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Why So Many Founders Fail at Talking About Their Own Product, with Elliot Volkman & Doug Landis!
117 Plays4 months ago
Why are so many cybersecurity company founders so bad at talking about their own products?! This week we're joined by Elliot Volkman and Doug Landis to talk about how they used storytelling training to transform one company’s message to its customers!
In this episode:
🤦♂️ Why so many founders are terrible at talking about their own products
🎭 The power of storytelling vs. spewing facts and stats
💰 Why companies should invest in communication skills for operators, not just technical skills.
📊 Building trust through customer stories, not flashy banners
🗣️ Practical tips for nailing your next conference presentation
Tune in for some real talk on how to cut through the noise and actually connect with your audience. No BS, just straight advice.
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🔥Want a little BKBT fire for your conference? Or maybe your GTM team needs a high-test dose of buyer insight at your next SKO! Drop us a line at [email protected]
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Transcript
The Importance of Soft Skills in Cybersecurity
00:00:00
Speaker
Like, at this point, it's kind of a trope to be the socially awkward engineer type in a basement with the lights off, rocking a hoodie, smelling like last week. It's terrible. And it's so real thick. Hold on. eight eight Hey, George, can i just quite can I just say something here? You kind of look the part way. I mean, it's black. That's what I was hearing. Big beard. and like Are you talking about yourself here? Like, what what do we what do we got here? Hey brother, if I wasn't speaking from lived experience, then it wouldn't be real, okay? Answer the question, bro. No, no, no. Hold on. That is a good point. you're You're living with those people. You work every single day with those people. Why is soft skills not an area of investment? And it's always technical because that's where this all stems from. Like they're working and they're understanding how to live through each component. But like,
00:00:53
Speaker
We're soft skills in cybersecurity. It's not a thing unless you're thrown up into the exec levels.
Introducing Storytelling Experts in Cybersecurity
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, then it's trial by fire. Then it's just like, I guess you have to give this presentation to the ELT. Good luck. Yes.
00:01:16
Speaker
Yo, welcome back to Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax, the cyber security podcast that tackles all the messy bits in the human side of cyber. Trust respect and all the rest. I am George K with the vendor side. And I'm George A, a chief information security officer. And today we have two guests. We have Elliott Folkman who's on the marketing side and Doug Landis who is more or less a performance coach for founders. They came together because they were teaching people at the company that they were working with how to tell stories better. And this was really important to me because I have said it time and again I don't know why founders are so phenomenally bad at talking about their own product. OK. To be fair not all founders but
00:02:03
Speaker
You would be surprised how many struggle with that first compelling story about why they developed a product or even how it works, what outcomes.
Why Do Founders Struggle with Storytelling?
00:02:13
Speaker
And yeah, this was a blast. These guys are hilarious. Oh yeah, did dude, like and Doug does, like he's he's like he's an actor, he's a trained actor. When you look at at Doug Landis, I was like, John Landis, the filmmaker? But no, Doug's actually really good, and he is a master at teaching people how to effectively communicate. And he also goes into, in the brass tacks section, how to actually prepare for delivering a good pitch, a good presentation, a good talk at a conference. And I think a lot of listeners,
00:02:46
Speaker
Really, if you're honest with yourselves, you really could use this kind of advice. And I'm not saying this in a derogatory way, but we should always be trying to strive to get better at what we do. These folks present us, Elliot and Doug, with a bunch of ways that you can improve your practice in public speaking and your professional brand. Yeah, we've been on a mission all year to turn the term soft skills into vital skills, and you need look no further than the insights in this episode to develop
Building Trust Through Storytelling vs. Facts
00:03:14
Speaker
your own. So let's turn it over to them. Elliot, Doug, welcome to Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax. George, George, thank you so much for having us. We are honored that you would ah allow us to bitch a moan for a little while.
00:03:32
Speaker
You know, Elliot, I was going to say something poetic, like, wax philosophical about, like, the world of cyber and, you know, the broader ecosystem. But, uh, yeah, fuck it. Let's go. No, you still have that opportunity. Well,
00:03:48
Speaker
well in the, the, uh, gameplay of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax, you are on the vendor side, which means the CISO gets first crack. So I will turn it over to my co-host, George A. Hello, gentlemen. It's good to have you on the show. ah Thanks for coming for our little time together to talk about, well, stupid shit that happens in our industry. And to try to give good suggestions how to make it better. So I have to ask you to start it off. In a world, of we'll call it black box, magic box.
00:04:25
Speaker
You know, stick your hand here and good results will come out kind of security marketing.
Challenges in Marketing Cybersecurity Solutions
00:04:31
Speaker
Buyers need to know that your story is for real. um Why is it that good storytelling is so important in conveying a message about a product or service and how important is it to be accurate? All right, Doug, you have to go first because either way you're going to have a much better and more articulate way to phrase this. Not much better trailing than this answer. I mean, that is that question. within like How much time do we have? Good Lord. Are you kidding me? like It's the ethos of of communication. if if you If you want to break it down, look, I think regardless of the industry that we happen to be talking about, it's kind of cyber here. I think the most important thing is part of the reason why we want to use storytelling or a narrative framework as as as kind of your core vehicle for communicating is because it's about trust.
00:05:21
Speaker
People, like, look, people, you know, buy things for people they like and trust. And storytelling is a vehicle that actually develops trust faster and better than spewing out a bunch of facts and stats. Because the moment, as human nature, our innate desire is to try and you kind of fill the gaps when someone's telling a story. But when someone's just spewing out a bunch of facts and stats, we immediately get defensive and we're like, what's your source? How do I believe you? How do I know that this is true? And so there's a whole bunch of questions that arise. But if you caught me and tell me a story, one, it's relatable. I can either relate to the character or characters either myself, or I know somebody that's like that, or two, it's just like you're more believable because you're less likely to, you can embellish a story, but you're not going to flat out lie.
