Why Your Best Cyber Sales Rep, Not Your CRO, Drives AI Adoption: Tal Peretz CEO & Co-Founder at OnFire

[00:00:00] This episode is brought to you by FastRamp2Revenue, the done-for-you new hire sales program built exclusively for cybersecurity companies. We bring the process, the frameworks, the training and the coaching, you bring your content, and we customize everything for your market and for your company and run the entire program for you. You don't have to pull a single person off your team to do it. Proven at over 15 cybersecurity companies? Get your new reps selling faster.

[00:00:28] Visit Unstoppable.do to learn more. 85% of companies did the exact same thing when they were adopting AI. They bought the license for Claude or ChatGPT, they gave the licenses to the whole sales team and let them go nuts doing various things, and then ticked the box saying, yes, the sales team is using AI and it's helping them sell.

[00:00:50] But let's say, if we're honest with ourselves, the results have been a little spotty about real who's been adopting it and the outcomes they've actually been able to get from it. You might have experienced this. I know I have in the last couple of years with some of my clients, and our guest today calls that where we should have been in 2024, not where we should be right now halfway through 2026. Tal Peretz is the co-founder and CEO of Onfire.

[00:01:19] And he's been working with cybersecurity revenue teams to help them get past just prompting and into building more powerful tools and agents, and also helping those teams find the right signals to get into accounts by being highly relevant to middle management, to more technical buyers.

[00:01:42] So in this episode, we cover a bunch of things, including why he starts working with a team's best reps, even though they might not be the ones that are best at using AI already. We talk about what one customer's best at the time. We talk about what one customer's rep built that made his whole region want to copy him immediately because they saw the value in it.

[00:02:06] And we also talk about the month-long test that he runs when a leader is reluctant to just give up entirely on the volume play when trying to build pipeline with AI. Tal's a great guest and someone who has real-world experience helping real cybersecurity sales teams. Here's Tal.

[00:02:36] Well, Tal, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Andrew. So good to be here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to our discussion today. We've got a really interesting topic that's very pertinent for right now. But let me tell you, first of all, Tal, you are an enigma because like many founders from Israel, you were in Unit 8200, but you didn't go on to form a cybersecurity company. What went wrong? Why not cyber?

[00:03:06] You know, it's funny because I get this question or ask a lot, you know, from former customers of France, et cetera. And the reason is I wanted to make a different impact. You know, I've been doing cybersecurity so long. I think I understand the technology. I think it's great. I think there is a much bigger opportunity in changing the biggest, let's call it, budget line in companies, which is revenue. And this is how we ended up with Onfire. Now, be honest now.

[00:03:35] Do your 8200 friends make fun of you for building something for salespeople versus cybersecurity? Definitely they do. Definitely they do. All the time. All right. Well, Tal, we're going to this new segment for the podcast is the spin the wheel. We got six options here. One is it's personal. One is visionary or smoking crack. The third one is differentiation teardown. The fourth is overrated or underrated.

[00:04:03] And the last one is cyber donut hot seat. Are you ready to spin the wheel? Let's do it. Okay. Visionary or smoking crack. We're going to come back to this at the end of the episode. All right. So I've got some good ones lined up on this one for today. So let's put that to one side for just now and get into the meat of the discussion. So let's think about what's happening right now in go-to-market.

[00:04:32] Huge topic right now is how do we use, I guess, more generative AI, but also agents inside go-to-market. And I'll tell you, something I've seen is companies sort of opening the world up to the salespeople. And they might have hired a go-to-market engineer. And they've got these tools and, you know, supposedly the magic is going to happen. But there seems to be a kind of, I don't know, a pause, but people kind of stretching their heads a little bit going, what are we really getting out of this?

[00:05:02] So I'm curious what you're seeing out there as you're talking to people in the same sort of situation. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's all starting going like a few months back. Everyone got the AI bill. You know, they have some leaders that say, hey, we need to bring the AI to the table. We need to help them be more efficient and create more revenue. Then they decided to buy one of the leading, you know, AI vendors could be a Tropic with Cloud or JGPT from OpenAI. And then they just brought it to the entire sales team.

[00:05:31] And we see it happen like across the board from the biggest enterprise right now in cybersecurity. And, you know, the way I look it up is you usually will go into the organization and you will see that, okay, we want to be an AI first or AI native, go to my organization. We decided that we're going to do it with Cloud or JGPT. And now what? And I think like this is the moment that we usually see like the companies falling into three main pillars, I want to say.

