The Art of Cybersecurity Sales and Sustaining Client Trust

Jennifer: 0:00

The rule number one for us is we do not agree with overselling ourselves, which can, I guess, at times feel counterintuitive, because you want to chase. You know there's a propensity to want to chase every dollar or every opportunity.

Monte: 0:14

Welcome to the Executives Edge podcast. Discover what gives today's most successful executives their unique edge and propel your business to new heights. Today, Scott and Rafi are talking with Jen Tisdale, CEO at Grim Cybersecurity. Subscribe and follow us on all your favorite podcast channels.

Scott: 0:33

Just like to start off with just a basic question. I guess for both of you Can you share a specific success story where unique sales strategy significantly contributed to your business growth? Either of you.

Raffi: 0:49

Hi John, I'll let you get started, if you'd like.

Jennifer: 0:54

Sure thing. You know. I would say that the best key to success for Grim, in relation to sales and customer relation development, has simply been becoming ingrained in the community of the industries that we hope to serve. Being able, because of the niche area of cybersecurity that we live in, the ability to build trust with strategic partners and, hopefully, clients one day. Right is to be able to understand their pain points and to really get ingrained there. As much as I'd love to have a silver bullet solution that everybody can go to, I think it's market dependent, and so the number one thing that has helped us is to become ingrained in the communities that we want to serve and protect. It certainly has changed a lot over the last several years, especially with the pandemic and COVID and chip shortages and all of that that's been hitting our economy.

Jennifer: 1:51

Over the last several years, I've been with the company. I just turned six years old yesterday, as a matter of fact, on Janes. I've been working with the company for a long time. When I first joined the company, it was to build out our embedded systems security practice, which is more about where our digital and physical worlds intersect, and so that's a relatively new area of cybersecurity, maybe a decade old, but that's really pushing it to say that it's been an industry unto itself for 10 plus years. So very nascent area. We've had to build it from the ground up.

Jennifer: 2:34

The go to market strategy, historically for our industry is to build out our own security systems. So very nascent area, we've had to build it from the ground up. The go to market strategy, historically for us, has been hiddenged on traditional enterprise security, network security, it security services. We don't provide product solutions, so we augment staff or we come in with our indeed teams and do some pen testing and understand where the systems are weak and vulnerable and help our clients, you know, harden the resilience of those systems. But we have changed our strategy over the course of the last two and a half years and pivoted more to a focus of where we see cyber going in the future. So less important to us is where it is today, but more important where technologies are going, and I think we can all appreciate that we're living in this increasingly connected world. Right, we have a bunch of IoT devices for convenience, for consumer goods, to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of other business models. Right, leaning heavily on tech and so us understanding that the introduction of additional lines of code. Additional technologies also create security challenges, and for us to be there for our clients to support them through that, to hold their hand and to really be more of cyber counselors, if you will, versus consultants or hackers or researchers, to help them understand the business nuance of the tech integration that they're doing. So that's really where the go to market strategy has taken us.

Jennifer: 4:14

We have identified target markets that we concentrate on in terms of our limited resources for marketing and sales.

Jennifer: 4:22

Right is to identify the markets with the highest growth potential, which for us, is advanced transportation mobility important for us to be able to, to advance transportation mobility important for those of us who live in the Metro, detroit, michigan area and beyond.

Jennifer: 4:34

That's all modalities of mobility air, sea, ground and then, of course, shared transportation, shared mobility, public transit, healthcare, medical devices, things that have high touch regulation or things that we have to be more mindful of for HIPAA concerns or patient information security concerns, of course, protecting health and physical well being as well in both of those areas. So it ties security to safety more regularly. And then our third pocket for market identification has been in the critical infrastructure space, which really is that overarching ecosystem for all the things we've talked about. Where do vehicles operate? Where does public transit connect to critical infrastructure, whether it's grid oil and gas, electricity, right like water supply, things of that nature that we get called up for to secure those infrastructure elements, either for commercial or for our government partners? So we've targeted those three areas as our exclusive target markets where we're going to put time and energy into growing. That doesn't mean that we don't do other work.

