Selling Through Curiosity

Overview

Oh, I loved this episode. I recorded it a while ago, back in q4, so sorry for the delay, but it is still so.

Pertinent, pertinent, pertinent. Yeah. Josh Martin, Josh joins me to talk about all sorts of things. But really, the highlight I took away from him is some of the tech he's using it, how he engages with his audience in a way that brings the product to life. So it's really hard

to sell a product without showing it. And it's really hard nowadays, especially to get anybody on the phone to be able to show them the product. So Josh actually gives us really interesting ways of how he's been able to bring the product to life and allow people to access it before they even have to talk to a salesperson.

Though seriously, he's doing it. And apparently, it was an absolute absolute game changer for him. We talked about some other things around the SDR team,

and Account Based Marketing. But, but this piece is the part you're going to want to take notes on and lead and lead in folks. Little bit about Josh.

Josh is an experienced cybersecurity leader with a strong background across technical business development go to market roles. He enjoys blending his unique technical background to translate real problems into positive, attainable business outcomes. His strengths include Product Marketing Solutions, and value selling competitive intelligence and enablement, sales, technical partner enablement, and go to market biz dev activities around Technical Marketing, partnerships. Add that in that comes across loud and clear. And my conversation today with Josh, so yeah, enjoy. Here's my conversation.

Transcript

Kerry: Hi, Josh, thank you for joining me on Tea Time with tech marketing leaders.

Josh: Awesome. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Kerry: I'm excited to have you. It's a it's early for you.

Josh: Yes. It's actually only about 9am out on the East Coast right now. But working for a foreign Israeli company. You often I end up getting up a lot earlier. So we have some trade offs. We work really early. They work really late. Every every morning is an early start for me. I'm not a morning person who would not work for me. But so kudos to you. Just Coffee Coffee gets you through it. All you need.

Kerry: Cheers. Cheers to that.

Josh: Cheers. Exactly.

Kerry: Amazing, Josh. Well, I'm so excited to have you before we jump into the heart of our conversation today. Why don't you share your story? What do you do? And how did you get there?

Josh: Absolutely. So currently, I'm a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at a company called the Yolo. Cy Oh, hello. And yes, it stands for because you only live what the buyer members that brought from 2012 I think. So we operate in the identity and access management space, which is actually where I've been for the past few years in my career.

Josh: Kind of interestingly enough, I, I always love tech, I always want to get in tech, I had a really great, you know, teacher in high school, we had one of the only like curriculums in the state or like we built a computer like my freshman year, you know, we had the only Linux curriculum. So I got exposed to us really early on. And I got an internship when I was in high school, working with a nearby university through family friend, all this stuff and working in their networking team. And I told myself, I hate networking, I don't want to do this. I just want to build computers, and then I end up falling in love with networking.

Josh: And then I told myself, I'd never get into collaboration, I did that. And at that time, I said never get into security. And now I've been here for the past like three and a half years I feel like out in the security space. So prior to clo I was at Z scalar also kind of operating in the Secure Access Service edge Iam space. Before that I was at Cisco for a couple of years. And I was very privileged to spend two of those years with Duo Security right after they got acquired. So really, you know, I've spent some time with some really, really fantastic companies seen some really fantastic products. You know, and I really liked kind of blending both technical perspective back into the business side of things. Because you know so much as we want go after the C

Josh: So he's in the big business makers, but we leave the people who are actually implementing the products out of it. So I really like to partner with them, you know, and help support our sales team there. So that's a little bit about, you know, kind of my background, how I ended up here. I'm kind of one of the weird, you know, no degree college dropout stories. I'm waiting for my Mark Zuckerberg moment where, you know, I make $30 million, or something because of that.

Josh: But no, I actually, I dropped out of college about three semesters in to go work at Cisco. So it's, you know, I, I'm a weird case, I'll just put it that way. I have to.

Kerry: How did you get a job? Because I feel like this whole idea of getting a job without a degree is kind of like people, it's still being worked on in terms of being accepted. So it is, how did you do that?