Storytelling: Captivating a Tech-Savvy Audience
00:06:08
Speaker
I mean, some people might, I don't know, but I won't. Right? But I was about to tell you what, I can tell you a bunch of facts and stats. You're going to be like,
00:06:15
Speaker
Okay. yeah You know, the whole game, like what three truths or three, what one truth and a lie. Two truths and a lie. Yeah, yeah right. Right. so it's it's And what do people do? People just spew out like facts or statements. Um, that's why I like, you know, storytelling, regardless of what industry you're in, it's like the most powerful communication vehicle there is. But then, you know, I'll throw this to Elliot. Why is it when we walk the floor on a black hat or an RSA or whatever regional like, you know, Rinko Dink B-Sides conference it is? like Bring it to us. But it's just like, it's like black box security. We will take your security data. We'll put it in this thing that uses AI and machine learning that we can't talk about any sort of formula on. We can't give you any of the BI around it, but
00:07:03
Speaker
You put it in here and then you get golden results. And you're like, Oh, cool. Well, could you run that dive or can you run that demo on some like live data? And they're like, Oh, Oh no, no, that's not, uh, we wrote, we recorded this demo in advance. So yeah we kind of have to baseline with your data. There's gotta be a whole POC and an NDA involved and you're like, what the fuck is this? Yeah. Goodbye. No interest in that. it Yeah. um So I will be totally honest and just ah be annoying and shout out my own podcast. But that is why Neil and I built our podcast and nothing is your trust is because
00:07:38
Speaker
everywhere. And I blame chase for this. Yes, 100%. He's the easiest one to chase to blame for this situation is because it was a philosophy and strategy. It wasn't really picking up the same level of heat, but ja chase came in, basically mapped it to productization. And it exploded everywhere. And that is why you saw as zero trust over. But that doesn't explain that that shiny object is on every booth today. You're going to see AI at Black Hat. It was all wasn't as bad
Rebranding Soft Skills as Vital Skills
00:08:08
Speaker
at RSA. I will say it was like one in four. But they love their shiny objects because it's easy to explain. People already understand it. And it's probably two com components. So there's brand awareness. Like people do not understand the power of brand and investing in things and being consistent and coherent and differentiating. They're just like, oh, everyone's saying this. Let's say this.
00:08:30
Speaker
It's ridiculous. If you want to stand out, there's no value in doing that. You're just slapping things on there because you think people understand it. The other piece is I think it's a more core element of what background the people are that are pushing this forward. So you have like the founders and the startups in the cybersecurity space who have a direct tie into this space. Like they've been in this world, they're a highly technical person. They've lived some sort of aspect of cybersecurity like I can solve this better than whatever's on the market and they try to build something else. Alternatively, you get someone who's like, oh, there's a huge total adjustable market and I have a shit ton of VC dollars and I'm just in it for the cash. That is the ones that pull in more cash because they're more articulate, they understand how to do it.
00:09:16
Speaker
And those are the people who chase things. The ones who are highly technical and try to solve things, they're in like this own little weird ah obscure level of communication. They don't know how to articulate. So it's like this weird divide of like someone needs to find the middle ground between those two and explain it. and You do see some of that, but not a lot of it. i can i Can I add a little color to that or some um contrary examples? um Go to Dreamforce. Go to Salesforce's conference. and If you look at what Salesforce does all over the conference, they don't talk about like Einstein AI is going to solve your problems faster and service calls will do this. You know what they do?
00:10:01
Speaker
They put up customer testimonials. They put up customers all over the place and they use their customers to tell their story because it's like, you know what, George? I'm a CISO and I trust you. We're on the same vein here. So like, I want to know what the hell, how you're thinking about. AI and you know creating policies in your organization to govern
Improving Cybersecurity Communication
00:10:20
Speaker
AI. Because that's what I care about. I don't want to give a shit about the technology that's going to do that for me because I want to know what you're doing. And if you're using technology, then cool. I can i i'm i trust that more than just the flash you know the flashiness that happens at most conferences, which is just like it's like, honestly, I feel like it's clickbait.
00:10:38
Speaker
Right? It's live click plate. Like it's these it's this flashy, flashy, you know, banners and and and and statements that they make. And then you, you know, you go into the booth and you're like, cool, I want to, okay, if you say this, show it to me, put this to the test. And then, you know, if they can't back it up and they lose all credibility, it it it goes it goes back to like this level of trust. And I feel like, um you know, whenever I'm at a conference, I walk around and like, I don't believe 80% of the shit in there. Okay. So you and point and way you brought up this divide between technical operators who started and people who can tell a better story. He sees something in between. So here's my question. What is up with so many founders being so colossally bad at talking about their own products? So product engineers.
00:11:38
Speaker
yeah A little bit of that, Doug. So some of this kind of ties back into where you and I actually connected. And I don't mean that our the founders and the equation of where we connected was like the problem. In fact, I'd say it's like the layer beneath it who was basically designed to rip apart and describe many aspects of the company, which was really problematic because they were like the people who were actually building this stuff. And there should be no one better who understands it than the ones who are leading the actual development of these subsections. So that was insane. But it it did bubble up to an extent. So ah I'm happy to like clarify exactly what that means. But basically, we built it an annual user conference. ah Doug very specifically came in to terrorize everyone in the nicest and most constructive way possible.
00:12:25
Speaker
to make people who are completely unready for the stage within a week's period ish and get them to a point where people actually were engaged in listening and not just what my greatest fear was. People were going to start reading off their confidence monitor and just like regurgitating. Yes. And I was like, this is my name here. Doug can save the day. Save the fucking day across every single person you connect to it. I can hand that off to you, Doug, ah for your perspective. um I basically was the messenger being an asshole to whatever extent that I could, but you actually were the one providing and listening in detail of like the different intricacies of what they were trying to put out. into the world But it also sounds like, Doug, you have done this before. So you've seen this movie before. I've seen this movie 10,000, not even 10,000 times. it is And look, no company is impervious to this. I don't care if you're a startup with like nine people, or if you're you know if your're Drada, which was like 300 people, or if you're Box, which was 3,000 people, or Salesforce when you were 20,000 people. No company is impervious to this. And the issue is this. i feel like
00:13:36
Speaker
um And let's go back to them to the early stage of like founders and why they're just just just notoriously bad at talking about their products. um and Part of it is is because they just drink too much their own fucking Kool-Aid and they just think that they're their shit is so great and they're not honest and transparent about what is great and what's not great. like what is it we like what fundamental look When I talk to founders, I'm like, what fundamental problem are you trying to solve? right but First and foremost. And by the way, who the hell cares? And have you validated that with them? Have you gotten their feedback or is this you just a really smart engineer that knows the space and are building this product in an effing vacuum?