Raffi: 5:58

It just means we're not spending the sales dollars there, if that makes sense, jen, are you selling as your sales, sales process and target direct to the end user, to enterprise clients, or are you and how do you partner with and you mentioned the community that you're consistently around? I'm presuming the managed services space, or some people that are actually doing managed services for clients, might be a partnership. How do you, how do you interact with the ecosystem of the IT services managed services partnerships that are out there that are also providing some level of security in the market?

Jennifer: 6:35

Yeah, I think the rule number one for us is we do not agree with overselling ourselves, which can, I guess, at times feel counterintuitive because you want to chase.

Jennifer: 6:47

You know there's a propensity to want to chase every dollar or every opportunity, but it doesn't serve us or, ultimately, our clients very well with that mindset. So where we have been strong is saying we can't help you, but we know people who can. Right, we don't fall into our space, it's not our sweet spot. So having strategic alliance has really been a benefit, not just to us, because hopefully in turn they do the same for Grim, but we can then introduce new relationships for people who do certain things better than we do, and so having managed services as strategic partners to us has really helped build out our portfolio and, at the end of the day, our clients trust us more by saying we don't do that, we're not the right fit for you. It's that transparency that has really endeared our company and our team to our clients' teams. Right, they know they're not going to get a line of BS from us. Nobody can do all things well all the time, and so that for us has been really meaningful for us in our partnership strategies.

Scott: 7:56

I've got a question for you, rafi, because I know I deal with new technology coming to the market all the time. We've got a lot of traditional sales methods and implementation that we do. How do you handle the more new, innovative products that are coming down the line that will affect sales? There's so many tools getting implemented. How do you balance that with your customers?

Raffi: 8:19

Yeah, you know what? Those are great questions. We have the prevalence of AI and what we do in almost all areas, right, and you know I've had a chance to talk about it before. Artificial intelligence is something that can help us get to the information a lot quicker. I think there are tools out there that can get you as Jen was mentioning earlier the target market that you're going after and getting an idea of what the landscape looks like, what the top 200, 500 opportunities are, and getting a really good tools that can tell you what's the best way for you to get to that end client. It doesn't also get away from the methodology that's been in place over the last probably 10 plus years, where marketing is so prevalent and clients are looking to self-educate themselves. Probably 60, 70% of the way there before they want to talk to someone that's got that title that is a salesperson, right. So I think sales engineering has been a very large component of what we do. But you know, a lot of these clients want to learn on their own, they want to do research on their own. So that multi-touch campaign, which probably used to be six and seven when I first started in sales, you know a couple of emails and calls and somebody wants to speak to you is probably now the last couple of reports I looked at. Apollo had a really good session and a webinar out there that talked about a 14-15 touch campaign, with getting creative on how to be able to get your clients' interest levels. So I think AI and many of the tools add to that component, but at the end of the day, we still do need again being in the community, being a trusted advisor, learning the like, get to know, like, eventually get to trust and, especially with what Jen you do, I'm fascinated by the work that you guys do. There has to be such a high level of trust that you have to build with a client and it's not done by one or two sales calls or a well-crafted email.

Raffi: 10:14

I think there's a lot of different elements and tools, but it all comes back to the basics of build rapport with your clients, understand where their pain points are, identify those pain points and, rather than be one or four or five companies coming in and providing a bid or a proposal identifying pain and I think you know, with many of the clients I work with, if you happen to be the person that helps them identify a pain point that's there and how to be able to solve it. Most consumers, especially businesses, are too busy to sit back and say I'm gonna look at four or five other providers that are doing what you're doing. You've come to me with an issue that I've got, you've got a solution here and you're really just building that rapport and saying I'm here to help you on party or fabric in your organization. And that's where I think that there's a misconception or or a Misstep.

