You Can Teach Selling, Not Attitude: James Irving, Founder, Emotive JLI

The conventional wisdom when you're hiring and scaling out your sales team is to hire experience. People who already know how to sell, so you don't have to teach them. They already have their network so they can get into accounts easily and build trust and get the first deals in the pipeline. That's the standard route that many companies go. James Irving didn't do that. In fact, he hired graduates instead straight into full-cycle AE roles. He's seen enough of the other way in 12 years at NCC Group and at SecureWorks. At Threat Spike, his first hire was a computer science grad straight into the AEC. Now actually struggled at first but went on to out-earn his even his own rookie year at Threat Spike. So in this episode, we cover a lot of ground, including how he ran interviews and how he spotted when someone was faking it during the interview and what he did about it. We covered the culture he created designed specifically to support the type of people that he was hiring. The moment where he wondered if his way of hiring more junior people was actually going to work and why he thought maybe he might be fired. And we also talk about the one column on his pipeline spreadsheet that decided which deals got deleted. And yes, in the spirit of not doing things the conventional way, he ran his sales pipeline from a Google Sheet for many, many months and resisted the board's questions about why they weren't using Salesforce. We cover all this a lot more in this episode with specifics and no fluff. Here's James. Well, James, welcome to the podcast. Thank you very much for having me, Andrew. How are you? I am doing well. It's a beautiful blue sky sunny day here in Colorado. How about you over in the UK? Well, it's blue skies. Yeah, I wouldn't say it's warm. All right, James, before we get into it, we're gonna spin the Cyber Donut wheel of misfortune and misadventure. There's five categories on the wheel. The wheel picks one, and you don't get to go do overs, you don't get to change which one it is. We'll just put that to one side once we spun it and answer at the end. Are you good for us to go? I am. All right. All right, we're going for overrated or underrated. This is where I say a thing, something to do with sales, and you have to decide whether it is overrated or underrated. And we'll save that for the end of the episode. Okay, okay. James, let's go back to the summer of 2024. You'd been at Threat Spike for about a year at that point. You'd just gone in and you were, you know, figuring out how to sell what they have as the first go-to-market hire, and then you're at the point where you're ready to scale. But instead of doing what most heads of sales would do, or at least first-time heads of sales, say, let's go out and hire some experienced talent and bring in their networks and all this sort of stuff. You did the exact opposite. You hired 14 people straight out of university into a cybersecurity sales environment. Walk me back to that moment that you thought of that's the way to go.

Two things really. Um, 12 years prior to that, working in cybersecurity sales for big companies, where I'd been an SDR, or I mean, we called it an internal account manager back then. And I'd watched really good people sit in that SDR seat when they should have been promoted, but not, and have more experienced people come in as account executives and after six months, nine months, 12 months, either not do very well and kind of hang on or, you know, be walked out the door after six months. And I thought the the younger people really deserve that opportunity to be progressed. And what and that started making me think because I was frustrated about that myself. Why is that? One of the big reasons is the cost of living nowadays. You know, young people have a mountain to climb to get on the housing ladder and everything else. So they're motivated. That's a big one. Secondly, I think in my era, sort of 2008, 2011, younger people were more probably into a party lifestyle from 18 to 25. I don't think that's the case anymore, from what I was seeing. People are more into the gym and lifestyle and health, and it's a different world, really. So there's less risk with younger people nowadays. Thirdly, I had just been with one of the consultants in my old job, and he said that credibility is the most important word in cybersecurity sales, bar non. Credibility is what gets you in the door, and once you're in the door is what keeps you in the room and keeps the buyer potentially engaged. And so I'd then been to BMW to buy a car. And I'd sat with the salesperson for about an hour whilst he threw options at me. And I wasn't really sure which was the best option for me and which was the best option for his commission. I just wasn't sure. And I walked out and there was a mechanic at BMW working on a car, and I asked him the direct question, you know, which car should I get? He said, just get the M340i. It's the best car we do, and it's just as fast as the M3. It's got the same engine. It's not quite as flashy. That's the one you want, mate. And I looked at him and I thought, I trust you. You've not got an incentive to do anything but tell me what the best option is. You've got the knowledge, you've got the credibility. And that thought then translated. So I was speaking with my CEO on my sofa with my fiance sat next to me, wondering when's he gonna step out of work mode? And we were thinking, who do we hire? And I said, why don't we? I gave him that BMW analogy and I said, why don't we go with young, credible people who've got experience in a degree, perhaps, in the world of IT and security, and who we can then train and make really good at this, and who are malleable, who can learn from us quickly, and who are motivated because there's two parts of the job. There's the pipeline generation, which they will be willing to do, but there's also the closing, which we can teach them. But you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

So the bit that I was confused about, but I think you cleaned up for me, was hiring someone, so junior might not have the credibility that you're looking for, right? And it might be a stretch because they, you know, I remember when I started off in cybersecurity sales, uh, someone told me, you know, you've got to be at a point where you're gonna hang for half an hour with a security leader, right? You can be able to hang, you can be able to have the conversation beyond what you sell and talk about security, things like that, right? Someone who's straight out of uni is probably not in that spot. But it sounds like you the degrees were what you were looking for, or you were looking for someone with that type of background, and therefore you're teaching them just sales. Is that is that what I'm right? That's correct.