Josh: Yeah, it's written. I'm kind of glad you brought that up. Because it's one of those like, it's being approached, I feel like kind of with more openness from a lot of employers. Also you look, I'm, I'm a tick tock fanatic. I hate to admit it. But you see, like everything on there, like it's almost being romanticised you know, about working in tech without a degree. Without these things, I think what it really comes down to, you know, there's always the fight of, you know, do you go after certifications, you go after experience, do you go after that degree. And, you know, I will always agree, experience trumps everything. And I was very fortunate to have a family friend, when I was in high school, told me get an interview with an internship, also, the guy helped me, you know, learn all those different, you know, pads, I could take her I needed to do to kind of take those on. But a lot of it just came from, you know, self teaching. For my 16th birthday, I didn't ask for a car, I asked for a Dell PowerEdge server, and I got that. And so I just started playing with, you know, whatever free enterprise tools, I can get my hands on, you know, deploying them. So a lot of it was self taught, but I really had, you know, some great mentors along the way. So, I definitely agree College is a waste for a lot of people. I really think, you know, certain fields obviously need it. I don't want an uneducated Doctor operating on me.

Josh: I want to get by though, you know, but at the same time, you know, it's not for everybody, you know, a lot of people are more geared, you know, to just go straight working, that's why I want to do as one start making money as fast as possible. So I hopped right into the workforce. And we're really seeing especially in North Carolina, we have a lot of, you know, we have to Research Triangle Park, we have a lot of great educational institutions. And a lot of our community colleges actually have now full tech programme, you know, we have like disco in the park, and we have disco programme to a lot of our community colleges. So it's things are changing in the educational space, and I love to see it. You know, and I will say my, you know, five, six years in tech now, not once has it ever been an issue, you know, and I always lead with that. I'm like, Hey, I don't have a degree. I know, some of y'all are crazy about this, because a lot of companies just want you know, they want 30 People with a Harvard MBA, or they want this many people from this school. But no, I'm always like, Hey, I don't have a degree and they're just like, Okay, we really don't care. Because college is there. They'll teach you about the tech space. Now, you know, they teach you all the foundational but basic things and you're going to use but you don't use every day. So yeah, that's a very long winded way for me to say I think college is a waste of time, but

Oh, well.

Kerry: Yeah, I my mom's a teacher. And so I never really knew that I could do anything different. Like I was set on the course to college. And I didn't really have a say or did I think that I could have like I, I didn't think I could get a job without having a degree. So I did the college thing. But there was a sliding door for me. My soft. My freshman going into sophomore year, I did this amazing internship with a photographer in Philadelphia. And I started the stylists started picking me up to support them and paying me and it was really good money. And I was like,

what I couldn't like I sort of wonder, had I done that what my career path would have looked like which would be very different and probably actually in the field I'd gone after which was geography. So it is this interesting sort of sliding door and I I think for what we do, especially like you can I think you can learn it on the job.

Josh: I think the challenge is you got to find the right. I'm going to call them kids because they're you know, 16-18 year olds who haven't left home yet and don't know what it is to live on their own. So it is college does help that way.

Josh: lawyer that structure. So to immediately be tossed into the job market without having any sense of like adulting a set is sort of this leap of faith that we got to take as businesses, but I do think we need to start figuring that out. I agree, you know, in, you know, just like what he said, in high school, I thought college was my only option, you know, it was, you know, for that was, I academically peaked in high school, you know, when you're, you know, kind of in that, like, top 10, they're just like, Nope, you're going to college, you're going to want to talk you That's it, that's your only plan, you know, and I brought up, I don't know, if I want to know, you have to go. And that's just why everybody thinks you have to do it's like you have, you know, if you go into to a trade school community college are looked down upon, right. So no, it's a very, it's a very interesting, you know, I, I'm very happy to see over the next five years, kind of what happens, you know, with educational requirements, even bachelors now are being stripped, you know, from a lot of, you know, job descriptions, job openings. So, it'll be very interesting to see, I hope that, you know, I think tech is kind of leading that. But, you know, no, you don't need a, you don't need all of that you don't need all that debt. You know, to to get that knowledge. I'll say, Go pay your dues, though. I love how you started with internships. And I think that's really a great way to get your foot in the door and start and start doing that. Absolutely, you're not gonna be making, you know, the same, the same money, but you're gonna be starting earlier. So it's, and you're not gonna be, you're gonna be actually making some money versus accumulating debt. So is the offset there. I could talk about this all day. I'm very passionate about to Josh, I do. See what I get into too. I know, it's so good.

Kerry: What's one challenge you're currently facing right now?

Josh: Yeah, so personal life or work? Either both intertwine one leading to the other.