[00:06:01] So you have one, the companies that maybe not yet even decided on going into fully AI and they're letting live behind those, let's say, the more legacy players. So they're in this position. Second, where I see most of the companies right now, I want to say like 90, 85% of the companies that they decided on the AI, they give it to the rep.

[00:06:23] And the rep is kind of using, you know, AI, which is kind of like 2024, maybe doing some prompt, building some messaging and emails and thinking that is building an AI solution or being like AI transformed. And then we have the pioneers, which actively have been deploying AI. They've been building AI, they're doing agents that do the work and build a system around it. And this is pretty rare right now.

[00:06:52] And I think like, you know, if we will do the same conversation in 2027, I think we will see more and more shifted to those pioneers. But right now, definitely the best teams are leveraging AI to transform their business. Now, do you think the real adoption is going to come from the company investing in go-to-market engineering and the backend processing of that? Or is the real impact going to come from reps just being better at doing things with AI?

[00:07:23] Yeah, that's a great question. And we'll be fighting this a lot and on fire. And I think the true answer is both. One, you need to have this top-down strategy and, you know, let's call it like a C-suite, you know, feedback on AI enablement that they want to do the change. And they're going to invest in that with new system, new tool, and even, you know, just giving their blessing. So that's one. And then in the same part, you should be taking the bottom-up approach of taking your best reps.

[00:07:52] And I'm not talking about, like, they're good in AI or something like that. You want to put your best reps with the right enablement to see what they're building. And they will be the ones that bring the entire sales team. You know, I just had a workshop on site to form our biggest customers. And we've done kind of like the same. So the C-suite are all into AI and efficiency. They build everything needed, you know, if you're bringing a company like us.

[00:08:19] And then in the same time, what actively been moving the needle for them is we took the best rep in the best region. We trust from his work. And then everyone wants to be lucky. And he brought up the entire team. Now, it doesn't matter what the CRO or the VP of operating operation or the internal go-to-market engineer that they bring into the table. They're all great. But sales, it's kind of like, I want to say, a competition.

[00:08:44] And once you put the best reps first with the AI, everyone wants to follow them all. And it's not just the best rep using AI. It's literally like, there's Jimmy. We all know Jimmy's great. And look at Jimmy now. He's actually using AI. I want to be just like Jimmy, right? Yeah. And this is, I think, the point that a lot of people miss. Because probably your best reps are not the best with AI yet. That could be, yeah. But if you will say, okay, this is the DNA of the organization that I want to build.

[00:09:14] I'm starting with my top reps, my eight players. And I want to bring the entire sales team to be in their performing. Now, I give them even better tools. And they're going to, they'll stay great because they're doing their job now with much more efficiency. So, this is the part that I think many leaders need to think about. And while they're building this AI strategy, how are they going to do that? Like, bringing it from the top to the down and bottom up with the best performers.

[00:09:42] What's an example of a use case that you've done with one of those top performers that is just, they've been amazed at what's been possible? Yeah. And I feel like, you know, going into use cases with AI, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. We're just taking what they've been doing and putting a lot of effort and knowledge and their taste in it. And transform it into something that is more, let's say, automated and do the work for them.

[00:10:10] So, probably the best use case that we've seen so far is what we call, you know, in foreign languages, like five by five. And which probably will be easy to understand as you have an automated agent that chooses for you the five accounts you should work this week. And on each of those five accounts, who are the five prospects? That's easy, yeah, to consume as a rep.

[00:10:34] But in the same time, you're getting on those accounts and those prospects, all of the intelligence that you, you know, been working on and doing your research and put a lot of crap and man lovers from why choose this five and not the other five. Who are the actual prospects that need to be engaged with? Because we all know that you don't need us to know who's the C-suite. Yeah. But there is one rep that just joined the company.

[00:11:00] And right now, he's been in charge with this and that project and all of that, you know, data points. And what is so unique about today with AI is, for example, when we do this five of five days on cloud and co-work is each rep can change its basis, its needs.

[00:11:18] So if you're working more strategic and you have a different point of view, and if you're working more enterprise or you may be in the healthcare vertical, so each of them can take this bullet print, change it, tweak it, use it with, you know, just talking to cloud. And you have a much more tailored and focused solution for your needs. And that's a game changer. This is like a pretty easy one.