Raffi: 11:01

Sometimes in some, some accompanies they believe I mean there is a numbers game as well. But you know, if you again, if you're one or four or five people that is looking at purchasing this mouse, for example, you become a commodity if you can tell them what this mouse can do for their productivity, their business and how to make more money in what they do. I think that's the, the the clothes ratios are a lot higher. Your credibility is so much higher with the clients and it Could be from something as as complex and as as important as cybersecurity all the way down to, you know, selling cell phones or whatever it may be. There said there's a product or solution in all capacities, but I think a lot of the strategies and and tools that are out there, tools, you know. Many of them are attached to AI. I think I just dares enablers and be able to help us out.

Jennifer: 11:48

I Love that you bring that up, because so much of what we have to do is data-driven right? Data-driven marketing and sales. We don't. We're a small company so we don't have the resources to have a robust sales team or a robust marketing team, but being able to leverage things like geo targeting with social media platforms or being able to understand what sites our clients are going to or what conferences they're at or where do they reside, and then Putting our message in front of them, because if we had to rely on them finding us, it leaves too much to chant, so we want to get in front of them digitally if we can.

Jennifer: 12:28

For, being a small company, we have a pretty broad brand recognition, which I'm very proud of, because people are surprised to learn that we're only like 30 people big. They're like oh, we thought you were a couple hundred people big, because everyone's heard or is familiar with the brand in the communities and markets we serve. But that's because we've been able to get out in front of them, either digitally through AI driven Social media campaigns or physically in person to build those relationships. But I do agree with you, rafi. Like the tech is so important, ai is so important to the future of our sales Campaigns, if you will, but we have to be able to couple that with the human touch too, so we don't see being replaced wholly in that way.

Raffi: 13:12

Quick question to maybe for Scott as well, but, jennifer, I'll start with you is With. Many of the clients that Scott and I probably work with are in that sub 50 person company where the CEO's got multiple hats to wear on, to wear as we probably do. What is your? What is your? What is your area of expertise? How do you focus on the sales element? Do you have a sales leader in place or are you sitting in that seat as well? And how do you pivot between kind of selling, running the business, the R&D components and all of the other things that you've got?

Jennifer: 13:48

Yeah. So I don't wanna imply that I do it all myself that would be an overreach but I do lead those efforts within the company. But we do have people that I lean on to help, you know, be the evangelists, the advocates of the work that we do out in the world, and largely they are our engineers here in the company. Only because at this point in time in the work that we do, I feel like it's premature to have somebody who's a dedicated sales resource, because we have to do so much education on what we do and not to say we won't get there over time but we're not there yet. So the engineers will come to the table with the technical aspects of the solutions that they're providing or the awareness that they're providing for vulnerabilities in systems, networks, products. But I'm there to balance that out with the business perspective and understanding, so that if they bring their executive to the table or their senior leader to the table, that I can be there to talk about the business concerns that they need to be mindful of as well.

Jennifer: 14:56

It would be unreasonable for me to put my engineers in that position solo. So we do try to provide that ying and yang approach in conversations and advocacy and sales calls where they can hear the tech expert talk about the tech but then have me there to balance with the business perspective that they're also longing to understand. How those worlds come together we don't have. So I do wear all the hats in terms of like marketing and sales overall, but I provide the vision and the strategy and then ask my team to help execute against it, because some of our people are experts in critical infrastructure. I am not, so I need them to be able to go in the world and understand what the pain points are, what the solution opportunities are and how we can help, and to introduce that conversation there.

Raffi: 15:49

Sounds like you're the quarterback leading that charge, scott, in your case with some of the clients that you work with, especially with clients that are going through that evolution of, hey, we're still kind of small, we're growing, but we don't have the resources right now for a full-time sales team or a full effort marketing team, how have you handled that with clients that you've got that are more at the infancy of building out their sales and marketing structure as they evolve and grow the head count of the organization?