And that's actually what I'm noticing a lot of companies in cybersecurity are doing now. They're focusing on people with that technical background, whether it be a computer science degree, whether it be a cybersecurity master's, whether it be someone who's been a solutions architect or systems engineer, and then they're then taking them into the world of sales because of that exact reason, the credibility piece. You it takes a real understanding, not just being able to answer the surface level questions, but being able to dig a little bit deeper into why they're asking that question and what implications that has for the deal, right? You know, if they're asking a certain question, it might be the deal's bigger than you initially thought. And people without that solid understanding of the fundamentals won't pick up on that. And so that's the route we went down. We we hired a computer science graduate. For the first three or four months, she wasn't great. And then after that point, she the sales side she just started to get and she understood the information she needed to extract, like the medic and all of that side, but also developed her own rhythm of way of extracting it, which was actually quite different to my way, where I would do a lot of the discovery up front. She did it throughout the process, and it worked very well for her. And as a result, she she made a lot of money money in the subsequent year, 2025, way more money than I earned in my first year in sales anyway.

How did you know that she was going to be able to make that transition, though, right? It's not everyone, right? Especially if you come from an engineering background or a CS degree. It's not for everyone to get in sales. How did you know? What were you testing her for the interview process?

Yeah, so that goes back to, I think every sales leader looks to hire people similar to themselves or they see similar traits within those people that they had themselves. When I started NCC Group in the sales team, it was such a it was a strange dynamic where you had one side of the building, we were all in the office back then, one side of the building full of salespeople, very sort of aggressive environment. People would be talking about sport, soccer, football, cars, girls, whatever. And then I'd go over to the other side of the office where the penetration testers were, the incident response consultants were, the risk management consultants were. And it was a completely different dynamic. A completely different dynamic. You know, no one was really talking about sport as much. It was a completely different vibe. And I found that I didn't quite fit in on that sales side. It was, I felt a little bit too geeky for that side, perhaps. And then I didn't quite fit in on the delivery side either, because I I had a bit more of the sales side in me compared to them. I was always kind of in the middle, which worked really well with buyers because they looked at me and they thought he understands me a little, but also I knew how to advance a conversation, ask the right questions and everything else that was needed from a sales side. So I always felt like a mixture between sort of left brain and right brain. And that's what I then looked for when I was hiring someone. So this person was a computer science graduate, yes, but she was also a personal trainer. And so I asked the direct question on the interview, which that's probably two different groups of people that you had to hang around with at university, which one did you prefer? And she answered it exactly as I had experienced it. She said, Sometimes I prefer the personal training crew, the gym crew, but sometimes I prefer the computer science brigade. But crucially, she then said, But I don't feel like I quite fit in with either. I almost feel like I'm unique. And so we had that in common. And so I knew that a career in, say, pure delivery, you know, doing sock analysis, for example, or doing penetration testing wouldn't quite satisfy what she was looking for from a career. And equally, you know, doing a career in sales that wasn't a technical sales job wouldn't also wouldn't also satisfy her. So it was that blend that I was looking for.

And then how did you start building out the criteria from there as you as you added more in? Was there more of a rigorous scorecard you had or a criteria sheet you were working off? Correct.