[00:11:41] You know, I've loved, I didn't talk about like agents that's running in the background and do some updates and like Skynet stuff. This is not the case here. We are taking the job that you guys already been doing in your, I don't know, Google Doc or doing your research or using other tools like LinkedIn, et cetera, and do it for you in a much, you know, faster way, in a way you can tweak it and actually be the owner of it. And that's been huge so far. What's another one? I'm not really, I love that.

[00:12:10] This is, because I sit there in my business and I'm thinking of, I can think of 25 things, right? And then, you know, I started building and realized it's more difficult than I thought and, you know, try to work it out. What's another one that someone could easily start doing? So that's one of the ones from the rep's perspective. Let's take another one, more of like a backend or background from the revenue operation that basically builds a system.

[00:12:34] So I think one of the things that AI with the right data infrastructure do best is the ability to do scoring and understanding my entire time. I can give you an example of a company that works in the zero trust network connectivity. And they've been doing their scoring or let's call this like tab analysis around how many employees we have in the company, which location they have, you know, so classic data points. Yeah.

[00:13:02] But what we've been able to do is to build this agent that's going into their entire closed one from the last five years, understanding what are the best closed one, which, you know, from our perspective is the fastest and the highest ACV. Those are your best deals. And then we'll let the agent run and say, okay, what are the data points that take them apart from the rest of the group based on my knowledge of what I'm trying to sell?

[00:13:27] And then it becomes so interesting because it takes you to a places like, hey, I analyzed this 100 deals. Those are the five data points that matters when we do scoring. One, if it's an error gap or what we call like separated network, you know, solution. If it's more of like kind of like decentralized sites between like, you know, their physical sites.

[00:13:52] And would you guys are doing much better in federal and the other like more regulated space? So I love that. So, you know, when I take on a new client and I work for startups with, you know, between five and probably about 30, 35 reps. Right. One of the things I do is I interview a bunch of the people, the reps, and I say, okay, what makes a great deal for you? I don't mean like ICP stuff, but what's great. Right. And they start doing this.

[00:14:18] They tell me it's got to be like, it's not, you know, large companies with 20,000 employees. No, they have to have this and they believe this and they must have experienced this. And if they got this technology, that's terrible for us. You know, whatever it might be. Right. So you couldn't get it, but it's all anecdotal. They haven't got enough deals. They might only have like, they might have closed, let's say, 20, 30 customers. Maybe 10 of them are at 15 or in production. To go to a bigger company, you've got to have true evidence to build this on top of. Right. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

[00:14:45] And I think like, you know, just maybe to bring like a one nugget for the audience is like, I think doing the, let's say the AI work just in the lab and taking all the deals and finding all the data points, that's great. But once you do this, you know, adding the conversation that you've been just doing and give the reps that perspective that, hey, you can be in charge and we want your test taste in this, like, you know, scoring mechanism for that example.

[00:15:15] This is the part that you're not just getting the right data and the right AI. You're also gaining their trust. And I think, you know, from working with like hundreds of, like, I want to say mid-market and up and enterprise companies, trust right now is the one that will make or break your AI transformation. Because you can do a bunch of stuff with AI and there's this crazy stuff right now. Yeah.

[00:15:41] But you need a rep and the people on the front line to say, okay, this is what I wanted to do. You guys prove it. I can trust on it. And now let's roll it out for everyone. And there will be a bigger champion. So we give a lot of, you know, thought around like how we involve human in the loop in those AI initiatives projects.

[00:16:04] Also getting their, like, you know, ideas and why they're thinking it's good or bad and getting their taste on it. But even more importantly, we want them with us in this team so we can win together. You know, I think that's such an important point, right? I look at, you know, rewind 15 years, 10 years, and the common complaint was, you know, we never get what we need from product marketing. And product marketing says, yeah, we send over these documents and they never use them, right? And they never talk.

[00:16:34] It's like, why don't you just co-create stuff? Why don't we just get together and, you know, figure out exactly what you need and what it should look like and I'll help you build it. Same thing, right? You co-create and you build trust and you build credibility by doing it. Yeah, definitely. You know, maybe I'm thinking about maybe software customers use us to be this, like, bridge between the different departments, you know? Yeah. Going back to a point you made a little bit earlier about where people, I guess, and where companies are, right?