Josh: I will say, um, you know, I kind of, you know, lead with us, you know, we still have a multinational company, we're global. We're based out of Tel Aviv, Israel, you know, and one of the challenges, you know, that we're always facing, I think everybody kind of struggles with is communication. You know, and that is something that I think everybody and take this in my personal life, too, if we want, you know, we all struggle to communicate, especially in kind of, you know, the business environment, saying, hey, I need this done now, versus a week later, priorities don't get communicated properly. You know, there's a lot of cultural differences as well. I think one of the funniest is, I've ocln for a little over a year now. I was one of the, like, 30 employees somewhere around there.

Josh: You know, and we all use WhatsApp, constantly, we had slack, but we use WhatsApp. WhatsApp is not a business communication platform whatsoever, it was the most disorganised thing. So now we're getting everybody back into Slack. So we have that central place. But yet, we still have everybody talking to WhatsApp. So we're kind of, you know, trying to figure out that, you know, the best way there because, you know, I'm also a strong proponent of

Josh: when they're, you know, internally, if you're struggling to communicate, you're also struggling to communicate externally, right. If you know, messaging isn't agreed on internally, then you're sending out different messages to the market. You know, so that's just kind of one little challenge that we're dealing with now. I think the other is, you know, just being a Lean Startup, especially in today's you know, economic status for whatever we're in,

Josh: you know, that's always going to be a challenge and really kind of driving that, you know, urgency with our customers. You know, because working in security from a vendor side, everything's a priority, everything's urgent, you need to get this done, you're going to get breached, but from customer side, they're like, No, we don't think so. We're not target, right? Especially now they don't have money to spend. So a lot of that is, you know, trying to figure out you know, how to best speak to them how to get that urgency going. I think that's kind of a good little segue into the into, you know, kind of selling with curiosity. And kind of, you know, what buyers want these days because it's definitely changed. It has changed the way we sell has changed, it's had to change because of the demographic we're talking to, especially in the tech space with the types of books that we're selling and talking to you right, they can you know,vendor fluff and the Bs let's just be honest, if the BS a mile away, and, and a big piece of that is, you know, buyers are more informed now. I think

Josh: COVID really shifted because before it was, hey, I want to go buy some, you know, firewalls, cool, you call up your vendor, they take you out to lunch, if you do a few meetings in the office and you buy it, but nowadays, you're having to do a lot of that research on your own. You know, from a customer standpoint, they already know what they're looking for they they have their shortlist. And then so it's kind of trying to find that perfect medium of, okay, they already know enough about me, what do I tell them now to get them hooked?

Josh: And that's really where that kind of curiosity piece or to come in. So yeah, it's a very, our buyers have changed. And thing time, I think that the way we sell habit, and so now we're kind of, you know, having to figure that out. But I mean, I hate to beat a dead horse with it. But, you know, COVID had to change how we sold to, you know, people weren't used to selling virtually, it's a weird feeling to never interact with that person, you know, physically shake their hand do any of that kind of stuff. So, no, it's a lot of a lot of different variables that kind of culminated to this.

Josh: Polygon, I will say, we'll do a little Hebrew lesson. Polygon, basically mean pay off. I don't know if I can swear. But it should show basically, you can, you can bleep me if you want. But, you know, it'd be used a lot in like cases, but now it's kind of this volume gone of, you know,

Josh: we're both speaking different languages, right. So, yeah, yeah.

Kerry: So let's talk about buyers and their ability to do their own research. And I, I feel like they want to do their own research.

Josh: Is that absolutely, right. It's not out of enough. It's not just out of necessity. I think that's part of it. But I think it's that idea of control. And given, you know, and COVID certainly contributed to this. And the fact that how little control we had over pretty much everything, that the one thing we we could control was a bit more work, you know, on on the worksite. And now having all so much information at our fingertips, and it being digital, and now with the technology we have available and less gating and those sort of things, it's becoming more prevalent that not only can you know, not only do we want to have more control in doing the research, but we can, yes, absolutely, I yeah, I um, I kind of relate it back to like buying a car, like I use a lot of car analogies, I love cars. So but it's, you know, I'm not just going to gonna go walk on some, you know, law and have a salesman sell me until what II think I need, right? You know, you did this before I was born. But before, that's kind of what you had to do, you know, you just kind of rolled up, you let them tell you all the specs, they weren't posted, they could easily lie about something. And you know, you'd get something you didn't like, and you'd be stuck with it.