So we we then started looking at, so in 2024, we did very well. We got the investment after many years of trying. And the the task then with the money that we were given over 10 million pounds was to double the annual recurring revenue, basically, from 5 million to 10 million. And so I started higher interviewing a lot of people. And at that point, you do need a criterion of what you're looking for. So I was really looking for people who I really focused on the soft side, the soft skill side of things. So what's their motivation? Are they, yes, they want to make money, but why do they want to make money? If you've got someone who you know what their end goal is, you can use that repeatedly to really motivate them. With technical people, it was understanding do they do they get a kick out of the business side of life and doing deals? Is that something that they actually find fascinating and interesting, or is it just something that they're here to make more money for the sake of making more money, or do they actually have a passion for it? It was also things like do they find IT and cybersecurity genuinely interesting? So if we felt like there was someone who's quite good on the sales side, but perhaps they were lacking an interest in the in the actual topic, we'd ask them to go and research and come back to us. Yeah, they have to find this stuff interesting if they're going to actively learn about it because it progresses so much every day. You see that now with some of the AI attacks that are happening with the hogging face incident, for example. I find that stuff genuinely interesting. So I go above and beyond to research it. And in turn, that makes me more credible when I'm speaking to customers. What else? I think, like I say, the left brain and right brain thing, do they think in logic or do they think more in terms of rhythm and words and that side of things? So asking about what they were better at at school, was it maps or English, or was it a mixture of the two? I think having someone who was really keen to be open and honest with you. One of the sad things I saw in bigger companies was people didn't want to own up to mistakes. They looked at their sales leader as someone who was perfect, who got everything right from the get-go, and they felt embarrassed if they had a bad call that ended abruptly. And so what I tried to do even at interview stage was make it clear that I was never the perfect salesperson. I had to really work at this. There were a lot of meetings that were car crash or even train crash meetings for me. And by almost mocking yourself in that way, it makes your team feel, okay, it's okay to fail and it's okay to talk about why I failed. So that was something that I wanted my team to be like. But I felt like at interview stage, they had to be open and honest with me from the get-go. You know, if you were fired from a job, tell me. If we've got that basis of open and honest communication and trust, we've got a basis for success. But if things are always being masked or hidden away, then it's going to be very difficult to have those hard conversations with people that actually progress them from level one to level two to level three. Another thing was focusing on the team above the person. In my experience, just little things that I used to notice, and I used to go home and talk to my fiance about is sales always seemed to be this dog eat dog world in the big companies I worked at, NCC Group and Dell, where it was everyone out for themselves and don't help the other person out too much because you want to keep your position at the top. And I never felt like it needed to be like that. I always felt like you can achieve more as a team by knowledge sharing each individual person. And it's not just a case of there's a cake and only the if you take a big slice and there's less for other people. There's multiple cakes. And if you go out there and work as a team, you can find different cakes to work. And it literally proved exactly like I said, the people who I hired with that philosophy started finding new ideal customer profiles for our company. They started realizing actually, you know, software development companies need to test more applications. And so as a result of that, they're going to need our unlimited penetration testing service more than most companies. And so we should focus on them. And sure enough, it worked. I think things like those meetings weren't the easiest to generate, right? Uh, because she could have generated meetings with retail companies, but she focused on what closed, not just what was booked as a meeting. And so having that blank slate with her taking her straight into the account executive role meant she focused on the right metric, what closed, and not the wrong metric, which I'd seen in plenty of other places.

Let's go back to a couple of things. That's a great list there. You know, you mentioned about being okay to be open and honest about the real, the real truth behind your career, things like that. I think that must take a lot of courage for someone to walk into an environment where you're really trying to put your best foot forward and you're trying to show, you know, how suitable you are for the job, but then suddenly talk about why you might not have been, right? Did you do anything in the interviews to make that a safe environment for them to be able to talk like that?

I think my tone is a big one. And my general way of about me, I'm I'm quite informal, I'm quite relaxed. I try and be humorous with people as much as I can and put them at ease. And I'm quite self-deprecating as well. And I think those things help a lot to sort of loosen the mood a little bit. I also, when I ask these questions, like what motivates you, like why do you want to earn money? I'd give them an example. So the most driven I ever was in my career was when my father died. And I decided for whatever reason that I wanted to earn a certain amount of money to make him proud. Because how do you say you've made someone proud if there's not a tangible number, which is a one or an or? This is my geeky side coming through. And so I this is what I decided upon. And so I told them that that was what when I was the most motivated in my career was when I had this emotional reason behind why I wanted to earn money. And that then extracted like reasons from them, like, oh, you know, I'm looking to look after my mother, for example, or I'm looking to buy a house because I'd be the first one in my family to do so. And that creates a bond with people right from the interview stage. And then it's a case of, you know, they start four weeks from now, let's say. But if you want to achieve that goal, that emotional goal you talked about, really you should be preparing now. And if that emotional goal is real, then you can tell on interviews because it's you can't fake emotion like that. And so it was a very different way of interviewing to the interviews that I had, which were a lot more formal, you know, perhaps a role play, talk through your figures. What did you sell? How did you do against target? And what talk me through your biggest deal and all of this? That can be faked. You know, salespeople know how to how to fake things, they know how to talk through a deal that never existed, or someone else's deal that they're pretending is their own or whatever else. And they've probably done it many times outside of work as well as inside of work. Whereas you can't fake genuine conversations and genuine connections with people. I felt that was the most important thing by far. Having that strong team bond, that strong team culture with everything with that in place. I felt like we could achieve a lot. You can teach people the skills and the fundamentals. You can't teach people attitude and also you can't create, you can't just put in a training module, we should have a good culture. You have to actively embody it yourself.