[00:17:00] What I see a lot of is a lot of sellers are at that, you know, very comfortable chat stage. I'll go in and I'll tell it and I'll ask it. They'll give me stuff back, right? What do you think is stopping them from taking that leap into, well, let's do some co-work things. Let's create something that will just do stuff on its own. Where's the barrier for them? Yeah.

[00:17:24] And I've been analyzing it a lot with my, we have like, what do you call it, like a FDE team for deployed engineers that's working with customers, you know, and trying to understand like what is like the, as you mentioned, like the data points that could be changed if you do this like co-work and what's stopping them. And I think it all fall down to three pieces. One is they need help with their data and motion.

[00:17:50] It's easy to say, let's do some messaging and AI stuff that's used just cloud. But once you need to fuse data from different sources like GOM, Salesforce, different data enrichment tools, and push it into your Salesforce back. This is the point where, you know, there is a lot of struggle from the technical perspective, just technical. So that's really point number one.

[00:18:16] Point number two is most of the time they don't have this technical guy in-house. So you call it like an automarket engineer. It can be an AI engineer. Someone with a technical flavor that can help think and also build some, that's a reusable set of tools in coworker, like skills and those kinds of flows.

[00:18:39] And the last thing, which I think it's like the most important one is they really don't know what to do and what is passive. You know, their imagination is tied up to the SaaS area of, I have this cool application that can do this reporting and that's it. And I think right now what we are trying to do with List is when we come to a new company and start to work with, it's like, this AI can be good as your imagination.

[00:19:06] And then we try to inspire them of what we see the best terms are doing. What are the use cases? Like we just discussed on the 5x5 or different places. And sometimes, you know, we're bringing the first ideas, but once the reps are getting into it, they know best their business. And they can be super creative.

[00:19:27] And, you know, I see some places where we started and then after one month, they've been building these crazy skills and artifacts and some long-running agents by themselves. And, you know, building, you know, I just saw like in the customer visits, like they build like an ROI calculator that is based on the like the deal desk, the CRO, the product marketing and enablement materials. So it could be pinpoint for the thing that you wanted.

[00:19:57] And in the same time, it will output you a polished slide deck so you can show the customer and you can build it in under like five minutes. And that's crazy. You know, just imagine like how much time it will take and if I use the right resources and if it's updated or not. And then to build it for any of the customers. So I think the barrier right now or the main ones from the three point that I mentioned is the imagination and what can be done right now.

[00:20:27] Yeah. I bet you get asked a lot why, what are others doing? Yeah. No, we get it all the time. Like, hey, tell us like what is the best terms are there right now? And I think we are fortunate, you know, to work with pretty, I want to say, innovative companies. And sometimes we help them do just the starting point and then they will take it and build, you know, a rocket ship out of it. And, you know, and again, go back to the beginning. It's crazy times. Crazy times. Yeah.

[00:20:56] You know, I really like the idea of inspiring the sellers and letting them, you know, go on a journey. I think, though, if you look at what's happened in the last couple of years, people have started using AI for let me crank up the volume and send 5,000 emails a day that are supposedly really personalized and all the rest of it. And it seems like the prospects out there are going to stop, right? This is way too far.

[00:21:23] So, I don't know if you think about like for a seller trying to reach and build pipeline, you know, just volume is probably not the thing. What should they be thinking about or how should they be thinking about this? Yeah. So, I think we all see, saw the, like the rise and fall off what we call like the AI as DRs or those kind of solutions. And I think that ties to the point around like where AI is not Excel right now.

[00:21:47] And I think like what we are seeing in the market is it's not a volume claim anymore because of the noise ratio goes so high. And the only thing that's mean right now is quantity and how you find the most researchers, you know, research around like the album to the prospect, how you find the right prospect, the right timing. Give it, I want to say, a well-defined outreach over the phone.

[00:22:17] At least, you know, this is the most strong channel so far that we are seeing for PG. But it's all around going to quality and not volume. So, that's, I would imagine for, I don't know, many but quite a few teams, that's a hard stopping moment, right? I got my engine, it's producing things. And seriously, I know it's probably not right, but I don't know if I want to just rail all back. That sounds like, you know, so how do you kind of, how do people think about that?