Josh: And, you know, now it's there's just so much information available from analysts, you know, you have the Gartner and Q's you have G twos, you have Capterra, you have all these abilities to not just go look at, you know, what the vendor says, but to get actual feedback from other customers, do they actually like it. And so, you know, prospects are coming in to, you know, kind of that first new business meeting, that discovery call, they're coming into that prep, they probably know your product better than you do sometimes. And so it's it's really starting to kind of tailor you know,

Josh: people understand what they want, it's kind of finding out that pain and driving them towards that, you know, why are you really looking at this? What kind of an impact is this going to make? Because, again, if you're going out looking for a Tahoe, and you get a Prius, you're gonna be a little pissed off. And vice versa. Just a little bit, right. Yeah.

Kerry: Yes, it's really interesting, because one of the things you mentioned early on it before, you know, in this, in, in this part of the conversation was tha buyers aren't aren't necessarily. What did you say? You said something around.

Was that around? Like, like how they know more about Ben? Ben, you do? I think I said something around there.

Josh: Yeah. Let's circle back to that. Because I think that's interesting. You know, the thing that came to mind for me, your analogy of cars was really good thing. And you know, and for me, and that, is that what's happening right now from when you're sick, right? You don't just immediately go to the doctor, you go to Google, you got a it tells you you have cancer or not. But of course, yes. You either have cancer or the common cold. Right, right. Um, so you had on, you know, went to the doctors with your Google list of all the things that it's possible. That's what it was. But what you said early on about buyers, it's all well and good and they come to you when they know that they have a problem. But if they don't know that they have a problem, or they don't think that they're susceptible to the problem.

Josh: Boom.

Josh: That then what? Like, exactly, exactly there, it's, it's kind of I think about kind of, you know, it's inbound, outbound, you know, inbound stuff coming in, they know they have a problem, but you know, whether it's like a compliance drive or an audit, something like that they have a need, they have a project, that outbound side is really where, you know, it's telling folks, you know, you're not as secure as you really think you are, you know, you have, you know, maybe you're not compliant, like you, like your auditor said, You are, maybe that pin tests only covered a certain, you know, little piece, and a lot of people just think they're good. And

Josh: this year, we've seen really, really newsworthy breaches, you know, from some, some big names, that I will not name, but that kind of paints the light of, oh, people are just going after these, you know, the big names, you know, what's my little 500? person company? You know, what do we have that people want? Reality? It's a lot.

Josh: You know, it's not just what kind of information can I scrape to do damage to your business, it's, I can get personal information from people, I can get their personal logins, everybody reads with passwords, I can go steal their identity, whatever. So it's kind of helping a lot of these smaller organisations say, No, you are just as successful, it's a second susceptible, I can never say that word is awful. But you know, you're, you're just as vulnerable as anybody else as these big names. I think a really good example is a lot of like, medical offices, especially kind of smaller, like franchise or cell phone, kind of, you know, clinic, they are hacked all the time, and nobody ever wants to talk about it. Because they have medical records in there, like, Hey, we're HIPAA compliant, we're good. But compliance doesn't equal security. And that's another kind of, you know, I'm taking this in 30 different directions here. But it's, you know, kind of helping people get that bridge between compliance is not security, they are two very different things. And I think, you know, from, from a marketing standpoint, it's really identifying those personas who identify with both because you have to convince multiple people about that. So that was very long winded, I went a bunch of different tangents, I'll pass it to, you know, I love tangents, because then I have lots to latch on to. So I'm grateful. I'm, in terms of outbound, and tactics, and going back to this concept of selling through curiosity.

Kerry: Does that really start with the sales team? Does it start with the marketing team?

Josh: And we talked a lot about some of this news that's happening.

Kerry: And I'm getting a little I'm gonna start getting a little bit tactical here, but like, how do you start to influence those smaller entities to say you are susceptible? This is a problem. And is that just through content and advertising? Or, you know, is that your sales team picking up the phone? What sort of, especially we were talking about being a lean startup and your resources being strapped? How, how have you approached these challenges?

Johs: Definitely, I think it's kind of it's, it's a combination of marketing and sales efforts, right? Everything always is it's the two organisations that always fight. But they're, I like to think of marketing and sales like siblings, right? You love each other, but you will also you know, beat each other down if you have to. I'm also an only child, so I don't, I don't know how that works. Thank you. Okay, so so you get it. I don't know how sibling stuff works. But I watch my twin site, and I'm like, this isn't normal. Stop it. My husband's like, I grew up with six siblings. This is totally normal. Yeah, my, my partner had, like, I think, like, 14 siblings or something. It feels like I learned them. I do one every single day. So yeah, I get that side. But um, going back, you know, it's combination. You know, on the marketing side, we have, you know, we'll do the ABM stuff, you know, we'll do the advertising we'll do the campaign work. You know, and we have that piece but then we also you know, we have one a fantastic SDR team that really helps us with a lot of that outreach and getting folks on the phone and this is where that kind of that combination of people already know what they want.