Scott: 16:17

Yeah, absolutely good question. And as you probably are seeing, rafi, most of my business owners are the top revenue generator in their own company and they do wear a lot of hats. The beauty about bringing in anybody fractional whether it's a CFO, hr, operations and, in our case, sales bringing in somebody that comes in and actually does the work and frees up the owner so they can get back into the business and why they got into it in the first place. And when they're building a team from scratch, or if they have like one or two sales people, I always take the approach to first build the infrastructure, make sure everything is intact. Infrastructure meaning sales process, workflow, pipeline management, make sure the CRM is up to speed, tie compensation plans to the important KPIs of the company and get all that in place before you bring on additional people. Because when you bring on new people, they will come into a sales process that is very regimented. Each stage along the way, going from lead qualification all the way to closed, one is gonna have standard operating procedures on every single stage. So they know when to upload documents, they know when to ask certain questions like discovery questions on budget timeline, and when a salesperson comes into a business that there's actually a good process. They tend to be the owners tend to retain them longer.

Scott: 17:55

I have had several instances of businesses that were just kind of free fall. They wanted to hire the salespeople first to get some revenue so they could then hire me to go in and create that infrastructure. But when a salesperson comes into chaos, they usually don't last very long because they just feel like the business just doesn't have the systems in place to really support the salespeople. And that is obviously very important. So just making sure that everything's in place and then bring the people on and grow from there, and then you learn best practices from all the salespeople.

Scott: 18:33

Ai is such a big thing. I implement it with all my customers to some extent or the other. It could be list creation, where they really narrow down to oh gosh, they even use the invasive cell phone numbers and they get emails. Well, those are at least good qualified leads that these people can call. And just building off of that regenerative AI that summarizes conversations, lists out, next steps, push a button, it goes into the CRM so leadership can see exactly what's going on. So it just kind of builds upon itself and the inertia goes as you're building your team and you learn from your other members of the team and then implement them.

Raffi: 19:20

Speaking of CRMs might be a decent conversation. Have Jennifer? Have you invested in a CRM for your organization and how did that process go and selecting a CRM?

Jennifer: 19:34

You know we found the CRMs to be a very process burdensome initially, I'll say it that way. But we have found a solution, a CRM solution that has been user-friendly for all in the company. It gives us the place to be able to add on as we grow, we can increase our services, increase the number of seats that we buy into for the program right, so it will expand with us. It has really been helpful in communication, though. Right For maintaining relationships with existing clients so that they never go totally cold. But it's only as good as your ability to use it right, and that has been more of a challenge, quite honestly, within my small organization than anything else.

Jennifer: 20:32

It's like okay, we've collected the data.

Jennifer: 20:35

How are we going to use the data consistently?

Jennifer: 20:38

How are we going to use the contact information that we have in a meaningful way, being sensitive to not spamming inboxes too frequently, because I don't want to become white noise.

Jennifer: 20:50

I want them to see a communication from our company and say, oh, grimm's reaching out. They must have something good for me, right, like I want them. I want to have high click rate on open, and so that has been a struggle for us in figuring out the right cadence of communication and what communication makes the most sense. So over time we've evolved into if we have a special deal going on or if we have a new service provision, or if we have opinions or thoughts on cybersecurity trends in the markets that we serve, we will push that out via the CRM, and that also enables us to capture the frequency and cadence of that communication. And then, of course, if they respond to us, that gets automatically collected, and so that's been very helpful to automate those processes for my people, because I don't have a sales team right, I'm using engineers to do that, and so I have to keep it as easy of a process as possible but provide meaningful information to our client base.