[00:22:45] I've got to really recalibrate what we're doing here. Yeah, I think like, you know, it's usually one of the two. There is the places that you go out and see that they used to do volume shop and it used to work in 2021. You know, where everyone buy and defy the day, whatever you've been selling. And now we're not working anymore. And they're right now in this position that they need something else and they're open and they want to do it right now.

[00:23:11] The second part, which is more of like the, I want to say the common thing is, they won't go all out on it yet. They need you to prove it with them. So you, the way we act is, okay, let's take this like kind of like an A-B testing, but with people. So let's take this group. They will be more into what we call quality and we're going to empower their existing workflow.

[00:23:33] We're finding the better accounts, better data, better prospects based on all the signals and data that we share with them. And then you have the B group. They're still doing what they're doing today. And this is mainly like, let's call it like, you know, out wild, like spray and pray. Hey, I have this account list. All the people that are coming to my, let's say, event. And now let's blast them with the same email, maybe change like the name at the beginning.

[00:24:00] And once you do that for, let's say, one month of like running these two functions together, you can see a clear difference. And it's starting with what you call like, of course, direct, let's say output, which is a new PG that got generated, conversion rates, connect, create, all the good stuff from the KPIs that we all know. But from the indirect perspective, I think if you go out to the reps and say, hey, how was your day today? Did you enjoy working?

[00:24:28] Did you find out that you're more productive? You know, those like small pieces that starting to transform the DNA of your organization. And once you convince with the top, the top line metric that's moving up and the reps are saying that they love it. This is a position that you say, okay, now I can go all in on that. And ditch out the old playbook. That's, I honestly, I don't see it working anymore. Or for Kurt, I think like 100% not in cyber.

[00:24:55] Because imagine the amount of like messages that the CISO or the VP of application security or infrastructure or whatever title that is getting right now. You know, I remember like I've been talking with like a couple of folks in Black Hat. That was pretty great, you know, event one month ago starting this month.

[00:25:15] And it was like, I don't look into my emails anymore because I'm getting so much spam around, you know, it can be like Meadows or this open AI model that just hacked to hugging face. And now I need to take care of that. And you see this is like, hey, guys, you don't understand my business. You don't understand what I'm doing. Maybe I'm not even the right person. You know, talking about like not always expressing the CISO.

[00:25:43] And I think like the best teams are changing. And there is a timing window for the best to win big. And those that will address AI and quality will win in their market decently. I think that what I see, and tell me if you agree with this, is the default always is we got to reach the CISO. We got to reach the CISO. You know, they should care about what we have. You know, often that's not all that true, right? To your point, they're not thinking about some low level tool all the time.

[00:26:12] Where are you seeing teams get the most success trying to get into accounts? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think like usually when we see the best teams getting into accounts, it's, you know, maybe it's like 2% going into the CISO. And it usually will come from a pretty high world intro that may be one of your board members or your CEO or something like that. But those are limited, as we all know.

[00:26:36] But if you want to do like a scale GoToWoget and you have like already like, let's say, 50 million of ARR and you need to go up to 100 million. Usually what will happen is CISO is not your target. And your target will be kind of what we see like, I want to say like mid-level management. Those directors for the specific niche solution that you guys sell. So let's say if it's network security or application security or, you know, anything like that or device management.

[00:27:05] Going into the director level, understand his pain, understand the priorities right now from the CISO to his team members that want to do their job better. And how the organization right now transforming around that and what are the risks that they're seeing. This is your safe bet right now. And it goes into, if we break it down to why, is the CISO is bombarded. It usually will be the final, you know, closure for that.

[00:27:34] You will matter. But if you win them too soon, you might be break, you know, your like chances into actually win this deal because it will say, okay, this is not important for you now. But maybe it is. But you need some help inside of the company to bring it up. And again, the volume and how is like noise ratio is so high. But if you go to the director level that's right now working on this in a day to day and is having this problem and having these issues and he owns a budget.

[00:28:04] Yeah, the network, the director of network security runs the entire network security solutions. Those are like, you know, in enterprises is eight can be even, you know, seven, eight, high, high, eight figures annually. Easy. Easy. So you go to that person. No one is basically right now connect with him, you know, even on the like the old tunnels, like emails, et cetera, because everyone goes into the CISO. And that's going to be an easy win for you.