Josh: nd not trying you know, everybody's first habit, I feel like in tech, you get a cold call. They just give you a hidden minute, you know, word vomit on every single feature every single facet of their product, every single use case that they can do. But we look at kind of the concept of selling to curiosity it's we don't want to tell them everything right off the bat. We want to know what gets them interested. We want pique that curiosity and then to get those years turning. So it's, it's a you know, all of our SDR messaging is kind of built around that, you know,

Josh: One of our biggest use cases is protecting legacy apps. Now, we're not just gonna go and say, Hey, we protect your legacy apps by us now. Because nobody will write their Bundler things that say they can do that, you know, instead, we'll say something like, Hey, how many non SAML speaking applications do you have? And then that gets people thinking a lot more. We were at oktane octaves conference last week or the week before. And our, you know, our booth up our screen, we literally just that how many non family applications do you have? And the number of people that were just kind of like, oh, like, hey, that's me, I fall under that. Because I can say we do you know, zero trust network access, we do identity based access, we do secure remote access, we do these things. Cool. So does, you know, 30 other vendors, it's instead having leading with those differentiators and kind of getting people, you know, kind of thinking about that from a sales perspective.

Josh: And one other thing, and this was another kind of talk I want to talk about is the demo.

Josh: The demo is yours these days, right? I mean, how many I'm sure, you know, you get calls from STRS, you get demo requests for all different do podcasting tools, marketing tools, whatever. And, you know, we've all seen bad demos, we've, I've given plenty of bad demos myself. And you know, it's I don't want, again, kind of going back people know what they want, I'm not gonna book a 30 minute meeting with you and go over every single thing in our in our platform, I'm not gonna give you a full overall demo that doesn't make use of your time. So we actually adopted was a tool that allows us to create kind of pre canned personalised demos, that's a click through of our platform. So instead of saying, you know, hey, let's just do a 30 minute call. No, they know what they want. Let's give them the demo. They want the demo. First, they want to show me the product. Thank you, thank you just show me what it is. Because otherwise, it's just air, right? You know, in, in SaaS and software, we, a lot of times we joke and just say we're selling hair, you know, but without a hands on, then you're not really doing that. So we're kind of putting the power back in the in the buyers hands. And I really think that's kind of where it, you know, it needs to stay for a little bit, you know, with, you know, sales teams and marketing teams helping to influence that build up that here's why you need to buy. You know, I really think that that's our point, and where we can really help. But now I can talk about demos all day long. Because it's I hate having to, you know, even tools, you know, for marketing that I want, I don't want to have to go and say, let me sit through your entire sales cycle to do this. No, give me something that I can then sell to my team.

Kerry: Yeah, this actually just happened to me, it was so infuriating. I, you know, as a business owner, one of the things I look at is where my team is spending their time. And I hate time tracking, I think it's the worst thing in the whole world. I refuse to have my team do it. But I do need to understand what what hours they do have available. And then and breaking that up between what's going to be billable, billable versus non billable, so that they have growth, time and admin and all that. And so I was trying to find a tool that would help me project rather than time tracking how we projected the future, like what my team capacity could be. And I saw all these tools out there. And not a single one of them actually showed me the product. I was like I exactly. I just want to make sure this isn't time tracking. And you're all sort of talking around that it's not time tracking, but I'm not really sure. Like, can I it's like, you want to see where you input the hours how easy it would be how you could report on it. That's what you want to see. That's what I want to say.