00:14:11
Speaker
Which I see a lot and then like this is the greatest thing I'm like, yeah, but guess what? Guess what determines whether it's the greatest thing someone actually putting their money behind it and their willingness to buy it So let's just say they've got a willingness to buy it Let's just say you built something that the market is like really hungry for it now The question is is how do you share and articulate who you are? What you do in ah in a manner that gets people to go? Oh, I get it, rather than them having to actually look at the product and demo the product and be like, okay, now I get it. There's such a disparity between how you talk about it and what it actually does as founders that that I find. And it's also largely because if you're a product founder, you just don't know the right words or how to actually articulate your story, whether it's your origin story or your why story in a way that actually gets people to to understand. and Part of that's just understanding storytelling mechanics, which we can talk about, but also part of that is just like understanding what fucking point are you trying to make? And this is to Elliot's comment. All of the speakers at Drata that were going up on stage, the very first question that I asked them, I was like, all right, what point are you trying to make?
00:15:13
Speaker
And the problem most people have is we're trying to make 18 points in a you know and ah in a five minute conversation, right? Or- Or in one sentence. Or in one sentence. or Or one slide. Six points on the slide, right? And you realize like, well, dude, that is so confusing to me as the listener, as the reader, as the participant in this conversation. And so it'd be really effing clear about your who your point is and for each person that you're talking to. So if you've got a mixed audience, you gotta be like, all right, what is my point for this broad audience? And how's that different if I'm going to speak to a bunch of investors? What's the point that I'm trying to make? And, and, and that's like the view. This is really, really important anchor in being able to communicate kind of who you are and what you do. And I think the other really important tip is to focus more on the why and less on the what and the how. It's the other thing that the product leaders or engineers tend to do is like, here's what we do. Here's how we do it.
00:16:09
Speaker
Right? Because if I'm talking to another engineer, oh, you're going to get it. like Oh, that's cool. But guess what? Most of us, especially if we're making a buying decision, I care more about the why. and like Well, and also like something that came up in a study I did with Danny Wolf last year on RSA was the language you use in your booth needs to be the language about your product that George would take to his yeah colleagues. on a percent i don't He's not going to speak your marketing language. He's going to see what problem it solves. And I think people get used to talking to each other and technology and they forget like you are actually giving somebody a message to carry to the next person. And CISO has got to go talk to the CIO or the CEO or the CFO about why it matters. She just has, or she just has the boiler plate. It's like, I i don't understand this.
Mastering Public Speaking in Cybersecurity
00:16:58
Speaker
is yeah time Yeah. So another little tip by the way, it's just be like, continue to ask yourself, so what?
00:17:04
Speaker
So what, so what, so what? Just keep digging and keep digging because what you'll find is underneath all that tech marketing jump mumbo jumbo is some real like human, human value, right? In human speak. um Yeah. and Yeah. I'm going to turn, I'm going to turn it over to George for a second, but I also think one of the, and maybe we'll touch on this later, but I often find that when founders get in front of CSAs for the first time, The mode that they go into is the same mode that they use for pitching. And I have said repeatedly, I was like, y'all don't need to explain end point to these people of all people like they don't need to know IOT. t They don't need to know like that. Why they need to know like why you exist. George George George. Let's be real here, but less technology, more booth babes and F1 cars.
00:17:57
Speaker
you That's clearly this clearly the strategy. like Seriously. That's where it's at, bro. I mean, that's why I got hired to my current role. This is actually a relevant point that George is bringing up. And I have to ask you guys, like why do you think technologists, founders, and usually like the good founders are technologists. i I don't really like hanging out with like the McDonald's founders that are just looking for a profit in a series being a takeover. I don't care for that. Why do you think technologists who are often brilliant folks sometimes so, they're so absolutely terrible at effective communication. Like at this point, it's kind of a trope to be the socially awkward engineer type in a basement with the lights off, rocking a hoodie, smelling like last week. It's terrible. And it's some real thing. Hold on. Hey, George, can I just say something here? You kind of look the part way.
00:18:54
Speaker
It's pitch black. That's what I was hearing. Big beard. Are you talking about yourself here? like what what do we What do we got here? Hey brother, if I wasn't speaking from lived experience, then it wouldn't be real, okay? Answer the question, bro. No, no, no. Hold on. That is a good point. you're You're living with those people. You work every single day with those people. Why is soft skills not an area of investment? And it's always technical because that's where this all stems from. Like they're working and they're understanding how to live through each component. But like,
00:19:26
Speaker
Where's soft skills in cybersecurity? It's not, it's not a thing unless you're thrown up into the exec levels. You're, uh, you know, yeah this is trial by fire. Then it's just like, I guess you have to give this presentation to the ELT. Good luck. You know what I find crazy though? It's so, if you have the soft skills, you're often the one that gets promoted into management. You're the one that gets promoted into critical roles. You get the cool opportunities because you can communicate it. Right. yeah But when it comes to actually investing time and money into developing those soft skills, Organizations seem to be absolutely allergic to that. They're like, we'll send you on tech courses. We'll send you on cert courses. We're not going to send you on like a Toastmasters course on how to like properly talk to a public audience. i that Send them to me.
00:20:13
Speaker
no Seriously, I agree with that. There's ah there's a cognitive dissonance between yeah what people actually need to see effective leadership and what we're actually training our people to do. right eight yeah give so i look I spent seven and a half years in BC and one of the things that you know really separated the great founders from like the everyday founders that built an interesting product. At the end of the day, if you think about you know investors, we're fundamentally making a bet on the person. tech technology We're not technologists, we're not financiers. We make that on people. And it's the people who can articulate the problem and the value proposition and the market opportunity and and the kind of company that they want to build from a culture and and and growth standpoint.