Yeah, no, I really like how you did that. I mean, it you're right, interviews are that pepper you with questions. You know, you feel like you've got to paint this rosy picture about things. And it's often not an emotional discussion, right? It's very, very logical and and surface level. You mentioned another thing there that uh you're looking for someone with at least an interest in the business side. I think in my experience, salespeople's business acumen could often be improved, let's say, for, you know, just in terms of how we think about things. What what did you sense, or or what were you asking about to really get a sense of their interest in business?

Well, I mean, we always wanted people who are interested in the topic, right? So IT and cybersecurity. But also, you know, have you looked on company tops, which in the UK is a filing system for every company? So you'll be able to see revenue, for example, you'll be able to see expenses and everything like that on a company, as well as you know, who the actual people who have equity in the company might be and everything else. So, what sort of research have you done? What do you think about the profile of people who are on the board? Have you noticed that perhaps they they invested years ago in other cybersecurity companies? Can you now see the direction that they want to take us based on the companies that they invested in in the past? This is all stuff that's publicly available, and you can figure it out if you if you really wanted to. You all you need to do is find a name on company's house and then find that name on LinkedIn and then see who that person invested in in the past. It's not hard. And you can you can then find articles about well, what was their approach to building a commercial team, both sales and marketing. So have they done their research, for example, and then asking directly, do you align with that vision that the business has? And if people would start to say answers which they thought I wanted to hear, I pretty much knew I could tell. And so I would just cut them off completely and say, look, don't tell me what you think I want to. What I want to hear is truth. Tell me truth. And then we would, we would quickly they often when people interviewed with me, they would say, This is a very different interview to what I've had with many other companies, but I really, really enjoyed it. And I think when we actually started doing interviews, like the Discovery days. So we would do us as an employer would turn up with say like 100 sales candidates, but then other employers would turn up. And the other employers are often bigger than us, in some ways, better than us in terms of size, might have offered, you know, better pension schemes or everything like this. But all the candidates would come to us at the end of the day and say, You're the company that we want to work for. And I'd say, why? And they'd say, because it seems like you've created that really strong cohesive culture. And I think young people are more about that than previous generations of young people.

That's interesting, right there. Because I mean, going back to when I started in cyber sales in 1998, I don't think I really gave too much thought about culture, right? I kind of walked into my first US software company, you know, a pretty aggressive sales floor there in Windsor. And it was a lot of fun, but I never really thought about it beforehand. Let me just try to understand your culture and things like that beforehand, right? It just didn't even cross my mind. But you know, as for me anyway, as I got more uh you know, further down my career, I realized that was more and more important. But you're saying that you're you're finding that the you know younger folks these days, that's is an important factor for them.

I was exactly the same, by the way, Andrew. You know, the companies I worked at were very old school. I thought that was the way. Whenever anyone was talked about culture, I always thought, well, what are they on about? You know, I'm here to make money and get out. Right. Get out my way and help me. And then go home and then forget about it. But work's changed. You don't go home and forget about it anymore. You you're probably working at home during the nine to five anyway. And then you've got Slack pinging, emails pinging on your work phone. It's more continuous now for sales professionals than it ever was before. It just is, particularly at startup environments where you're having to deal with the US in the evening when you're in a GMT time zone, or you're having to, in the morning, you're having to deal with the Middle East. So you're waking up at 5 a.m. It's a continuous thing. And so culture then does become more important because these people become not just your work colleagues, but your friends and almost your family too. And from the other side, where I didn't see culture as was as that important was I never led a team when I was at these other companies. So I was just a dog in a dog eat dog world, siloed off, trying to do my own thing, covering up my homework, so no one saw what I was doing. I realized the one that really made me think was about two or three years into NCC Group, I was doing really well as an SDR. I was top of the tree in terms of book meetings and SAT meetings. And my external account manager, my AE, was also top of the revenue chain. So we were doing great. And a guy came over to me called Charles Preston, who was the second best performing account executive. And he had an SDR called Stephen, who was like my main rival. This is how I used to see it. And he goes, You do know if you shared knowledge with Stephen, then you'd both do better together. And I rang up Tom AA afterwards. I said, This guy's trying to make us like share our secrets. Like, we shouldn't, we shouldn't reveal anything to him. That guy, Charles, now runs USecure, the business that does set security awareness training. He texted me the other day to say they've got something like 2,000 MSP partners globally that we sell USecure, loads of distributors and everything else. They've got Series A investment. They're doing great. And he was right. I knew he was right back then, but I was very entrenched in my view. And so, yeah, that culture is really, really, really, really important. I I used to see it on our sales channel that we had internally. Someone would say, I've just done a call and I think I did quite badly. I I jumped, I did an intro and then I jumped straight into handing over to the technical guy. I got nervous. And we'd literally all like, me and the CEO would sit there and, you know, why did you get nervous? Like, no, there was no negative recriminations about it. There was no sort of bollocking as such. It was just a real collaborative working environment. And, you know, if at any point people felt uncomfortable, I'd be like, well, I've done that myself in the past. And so we created something I think quite not unique, but quite special in my career as a result of that culture. And I remember right before in my last couple of weeks, uh, my first hire was on a call with the CEO, and I was in the office at the time, but I wasn't on the call. And I could just twig in my ear that the call was going really well, yes, but also that they were both really positive and upbeat. They were sort of having a laugh with each other before the client joined. When the client joined, they were building rapport very well, and there's lots of laughing and joking, but also when they go into the business side, the conversation was flowing and they were advancing the deal. And this was a big deal they were doing with a company out in Hawaii. And I went for dinner with my CEO afterwards and I said, How much of the success of that call do you think is based on skill and you know, things that you know and product market fit and all of that? And how much do you think is just based on the fact that you two were in a really, really good mood? And he said, I think that really, really good mood side is weighted just as much as everything else. Because if we weren't, if we were in a terrible mood, it doesn't matter about everything else. We wouldn't have been able to hold the conversation. And so this is where I really started thinking like this this art side, this your mood, your passion for the company, the culture, and all this stuff is really, really, really, really important.

