Unlocking the secrets to trust in cybersecurity sales with Dani Woolf, CEO at Audience 1st

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

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

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

[00:00:44] to FOD and buzzword mumbo jumbo, and also the one with someone who's a field sysso and advisor to startups called How Security Buyers Think and Go-To-Market Strategies for Young Companies. I'm not getting paid for this promo. I just really enjoy the show that two George has put on.

[00:01:00] Check it out. It's the Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax podcast. Now on with this episode. We are in a tough position in sales and especially in cybersecurity sales. We want to engage with other people who we believe will have use for our products. And in a short

[00:01:17] period of time, we're going to build enough trust with them that they actually want to buy from us. And the thing that really makes it hard is that they, the people that we talk to have a

[00:01:27] preconceived notion that talking with us is going to be a terrible experience. It's not in their best interests to open up and have conversations with salespeople. This is an area where we can

[00:01:39] all get better. So I wanted to talk to someone who talks with a bunch of cybersecurity buyers and has worked out a model to quickly build trust. And that's why I'm excited

[00:01:48] to introduce you to Danny Wolff, the CEO of Audience First. Danny's been in marketing for 15 plus years, some of which was in cybersecurity marketing. And with Audience First, she's taught with literally hundreds of cybersecurity buyers to do research on things like how they buy,

[00:02:06] how and when they engage with vendors. She's figured out great questions to ask of them. She's asked them what type of messaging they prefer. And she's learned how to have deep conversations with them that actually really matter. In short, she's figured out how to build

[00:02:22] trust with cybersecurity buyers. We cover all of this and more in this episode. I'm Andrew Monaghan and this is the cybersecurity go-to-market podcast where we tackle the question, how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster? Well, Danny, this is going to be a

[00:02:48] interesting episode. I'm looking forward to this for a while. I think there's an interesting discussion to be had with someone with your experience that can really help out our audience, but also help out the good folks at Cyber Donut. So Danny, we're going to get straight

[00:03:02] into helping our company, our cybersecurity vendor, Cyber Donut. For those that are new to the podcast, Cyber Donut is an amazing company. It does amazing things with technology. It's just raised this A-round for about 20 million. And what they're trying to do is get from

[00:03:20] having 20 customers up to 100 customers. So the head of sales, Bob Cunningham, he's hired some sales people when they're starting to get out there and do some more marketing, do some more go-to-market

[00:03:31] stuff to try to hit those big growth goals. But one of the things that is interesting is they've realized that they're trying to connect better with their prospects. And Bob is

[00:03:41] telling his sales team, go be trusted advisors to these people. This is a new area that we're in. The technology's hot. We need to roar our sleeves up and give the people some advice and be

[00:03:52] trustworthy. And anytime I hear that from someone I remember or someone online, I know Antinay Arino says there's only two things you need to be a trusted advisor. One is trust

[00:04:02] and the other one is advice. The advice I kind of feel like is the easy bit. But we gloss over the idea that we're going to be trusted. And I think sales is interesting and

[00:04:12] that almost as soon as you put that sales in your job title, there's certain stereotypes to go with it. And we're often backly against this idea that we're untrustworthy. We're

[00:04:22] in for ourselves and all the rest of it. So what we're going to talk about today is how we help the sales team at Cyber Donut go through a process to become, let's say in the eyes

[00:04:32] of their buyers, trustworthy type people, even if they are obviously already, the perceptions tend to ring true. So I'd be interested if you were sitting there with Bob and saying, Bob, listen, you got to help your team a little bit here. What sort of advice and process would

[00:04:47] you start to talk to them about to help them on the trust side? Well, I'd have to give Bob a pat on the back because first of all, he actually realized, first and foremost, that

[00:04:58] they need a better connect with customers. I mean, that's huge. In my experience, what I've seen is that a lot of professionals in the go-to-market team are largely on autopilot. Let's look at

[00:05:14] some of the challenges before we get into what we need to do about it. We're faced with aggressive growth goals. You're backed by investor profits, so you got to perform. It's hard to connect with practitioners and buyers. They're innately skeptical because of

[00:05:31] some of the shady tactics that are going on in the industry. Sometimes we just don't know what to do. We don't know how to connect. We don't know how to communicate as best we can with

[00:05:42] the people that we're trying to sell to. And so that causes a lot of friction between the customer and the vendor. But the fact that Bob knows, okay, we need to do something about it

[00:05:55] is strides ahead of a lot of companies that I've seen in this space. Taking a step back to say, okay, let's assess ourselves. I think step one is let's assess ourselves. What are we doing wrong that's not allowing us to really understand our customers and really understand

[00:06:13] the people we're trying to sell to? Why don't more companies do that though, Daniel? Why don't they take the step back and say, look, there must be a bigger picture here. Okay, well, first of all, it's hard to admit that you're doing things wrong. Let's just be real.