Josh: Exactly. You don't want to see 30 different use cases that have nothing to do with you. Right? No. And that's also why, you know, I went with, you know, kind of this tool to do a click through experience, I will say versus a video because videos are also power of editing, right? You can make things look like they work and they might not or you know, it's just not tailored enough, actually, so is this tool actually sitting on top of the product itself, and really sort of interact with it, even though they're not actually doing anything or using it. So it's really unique. The way it works is actually takes a screenshot. It's a web browser extension. It will take a screenshot of the HTML and the CSS within the platform. And then it basically like re renders it. So it's a it's not a Live platform. You can't mess up anything. It costs us nothing to host because you know we would have to host something in AWS and saw our software magically turned in my hacks that host nasty stuff on it. But no It's simple, you know, they can go click through just like they're sitting on their own. And that way we can, you know, tailor it to say, okay, you know, one of our use cases is third party access, let me show you all of the flows for third party access, there are SDRs are using that, to where they will take a link, they'll personalise that, for that prospect, they'll change up a few little, you know, the guides or whatever, because they'll also tell you, Hey, here's what this is doing.

Josh: And guide them through that whole experience. And it's really interesting, because you do a demo call, let's say, you have two people on it, they're like, this is great, what's gonna happen next, oh, I need to do a bigger call with 30 other stakeholders, and you're gonna have to keep doing the same demo over and over again, oh, my god, that is the worst enemy of our sales cycle.

Josh: It's, it's awful. But now we can actually track where that's going within the company. And we can start, you know, we do lead capture on that as well. So we can start to track that within the company, see, you know, which stakeholders or you know, in it the most completing it, and that really helps us then tailor that next meeting, or that proof of concept. Even better, so we're just showing what you're interested in, and nothing more.

Kerry: The products gonna be really good. Yes, it's, it's fantastic. But I feel I feel like in order for this to work, in order for this to work, the product has to be the product itself has to be a really smooth experience to really get a sense that you're feeling it through screenshots.

Josh: I mean, absolutely, yes. Yes. And that is, you know, specific to clo in kind of our platform, it works very well, because we're very simple to use and everything. Yeah, one of my biggest issues in security as well, tools, you start clicking through, and you don't know what anything means, like everything is in security speak.

Josh: You know, I can't relate back to old firewall rules, you did a dump of all the firewall rules you had in, you know, in from the terminal, you just see these lines that just say drop this address going. I don't understand business intent from that, right. But you know, versus our platform, everything's a very natural language, if you are build a policy to say, you know, third party users from this vendor can only access the application, following these parameters, like, you know, this these days, these times, we can do that really well. So it does, it does matter what product you have, you know, because, you know, through your timesheet example, or time tracking, it would be great, because you can actually see how you go in input time as an end user, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think I love what you're saying, if you're going to do this, do you mind me asking not because we want to plug the tool. But I think there's so many tools out there that we sort of get lost in the shuffle. So to know like, what you're using is really helpful. So what tool is this? Yes, I will happily plug them, please. It's called a walnut like like like the nut, walnut, the IO, they're another Tel Aviv based startup. There are other tools out there. They're very similar, but well, not, you know, it fits our purpose as well, because it's not just a sales tool. It's also a marketing tool. Because we are now in the process of basically replacing every demo video we've ever done a walnut. And that allows us to really, you know, again, I hate doing videos, and from a marketing side. I mean, this podcast, how many hours of editing are gonna go into it? Right, right, you know, 23456 hours, you know, be honest. Doing a video is the same way you want to do a 32nd

Kerry: Yeah, yeah, that's why I don't do video, we only do audio, because video, it will take up to six hours. But because we just do audio, it's probably like one to two hours. But yeah, that's why because it would take directly from my side, you know, in technical marketing, I'm a team of one.

Josh: And organisation have one as we like to joke about, um, you know, so if I want to do you know, even the 32nd demo video, that's a two week process, right there. It's all in editing. So this really allows us to stay really lean, really nimble, really agile is well, you know, perfect example.

Josh: Okta in the IBM space. They've had a, their SSO service has been degraded. I hope they got fixed during a few days ago. And we were able to then flip and just do a quick demo on how we could solve you know, an IDP failover really quick, wanted to do a video that will have taken, you know, weeks to get that done, and we wouldn't have been able to get into that right time. Not Hey, Okta stuck in there down is more thing, hey, people are recognising there's a problem happening right now. This is going to happen. Here's how we can kind of solve it. So it really allows you know, me from you know, focused on our technical decision makers to get them more effective content. Because techies and engineers don't just want to read white papers all day? Not at all. No, they want to see. And actually, I think that's really important. And I love what you said to around not having, having it riddled with security speak either. Because if you're talking to a non technical audience that you know, chances are a smaller company isn't going to have the IT department that's probably necessary to be able to run these tools. So no, not at all. In the end, that's a big problem, going back to the whole college discussion, honestly, of cyber is, you know, under that for various reasons, and that's a whole nother topic for another day. But no, a lot of smaller organisations don't have, you know, the knowledge or the resources to do all that they can afford, you know, the people with that knowledge. So it does become, you know, really imperative to have that super smooth interface, not just on the administrator, engineer side who's deploying it, but the end user side as well, how they actually start to interact with it and doing demos like this, it helps the end users a lot, because you kind of give them a little teaser on how their workflow is going to change where we're not disruptive to an environment. But we can also be disruptive to an end users workflow, we're changing how they connect to work, right? They might be using a VPN, and now they're going to be going into their web browser and going to this link and logging in and clicking on icons to get to their apps instead. So we kind of give them a little teaser of what that looks like that hooks them as well. So yeah, yeah, messaging is really important. And going back to this idea of selling with curiosity.