I I love that you know, the importance of energy is is underestimated in general. The importance of your predisposition towards the products in the company that you represent and sell for is underestimated as well. I think too often it's it's okay just to try and fake it when I wonder how more how much more successful people would be if they really put themselves in an environment where they had that.

Yeah, I just hit it off with the CEO uh straight away on the first interview. We interviewed for about 45 minutes. He offered me the job 15 minutes later. The recruiters were astonished. And the reason I hit it off was because he wanted to change the cybersecurity market for the better. He felt like the small, the SMB companies and some of the smaller mid-market companies couldn't afford the level of protection that they actually needed. You know, they there were so many different tools that they needed to buy, five, 10, 15 different tools from a defensive side, really expensive offensive security, penetration testing, and everything else. He wanted to be almost like the, if in American terms, the Walmart or in English terms, the Tesco of cybersecurity and make it affordable for all. And so, by because he was a software engineer, he was able to build everything that was needed in one place rather than 15. And having worked in the mid-market for bigger companies and constantly trying to upsell them tools that they just didn't have the budget for and they felt frustrated about, even though they wanted them, I resonated with his mission. I really resonated with the mission. And so that was then transferred. People say to sales is the transference of belief from you and the company to you, your belief in the company to the customer. And so I had 100% unwavering belief in the company. And so whatever objection came my way, I was able to just give my own personal story of how I'd seen this from big companies versus working at this small company. And people resonated with it. So yeah.

Let's go back to the you got the recent graduate coming into the company. They've they've got the job, you got that the mindset is all melded together. They're motivated to join. But now you have to get them to be to teach them the bit that you want to teach them, which is okay, well, how do we take all that raw material and make you into a successful salesperson? What did you learn about how to do that and do it as fast as you can so that they're if they feel like they're making progress and really making a difference?

So in the time between them getting offered the job and them starting the job, the books, then Andy White Medic book, for example, a couple of others that I felt were relevant to those people based on the interview I had, they're the they're the science, right? And they've got to, they've got, there's no one better to explain the science than the people who wrote it. So get them the books, get them to read them, get them to try and understand them. But then there's certain things when you're trying to take on a new field that don't just click straight away. So I would always try and explain things in ways that made sense to them. So one of my team was really into golf. I'm quite into golf, although I was nowhere near as good as him. There I go, the self-deprecating side again. And so I would try and explain things to him like, okay, well, you're really good at the pipeline generation side. That's like you're driving off the T, but your conversion isn't great. That's like you're chipping, and that's going to cost you shots. And so you've got to work hard on the things that you're not so good at because the things you are good at will always stay there in your game. And so it was using analogies like that that from one side of life that they understood to a different side of life that they were trying to understand that made things click quicker. I would always do this with customers and also with my team as well. Cybersecurity is unnecessarily complex, I would say. And when you break it down, when was it actually invented? Well, with the birth of the computer and the internet, really, it started coming to the fore. How did people actually come up with the principles behind it? Well, they must have looked at physical security. They can't just come up with abstract principles. They have to look at, well, okay, if you're making your way through a building, you have you have to scan your badge, for example, and you and that it then opens up doors. Well, it's kind of the same as making your way through a network. And so they would have access controls. And so all of cybersecurity principles have been built based on physical security principles. And so then people would start to get the underlying fundamentals behind network security and cloud security and everything else, just kind of converting it into physical security in their own heads. That was really important because salespeople in cybersecurity are always going to get asked a technical question that they don't know the answer to. Unfortunately, that's just the way it is. But if what buyers are really looking for when they ask those questions are is this person genuinely interested enough in this topic to at least give it a go of answering it? And if they could use that physical security analogy, they'd be able to give a best effort at answering the question. And with that, the that would be endearing to the potential buyer and they'd they'd continue the conversation as a result. Whereas if it's just a case of, well, do you understand what I mean by that? And they're like, no. Then it's like, why do they need to continue the conversation on any further? So all of what I built, everything I built, was based on 10, 12 years of working at these bigger companies and seeing what I thought they were doing wrong. And, you know, I wasn't the CEO, right? I wasn't the chief revenue officer. So some might say, well, you who we who are you to question it? But it was just little things that I thought could be slightly different. And it I trusted myself. I was very fortunate that the CEO backed me with this quite risky strategy as well. And it and it really, really paid dividends.