[00:06:25] As human beings, we don't want to admit that we're doing something wrong. We want to admit that we're doing a lot of things right. We want to add to our resume. We've increased growth by XYZ. Our pipeline is 123 and our close rate is whatever, whatever, whatever.

[00:06:45] It's hard to admit that we're not doing a very good job. That being said, I think being a strong go-to-market professional is being able to admit that, okay, this worked this time,

[00:06:57] but maybe it's not scalable. How do we do it better this way? Or how do we shift with the dynamic nature of a person? We're not selling to an organization. We're selling to a person

[00:07:09] at the end of the day. That organization is comprised of people. How do we understand people? We can't couple people in broad segments. We need to understand them individually at the end of the day. That's my very strong belief. So, yeah, self-assessment is critical, first

[00:07:28] and foremost. What are we doing wrong? What can we be doing better? Where can we turn? How can we put more gas on the pedal on levers that are working? When should we put our foot off

[00:07:42] the pedal if it's not working? Those are really foundational steps in being a go-to-market leader, in my opinion, is understanding what levers to pull on and not to pull on. So, that's self-assessment. The second is looking at your team and understanding, are they curious enough?

[00:08:06] Are they consuming information? Are they asking the right questions? And when we kind of set up, when we kind of talked about this episode and somewhat prepped for this episode, I told you about my belief that we need to focus on an

[00:08:25] inner shift before we can improve our outer shift. Now, the inner shift is everything that goes on inside our mind, inside our body. The outer shift are the tactical elements and things that we do

[00:08:36] to connect with people or go-to-market in general. So, right now what I'm focusing on is that inner shift. So, is our team asking the right questions? Are they deeply curious about the people that we're trying to persuade? It's not enough to want to persuade someone to read your

[00:09:00] website or buy your product or solution or even request a demo or go into a POV. It's not enough to just jump to that. You have to understand the foundation is you have to understand who it

[00:09:13] is you're trying to sell to and persuade. That's the foundational element. Are we asking the right questions? Are they curious? Are they empathetic? That's another element. Are they empathetic? Do they truly understand our customers on a deeper level, not just what does they do,

[00:09:31] the demographic information and pharmaconeformation, right? The behavioral data, the psychographic data, you know, what are their perceptions? What are their needs? What are their beliefs? What are their... How do they operate as human beings? I'm going to sidetrack here. I read a few

[00:09:50] years ago, I read somewhere that B2C buying is emotional, B2B buying is not. And I'd say the opposite. B2B buying is emotional, B2C buying is not emotional. I can quickly go on Amazon and

[00:10:04] just press buy button without feeling anything because, you know what? Well, yeah, I have another water bottle, but it's not emotional for me. I'm going to go spend, you know, a million dollars on a security solution. That's emotional. There are repercussions and implications for

[00:10:19] that purchase. And so understanding those implications and those feelings of an individual is key. And I see they're itching. You want to say something? Well, it's interesting. So I have this belief having worked in many different companies

[00:10:34] is, you know, the company needs to help salespeople understand these things. It's not like you just go off on your own and just understand it all, right? You're missing a mark, missing something as a company if you just expect the salespeople to figure this out on their own.

[00:10:48] And yet, if I was to grossly oversimplify, I would say that 98% of the training I received at a company over the years has been about products and 2% has been about the buyers. And it seems from what you're saying, this is entirely wrong. Yes.

[00:11:05] So what do we do about that then? We invest in more buyer research or we teach our teams the best way is we teach our teams how to communicate with buyers and customers and extract the right information to help them do

[00:11:24] their job and apply that information that they got from the conversations to their job. It's not easy, but it's very much doable. So combo the two then, right? I truly believe that no matter what function you are,

[00:11:37] you shouldn't be left alone to your own devices to go figure stuff out, right? There should be a way to help you out. So do you say natural traits, curiosity, empathy, things like that, we need to harness those and help them use those in conjunction with

[00:11:51] maybe some research that we can give them to say, this is what your buyers are experiencing and feeling and their fears and frustrations and hopes and desires, things like that. Yeah. And here's how you pull out that information. Here's how you pull that data.

[00:12:06] Here's how you have the conversation to understand that in the first place, right? Here's how you interview for open-ended questions in order to get the subjective and objective input and output, right? I think the third characteristic internally is likeability.

[00:12:23] Like, is my team even likable or are they schmucks? That's a very big deal. And when we talk about trust, you have those three characteristics, you make that inner shift with those three characteristics. That's the first step to building trust. So likability, curiosity, empathy is the trifecta?