Kerry: It sounds like a lot of what you're talking about is making as much readily available on your website as possible, because in their own curiosity of trying to solve their own problems of understanding that giving them as much information for them to go do their own research in that world of curiosity, but then when they are ready to buy, having the sellers show up to understand where they are in that buying cycle, right, and not just launching into the solution, but really setting in the will where are you? And what are you looking at? And what problems are you having? And that it sounds like the curiosity you lead with? Isn't that high level? It's, it sounds like you get a little bit more to the heart of it a little bit quicker?

Josh: We do we try, you know, we've identified, you know, one of our biggest kind of use cases ICPs, we're going after guys are on the IPP is, you know, manufacturing, we have a lot of legacy resources. And we cover legacy really well, we do a lot of you know, bare bones compliance, things like multi factor authentication, audit, trails, session recording supervisor, all these kinds of things.

Josh: And so, and again, I could tell you, Hey, you're interested in third party, we can do a little bit more, and I can really see your eyes glazing over. You know, so instead, we just say, hey, how many non Sam laps Do you have? Do you want MFA and SSL on those? Cool, let's talk, we can do that. So it's more leading count with those pointed questions to kind of get their gears going. Because when you start with something like how many, you know, non Sam laps Do you have? Okay, so you have that number of legacy applications? Oh, well, I also have SAP, I also have Lotus Notes, I have these other things. So it starts to kind of, again, get their brain going on what else we you know, that we can help them with? It also helps our product it's very multifaceted. You know, so we have a lot of solutions for a lot of different industries. But ya know, we really just try and leave without one point question. We have legacy resources, do you have issues implementing MFA? Do you have an audit coming up? You know, things like that. That's how we leave most of our conversations. I had, you know, which, which question to start with, is that based on the ICP, of who's showing up is that so definitely, it's very persona driven. You know, I will say, I've been in a lot of like events and conferences recently. And before everybody comes up, they're like, What do you do? And I'm like, hold on, what do you do? Because I have like 60 Different talk practices. I've rehearsed in the shower in my head, you know, as everybody does. Um, so it's very persona dependent. You know, what we go with if we're talking to like an identity, you know, and I am specialist and I am engineer, we're going to lead more with our capabilities there. If we're talking to somebody on the networking side, we'll talk about you know, SD Wan replacement or VPN replacement. We'll talk about things like that. So it definitely does depend on the persona and also the industry is why we're split between it which is information pack normal enterprises and OT which is the operational packs more of the industrial you know, what makes the the lines the factory lines move? What makes his your chemicals what makes it you know, what controls your water treatment plants? So we're kind of split on you know, on both sides as well. So yeah, everything is very, you know, vertical industry in person.

NOTICE specific. So we have a lot of tailored messaging for one person, well, I will say I one person that we do like our so we, I mentioned earlier, I joined clo just literally about I think it's like a year and two months or something. And I was our first US marketing hire. And that was that was an experience, I will say we were a team of three at that point to an Israel one that you asked me. And that was a journey. But in the past year, we've actually scaled our marketing team now believe is about 12 people. So we have scaled really quickly, you know, our leadership recognises marketing is important, you know, as important as sales, you know, so it really helps us we do have a big team, but at the same time, you know, there's myself and we have a product man or a product marketing manager. And so it's kind of a, we're a very lean team. I think total worldwide are about 80 employees around around there. So we've really, we scaled really quickly, thankfully, we do have, you know, a good supporting team now. So yeah, and it's all about you know, it startup vibes, this startup mentality, you know, you kind of, you have to grind sometimes, you know, to get to that, to that peak to see everything. So, we are all, you know, we're all in it. You know, so it's, we're actually doing a video series on Challenge accepted. But that's kind of, you know, the marketing team's philosophy to everything, we're going out and solving other problems, you know, in the company, just because we need to. So yeah, challenge accepted. That's our motto.

