ago and some other success they had.

Mark van Oppen (29:45.635)
Yeah, you nailed one of the hardest things to judge in an interview process. And I get wary of somebody who's been in an icy role for a really long time and maybe also has some short stints in those roles. Sometimes those people are great. But if in that scenario, I'd want them to give me three references that are just raving about them, right?

They show up and they're willing to figure it out and apply their cumulative expertise to this new problem and chase it. If they have one playbook and they're just trying to snap in a new employer's name into the trusted playbook that they've been running for years, I'm worried about their fit. And what you just said is that that same confidence, they come with a level of like, I've been there, done that, and I'm not willing to hear new ideas.

And as a parent of kids that are single-digit ages, it reminds me of talking to my parents about parenting. All the confidence is there, but they don't really remember the fact that it's been 40 years since they've done this. And a lot of the context and a lot of the nuance and a lot of the hard bits that you're just in the thick of it have just faded from their memory. But all the confidence and belief around the right way you ought to do it is still there.

And that's similar to a sales rep, right? They've been doing this a really long time. If they stay willing to learn and they stay willing to make the prospecting calls to do that effort, then you're in great shape. But that's not always the case for sure.

Andrew Monaghan (31:28.454)
Yeah, the absolute top performers are hungry to learn. It's that kind of band below her. They're really successful or successful, but you know, they're in that kind of spot. Here's a question for you. I'm always interested to think about is, you know, as you're trying to grow the company, right? We talk about having a sales team. In reality, it's a bunch of sales individuals who are part of a group who are trying to have a shared goal, right? What the person in New York does

doesn't necessarily help the person in LA with their deals. It's just the way things are, right? And often think about, you know, the role of the seller at a smaller, you earlier stage company. They want to their numbers, but the thing that some things lose sight of is we're trying to build a scalable model here that's going to grow the company beyond just what you do. And I kind of need you to not go off and be the lone wolf all the time, right? If we're going to scale something, we can't scale 15 different motions across the country.

How do you think about that balance between we want you to go do your magic and be successful, but we kind of need to be able to repeat this as well?

Mark van Oppen (32:31.222)
Yeah, that's a reasonable concern and something we're doing later this morning actually is a presentation from one of our sellers in the West Coast who over the last year or so has gotten very into Claude and automating some of the discovery in the prospecting list. And after meetings, he has a Claude recurring skill that

captures the transcript from that meeting and then drafts a follow-up email according to some really strict templates that he uses around, these were the issues, these are the items that were followed up for you, these items are followed up for me. And then, of course, he edits it and customizes it, but it gets 80 % of the way there through automation, and he set it all up on his own. And I'm actually having him present how he did this and how he uses Claude to augment building.

list and some of the research for the right people and then how that shows up for follow-up tasks and I want him to help support rest of the team. He can share skills in his his CLAWD deployment and we're trying to sort of make each other better without saying, hey, you need to be the coach for the rest of the team. I want him to lead the team to water. It's their job to pick it up and use it, but I can kind of do a showcase of excellence in action.

And this is an example of using new power tools to make yourself better and make sure that you don't forget things and make sure that you have these power tools for notes capture and follow-up capture, right?

Andrew Monaghan (34:10.755)
Any ideas how you go past that, guys, here's a good thing to do, to why we should be doing this every single time and I'm gonna hold you accountable and all this stuff. Any ideas about how you do that?

Mark van Oppen (34:21.836)
Yeah, I've started walking into required traits on a deal. like the easy example is required fields or required attributes in a Salesforce opportunity record, right? As you progress through, you can identify risk if it's already at a negotiation stage, but you don't have more than one contact on the opportunity. That's a big red flag.

right. D you can't possibly be running a commercial or, or financial play along with a technical play along with a legal review with one contact, unless it's a very small company. right. So, you, you can sort of view it that way and you can build some sort of basic observable metrics that way. But the, the sales reps are motivated by, by quota attainment, no, we're achieving and some of the bragging rights. And if there's a rep that does really well and.

is also demonstrating some of these leadership habits. I like to call out. There's a reason rep A is at 200 % of their goal and they've also led three of these best practices sessions in the last year. And that's a pretty cool tie back to say, just look, cause and effect. There's dollars at the end of the rainbow if you follow these patterns. And the sales reps tend to react well to that, right?