[00:12:44] Empathy, yes. Okay. Those are the true, that's a trifecta. Then once you've harnessed and nurtured those characteristics, you can move towards that outer shift. The outer shift is again the tactical things we can do on a regular basis to foster the inner shift but also

[00:13:03] get the output we need to progress in the trust building process. And that's understanding, listing everything that we know, having it in a repository somewhere where we can look back to remember those signals and remember that information. It's active listening, that's between

[00:13:25] curiosity, like if you blend curiosity and empathy and likability together, you're going to kind of spit out active listening. It's not just what comes in the ear and what comes out the ear, it's actual processing and looking and identifying verbal and nonverbal language.

[00:13:47] Do I even know what they're telling me? Does it process, does it resonate in my mind? And then maintaining an authentic connection on a regular basis. It's not just, oh, well,

[00:13:59] I'm going to set an auto check in Salesforce or an outreach and say, oh, hey, do you have any questions three months down the line? No, hey, how are you doing? What's new? I see that you're

[00:14:10] going to Black Hat. Let's have a beer or let's go for coffee or, hey, I see that you are going through a rough time with everything going on with the change healthcare attack. Let me bring you out

[00:14:23] to LA. Let's just have a nice weekend where I can take you out. We can jam, go to a nice dinner. True story by the way. That's the outer shift and if you maintain understanding, capturing the data, active listening and maintaining that authentic connection while nurturing curiosity,

[00:14:41] likability and empathy, those six is your key to building trust long term. Well, let's get practical then. So one of our sellers is Sally McPherson and Sally's desperate to be this person. She's thinking about those six things.

[00:15:00] Where are there any natural points for her to start to say, okay, I'm going to start tackling this, I'm going to work on that? Are some things less easy to move the needle on because they're more

[00:15:11] about inherent traits and are other things easier? I'm trying to figure out where they would start to try and improve this. So if I understand correctly your question, what are the conversation starters to kickstart the program or the process? Is that

[00:15:28] what you're asking? Much better than me. Yeah, that was a good way to ask it. All right. I ask it that way to validate because many have come up to me. How do I even

[00:15:38] start a conversation with like a CISO or with someone? Well, there are many ways to start a conversation with a practitioner. What's worked for me is just to introduce connecting with them on LinkedIn and introducing myself and saying, hey, not selling anything,

[00:15:53] just want to say, hey, like what you're doing here. Eager to understand more about you. You in? Yes, you in but not now. Cool. Or are you out? Just give them an option. Do you want to talk to me?

[00:16:06] Yes, you want to talk to me? Yes, but not now or do you not want to talk to me? That's worked 70% of the time. The other 30% is either silence or no, not now, mostly silence, but sometimes say, hey, I'm not really interested or it's not fitting for me.

[00:16:25] I'm like, okay, well, that's cool. But in the 70% that has worked, I've been able to connect with some really cool practitioners, really great marketers. Some of them have turned into customers. Some of them are great friends. Some of them are great contacts.

[00:16:44] That's one way. The other way is meeting at events, which is awesome. I've been to some really great events this past year and I'm fortunate in that my LinkedIn presence has helped create a connection at those events. So that's actually another tactic that you could do. So

[00:17:07] be active on LinkedIn so that people know who you are. Let's just be real. But just coming up to people and say, hey, this is who I am or creeping into a conversation because we

[00:17:19] know what LobbyCon is and those bars are hopping. Sometimes you could just walk up and be the weird person and just start listening in on a conversation. It makes sense because it's packed in there. So, oh, hey, I'm Danny. Oh, interesting. By the way, sorry, I'm interjecting

[00:17:35] your conversation. Sometimes you don't want to do that. You have to see if it's open and there are a lot of people. But if it's a one-on-one, don't do that. But that's been a great tactic.

[00:17:45] You kind of have to put yourself out there and that's where this deep curiosity comes into play. Like you need to want to soak up information and want to engage and learn. If you're apprehensive about that, you're going to have a very hard time making those connections.

[00:18:06] And I understand that even though go-to-market professionals are seemingly more type A and outgoing, that's largely an assumption and maybe a stereotype. There are a lot of people who are neurodiverse or neurodivergent in the go-to-market space and it's harder for them. So, my hope is

[00:18:29] with this conversation that these tactical steps will help them feel more comfortable in starting the process of engaging with people. We can go into this all day. There's a lot done back. Yeah, yeah. But what I'm hearing from you is something that's very natural. You're approaching

[00:18:52] people in your own way very naturally. The phrase everyone throws out all the time is authenticity. But I feel like what you're describing to me is a very natural thing for you to go and do.

[00:19:04] What I see a lot of is people believing they need to act a certain way. They need to act like sales people or act like business people and use words and be unbelievable professional and all this sort of stuff. It seems almost like against what you're saying, right?