[00:28:31] And if you do your work and have the research and you understand why it's the right timing, why the solution is superior to what they have and how he can make him the star of the organization, he will bring it to the CISO. And this is how you're going to close the deal. And again, I think like AI help you with not a lot to be much more prepared than find those targets. It's not easy. Yeah. But I think like those are the best teams that are doing right now.

[00:28:59] Yeah, I think I was talking to one of my clients probably a couple of months ago now. And I had this kind of point of view, which was if you look at a salesperson in cybersecurity, what they get trained on and what they learn, they get very little training on the actual prospect they're going to go talk to. Right. So what happens is they'll say, OK, when your main target says the director of SOC, let's say, right? Or the leader of the SOC.

[00:29:26] And you might get a half pager or one pager, but this is the pain points they have. Right. And then that's it. Right. And I feel like there's an opportunity. Why wouldn't we have like the, I don't know how to call it, the director of SOC bot internally that I can just chat to about, you know, tell me your life and what with this and how would you view this and how would you view that? And every day go in for 15 minutes and just, you know, learn from them.

[00:29:50] And then you can be hyper, hyper, you know, relevant when you reach out to them because you really have spent the time to understand their world. I love it. I love it. And I think like, you know, specifically SOC right now, I don't know your take on it, but all this AI SOC, Agentex SOC, there is like, it sounds to me like there's like hundreds of companies selling to the same buyer. And I'm assuming that 95% of them go into the CISO, but that is the solution right now, man.

[00:30:19] As we all know, SOC, they're like first line people. They're not the highest paying, you know, in the security organization. It might be, let's say, I want to say problem level three out of five to the CISO, maybe. Yeah. But if you would go with the director of SOC that wants to be better in his job, wants to take off his fire from his head, wants to train his people and empower them, and maybe also replace a couple of them. That's fine. Yeah.

[00:30:48] Making their A players to be like the B players to be A players. And you say, okay, I can do that and also make you the AI champion in the cybersecurity organization right now. That's cool. You will take the call, that's for sure. And you will be in a much better position to close this deal because you find yourself a true champion. That will bring you to the CISO. That's interesting, Eric. Let me ask you about this. So I often think about signals and triggers, right? Why would someone want to engage?

[00:31:17] Let's take our director of SOC because that's what we're talking about. I don't know. Is it a completely different set of triggers or different way to think about, you know, when to be relevant to these people? Yeah. So I think, you know, and this is also pretty close to my heart, like how we build on fire on it is.

[00:31:35] We came from the teases and as we've been like engineers and security professionals our entire career is that those signals for these people are not in, let's say, the classic avenues that you're looking at, like LinkedIn or some white papers or those kinds of things. But they do talk a lot on public web in places like Slack, Discord, GitHub, etc.

[00:32:02] And this is where the most interesting conversation is happening. Because let's say that the average director of SOC wants to approach and let's say find the next agentic SOC solution. If you go to the community, ask his friends, hey guys, what do you think is the best solution right now? We're having this and that problem. Or we are into this right now project and I'm looking to find like the best tools. I've been validating this and that. That's the places where we see the best signals happening.

[00:32:32] The problem with them is it's usually anonymized because people and, you know, I overread it. I'm sure Henry also had one. And you don't wrote on your username a tall parrot. You go out with something like, you know, lucky seven, zero, zero, seven. And now what? You know, me as a rep, what I can do with that? But so, you know, this is basically what we've been building for the last two years and on fire.

[00:32:58] Like the ability to capture what is happening in the public web in those technical forums and de-anonymize the prospect based on their public footprint. And then instead of looking into, like, call it a signal without a name, you can know, okay, this is the agentic SOC leader that I want to meet with an ICP company. And right now is the right timing. And this is why, and I have the entire context.

[00:33:25] So I can be much more precise going back again to quality and how to do a better PG motion right now. Yeah, that rings true for me. I remember many of the salespeople listening to this will probably empathize with this. I remember years ago when companies like Sixth Sense were breaking through. It was at a company and we got through from Sixth Sense. And someone from Wells Fargo downloaded the white paper or whatever it was. Some signal triggered, right? And my first question was, well, who? Like, where do we go?

[00:33:55] And they said, well, we don't know, but you should go prospect into Wells Fargo. I was like, okay, well, that's not a novel idea, right? Thank you. Thank you. And by the way, do you know there's 10,000 people in IT at Wells Fargo? You know, this doesn't help me very much. Yeah, definitely. So we're getting it all the time. I think like the, and also I think this is like the majority of the market, like moving from this account level signals. Where I think Sixth Sense done a great job. Yeah, and still does.