Was there a moment in those first six months where you're like, is this really going to pay off? You mentioned your first hire in the first few months struggled, right? Yes.

Yes, yes, yes. I mean, two worlds, pre-investment and post-investment. So 2024 was pre-investment. So we hired this person, the computer science graduate. After two or three months, the CEO was saying, well, the numbers aren't really there. Are we sure this is the right person? And I said, absolutely it is. That's kind of a low pressure environment. We're still kind of going for the investment, but you know, I'm sure there was a lot more pressure on him than there was on me at that point, but it was still less pressure. Post-investment, it's high pressure. So, you know, the investors are looking at me as a first-time head of sales and they're thinking, is this the right person? Uh they've got big targets for the company, and you are taking a very risky approach, which sound can sound a little bit fluffy. And yeah, there was a month in May we'd hired by this point probably seven or eight people into the sales team. And we had a shocking month. We we really we probably did a tenth of what we were selling that year on average in a month. So I was thinking, I'm done. I'm got I'm gone. It was a nice try, but you know, back to being a salesperson or whatever. And the following month we went away. So we had an event, InfoSec in the UK, and then we went over to Indianapolis for an event, a hospitality event. And I started noticing the work ethic of my team when I wasn't there, you know, waking up really early to do calls in the US, so like 4 a.m. so that the 9 a.m. calls in the UK could happen. And that wasn't without me set asking them to. And some of the times I was even saying, take a holiday, take a break, get someone else to do it. And they were like, no, we need to do this like for you, for the team. And I was like, I've never seen this at other companies before. And there was no question, like, is this my deal? Is this my commission? It was just team above and beyond. And so at that point, I was like, the fundamentals are there, definitely. The work ethic's there, the conversations are improving and becoming less and less needed on the calls. I said to my CEO in June, I think we're gonna do this. And he was like, well, I don't know, the numbers don't look great. And then June came, uh, we did, we got back on track, and then July came, we did a record month, uh, like uh 1.5 times what we usually do in a month. August came, we did maybe two times what we do in a month. September was kind of back to normal, and then I got a little bit worried at that point. And then in October, we did five times what we do in a normal month, and we did the target by the end of October. And I was and I was just like, okay, you trust yourself, you trust your beliefs, and this is what's actually possible. And so, yeah, that was probably the best moment of my life.

You mentioned that uh you had that moment where you massive question mark, am I the right person to be in this role? When was the first time that you ever experienced imposter syndrome like that?

I never suffered imposter syndrome. I always backed myself, but there were plenty of people around who had much bigger stakes in the company and invested more money than I'd ever invested in it, who, you know, rightly, fairly were questioning, you know, is this the right person and everything else? So, but that motivated me in a way, like Michael Jordan and the tell me I can't commercial. It was like that almost gave me a greater impetus to succeed and also double down on my way of doing things.

Was the whole team in the same office when you were hiring them?

No. So, I mean, again, it it was we were only 20 people when I joined, and there was a small office which was then disbanded because the company, not many people were going in basically. And so we didn't have an office until July, no, August of 2025. So from September 2023 to August 2025, it was all remote. Now we'd obviously meet up at events which were quite regular, maybe once every month or once every couple of months. But apart from that, it was remote, yeah. And so it was interesting doing things like cold calling. So, how do we create an environment where people can learn and listen from each other when doing the cold calling from a remote standpoint? And that was an area where you know I hired an SDR manager in the end to look after that team. And yeah, the investors were very keen on getting the at least the SDR team in the office full time. And I and to be honest, I could see their point on that. But it was just, it was all moving so quickly. The the office only came in in August of that year. And yeah, so it was we had to adapt in terms of the of the creating an office environment for salespeople to learn and succeed and listen to each other.

Any any tips on that? Because I I you know, I I go back to my career. I can imagine my doing my first five years sitting in my in my rented flat somewhere in the living room, just making cold calls and doing all my own like that. I was always in an environment where literally there's that buzz around you, there's the energy, there's the sharing, there's the, you know, just shooting the shit over lunch about you know something that happened on a call or whatever. The learning that comes from that is amazing. So I'm just kind of intrigued these days about remote teams where there's junior people and how you try and bridge that gap.