[00:19:19] 100%. These are people at the end of the day. And then when you look at the total addressable market, pardon me, when you look at the total addressable market and you look at the people in the total addressable market, how many are actually

[00:19:33] in the market to buy something? Let's be real. 1% to 3%, right? 3% at best, yeah. Is that the KPI these days? The rest are there to do their jobs. The rest are there to connect with people to do their jobs better. The rest are there to get value

[00:19:49] and understand how they can make their life better. So, I'd even say you don't want to act like a salesperson and a business person. I mean, yes, you want to be professional. You don't want to come across as someone who looks unprofessional and not presentable and

[00:20:06] like a bro or a frat boy. That's an issue that we see a lot in our industry. But these are humans at the end of the day, right? The most compelling insight that I've extracted in all the customer interviews that I've had in the past three years,

[00:20:22] just start with the research. Be curious and research your customers. This is a legitimate verbatim quote, come to me with open arms and to actually learn about who I am. The ones that are

[00:20:33] like, hey, I've got a bottle of whiskey. Can we just have a conversation? Those make it through. That's a verbatim quote from CISO. Or some of the best engagements I've had with vendors

[00:20:45] is just having a burger or taco somewhere, having a beer and just saying, hey, what's going on? What's going on in your space? And then proceed to talk about whatever else comes up.

[00:20:54] Products are a solution to a problem. If we don't understand the problem, we cannot sell the product. What I'm hearing from you is definitely a human approach, right? Just be a human. Imagine you're

[00:21:06] trying to create a human connection as opposed to a business connection or a sales connection. You're trying to attach the outcome and trying to get leads or whatever it might be, right? But be a human so that you can have more authentic and deeper conversations.

[00:21:20] 100%. And however those connections rank, and I don't want to say rank or however you define those connections after you've established that initial connection, treat it as such. Like I said, some of my network, they are business connections, meaning we're... I wouldn't say it's strictly

[00:21:41] transactional, but we're here to solve a problem. We're here to develop and improve their organization. And I understand based off of the active listening and the nonverbal language that they're not interested in hanging out or anything beyond, let's just get the work done. Others are like, okay, yeah,

[00:22:00] you know what? I'm having a hard day. I just need to talk. But have also been business connections. So they rank in a different kind of court, right? Others are just friends. I thought they would be business connections, but frankly they're really friends and they've shown up when

[00:22:17] Ish has hit the fan. I don't know if I can curse. I don't know if this is E for Explicit podcast. But when it's gone... Like when it's been a rough time, I know I can rely on those people

[00:22:28] and I can pick up the phone and I know that they're going to show up or if I need help, I know they're going to show up for me. So you also have to assess what kind of connections you

[00:22:41] have in your network. You know who does it very well actually, and I wish I had it in front of me because it's a model. Maybe I'll... I don't know if you've met them before. I'll introduce you

[00:22:50] to them if you haven't. And maybe we can connect their collateral here is the folks over at Black Hills Information Security. They've... Give me a second if you don't mind. This is super

[00:23:05] important because they give kind of like a framework on... It was Jason and Deb over at Black Hills. They gave a framework on, I don't know what they called it, like friends, who's a level one friend and who's like a level 10 friend, something like that.

[00:23:23] And that's really important because then you know who you can reach out to. You can... Especially if you're targeting specific people in an account or in a pharmacographic profile, super helpful. Anyway, I went on a tangent. Apologies.

[00:23:42] So, Danny, let's learn a bit more about you personally. I have a list of 49 questions here and we're going to spin the wheel to get three questions to ask you. Now, I should let you know

[00:23:56] that our technology or spin the wheel technology might sound really simple, but it's actually very advanced. We're using a lot of next-gen techniques in here. We've got some quantum photography to protect our algorithm. We're using AI to come up with the best questions that are

[00:24:12] there. All of the idea that we're going to get really insightful questions completely randomly from our list. So, are you ready to go? Let's do it. All right, let me spin this wheel.

[00:24:28] All right, number nine, Danny, how did you make money as a kid? Wow, that's a great question. First of all, I wish I made more money as a kid, mostly bribing my parents probably,

[00:24:40] but I know that at some point I was fed up and wanted to get a job, so I'm pretty sure it was at some retail company folding clothes. It was a good time, I guess. Folding clothes in a

[00:24:58] clothes shop. That sets you up with success with cybersecurity right there, right? It was very cathartic. Good work, I guess. It was really stoked by my first paycheck. That was exciting. Yeah, I'm not kidding. All right, let's spin the wheel again.

[00:25:19] All right, number 36, what is an embarrassing or funny moment, memorable moment in your career so far? Oh my goodness. So, I love this question because it's really a huge part of my backstory. Embarrassing moment, I was sitting in an offsite with the marketing team.

[00:25:41] We were doing some feedback sessions with customers and I was listening to this one see, so basically talk about threat intelligence, deep and dark web intel, and the word zero came up in the conversation. And I was like, oh cool, zero. So by extension that also means zero

[00:26:01] trust. And so I somehow in the conversation stitched in the word zero trust to intelligence. It had no context. There was no context whatsoever to it and the practitioner was like, what the hell? Who is this person? Get them out of here. And I was completely embarrassed.