Raffi: 22:00

You're doing it the right way. I think it's interesting. Based on what Scott mentioned, I echo that especially when you're at the point you are, as a business, saying, hey, listen, we're not at a point where I can hire full-time salespeople. I hope to get to that eventually as the business grows. But building the sales engine the way you are, I think, is a fantastic way to do this and it's interesting. Even clients that probably both Scott and I come across. It's a lot of that work's not done, even a CRM system. So you've got all these leads and all of this work you've done from digital marketing et cetera, but you haven't actually housed it somewhere. And in many cases, especially if it's a founder-led sales organization, as we've mentioned, when you've got multiple different hats you're wearing. One of the areas that you have a hard time with is detail in every one of those disciplines. And if you're not updating it as you mentioned, jen, updating the CRM and making it part of your fabric and doing it consistently, what happens when you fast forward a year, two years, three years and you've got a sales team there? You wanna go back to some of those old opportunities that just time and circumstance were not intersecting at the time it wasn't an interest level they had.

Raffi: 23:07

I have an interesting story that came up the other day. I really love this one. I'm with a client of mine and he's making a sales call. So I'm on the other side. He's the CEO and he decides to make the sales call and we're talking to this prospect and they're using a competitor's product and the CEO is very eager to say all right, I'd like to see how I can actually go ahead and shift that business over. I know we've got a superior product and quality, et cetera, and goes through his features and eventually the client's like listen, I took the phone call, I'd be happy to talk to you, but because the CEO reached out out of respect, I wanna take the meeting, but ideally I wanna make sure that I'm saving some cost here over what I'm doing and was looking at our products as kind of commodities.

Raffi: 23:47

It's interesting as the conversation went on he's leaning towards cost savings, the CEO's going on features and at one point the gentleman stopped and said you know, I actually know who you guys are. I get emails from your organization and I've had for the last two years. I've got a folder here, decides to share screen shows a folder he has and all of the communication, and again the salesperson who works for me in this organization sitting next to me. I called on them two plus three years ago. So the database, or our pipe drive, which we're using at times. The database had all the info. But what was really interesting is the client then opening up and saying, yeah, I've been following you guys, I actually get all the info and I've kept it. And of course, I lean over to the salesperson and I say everything we presume is not happening is happening behind the scenes.

Raffi: 24:34

All of those touch points are important to people. Like you mentioned earlier, jen, with Grim, you want to make sure the message is clear, concise, coming to them at the right time and not white noise. This particular client and the opportunity. It couldn't have been done any better.

Raffi: 24:49

I should have recorded that meeting and played it back to most of my salespeople and saying trust me, every step along the way moves you an inch closer. You're just not seeing what's happening behind the curtain. You have to trust that the process works and you know back to crediting you as how you're building out your sales structure. All of these things are so important because the biggest mistake we could make sometimes is bring a salesperson, put them into an environment where there's no accountability, structure and process, and potentially the cost associated with hiring a highly skilled salesperson and then having them leave out at four, five, six, eight months is the biggest mistake I think we could make as a business. It's just throwing somebody at the problem but not giving them the tools and the structure. So we don't see you, and I'm glad to hear some of the things you're already building in your organization.

Jennifer: 25:36

That is very promising for me to hear, because I often wonder like are we doing it the right way? Are we doing the right things, and can we at some point create an environment where that full-time or part-time or contracted sales support person can thrive? And you just said it, and I think it's very enlightening that if you can't create the environment or the culture for them to thrive and be successful, then you're not ready to grow your sales team yet. Would be my takeaway on that and please correct me if I'm wrong right, because I would hate nothing more than to invest time and resources into a salesperson or team and then have them leave a few months later and have to start all over again. That just feels so deflating to me in theory, right? So anything that can be structured ahead of time so that I can avoid that scenario is very helpful information.

Raffi: 26:34

Many times what I end up hearing from clients is you know, we've tried this before salespeople don't work in my industry or in my business and they hired somebody two or three years ago, they hired somebody a year and a half ago and a lot of it. When you kind of peel the onion back, a lot of it is two things. One is as a sales leader. Especially if you're not coming from a sales background and you're more engineering, you're wired a little bit differently and you're the builder of the actual technology. Many times a lot of CEOs are interviewing salespeople through the same lens that they would an engineer or a back office individual, whomever it may be. They're using a lot of the same methodology and salespeople by trade are engaging. They're gonna be able to answer questions as what they do for a living. But because they didn't actually interview to look for the sales skill rather than the domain or the industry they're in, they hired a mishire and somebody went ahead and took the job, came into an environment that wasn't structured, they promised a lot of things and five or six months later it didn't work out. Maybe a year later it didn't work out.