00:20:55
Speaker
Those are the ones that everybody fights to invest in. Those are the ones that stand out from from somebody that's just really fucking smart and built an interesting product. That is not as interesting because that doesn't have staying power. So I would say it to those founders that are like that are that are You know, afraid of actually developing their communication skills and afraid of developing leadership skills. You got to figure out how to get over that. And you got to go, whether that's going through an incubator or whether that's like you getting some real, real coaching, you've got to figure out how to communicate effectively. You got to figure out how to go from an individual contributor, IEA coder to a manager, to a leader.
00:21:32
Speaker
and And oftentimes, you know to your point, there's there's usually not a lot of development training for that. like What's the difference between a manager and a leader? How do I go from how do i relinquish control? How do I actually coach? How do I hire and fire and all the really, really hard decisions um that need to be made? What is the core ethos of it all? It's all about communication. And how can you like be transparent and talk about you know what what really matters? And I only have one little nugget to build upon that because you're exactly right, Doug. But so I i recently, at I don't know, obviously recent, it was like six months ago, I had a chat with the guys over at Hacker Valley. And instead of assuming that you can get ah you can get vouchers for any certification you want when you're in cybersecurity, but you want to get those soft skills, it comes down to like finding a mentor.
Strategic Planning for Cybersecurity Investments
00:22:18
Speaker
They even threw out the extent of like, you can build a chat bot based on someone who has is enough published things to get it to like mimic them, which I thought was kind of creative. But I do think at the end of the day, finding a mentor who has those skills that you look up to that might be accessible. I think that's a very valid route to go. And, you know, people in an executive level position, if they have enough time, they tend to you know open doors for other folks like that. So I think the mentorship thing is highly lacking in this space. But now this also comes down to like the we have millions or hundreds of thousands of empty roles to fill because they're just focusing on just technical amplitude and they're not focusing on bringing people to a higher level that needs to be
00:23:04
Speaker
integrated into the business, if that makes sense. Yeah. In our last episode with Rihanna Schultz, George talked about how for incident response stuff, from his military days, you just got to be able to stand up in 30 seconds. This is the problem, this is what happened, this is what we're doing about it, and how effective that is. So much so that at the beginning of this year, I told myself I was going to stop calling them soft skills and I was going to call them vital skills because they're I think we relegate them, right? The name that we give it just feels like, well, if I have to make a decision between investing in this person getting technical hard skills or soft skills, like we just sort of like set that up for failure. So in the remaining time we have in the first half of the show, I also wanted, we've been talking about storytelling and communication, but you guys are both on the kind of loosely go to market side of things.
00:23:52
Speaker
so Curious about any other common pitfalls or trends you are seeing now in that side of the equation, whether it's scaling. Oh, you just you love the lab. Oh my God. Are you kidding me? Like seriously, how much time do we have? think isn' it That's my world for the last 30 years. Like, come on. it's still all right pick pick ah pick one Pick one of the last five years. It's just been like, you know, stuck in your craw. Well, here's the funny thing. Outside of cyber. outside of cyber, the rest of the SaaS software market is in the last 12 months just getting decimated when it comes to pipeline building. Building pipeline is
00:24:33
Speaker
Brutal, so brutal. Why? Because we have too much technology out there and everybody's been to actually forced to shift away from this growth at all costs to actually efficient growth, which means you've got to really pay attention to the magic number. You got to think about you got think about your cost basis. You got to think about actually past profitability, right? All these things really matter now. And so as a company, George is a CISO, you're making one big decision this year, not 10. When it was really frothy, and we all had money, and money was cheap, and we all had money to spend, it's like, cool. As an organization, we're going to make maybe make some both multiple strategic initiatives, make multiple bets throughout the year. Now, it's like, no, no, we're cutting a lot of costs. Stop that. You make me cry because I literally can only buy one one nice toy at a store.
00:25:20
Speaker
be a it's been ah It's been a two month like vetting process and selection from like 13 different suppliers and we're going to have a POC to test it. and oh It's going to take you like 10 months to buy one thing. right By the way, look did it listen listen to what he just said. The sales cycle is now 10 months where when it was super frothy and you were maybe doing 10 of these. 90 days. 90 days, right? so like Look, pipeline's hard. Sales cycles are hard. There's like 14, 18 people involved in the buying decision. You got to do POCs and a bunch of stupid shit. and um If I'm CEO, I'm thinking about like, what can you what is this replacing?
00:25:56
Speaker
but what Okay, so if you're going to make this one decision, what five tools or what five other pieces of technology can you replace it with? like What are you going to remove? That's actually the truth. like now it's and Ross Hellyer talks about this too. The only thing that security leaders are really considering when it comes to business case analysis is what can your tool replace? Because if your tool can't replace anything in the stack, we already have too many tools for too many things. 100%. Actually, do you get that a little bit? What if it replaces on paper pretty apparently people like the AI equation, if we want to go that route, is that problematic from your perspective or like i I've seen people like do more with less. We're basically replacing people with a piece of technology with by the way, the bullshit. But yeah, whats what's your take on that? Like I mean, like in terms of.
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, but like if we're going into the same storytelling capability, if we have founders saying, hey, we've got this fancy new AI tool, this is going to replace some of your ah maybe over bloated teams, which is not typically the case in cybersecurity. Yeah. And that that equation. It depends, right? Like, I mean, look, if you like, we have a friend who he developed a technology that can basically if applied correctly can replace level one, level two analysts, right within a sock. And he's been working on this thing for years. He's an awesome dude. I'm talking about, uh, as a Dean. So like, you know, if he had his technology and he could actually prove to me that, Hey, you will only have to deal with your highest level alerts. You will not have to invest human analyst time on this.
00:27:41
Speaker
You'll save money on headcount and on T&M for investigative efforts. That's a tangible thing I can take to say like a CIO or if your board is like informed enough, they can understand that. The real truth is you have to look at what the overall function is and you have to speak in higher level functions. So for me to say something nuanced like, hey, we'll save time and material and you know like it's more efficient for the guys, unless that comes down to we can cut guys, ownership or the board isn't going to care. They're not going to really listen to that. So all they're going to want to know is can you take this tool, replace another tool or even better replace two tools with it, right? Can you save us that budget and can it be cheaper than either of those individual items? That makes sense. Right. And it's from a business case standpoint, like dude, ah in in the last, I'd say year and a half,
00:28:39
Speaker
I've really become more of a business analyst than a security professional. Like I, you know, every once in a while I get to hop in on investigations and do fun things, but like for the most part, most of my life is like projecting budget, figuring out what our roadmap is, trying to predict needs and then trying to time them out so that, hey, you know, in Q2 next year, maybe we can go for this compliance certification, but we're not gonna have capacity to really focus on it until we're done this POC and we're done this purchase and, The the the the plan strap plan as a CISO has to be very like strategically built um and it has to be very tangible.