[00:26:22] I thought I knew what I was talking about but clearly throwing buzzwords around at that time was not very smart. Fast forward four or five years later. We are very good friends now, this practitioner and I, you may know him, Chris Roberts. It was a learning experience,

[00:26:40] very embarrassing. Got out of that room with my tail between my legs. And fortunately, Chris was able to have a good conversation afterwards explaining why this doesn't resonate, what was the problem? What could we be doing better just as marketers versus

[00:26:57] throwing buzzwords around in feedback sessions? Isn't it so good they took the time to do that though? Yeah, 100%. I could have gone two ways. And I tell this in my story. I could take

[00:27:10] the red pill or the blue pill. I decided to have that conversation with him instead of stay quiet and just continue with the status quo. So that was a change moment in my life actually. I'd love to drill down into some of that today in our conversation.

[00:27:26] Let's do that. Well, let's spin the wheel one last time and get this third question. Let's see what it comes off with. Let's do it. All right, number three, what is the story behind you getting your first job first job in cybersecurity? Oh, yeah,

[00:27:46] this is a great question too. By the way, I love this format, this kind of like quick fire format. This is awesome. And I love the spinner. So I was working in another SaaS startup in

[00:27:58] Celebev. And at the time, part of the strategy for outbound was to segment different kind of verticals because we knew which verticals had great opportunity and an upside for the company. And one of those verticals was the cybersecurity space. So the SDR at the time was targeting

[00:28:20] some accounts in security. And this one company kept coming up and I was like, okay, I'm going to take a look at what they do. I was trying to get an understanding of what these companies were doing

[00:28:33] and why we were trying to sell to them. And just something about this company's name stood out. I don't know why. But I learned a little bit about the space. I was like, okay, this is really cool. This technology, the way they're building technology around protection is super

[00:28:50] cool. And at the time, I was feeling kind of stale at my job. I wasn't learning anything. The product was okay. The space was okay. The market was a little bit boring. No real innovation.

[00:29:06] And then I remember, okay, well, I saw the company that was in our target list, our ABM list, was hiring for marketing. I was like, oh, okay, this is interesting. So I was like,

[00:29:17] you know what? Let's just take the call. And then I had the call with the marketing director at the time and listened to what they do. And I thought that was absolutely incredible. I thought it was

[00:29:28] so cool, so innovative at the time. And I was like, let's do it. Let's go into the space. I like the mission. I like the fact that our goal is to protect human beings and to protect

[00:29:41] organizations. And there's something about that mission that really resonated with me at the time and still today. And yeah, I didn't look back since then. I know that being in this space

[00:29:54] is something that I'm going to, I'm going to die on this hill. And I'm dedicated to the mission and helping people and helping the practitioners and helping the vendors. So yeah, it was a super exciting and unexpected shift. But those are the best shifts in life.

[00:30:14] Which was the company and did it fulfill your, the mission that you thought it was going to fulfill for you? Yeah. So the company was Garticor. Now they're part of Akamai. They were acquired a few

[00:30:25] years ago. And absolutely yes, I would have to say that was the best company I've ever worked for. I've been in tech space for about 15 years now. That was the best company by far I've ever

[00:30:35] worked for. I'm still in touch with a lot of the folks there. The technology was great. The leadership was great. I think overall, if people who have started companies or companies

[00:30:48] that are well established today can look at that company as a model of how to do things from a culture, from a technology perspective, I think they'll learn a lot of good things. So how did you come to realize all this Danny? What were you doing

[00:31:08] at the time to say, you know what? There's a better way and I'm going to do the research or find out how best to do this. I'm glad you asked. So I've been in marketing for 15 years as I stated.

[00:31:20] Several of those years I wasted on trivial tactics on the vicious status quo funnel cycle. Let's put a lot of money in ads. Let's put a lot of money in content

[00:31:33] syndication. Let's put a lot of money in big trade show events. Put a lot of money in writing byline articles and none of it had any impact on pipeline. And I got burnt out. And when I

[00:31:50] wanted to go to show results, I had nothing to show for. So I didn't get promoted and I felt like crap. And I felt like I wasn't learning anything too. It wasn't until I said, okay,

[00:32:06] I need to change something altogether. And I said, okay, well, maybe I should start coming to the analyst calls. Maybe I should start talking to sales more. Maybe I should start

[00:32:21] talking to customer success more even the founders. But when I went to do that, as much as they had good intentions, I was held back. They didn't let me come to the analyst calls because we only

[00:32:32] have one seat and we're paying like $5 million to Gartner and Forrester and you're not allowed. Sales is too busy or Salesforce doesn't have the notes that you need in the context of demand and marketer or customer success doesn't want you to talk to the customer because,

[00:32:48] God forbid, we screw up a deal that is in process. That was really frustrating. I took it, I took customer research into my own hands and realized that the new processes, we as an organization need to more systematically speak to customers and buyers

[00:33:10] and apply those insights to every part of the go-to-market process to the customer life cycle. Always on, always on. It has to be a continuous process, not one and done. And the biggest problem I see in a lot of organizations is that they do the customer

[00:33:26] research, they get the data but it just sits there and collects dust. Did I answer your question? I know again I'm going off on tangents but I love these questions. Yeah, this is how you start to gain this area of understanding how best to do this,

[00:33:38] how better to do it. It's something like you're going into the usual blueprint. We're going to do the usual things that people do, do some content generation, do some Google ad words or what might be and oh my God, it's not working. Punch in the face right there.