Raffi: 27:41

It doesn't mean salespeople don't work in that industry. It means let's go ahead and hire for the skills that we're looking for. Are you gonna hire them as a salesperson? Can they sell? Do they have the capabilities of having substantive conversation with people that don't know as much about their product or service? Can they identify pain points, building that out? But also really important is building that structure for them to be successful in that, because, again, culture and a sales culture is very important to have in an organization, especially when you're going through that evolution and the growth of the company is yeah, you wanna engineer, you wanna build out the product and scenario.

Raffi: 28:16

But once you get to the point where you have to monetize this, to keep all that labor there, and as you're going through that monetization, do you have a sales culture? And it usually starts with the leadership team and is there a culture of sales? Because if we don't bring that deal in, we can't engineer a cross-sell it, upsell it, implement it and all of those different elements unless you bring that deal in the house. So yeah, I'm probably going a little bit too far into it, but kudos to you. Like I said, it's, you're building a lot of things there. And, to answer your question, you will be successful when you hire salespeople, but you just do it at the right time with the right resources and at the right position of the organization. What do you think of that?

Scott: 28:56

I'm too happy to hear there's so many elements, as we've discussed, that do weigh into the possibility of salespeople leaving the organization. You hit a nail on the head. There's three of them culture, speed of the team, speed of the leader it usually starts with the owner and secondly, having a sales process, as we've discussed. Have all of the structure in place to hold on, have a system. The third, which is very important, that I think almost has the most weight, is a compensation plan that is a win-win for the employee and the employer and probably obviously you gotta be in tune with what the market is paying. But you look at on-target earnings. You'll have 50% of that on-target earnings. It's gonna be your base salary. The other 50% is going to be your commissions, variable pay, bonuses. And you take that other 50% let's just say on-target earnings is $100,000, you're gonna have $50,000 to work with on commissions, bonuses or what have you. But you take that and weight it out on the importance of the KPIs you want them to achieve.

Scott: 30:09

It's not any real secret that salespeople follow the money and if you set up that variable pay with the most weight behind, say gross margin, that might be one of your most important KPIs. It could be just revenue, it could be customer satisfaction, but you need to make sure that they're driving towards all the important KPIs in the company and that it is a win-win. If you have a brand new plan, you wanna take a look at it at least within the quarter to just make sure nobody's at the disadvantage, whether it's the employer or the employee. Now feel free to modify it and then, once it gets into place, tend to hit. You know, just say you streamline, they're using that particular plan for a while, then revisit it yearly. So it's really important to make sure everything's in place from a paid perspective, or there's a good chance that you might have turnover.

Raffi: 31:04

I'm actually going through one of those right now. Interestingly enough, scott and Jen, it's compensation plan was built and we have a more mature team. This is about five or six salespeople. Two of the salespeople have been on this plan for about six or seven months and have come in and said listen, I'm gonna need a little bit more. It's competitive market out there and as a business owner you gotta balance around, say, all right, do I go ahead and pay just to be able to retain someone and it's gonna be outside the budget that I can allocate for this. And you know the client and I have been kind of talking and said, well, why don't we create a plan here?