Demonstrating Business Value in Cybersecurity Solutions
00:29:20
Speaker
Now the problem is business conditions can change overnight. you know Someone could discover that you know your your product is bad for baby seals and now like you've taken a dump in in terms of your revenue. Now that whole strap plan goes out the window.
00:29:34
Speaker
Right. So that's where the game gets almost impossibly hard from a buyer standpoint. Hey, can I, can I, can I ask one, um, following question to that, which is how wouldn't you think about ah ROI calculators? And I say this because everybody feels like, Oh, you're you're talking business value and business justification, right? And by default, most companies think like, Oh, we build an ROI calculation of formula. I'll tell you, leave you and I'll tell you right now. The answer comes down to what my CEO tells me when I talk to him about the cost savings over year two, year three. I care about the dollar today, not the dollar tomorrow. They don't give a shit about what you're going to save them next year or the year after. They care about the the P and&L line today. yeah Yeah, totally. Totally. Okay. So it's like you turn this thing on and your immediate impact.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah, for the benefit of our listeners who couldn't see that when Doug asked this question, George rolled his eyes so hard that I thought he was going to have his seizure.
00:30:40
Speaker
Oh, God. Amen. um Hey listeners, we're coming to Denver. Catch us on October 9th for a listener meetup. And the next day you can catch us as the closing keynote at Secure World Denver on October 10th. See the show notes for discount codes to get into that show. We've got more conferences coming up. If you'd like us to talk at yours, or maybe you'd like to inject some next-level energy and insight into your sales kickoff next year, get in touch. Email us at bareknucklespodatgmail.com or just DM George A or myself on LinkedIn. And now, back to the interview.
00:31:29
Speaker
And we're back. All right, it's time for brass tacks. So I have to ask you guys, let's say, you know, you want to talk about a piece of technology, right? And let's just say for the sake of the argument, you have a you know brand new endpoint detection tool, right? You need to articulate this into a marketing campaign. and you need to actually set up a booth at a major conference. What is the message and how do you get there? Yeah, I mean, I think for every campaign, any kind of messaging that I do, I focus on the outcome first. um You got to say EDR in there to make it very clear, but any of the AI, Zero Trust, all that buzzword out the window, focused very specifically on a series of ah outcomes. Usually it's use case driven.
00:32:26
Speaker
And then you can drill into like hour saved, high fidelity, the buzzwords that are relevant, but still buzzwords are a layered lower. um But you need to be able to back that with customer stories, use case stories, people that are third parties outside of you to basically validate whatever your claims are. But for me, it's just as simple as making sure that we're reducing risk. We're not saying things like we are going to guarantee, prevent, stop all all the other bullshit. You have to come down to reality. And that is one of the most critical things of aligning with outcome is not also just talking bullshit. So somebody that doesn't know shit about technology, this guy.
00:33:11
Speaker
um There's two immediate things came to mind. One, first is like, well, okay, if I'm going to this is a security conference and I'm, you know, you got to think like the people that are attending understand security. So I have that baseline. I'm not talking a bunch of neophytes like me, um but two, I also, I'm a big believer in, Anything that's super technical that we try and use fancy marketing words to get people to like pay attention never really works. So I'm a huge, huge believer in using analogies. And in this particular case, you can use a really fun analogy. You could actually say something to the effect of like, you know, how much do you trust and believe shit that comes out of a politician's mouth?
00:33:52
Speaker
right? And send you something like, you know, listening to or trying to trust something that comes out of, you know, a president's mouth is like, you know, trying to trust your endpoint security. You know what I mean? Like use this analogy because an analogy is actually is a really, really simple way.
Using Stories to Engage Your Audience
00:34:09
Speaker
It's a great tool to take something that's really complex and make it simple because the analogy and what you really need to build into is the why, right? So why is it like that? But the analogy is like breaks it down into something that we can all relate to. That's a lot lot more like kind of immediate. And in many cases you can also have a lot more fun with it. And so now you stand out from everybody else.
00:34:29
Speaker
Right. Especially given the fact that if this were going on, let's say this were happening in two weeks, we have election coming up in November. Like, okay, so cool. Let's kind of play with that a little bit. It doesn't have to be political, but let's play with like this notion of trust and security and how much we really trust our, you know, our way. I could tell you a hundred percent chance that that stands out on the floor relative to everything else, which is just like green text on black background, AI, blah, blah, blah. And there you go. I don't know shit about security, right? So like, so, so to George, to your question, it's like, how did you, what kind of marketing materials and messaging and your branding and your booth to me, it's like, stand out, man. Like speak every day, speak.
00:35:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's a real fear of that. L.A., you talked about earlier, like, how do you stand out? I think there's so much yeah of cyber marketing is just always looking over the shoulder. um When we talked to Chaz Larios at Anvilogic, she was very clear about how when she is trying to think through new marketing practices, she actually doesn't look at security at all. She tries to like look over the garden wall at other sectors because she's like, I'm not learning anything from all of this stuff over here. But um so we talked in the first half about storytelling and you began to tease out how elot you got Doug to come in and work with people on that. But brass tacks, I think people heard that and they'll be like, oh, I could never get that done. So could you walk us through how you made the case for that investment? Because it strikes me as vital, but also unorthodox. Like I think people would want to understand how how that came about.