And I want that to help accelerate commissioning.

Andrew Monaghan (35:49.598)
Yeah, yeah.

It is funny how they'll, if human beings will listen to someone tell us to do something, but when we see someone beside us doing it really well and get success, and we just seem to gravitate towards that as, I'll do that as well, because if Johnny can do it, I can do it.

Mark van Oppen (36:06.337)
Exactly, exactly.

Andrew Monaghan (36:08.575)
Last question around that whole area. I'm always curious about how companies approach this. If I'm a new, let's say you hired me as a new rep here in Colorado, not that you're gonna replace your existing rep, but let's say did that next week. What would be my experience of ramping up at Securoft to get up to producing pipeline and business as fast as possible?

Mark van Oppen (36:29.494)
Right now it's fluid. I think a lot of the training material and a lot of the sort of reference pitch language is out of date almost as soon as it's been recorded and created. And so I think shadowing other reps for the first, for intro calls, for initial demos, meeting with the CS team, meeting with the product team is part of it. You want to learn from an active dialogue with other customers and we can get you started with

with some of the initial pitch decks, some of the initial example recorded scripts, and you want to hear two or three different people give it. So you have different language, different syntax, different sort of vocabulary in that motion. But it's very dependent on a rep getting at bats and hearing customer conversations. One of the things I'm trying to do right now is build a library of intro calls that are recorded so I can have somebody go through and listen to them. But...

They're so different and especially in the era of AI tools and these different protocols evolving every six weeks, 10 weeks. It's moving so fast that creating these static assets, isn't that helpful? I basically want to say, hey, shadow this human, shadow this person, you're going through this and also you can pick up their prospecting.

templates, their prospecting language, their, the way, the skills from Claude, things like that. want the rep to start learning and take that ownership themselves, to, build some of that skill. But, if you figure out a better way to do it, that's more scalable and programatized, please let me know because that's what's one of the trickier things.

Andrew Monaghan (38:08.349)
Yeah, it definitely is. So you're 90 days in, what does the next 1980 days look like for you?

Mark van Oppen (38:17.28)
It's funny you ask because I am working on a board deck that we have a board meeting tomorrow actually. And my deck is the first 90 days, what have we done so far? And then the next 90 days, what are we going to try to get done through the balance of this quarter and into Q4? And it's putting points on the board and materially operationalizing some of the cleanup and the streamlining that we've done over the last 90 days. So.

The motion that I really spent time on was getting my arms around the systems, getting my arms around how we forecast, getting my arms around what the definition of a healthy opportunity is at each stage as we have it here making the appropriate changes. So that meets my language. That's kind of plumbing in the sales world. It's just making sure that we're doing this in a way that's repeatable, that's logical. And then

Stepping on the gas is the next 90 days. It's making sure that we have five campaign motions we've launched and we have a sort of bucket of totally allocatable funds and we're going to spend money on what works. And so we have some feedback loops around that pipe gen motion and we're stepping on the gas across all five of those programs and we will.

I have no doubt, have a slightly different outcome than the plan says today. But I can tell you that we're gonna follow the traction we see in the market across those different themes and should be a lot of fun.

Andrew Monaghan (39:56.025)
Well, Mark van Alpen, CRO at Secure Auth, thanks for joining us today.

Mark van Oppen (40:00.355)
Thank you very much. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Andrew Monaghan (40:02.49)
I wish you all the best the next 90, 180 days and beyond.

Mark van Oppen (40:05.795)
Thank you.