Raffi: 31:38

There are some flaws in your current compensation plan that can be in the benefits of what's in the best interest of the company and how can you pay for it. Just to give you an idea, they've got a gross margin component they introduced about six months ago. It was based on revenue only before and it's gone to gross margin now. The challenging thing is the gross margin caps at 15% and it was, you know, zero to 8%, you get paid this. Eight to 15, you get paid this, and 15% plus you get paid. Let's say, you know, 1%. The challenging thing is there's deals coming in that could be at 30 and 35 and 40% gross margin. The salespeople have the capability of dictating that. So, with the plan the way it is, I remember talking to the CEO saying where do you think most of your deals are gonna come in at? Because, well, we've seen higher margin. I said, yeah, you probably moved from eight and 10 to probably 16 and 17%, but it doesn't benefit that salesperson to get that margin anything above 16 or 17% right now. And they can do that. So the two small elements we added to the plan. I said why don't we put a 15 to 23%, 23 to 35 and then even put a 40% plus, which might be North Star and aspirational, because you may not be able to get too many deals there. But unless you put a plan in there that has that capability, and guess what, if you get a 42% gross margin deal that comes in from this deal, the salesperson is gonna be ecstatic because they got a nicer commission. You as a business owner got a ton of additional margin on that deal and it's a win-win, it's a revenue share. So we augmented that first.

Raffi: 33:11

And the second thing we looked at is that you're paying existing accounts and new logos pretty much at the same caliber. You know an account that's been with the company two and three years. You're paying the same commission as the brand new one you brought in the door. Well, there's so much more value and more difficulty in selling a deal and getting the first 12 months out of it. Why don't we go ahead and add a component there that gives a multiplier 1.2%, you know, 1.2 times 20% kicker for an account that comes in the first 12 months. This way again, once you bring it in the door, you know sales people are going to be around but they may not be in your company for three and four and five years. But bringing that account in, then you can actually go ahead and create your account management structure and cross, sell, upsell, get referrals from it all of those different, various elements. So, very quickly we just added those two components.

Raffi: 34:00

That shows the salesperson they can make more money. Here's your ability. You don't need to go to a competitor. We've got things built in that if you drive towards what's in the best interest of the company, I'm going to pay you exponentially, based on kind of a revenue share between us and really excited about this. I got a call about it tomorrow to be able to roll this out to the team and they're going to be ecstatic. That's the big thing is with salespeople. Anytime you put any kind of a capacity cap on it whether it be dollars, percentages, you name it they're going to follow exactly. I mean, they're brilliant at looking at a compensation plan and maximizing that. That's what you want them to do. You want them to do.

Jennifer: 34:36

So the only thing you're limiting is yourself as the company, exactly.

Raffi: 34:40

I think somehow somebody in finance probably put that together and said we want this person to make $52,000 a year, and here's your OTE. Well, great. What about paying them $82,000 if they can go ahead and put this much more into the business? So not rocket-sized, but it's one of those where it's just it's. Sometimes we build these things and we over engineer them to try and figure out all the things we don't want to do, rather than just open it up and say you do the right thing for the company and for your clients, compensate the salesperson and make sure. It's a nice little trifecta that works really well, right, right.

Scott: 35:13

And when you cap, rafi, when you cap your performance, like you mentioned, like 15% gross profit, well, the path of least resistance is going to be the lower gross profit. Salespeople can sell anything if you give it away, and that's kind of what happens. They get content and making money. At that 15% there's nothing that really matters. It really is driving them to go any higher. So why not take the path of least resistance and just kind of keep it at that level where they've been capped? So, to your point, make it in stages. The higher the gross profit in this case is going to be just rewarding for both the business owner and the employer or the salesperson.

Scott: 35:51

So I do have one question for you, jen, with that, if we've got time. The landscape out there has been ever changing and from a sales perspective and I know you are the driver of sales from a sales perspective, how do you adapt to different markets, different personas? I know you've probably got your set customer that's your good ICP or your ideal customer profile but you do have different personas, you have different markets. How does that affect your sales strategy on how you approach the different personas and markets, demographics?

Jennifer: 36:35

Yeah. So it's more of a marketing conversation or more of a storytelling challenge than it is a service provision challenge, because we are providing the same value, the same service, from market to market, but how we tell the story of what we're doing and why we're doing slightly varies. We're telling a very different story, I think, for medical devices than we are for public transportation, but we have to be able to understand those pain points that we talked about in the very beginning. So I guess we'll go full circle on this discussion. Right is we have to be able to pivot based on the concerns and changes of the markets that we're serving. We've seen an automotive slight change.