[00:33:52] And then you dug deeper and try to figure out why and what can I go do differently, understand the customer better. And if you were to guess, how many customer interviews, buyer interviews have you done over the years? Oh, hundreds. I don't even know.

[00:34:08] You know what? I'm going to go back and count after this. Hundreds. You need a counter on your website or something to say 433 and it goes up every day by a couple. Seriously, but I will say that if you are doing

[00:34:27] customer research and there are a lot of different ways to do customer research, I do qualitative research. I think there's a lot of value in that. Quant is great. I like qualitative research because it's juicy. You understand the why, the what,

[00:34:42] the why, the how. So you're having real conversations with these people, right? Real conversations with people. I think, first of all, I think leading with feedback is just like a genius way to establish a connection with somebody because they want

[00:34:54] to give their input, right? You know, think about their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, right? They want input. They want progress. They want to make it an impact. They want to be heard. But I will say with qualitative research, especially interviews, you don't need hundreds

[00:35:12] of interviews. You can get 8 to 10, let's just say 15 at max, interviews down, and you're already going to get saturation. You're already going to get the trends. You're going to understand. You're going to start seeing similarities very quickly. And you can knock those out in a week.

[00:35:32] People say, oh, it takes a long time and blah, blah, blah. Nope. You can even knock it out frankly in two days. Eight conversations in two days. Come on, let's be real. It's eight hours.

[00:35:42] Not even. Not even. I spend an hour with people. You can spend 15 to 30 minutes with somebody and get a lot of information if your conversations are focused, right? If you've done that inner

[00:35:53] shift and outer shift and you're curious, you know what questions to ask, you can knock it out in a day. What are the questions to ask then? Let's give cyber donut folks a couple of really good ones that you find always lead to interesting conversations.

[00:36:08] Oh, okay. So it depends what you want to know. Well, let's talk about a scenario. Cyber donut needs to know. Well, cyber donut, right? They're scaling. They're in the scale mode. We got our scene.

[00:36:21] We just got our A-ran. We got our first 20 customers. But we know intuitively what worked in the last year probably won't work as we scale. We need to go and understand new segments deeper, let's say, and understand what they're really thinking about. We have these

[00:36:36] ideas that we might be relevant in this new segment of the market over here, but we don't really know. Let's go and have some discussions with buyers. All right. You want to understand a few things. You're targeting a new segment. So you want to understand

[00:36:51] pains and needs. This is how I would set it up. Pains and needs of a new ideal customer, a new target. I wouldn't even say ideal customer profile because you're evaluating even if that's an ideal customer profile. Second is how do you position to those people

[00:37:07] and how do you create messaging for those people? And then third is, how do we target them in the right channels? So buyer's journey, right? Those are three very concrete use cases or research objectives. First is who are you? What do you do?

[00:37:23] And why do you do it? What is your motivation for doing what you do in your job? Your personal motivation or the role's motivation? Yeah, both. It could be anything. Sometimes people talk about their personal motivation and sometimes people say, I'm just in for the money. Others say,

[00:37:40] I'm in it for helping people. That's a personal motivation in my opinion. What's your bleeding neck challenge right now? And when I say bleeding neck in your role, there's this famous question, what's keeping you up at night? But no, what is really

[00:37:57] like, what do you need to triage right now? Right. You got blood gushing out that. Yep, 100%. What's that? What's that? What's keeping me up at night is my old dog and my child. That's

[00:38:08] what's keeping me up at night. No, what is like, why is your ass potentially on the line? Well, it's going to get you fired. Yeah. Yeah. Though I don't like to set it up that way because that's scary.

[00:38:18] Be quite so next to this. So that's one. That's one. Others are, think about a time or oh, another is what is your goal in your job? What are you trying to achieve?

[00:38:31] Think about a time when you tried to achieve that goal. What solutions did you have in place to achieve that goal? If that solution didn't solve the problem or you didn't achieve the goal,

[00:38:41] what did you do to what happened when you decided to evaluate a new solution to achieve that goal? What are the triggers? Right? Like what, why did we have to move to something else? Another could be okay, you started evaluating that solution. Take me through the journey.