All about culture again. And this is something I noticed when we finally got proper data towards the end of my time and we moved away from Google Sheets, which I'll tell you about, into HubSpot, and we had all the activities because it was the HubSpot was linked to the dialer, so we could see all the calls being made, the conversations, the minutes, everything that the metrics that I had at other companies. And I saw people cold calling at 10 o'clock at night to the US, for example, consistently, day in, day out. And so, how do you you can't create that with a culture of fear? I don't think. You can with a culture of fear, you can say get on the uh whatever phone from 9 p.am. till 6 p.m. But at that point, people are straight out the door. You can't create people actively wanting to prospect accounts in different time zones outside of working hours without creating a really strong positive culture, a competitive nature, where people are enjoying themselves on joint Google Meet calls, um, but also trying new things when cold calling. That's how you create that sort of environment where people are succeeding. The actual knowledge sharing can be difficult because you've got the whole, well, the microphones, but then people don't want to be creating noise disruption for others on calls. So it can be a little bit difficult. And at first, I noticed people would do their calls but put themselves on mute because they didn't want to embarrass themselves. So again, I was the first to try and embarrass myself to show that that's not a bad thing. Yeah, little things like that. But it was always one I did ponder in my head. You know, do we need at least the pipeline generation function, the SDR team, in an office full-time to really sort of knowledge properly? I think with the account executives who are mainly doing online calls nowadays, as opposed to face-to-face meetings, that seems to be the norm in cybersecurity at least. And it wasn't when I first started, when I first started in sort of 2014, it was mainly face-to-face meetings. I think for them, the offices can be a bit limiting because you know you've got headphones on, you've got people around you distracting you, you've then got to go and find a meeting room and everything else. So, yeah, different strokes for different teams.

You dropped in there a minute ago. You're running all this off Google Sheets. Is that what I heard you say?

Yes. So again, one of my gripes at Dell and particularly Dell, not so much NCC, but particularly Dell. Dell had Salesforce, right? And Salesforce is a great piece of technology, but it is, in my view, too complex. Now, particularly the way Dell had it set up, because you've got to think Dell had SecureWorks, which is where I worked at, but then they they also had their hardware business and everything else. It became this huge, complex CRM with so many different reports and everything else. And I noticed that a lot of the time what people were doing at Dell was just spending their life, kind of they'd wake up, go into work, make a coffee, and load up the CRM and look at a load of dashboards. And I was like, how's that making the boat go faster? And then one of the things that really annoyed me at Dell was the numbers weren't great, which happens, you know, economic downturns, whatever else. And so they said instead of us looking at a close ratio of three to one from pipeline to close, we now need to move it towards 10 to one. And so we need whatever your pipeline is right now, say your target's a million and you've got three million of pipeline, we need that to be more like 10 million of pipeline. Well, of course, all the salespeople just start putting in nonsense deals in the pipeline to hit this 10x target. And then they're waking up and the problem's even worse. They're going into the office in the morning, and instead of looking at, say, 10 deals, they're looking at a hundred deals and they don't even know which one to work. And so I had a big view that some of the metrics that people focus on in sales can be counterproductive to actually getting to closed one, number one. And number two, that CRMs were unnecessarily complicated. Another thing I didn't like about CRMs, and this is more of a modern day thing with all the integrations, is you You're a sales rep, you email an account, it automatically syncs from your email to say HubSpot that you've emailed an account. And so it creates that account if it's new on the system and puts the person who emailed it as the account owner. Now they've they've emailed an account, yes. That could be through AI nowadays, that could be through an automated cadence or whatever. That doesn't mean that they own the account until the end of time. And so then it requires policing and everything else. And I just saw a lot of problems with CRM. So when we were at that early stage of sort of six or seven salespeople, I ran it purely off Google Sheets, which is very simple. Like column A, account name, a column. This is a sheet of pipeline, but have another sheet for closed one. Column A, pipeline, column B, first name, column C, second name, column D, deal name, column E, deal value. Crucially, column F, next steps, as in, do they have a next call agreed in the diary with the prospect? Is it legal review or whatever? And if there was no solid next step, then it was in normal text. And if it was in if there was a solid next step, it was in bold. And I would go through this Google sheet and the deals at the top that had been there for a while, because obviously the new deals would get added at the bottom. I would look at, and if there was no next step, and then I'd go on version history, if there'd been no next step for a couple of weeks, I'd be saying, why should I not just delete this? I felt like real pipeline, having a grip on real pipeline is absolutely crucial, but having a grip on pipeline is nonsense. And so I'd seen pipeline at other companies create problems. So I was militant about it being real pipeline. And so we actually did that with Google Sheets very simply. It was actually quite easy to do. You know, the ones at the top that had been there for a while that hadn't moved and everything else, it was quite easy to just go through and delete. And it was quicker than me, Google Sheets is instant. It was quicker than CRMs, which can be a bit clunky from time to time. And it just worked. It just worked really, really, really, really well for us.