Jennifer: 37:21

So, though it's a very nascent career in automotive cybersecurity, five years ago they were all about discovering what the vulnerabilities were, where the code could break, what could go wrong.

Jennifer: 37:34

We didn't have any regulations, we didn't have best practices, we didn't have any standards to which the industry needed to comply, and now we're starting to see the emergence of those regulations, and so they're they've pivoted.

Jennifer: 37:48

So we must also pivot to be more compliance focused, right? So it's not just about the break of the technology, it's how do we keep you in good standing with the compliance, and so we have to be able to be nimble and ebb and flow with the industries that we're serving, just as much as we need to have good technical skills right, and so, for me, that's where that understanding of the business, of the market, is incredibly important, and, whether that comes from me or a sales team, somebody needs to be paying attention to those industry trends and communicate back back to our technical team so that they can change their approach or change, you know, the service provision accordingly, and sometimes it's easy to do and sometimes it's difficult to do, especially in a global market where the regulations or the things that we need to be mindful of change from country to country, and that becomes increasingly difficult without having dedicated teams to track that.

Raffi: 38:51

Well, scott and I being salespeople being on here, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't give you an opportunity to be able to tell people how to get a hold of you, how we can actually get someone to engage with Grim. So, if you want to give us a little bit of an overview and how to be able to get a hold of you, john, yeah, well, real simple.

Jennifer: 39:08

We're on all the social platforms. You can find us at grimcybercom, at grimcyber on X formerly Twitter at grimcyber, on LinkedIn and Facebook, and you can find me, jennifer Tisdale, on LinkedIn or email me at info at grimgrim-cocom and we would be happy to figure out if we can help you.

Scott: 39:35

And Rafi, how about yourself? How do people get in touch with you if they've got a need for a sales structure and process?

Raffi: 39:43

Yeah, rafi Yardimian, the company name is Boston Sales Solutions the best way, and I think I spent way too much time on it, but LinkedIn is probably the best place, rafi Yardimian, and my email is Rafi at salesaccelerationcom. Those are all great ways to be able to find and connect with me and be happy to help any clients that have a need and are going through that growth phase where they want to bring in a sales team. It's interesting. My clients are kind of in two phases either similar to you, jen, where they're still building out the sales foundation and are trying to figure out when do I bring the sales team in but I need to solidify that and they're not as articulate and eager to want to be in the sales processes you are.

Raffi: 40:25

Some people are like that's kind of icky, I'd like to stay out of it, and the others are a little bit more mature, like the group I mentioned to you, where there's already a sales team in place, similar to some of the clients, scott Scott, where we come in and we run the sales team, because the icky part that the CEO doesn't want to deal with is managing salespeople, because that's not their nature. Scott, how about you? How do people get ahold of you?

Scott: 40:49

Well, I'm Scott Tappin. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I've got a website, s3sewincom. That basically stands for Strategic Sales Solutions, and we are powered by sales acceleration. Any questions that you need to contact me directly, you can contact me via cell phone 248-515-8799,. Or you can contact me via email, which is stappin T-O-Z-T-O-M-A-P-P-A-N at salesaccelerationcom. And I do appreciate your time, jen. This has been awesome. Like I said, I learned from all my customers, all my peers, and there's quite a bit that I just picked up from you, and I just think it's awesome. Rafi, you've always been a great advisor for sales acceleration. You and I used to have informal sessions when we were new and right now, it's just really fun to watch you blossom and grow to where you stand with sales acceleration. So a great job this past year and good luck to you in 2024.

Raffi: 41:54

Like I said, a great job. Look forward to collaborating and this is a lot of fun. And, Jen, thank you so much for jumping on and providing us some context and info.