00:36:03
Speaker
Yeah, so it it actually came in two parts. So Doug was presented. I don't know if you were actually thrown at us to support another effort, just general speaker training for the organization. it Again, startups need that at a desperate level. We especially we lost like our subject matter experts. So we we needed to. up level a lot of other people. So I think that was the context of it. However, in this particular situation, we basically had a group of people who are writing the scripts, trying to detail and position things in a very specific way. And then we had the speakers who were supposed to just ingest that, be the actor, take their cues, be whatever that is. And it doesn't work that way, especially when like the source material was so dry that there's there's no level of interest. So that is where I can only be so mean. I try with the velvet hammer approach. ah And that is where it's really good to have a third party, an expert who is you know disassociated from any part of this organization. And they're just there to listen and provide feedback as a bystander of terrible and dry ah material. And that is essentially where it came into play. So we just said, here you go, Doug. Listen to this.
00:37:23
Speaker
terrorize them, give them constructive feedback. And Doug, you did go out of your way to extend that. So if we only waited to the day before, it would have been a disaster. Oh, disaster. Yeah. Oh my God. I think we started like three weeks or a month beforehand, and we still should have started like two months beforehand. So look, I'll give you the context. So it just what happened that the CMO, Sydney, she used to be a CMO at a company that we had invested in as a company. And so I'd known her for years. And I did this with her previous company. And the idea, of the ethos around it was like, hey, speakers, we need to make sure you all are bringing your A game, right? Cool. So we're going to bring in this guy, Doug. um I'm a professional trained actor. I trained every single Salesforce customer facing human being for years on, on like speaker training. So like you want to stand and deliver in front of one, ah one
00:38:12
Speaker
prospect or you want to do it at Dreamforce, I'm the guy. So but what what you have to understand is in order to be a great speaker at a conference, you got to know your content inside and out. So that's the very first thing. So focus more first on the content and then the physicality of delivering the content. When you know the content, you feel more comfortable moving around, using your hands, not looking at the screen, not looking at the slide, looking at the audience, looking for your actions, et cetera. But you can't focus on that first. You've got to focus on the content. So that's what happens. I was like, you know i was like to eliliot like I want to sit on every practice session. I want to look at the content, show me the slide, show me what you're building. And then I just thrashed it because
00:38:51
Speaker
one, there was no point. Like, literally, it was the first question, like, cool, what's the point? What are you trying to get across? And I'm like, well, what do you do this and this? And I'm like, that's too many things. Give me one. Like, oh, shit, okay. And then so we got to focus, we got to hone in on what that point was. And then outside of that, it was like, okay, now let's break down the content and think about ways in which you can use stories in the conversation, in one hundred percent in the presentation. So when I talk about like storytelling, ah you like people have to be one I want to become better storytellers, but two, you also recognize that it is a vehicle for communicating. So you got to know when to get into a story and when and how and when to get out of a story. And what are those triggers that you're looking for if you're delivering a presentation? So a story is a great way to start
00:39:38
Speaker
You know, a presentation or a keynote, because guess what? It gives you context. If your point is really clear, it gets people connected, engaged. If it's funny, now you're like, you you're hoped, now they're going to want to listen to more. and And what I find in most of these like conferences and someone's getting up to speak is like, they're not really clear about the point they're trying to make. It doesn't, if they don't own their own voice. There's no narrative. There's no narrative built within like the like the content itself. And, and there's no real flow. So like I sat down and I was like, cool, we're going to redo your slides and we're going to move these slides away. And guess what? I need you. And here's, here's my one exercise to everybody. Here's like, here's how I know if you're ready.
00:40:18
Speaker
if If in the middle of your presentation, I just shut it off. Can you keep going? You got to know it that cold, but you can just keep going. And guess what? This is bonkers. It's never happened to me. And I've run like literally hundreds of kickoffs. you Give me PTSD, man. This is so bad. This is crazy. So the the head of the chief product officer is up and he's got a lot of content to get through. And, uh, but he was, he was nailing it. I've got him on the physicality using his voice in his hands. And like, he knows his content cold. And guess what? Boom. Power goes out. howly everything power Power goes out at a four block radius. Everything goes off. He didn't stop.
00:40:56
Speaker
He didn't skip a fucking beat. He just winning kept going. winning he just kept go And he went for like another 10 minutes. And then we finally, there was a natural break in the conversation and then we stopped and we're like, cool, we got to figure this out. So we're going to give everyone a break right now. But everybody was like, how did you do that? it was amazing and And it was like ah like, dude, you know, the content cold and now you can get physical and and yeah we we worked hard. Great. That's awesome. Two, two, two short stories, Doug. I used to work at a global marketing firm. We would pitch like Sony, you know, like big brand. And it was always, we were drilled. Like, can you do this without the slides? Like PowerPoint goes off. The USB is corrupted. The power goes out. Whatever HDMI cable got frayed on the way over. and like That was like the training was like, you just had to be able to deliver the pitch without the slides. um And then the other short story is the first time I ever spoke at a security conference, I got the call. I was kind of terrified. I was like, I'm not a technical operator, massive ah imposter syndrome. I take to YouTube. I'm going to go look at like the leading lights of cyber and their presentations. And I could not get through the first three minutes of many of them. I was like, oh, these are terrible.
00:42:08
Speaker
These are so boring. What I did was instead i I basically based my structure off of TED talks, which almost always start with a story. Somebody has to like open with a narrative because it's the scaffolding to hang something on. yep But yep enough of that, I'll turn it over to George for the next question. Actually, it's pretty relevant to what I was going to ask. My thing is like, I'm a big, annoying dude that loves to do practice before I do anything live. So before I do presentations, like before I do anything athletic, it's always practice, practice, practice. So I'm the annoying guy in the hotel room that'll rehearse my entire presentation for the mirror. All if I'm doing like a talk, it's like a walk around on stage thing. I'll actually practice the motions and visualize it. Dude. yeah Amen. God bless. By the way, everybody listen to this podcast. Shut up for a second.
00:42:55
Speaker
listen to what he's saying. do would If he can do it, you could do it. It's the weirdest thing standing up in front of a mirror and actually presenting yes its presented to an audience who cares. Like you want to you want to you know, you want to communicate. It's even weirder things where it's just like little things like um I've recorded myself before doing a practice because like what my voice sounds like to me in a conversation and what my voice sounds like to an audience or two different things.
Rehearsing for Effective Presentations
00:43:22
Speaker
So, yeah outside of the weird stuff I do, do you guys have any tips for practice methodologies for how someone, like say it's in Georgia situation, it's your first talk, right, at a conference this weekend and you got a couple days beforehand.