And when did you what forced you to get off the Google Sheets into something else? Was that a board decision for you, or did you realize it along the way?

The board wanted the board thought I was crazy. Yeah. The board were like, you're crazy running into this off Google Sheets, but also the board could see that I was generating results. For me, it was more the account ownership thing, where it was a case of, okay, we are now, we've got a lot of leads. We the leads are now sort of being not hoarded but segmented up and everything else. And people are kind of unwilling to put leads in to the leads tab on this sheet in case someone else then you know starts working the account or whatever else. It got to a point where there were a lot of entries on this sheet as well. Uh when we started moving up into like 12, 15 salespeople. And that's where I started thinking perhaps now we need to move to a CRM. Actually, since Threat Spike, I've been doing you know, consulting fractional work, and the power of Claude nowadays with Google Sheets is crazy. There's app scripts and everything else where it actually will do account ownership on there and everything else. So it is still possible through Google Sheets. And I would really encourage sales leaders with less than 10 people in their team to go down the route of Google Sheets first, get it right, the process of what you actually want from a CRM, and then go to CRM when you get a bit bigger and everything else. And then you'll have a real framework of what is working for you. And then when you're working with the CRM, the RevOps people and the implementations consultants, you can be strict about this is what we need and this is absolutely what we don't need. Because these people will come to you and say you need 95 different reports. And I really don't think you do.

Yeah, it is funny. It is the default reaction. All right, we got our seed funding, something like that. Okay, we've got to spit up these core tools and one of them, one of them Salesforce, and then you spend half your life trying to figure out how to use it and set it up, and then you hire consultants, and before you know it, you're tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds, in the hole. And you're sitting there going, well, we've got 15 deals in the pipeline this quarter, all from inside this tool. We spent over $100,000 setting up and running. It's it's an interesting situation we get ourselves into.

Correct. And it's also the time as the head of sales that you spend on these calls, you're having to direct these people and give them all the insight that you've built up over the last couple of years as well. That that's something that is like a hidden cost with it all as well.

All right. Well, James, let's go back to the overrated or underrated. Uh the spin the wheel of misfortune and misadventure. So I'm gonna give you three things here in turn, and you have to tell me whether you think they're overrated or underrated. Are you ready to go? Do I get to say why as well? Oh yeah. Okay. Oh yeah, you tell me. All right. All right. First one is cold calling, overrated or underrated?

Modern day 2026, I think it's slightly, slightly overrated because I think people are in the not in the office buyers as much. When they're in the office, they wanted to get away from, say, the main communal working area and go in a room and take a call. I think nowadays people are working from home, diaries are busier, it's harder to get in touch with people, and they're some of the buyers are less willing to take a call, but they're more willing to respond to a LinkedIn message or an email. It's it's marginal though, but I would say in modern day overrated 10, 15 years ago, underrated. Got it.

All right, next one. Two years of SDR experience. Overrated massively. Tell me more.

Because success for an SDR equals booked meeting. You know, we had we had people from Dark Trace, and they were quite open that they would get paid to book ridiculous meetings with people who were never going to buy because that was just the system, and they would just game the system. It took months for me when I had those people to train them out of that and say, why are you booking a meeting with this random person who lives in the middle of nowhere, who's never going to buy? Oh, well, that's just, you know, that's just kind of my default. That's like having breakfast with me. Well, it's like, we don't need that anymore. And my first hire proved that because she focused, like I said, on the software engineering company. She forged a new ICP for us. Whereas, and she wouldn't have been willing to do that if her default mode was just book a meeting with anyone. And then people will go into the counter-argument, you know, sales qualified leads and everything like that. But a lot of that stuff can be end up being very subjective. So I think massively overrated.

Very good. All right, last one: hiring athletes into sales roles.

I think cybersecurity sales, slightly overrated. In general sales, probably underrated, they've got that competitive mindset. They've got discipline as well. There's a difference between motivation and discipline, right? And discipline is, I think, eats motivation for breakfast, is the saying. You know, they've got that discipline there. But yeah, often sometimes athletes aren't really interested. They don't tend to be interested in the IT and cybersecurity side, which is why I'd say slightly overrated.

Interesting. I didn't thought about that. Uh different way to think about it. Um, a lot of it's through your DNA, though, right? You just who you are. Yeah, I'm not an athlete, so uh unfortunately. But yeah. Well, James, listen, it's been a blast uh chatting you see today. You've got incredible experiences that you've doing things differently over those years, and uh, we wish you every success going forward. Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure coming on and uh great show you've got going as well.

Thank you.