[00:34:24] I don't know if I would agree with that. And then, you know, moving into prospect level, which we saw a lot of like shift on it. And now I think with AI and its capabilities, we've been able to take it to the next stage around like, how do I go to the deepest parts of the internet and de-anonymize prospect in a compliant way

[00:34:48] because of the consent data that they fill out on the public forums and use that in my business. And I think, you know, this is also a win-win situation for both places. I think that maybe just to break the narrative that let's take the director of SOGT, that is not, that they usually don't want to meet salespeople or they have resistance to sales. So I think it's true for 99% of the time.

[00:35:14] But the moment that they're having the project in hand and they need to find a solution for a critical business problem that they have. This is the moment that they want to take the call with you. They want to be educated. They want to try it. They will be open to that. So we see the non-fire as kind of like a win-win situation is you're getting the signal, you're getting the pain point. And this is the moment where you connect them to the sellers.

[00:35:41] And then, you know, made the best product and company wins. But right now, both sides put their resources and efforts on things that matters. So that's how we got to like envision on fire and to build it. And it all came up from like our experience, both as engineering and security leaders, and now from the selling perspective. Yeah, that's pretty powerful. I mean, I think, let's play that out though, right?

[00:36:07] So I'm a seller, even a bunch of cybersecurity company as customers. So I know you live this with them. You tell me that this company, this person, you know, how do I reach out to them without sounding like a complete creeper that I, you know, I can't say I saw that you, you're anonymized on Reddit said this. It's like, whoa. Yeah, I think, you know, I saw everything already in that perspective. But I'll tell you what works. And maybe let's focus on that.

[00:36:36] So what works is addressing the pain point without saying that, hey, I saw your post on X, but going, hey, we at Company Y are usually help teams that having, let's say, vulnerability prioritization headaches, or they having some problem with their SOC initiative to going AI.

[00:36:58] This is why I think it's relevant for you guys, like a well-researched, like tool line, you know, centers. Are you open to have a conversation and feedback on it? And once you do that and the content is based on the pain point that you saw from the signal and you're addressing it in the right timing fast, because if he wrote it right now, at least, you know, the way I recommend to my customers is you should reach out to the minute after you see the message. Because right now it's fresh in his head.

[00:37:28] And going back again to what I said before, he wants to find a solution. He needs to address this business problem. He wants to work for people that understand him. And that is the goal. I think also something that, you know, people often not do, and I think this is also something that should be put in place, is now do not reach out just for one contact. For example, the one that showed the signal. If something is happening in the organization,

[00:37:56] they're having a trial, they're doing this project, there's going to be plenty of people involved. And if you do, and I know it doesn't matter what I'm going to tell, people will still go out to the SISU. But if you go to the SISU and you're asking me, the way I will frame it and why the SISU actually works is, this is the pain that I know you guys have been having. This is why we solve it for same type of customers, you know, in the same segment. Who will be the best contact so you can introduce me to to solve this?

[00:38:26] Do not ask for his time. Make it to be as easy as forwarding your email to the head of X. And this is how you win big in this top-down motions. So at the same time you see the signal, reach out to the entire buying committee with a dedicated messaging. And please don't say that you saw it on Reddit, because this is the time that it will block you. Right, right, right, right. So the message is, it's not that we just do one way.

[00:38:54] We do, we get them surrounded is how I think about it, right? But we just be very careful about the messaging and what we ask for. But we've got the advantage of the timing might be a lot, lot more aligned because they've got the signal and the trigger that you're talking about. You got it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, so last question around this. What are you working on on fire right now for the next six months, 12 months is going to keep advancing this whole idea? Yeah. You know, this is such a crazy time.