[00:38:58] Like what did you do to start evaluating that solution? Where did you go? What actually happened? Right. Who did you talk to? Another could be what helps you make a decision with regards to a new solution or what are the barriers to adopting a new solution?

[00:39:16] Who else do you need to talk to when adopting a new solution? Those are some core questions. Or what can we take advantage of right now in this space to differentiate between other solutions?

[00:39:30] What's going on in the market? Yeah, what are you seeing? Right. So there are so many, you can go through so many different routes. But when I talk about understanding what it is

[00:39:41] you need to know or even understanding what it is you don't know that you need to know, that's part of curiosity. That will help you then do the outer shift, which is the tactics, developing the understanding, developing those questions to really pinpoint how to have that

[00:39:59] conversation with a person and get the best insight for you as an individual to progress and make way better decisions than that vicious status quo funnel of dumping a shitload of money and that just doesn't go anywhere. So when you go through that process

[00:40:17] of the inner and outer shift, more predictable growth, you're able to forecast better, you're able to have impact pipeline more efficiently, you're able to establish the connections more efficiently because you're getting that feedback. And so I've seen it be super

[00:40:32] successful for me, for others. This is my mission, this process. The way we function like this is my mission, not just on the marketing and sales side, on the founder side,

[00:40:42] on the CSM side, on the product side. Well, I can tell by listening to how you approach it and the questions you're asking, you're deeply curious about all the stuff that they've got

[00:40:52] going on and really trying to learn. I'm wondering, is there some insight you've got from doing this that's just totally surprising, that you just never imagined you would connect the dots on when talking to all these different buyers? Oh, yeah, 100%. So my assumption as a marketer looking at

[00:41:12] these enterprise executives is that they have their shit together. But frankly, they don't. They do not. And the biggest part is when I say they don't have it together, forget about the state of security and all the problems that come along with it. But the biggest

[00:41:32] part of that equation or that hurricane is the human side of things. The more I have conversations with people who are practitioners, who are key decision makers in security, the more I understand

[00:41:48] and see that they also have a problem connecting with people. It's hard for them, not just on the vendor side but internally. Internally between teams, different teams who have different goals, but also within their teams, between stakeholders. And so we're not, you know,

[00:42:09] there are the go-to marketing and sales and marketing and product. We're not on the vendor side. We're not the only people having a hard time, you know, starting those conversations. It's those executives and practitioners who are also having a hard time as well and maybe even

[00:42:25] a harder time than us. And that was a huge insight and a surprise to me and something that I learned very quickly. And I was like, wow, okay, well, how do we as vendors and also go to

[00:42:40] market professionals make them more comfortable and more successful in communicating? And so I think this process also can be super critical and helpful for them. But coming in with that curiosity and that understanding and empathy to establish a connection is a huge differentiator as someone

[00:42:59] who is trying to persuade someone to buy from them but just someone who's trying to connect with a human being. You can rub off a lot of good, you know, tactics and advice and value to

[00:43:12] somebody who's going through those challenges. So, Danny, one of the things that I was thinking about as you were describing what you do and the questions you asked, and you said mentioned founders and I think early on you mentioned messaging as well. You know, when I look at

[00:43:27] what companies are doing right now, there's almost, I don't know, it could be advised in a couple of different ways about their messaging. One is the category creation road, which is you got to

[00:43:39] define a new category, you got to name it and claim it and be the company that just is the one, you know, real economic winner in that category, right? By doing it well. And sometimes what

[00:43:53] happens in the bid to be different and create in the category, you start using buzzwords to describe what you're doing. And, you know, I'm kind of always interested to know what people think about that. But the second thing they're advised on that's completely different is just

[00:44:07] tell people what you do, right? I mean, if I come to your website, I don't want to see flowery language, I want to say, oh, you do this, you are the sim for SMB or you're the

[00:44:17] firewalls for, you know, multi site, multi remote offices or something like that, right? So, you understand exactly where they fit. Have you kind of come across, have you realized anything or getting views having taught a bunch of folks what buyers prefer,

[00:44:34] right? When they go and look and try and make sense of what you do? Resounding yes. Okay. So, I'll tell you a story. I was speaking to an early stage startup. I don't even remember what space they were in. And I asked them, well,

[00:44:52] they reached out to me and they wanted to, you know, talk to some CISOs. They wanted to do a panel. And I said, well, what do you want to know from them? They said, well, we want to

[00:45:02] build a new category. And we want to know how to do that. I'm like, and I looked at them, I said, why? I didn't get a concrete answer. But what I told them was another story.

[00:45:13] And the other story was we sat in, I ran a focus group with about 10 CISOs. And another company came in and we had that, you know, discussion and we asked them questions. And that company in an established category started using that category name.