00:43:38
Speaker
what would you do to prepare so we are not some boring disorganized dude and i love defcon i love the people at defcon but some of the presenters at defcon fuck my life guys you guys like don't even fucking show up with slide decks dude i walked out of a talk last year i walked out of the talk because he was like oh that slide's not supposed to be in there and i'm like Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Do you know how many people submitted to talk here and you got a spot and you can't be arsed to practice or get your shit together? Like, come on. Dude, it's rude, man. So what would you guys recommend?
00:44:13
Speaker
Mine's really straightforward. It's just talking to people that have no business to understand or care about this thing and see if they can comprehend the core of what you're trying to communicate. That's great. Usually what that means is my counterpart in this house. I use my mom for that, but yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the mom test. Dude, it's the mom or the grandma test. How would you communicate this to your grandma? Like that is a great, great, great litmus test. Right. I mean, look at the end of the day, I think there's there's several things that you have to take into consideration. First of all, most people, when it comes to like building, you know, a presentation, they go, Oh, what content do I have to work with? And then like, and then it's kind of where they start, right? That's the starting of the pyramid. The reality is it's upside down. The very first thing you need to think about is what's my objective? What do I want everybody to think, feel, or do differently as a result of our time together?
00:45:05
Speaker
Period. I need to be hyper clear about that. What do I want them to think, feel, or do differently as a result of our time together? Secondly, who's in the audience? The very first thing is the objective, who's in the audience? And then I can go into my content and start to extrapolate or pull some things out that I think might be interesting. Thinking also back to the fact that like, all right, what is the point that I'm trying to make? There's a bunch of little nuances that can help you, right? So one being really clear about like making sure that I have one point per slide, one point per slide. And if you take all of your slides, and let's say you just wrote in the top you know the top line of the slide, let's say you just wrote in what the what the slide was gonna be about, all of your slides together, if you put them in, I can't remember what what mode it did in PowerPoint, But if you put them all in, you can just read all of the the headers and it should be able to read like a story.
00:45:55
Speaker
So think about that because now all of a sudden you've got to flow because the thing that screws people up is when they get out of their flow and they look at somebody in the audience and someone wins at them and they're like, oh shit. They freeze and they're like, where was I? By the way, the other thing is there's some physicality that's really important. When you know your content, you also need to know how do you actually engage all parts of the audience? How do you use your eyes? How do you use your voice? You've got a microphone. Microphones decide designed for you to get. Silence is really powerful. Super powerful. How do you use a clicker? Oh my gosh. um I can't tell you. one thing that is the one thing This is the one thing that I told Elliot at and I was like, he's like, what are you worried about? I'm like, you know what I'm worried about? I'm not worried about people fucking up on the content because here's the thing.
00:46:44
Speaker
Nobody knows if you make a mistake. So don't ever acknowledge the fact that you just made a mistake. Nobody knows that. And number two, you don't present slides. You're your number one job when you're presenting. The number one job is to elicit a positive response from your audience. That's it. Right. And so what's going to screw up that response is if you start calling out the fact like, oops, made a mistake, or you're like on this slide, cause now you're reminding me, you're just presenting a bunch of fucking slides. I don't care. I want to hear about you and your story and what you can share with us. Right. But I'll tell you. So the one thing that was driving me bonkers is we were working with a Drata team. I was like, I didn't have enough time to work with everybody to get their hands off them.
00:47:24
Speaker
Fucking clicker. So literally they're this click in front of them, click, click. And it's like, dude, don't draw attention to the fact you have a clicker. Put that thing on your side. yes Clicking needs to be the side to support you. And to your point, George, that you'd said, like, if you know your content code, well, then guess what? I don't need a fucking, fly I can just like, I can move around and like. but don't get ahead of the slides because then now you're not aligned with what the message is the point you're trying to make and that's where like practice really comes in right so George you know the thing that I think the best thing you can ever do if you have a short amount of time the best thing you can ever do practice like the fucking outward for word your transitions
00:48:03
Speaker
transitioning from one slide to the next the like your transitions are the glue that make this feel like we're telling is i'm telling a story and we're talking in like narrative form versus slide, click, slide, click, slide, click.
Prioritizing Marketing Strategies in Tech
00:48:18
Speaker
There you go. I love it. Thank you. but ne Um, yeah, George and I have several presentations this year. So we're just literally going to read this transcript and do all nice. So Elliot and the first part you talked about investing in brand and also in the first part, Doug, you talked about, you know, some of the challenges to building pipeline now. So I want to turn in our last question a little bit away from storytelling and this larger sort of go to market issues. Um,
00:48:47
Speaker
Yeah. saw Saw a really great post from Sarah Brannock, also past guest of the show where she was saying, you know, like if you invest in scaling a sales team before you invest in marketing, it's basically like asking a Formula One driver to like beat everybody driving a Honda Civic. Right? There's no fuel. There's nothing for them to go on. And I have seen that movie a thousand times. I've seen the VC money comes in. So we're in hyper growth mode. I guess I got to go hire a bunch of sales people. And there's again, we're, we're back to the core. No one knows how to tell a story. So they can't train the sales team properly. So everyone's pitching like in eight different directions and the marketing's kind of all over the place. So yeahp I guess this is brass tax, Elliot, for you, like,
00:49:31
Speaker
What's the order of operations and like, how can we just get founders to recognize that? Because I think everyone just keeps copying and pasting this playbook over and over again. The old playbook. yeah I mean, the second element of that after they've hired their BDRs fresh out of college to just spam people with email is usually they will do a demand gen hire, which there's plenty of debate in this, but my personal approach would be you need a product marketing person who at least understands your audience. Stop saying just we're selling to the fucking CISO for the love of God. and
00:50:07
Speaker
to That's not how this works in 90% of anything, unless they're a small organ, they just have a fake CSO towel. Anyway, you get a product marketing person who their sole role is to get product market fit. That means building relationship with your product team, yeah building relationship with that audience, even if they are your customers and finding a connection between it so you're not just selling bullshit down to the world. And from that, everything else is just a nice little snowball that picks up speed. You get messaging, you understand exactly what people care about, what they don't care about.