[00:39:22] I don't know if I can even think about 12 months because each month, you know, things like changing so fast. So we are decided that right now we are, the main focus for, let's say, the next two quarters, okay, is only one. How we make on fire become the intelligence layer that runs inside your AI context. And what it means, like if you break it down is how you take on fire to be integrated into your cloud,

[00:39:51] chat GPT, becoming the true infrastructure to the entire revenue organization. So you can use it in any AI flow that's going to happen. It's integrated into your Salesforce, Gong, sales engagement tools, whatever it is, and to build as many what they call use cases that transform your day-to-day activity. If you're going back to the five-by-five, if you go back to long-running agents,

[00:40:20] all of them in the same category of becoming this infrastructure of AI for your revenue organization and still focusing on those cybersecurity companies. We think this market is so big and the pain is so high right now that there is so much to do. So right now this is our focus and my entire product data engineering teams are working heavily on that. I think that's so needed right now. I think, you know, the bad thing about what's been happening in the last few years

[00:40:51] is that everyone's been doing more basic stuff quite well, right? And whatever you do around the edges that's more valuable and more interesting is where you're going to be able to stand out. And I think this sort of in the flow of what people do is so powerful. So I would support you on that journey, Tal. All right, let's go back to our spin the wheel. Okay. And see what this throws up for us right here. So we landed on visionary or smoking crack. Are you ready for the reveal?

[00:41:20] Let's go. All right, first one is by 2030, 80% of B2B purchases under 100K will happen without a human seller or buyer, just AI agents buying and AI agents selling. Is this visionary or am I smoking crack? Yeah, I would go with smoking crack. But I'm pretty sure there is, will be, let's say, 25% will be completely autonomous.

[00:41:49] But we'll see, you know, you can have an error. There's like, as I told you before, like each month is crazy. Yeah, I think there's two levers here. One is the percentage, but also the size of the deal, right? So, you know, with 2K deals, 5K deals, yeah, maybe, right? Maybe that will happen. I don't know. I think the idea that somehow it's going to replace sales is like replacing oxygen. It's like, well, you know, it's lots of different uses. So you've got to figure out where the real sweet spot is. All right, next one.

[00:42:19] The most successful cybersecurity salespeople in the next five years won't come from sales backgrounds. They'll be former security practitioners who also know the business of cyber really well. Is this visionary or am I smoking crack? I go with smoking crack. I tell you why. I think that sales is something that you need to master in. And it's way more important to be like a domain expert.

[00:42:46] And I think like we still see the best salesperson. They know what they're selling, that's for sure. You know, their product and everything. But they are much better at like within the room, understanding the deal, understanding how to build hypotheses, how to build like the value recognition of that. So I don't think it will change. Yeah, I think, what about this is a slight variation. I think that I was talking to someone about this a couple of weeks ago.

[00:43:15] Why wouldn't you take two of your approved headcount and for AEs and hire two field CISOs as your experts that you pair people up with, right? And you almost get the best of both worlds like that. Completely with you. Yeah, 100% that's better. Okay. All right, last one. By 2030, only 10% of leads will come from traditional outbound marketing, emails, webinars, cold calling. And 90% will come from,

[00:43:44] let's say the newer ways of doing things. Wow. Smoking crack. I tell you, I tell you, I always see it anywhere. I think like, 2030, people will still be here, specifically for enterprise. The thing that will be shift is their work. Right now, 80% of the time is manual work. 20% of the time is actually been selling. And I think about 2030, maybe, will be in a position that will be the opposite way.

[00:44:14] 80% of it will be inside customer calls and deals and working on relationship and creating trust and understanding. And I will leverage AI to do much more. I think, you know, if you want my take on 2030, it's like, if, for example, right now, the quarter per rep, whenever it will be like $1 million, and in 2030, it will be around $5 million per the exact same rep. And this is the unlocker of the economy in my perspective.

[00:44:43] If we can do this uplift, this is a completely different ballgame. You will need less people, that's for sure. But each one of them will do a much higher quotas and more deals because we took a lot of this admin time off and turns into customer meetings. Well, Tal, that's a much more nuanced and thoughtful way to think about this than my statement around vision you're smoking crack. So, all three of my statements are smoking crack. So, that's good. I'm cool with that. Well, listen, Tal,

[00:45:13] it's been an absolute joy having you on the podcast. I really enjoyed chatting and I wish you every success for the rest of the year and into next year too. Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast, Andrew. Hey, Andrew here. One last thing. If you enjoyed this episode, will you do me one small quick favor? And that's just send it to a friend. Simple as that.

[00:45:43] Your podcast player will have a share button somewhere. Click that and then text it, Slack it, email it, whatever's easiest for you to someone you know who you think might want to listen. That's the best way you can support this show and I really appreciate you for doing this.