[00:45:35] I don't remember what it was. Again, I probably should have come more prepared with this example. But it was something that I knew what it was, but a few of the CISOs were like,

[00:45:46] what is that even? It was a gardener category. What is that even? And so they had to spell it out. They were using acronyms. They had to spell it out. And they were like, oh, okay.

[00:45:57] So that just goes to show you that these practitioners and these executives are not following the acronyms. Spell it out. Use simple and concise language. Say what it is you do in simple terms. That's the best way to reduce as much friction as possible. That's our goal,

[00:46:13] is to reduce friction for them. Second thing that I'll say is when you're coming in as a startup or when you're trying to maybe reposition and create a new segment or division, nobody knows who you

[00:46:29] are. The best thing that you can do is to regurgitate what it is and what you do on a regular basis. Then and only then, so you have to evangelize out the wazoo, right? You have to teach

[00:46:40] people. You have to teach them something new. You have to get them, get yourself in their minds and get it sticky. Then and only then can you make a shift or make a new category that you own.

[00:46:57] But you own it because you're known for that thing. You can't own something if you're not known for that thing. In that model then, what you're doing is almost putting the exclamation

[00:47:08] point on many years of work probably to get to the point where you can actually name the category and be the person. You can't sit there with a blank sheet of paper saying, well let's go create a category somewhere. We haven't got a product yet or anything.

[00:47:21] Well, you can. You can sit there and say, I'm going to create this category. I'm going to own this category, but it takes time to get to owning something. Yeah. I was talking to a friend I had worked with before and he was asking some advice on

[00:47:36] this potential next move he was thinking about making. We talked about is the company that he's thinking about joining, are they part of a wave? Is there something big going on they're

[00:47:47] part of or are they somewhere, I don't know, not in a wave or trying to create their own wave? And what I was saying to him is personally, I would much rather be with a company who is writing

[00:47:58] some bigger thing that's going on and helping other companies succeed on that path than sitting there with 10 people at a startup going, let's create a wave. It seems like especially if you're an individual contributor or not a founder, let's say, because you're going to be out there

[00:48:16] working your ass off for not much payoff at the end of it really because the chances of all working out is you getting a big payout is not very big. Yeah, I think another thing that just thinking about it now looking at some of the players in the

[00:48:29] market, the other option is you can take a lot of your money and dump it into the analysts, traditional analyst firms and own that category. I think that that model is very flawed. I don't know how sustainable it is across the board. Maybe there have been

[00:48:51] isolated success stories, I'm not going to name names, but for, I'd say it, but for the average company who's just trying to make an honest living and actually help practitioners and have a share of that market, they don't have the money to dump into the traditional analyst

[00:49:10] firms. If you're going to own or win a category, even be part of a category, right? You have to take a more grassroots approach and it's a longer play. You've got to understand

[00:49:22] that it's a longer play too. Let me put a full stop, a period on the end of this conversation, a quick story from my background. I was at a company recently, not recently, a few years

[00:49:32] ago now. A new CMO came in and remember we said, look, we've got 25 customers, let's say we had, here they are. Here's our call recordings for all the sales calls we do,

[00:49:45] but here's the customers. Tell us which ones you want to go and chat to to learn about what we're all about and all the respite. Three months later, I remember the CMO came back and

[00:49:56] said, well, I've got some new messaging that we're going to roll out. We said, okay, what is it? We kind of went through the whole thing. Then someone asked, where did this come from?

[00:50:06] He said, I talked to analysts. I went and talked to the analysts about what they recommended we should do for messaging. Then someone said, so if the 25 customers that we have, how many did you

[00:50:16] talk to to validate or create the messaging? I think he said one. I remember at that time, it blew my mind that we had this rich vein, hard won customers who mostly love what we did.

[00:50:33] Most of them are pretty happy and they're willing. They've shown themselves willing to talk to us. Just let us know, we're in this to help you succeed. We had someone completely ignore them

[00:50:45] and go off and talk to analysts about what they thought we should be doing. Given what you're doing right now, I remember the time thinking that just seems to me to be wrong.

[00:50:53] Yeah. I can catch about this for hours. You'll hear me talk about this in detail in the upcoming months because I have to get a lot of things off my chest with the rest of this. But I love that story. I appreciate it.

[00:51:13] Well, Danny, listen, there's been a lot of fun chatting today. I love the thought that you've brought to this. I think you yourself are very empathetic and likeful when it comes to helping salespeople succeed, especially those the ones at Cyber Donut. So thanks for giving some thoughts

[00:51:29] about how they can improve and get better out there in the marketplace. I'll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Is there some other way you'd like people to get hold of you or engage with you? Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way. You could visit audiencefirst.fm.

[00:51:44] It's audiencethenumber1st.fm. You could listen to audiencefirst podcast as well if you want to just hear some rants and get some good information on how to connect the buyers in the security space. But yeah, LinkedIn is the best way. I'm always online.

[00:52:00] Awesome. Danny, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me.