00:50:41
Speaker
and you kind of go from there. But if you just hire like a demand gen person after your sales army, um all you're getting is just crappy ads, more, more spray and pray. Or it's like write some blog posts that the sales team can put into emails. Well, I mean, and that's, that's like, so that's a content marketer. Now you're talking like, Oh, it's a new, new marketing role. It's gotten all the, all the. page can i can i Can I throw a little twist in this little please go kind of production wheel that you've developed here? Because you know what? Don't hire marketing for sales yet. And and you know the truth is your first hire needs to be customer success. Interesting. First hires need to be customer success. Here's why.
00:51:18
Speaker
It's counterintuitive, but the first hires need to be customer success because you have to make those early customers that you, as the founder, went out and sold and closed. Your job is to close the first million in revenue. And your next job is make sure all those customers that you landed, that you made all these promises to, are wildly successful and will advocate for you and talk on your behalf and give you feedback. And what's going to happen is those customers, those your that's your petri dish of language to use. What does value mean to them? What are you actually doing for them? What would happen if you were to turn this off for them? What would they do? What would happen to them? What's their willingness to pay for this? When you have that insight from your customers that your customer success managers can uncover, then guess where that goes? Then it goes to product marketing. Yeah, I think that that's like, I would say, I would only mince words and say maybe it's customer marketing only because customers ah typically is a sales function that is more or less like check in for the renewal. and so no I agree with you. I agree that that customer success person needs to basically be doing the anthropology of those first design partners and customers. Yeah, your early customer success folks are there for implementation, integration, you know, kind of like the conduit between support and product to get shit fixed so that they continue to use it because they're driving adoption, right? And that's that's what your early customer success folks are supposed to be.
00:52:37
Speaker
um Customer market, at the end of the day, we just need that feedback. And to be honest, the CEO needs to be involved in those conversations when he's talking about feedback and that information needs to get back to the CEO. So the product is making sure that they're prioritizing the right capabilities. Because I tell you what, these product founders, they think they know everything. They think they know it's actually right for the customer. They think that they know the right form or the right how to prioritize what capabilities need to come out next. And it's like, no, your customers are going to tell you, talk to your goddamn customers, and then use that information in your product marketing to develop your materials to help you with pricing, packaging, positioning, competitive analysis, et cetera, and then go out and hire salespeople.
00:53:20
Speaker
Because salespeople don't want to be full stack sellers for long. What I mean by that is they don't want it to be the person that goes out and hunts, kills, and eats every deal. I need the pipeline machine. I need awareness at a minimum built so that when I'm calling people, they're like, who are you? What's this endpoint security shit? I don't know. What is it for? What do I care? Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Usually you get a demo junkie in there, uh, monkey, sorry, in the mix too, because they are not technically literate enough to be able to do that. Yeah. There's that piece of the equation to just get a knowledge myth that you exist and then, you know, good luck.
Common Mistakes in Tech Marketing
00:54:02
Speaker
I literally just want to answer the cold callers with what is this end point shit? I don't even know what you guys are selling. And they freak out. They're like, I thought I was talking to the CISO. Um, with, with that gentlemen, thank you so much for the time. This has been an absolute blast and as ever filled with just razor sharp wit and insight. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. Good times. Thanks. Appreciate it.
00:54:34
Speaker
And it's time for one of our favorite sections of the show. It is time for the weekly teardown. Normally, I'm the one doing the teardown, but this week, Mr. Kameed has something to say. George, take it away. Yeah, it's ah I've got a lot of weird solicitations. I got the connection request. It's the, you know, love to connect and it's you know okay they have mutual connections and I sort of click accept with trepidation a week goes by okay cool wasn't a pitch then the pitch comes and it is completely irrelevant to anything I have to do today the one I got to today and uh this one was I hope this message finds you well have you considered getting your team CCSP and CISSP certified these certifications blah blah blah blah blah
00:55:25
Speaker
My response, I don't have a team. Like this was said to this person. And then I cooled off a bit. I sent you the screenshot. We laughed about it. I came back and I said, okay, no snark. I am genuinely curious what in my profile info or in my posts would suggest that I have a team that needs certs. answer. My assistant sent you message in a flow as he was really out to the CISOs. I mean, that's actually how it's written. So I don't really understand that. I think I was in a workflow, like I just got wrapped into some automated workflow.
00:56:06
Speaker
And it was just like I was in the CISO segment. So I was getting the cert stuff. Anyway, I was like, Oh, well, that's really honest. Thank you. Please remove me. But I mean, that just kind of goes to show like, what the hell is going on? Right. The other thing is. Hey, great to meet you, George. As a quick intro, we specialize in creating product and overview explainer videos designed specifically for tech brands, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh. Y'all, it's public. I'm head of community and events at the CISO Society. What the fuck? My reply, we don't have a need for explainer videos as we don't have a product. Like, at a bare minimum, just read the profile, y'all. Like, come on.
00:56:51
Speaker
well i mean Well, I mean, we still, and this is valid, we still get folks who approach both of us online and they literally just clip or copy and paste the headline on our LinkedIn profiles and they're like, I see you do blah, blah. And then they talk about their thing and you're like, Are you trying to relate to me? Like I don't. Okay, cool. Cool story. All right. So at a bare minimum, y'all, if you're going to do outreach, like just, okay, fine. You're not going to do the time and effort to actually learn what the product is or the company or what they do. the people you're job that to or That would be the ideal, but like at the minimum, read the profile. Jesus Christ.
00:57:42
Speaker
That wraps up this episode of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tax. If you liked what you heard, the best thing you can do to help the show is share the episode on LinkedIn and tell us what you liked about it. Check out the show notes for other ways you can support us. We'll talk to you next week, but until then, stay real.
00:58:01
Speaker
When you say start, you're saying like introduce yourself, who you are, what are what's your story, what's your background? No, we're just we just go straight into questions. Oh, fucking rap. Let's do it. yeah yeah I love that. Yeah. Sorry for the headphones. No, no, we curse wildly. So that is encouraged. There is a reason why I invited you today. Yeah, there's a reason why our podcast carries an explicit rating on all episodes. so Really? All right. So here we go, guys.