Kerry: I love that. I love that. It's interesting, because personalization, the person, the kind of personalization, you're talking about, especially when you could sort of list out all the potential questions, that event, you know, that a customer could have, in relation to the problems you solve is vast. And so to sort of sit there in the in the potential curiosity of those potential customers and then personalise that user path? That's not, I mean, he's talking about Challenge accepted. I mean, where did you start with that? You obviously didn't do them all in one go? Did you? Did you think about your biggest ICP, your lowest hanging fruit? Like, where did you begin? When you you accepted this challenge?

Josh: Yeah, um, this all kind of really started when we were kind of, you know, revamping our messaging, and kind of really started through everything. And that's where we started to realise, you know, holy shit, you know, because we're fighting the it versus the OT split, that was, you know, you know, one of our biggest challenges, but then the complexities beneath that, because you have on both sides, you have business decision makers, and then you have technical decision makers, and a lot of folks, you know, especially in security, they really just focus on the BDMS, they, you know, I was at, you know, one of my previous companies, it was your first call to beat to the CFO, you know, you're going right after them trying to get that buy in, they don't care how easy it is to implement, they could just buy it, they listened to everything, and then they stick their engineers with something that never gets implemented or adopted by everybody. So that's kind of, you know, kind of where I took on the technical marketing role, to focus more on the TDS. So we kind of had this two prong climb up and down approach. You know, it's, we're on the business side, we're starting up in that Ceasar level, because we're going to need their buy in see, so CIO, whoever we're gonna need that buy in from them. On the technical side, right, just got going bottom up. So we're focusing on, you know, our outreach towards, you know, engineers, administrators, people, you know, support managers, people who will actually be implementing it and kind of multithreading from there. So I think that that was, you know, one of our, you know, that's kind of where we started. We're doing a lot of work with ABM right now, to get that fine tuned in investing into that, you know, for those to help with that, you know, that kind of scale that we want to hit.

Josh: And the other piece has been scaling our SDR team, you know, we went from an outsourced company, several of them to actually bringing them in house with in House leadership. We've seen a lot a lot better success there. You know, when we can really help better control that message. You know, the SDR is no you know, I'm talking to a techie persona I'm gonna get them you know, that won't that demo. I know they want see that first. But if I'm calling to see so I'm guessing them over you know, one of our you know, ebooks on you know, how we help your case study or something like that. So, a lot of it really is on our on our SDR team. So just if he had ever listened to us, huge shout out to all of y'all. You know, it's great having you know, strong SDRs to help you know a lot about outbound work there.

Josh: I, you know, I can talk about this in depth as well.

Kerry: I'm gonna plant the seed, and then I'm going to have my last question for you. But I do think there are elements like there are things that need to be in house and SDR team is definitely one of them. Because of, especially on that personalization side they need to really understand inside now, absolutely product does.

Josh: Absolutely. And they can't do it from the outside. No, you know, an interesting example, you know, and we have a lot of very fresh SDRs is well, you know, new to tech, new the security. You know, one of the things I did call months ago is I took them all through a training to actually instal the AR platform, and to actually, you know, implement it just like a customer would. And they were all like, I've, we've never gotten this, we've never been, you know, everything is just kind of been in past and we really didn't know what the product did. But one of our biggest differentiators is you can follow up in 15 minutes, and get your entire environment protected. And like under a day, you know, it's really easy. And so now they can better speak to that. You know, and that's another area where I think a lot of companies are lacking is they think SDRS get off ship, I'm gonna be honest, you know, not just does not from a, you know, cold calling, you know, you're an idiot, kind of a, you know, a thing, my partner's an SDR. So I get to hear a lot of his, you know, his fun parents that he calls.

Josh: But they're, you know, people are like, Oh, they don't need to know about the product. You know, they don't need to know something about that. I don't want them talking about the product. That's when se should do. We don't we don't believe in that, you know, we were actually going through initiative right now to our every single person in our company has to deliver a demo. And you know, it'll be judged, basically. Because everyone in the company is in sales, you never know who you're going to run across in the supermarket. Or just, you know, good example, I was at a colleague, kid's birthday party a couple months ago. And who's there see, so for one, the largest school, school programmes, school districts in the state.

Josh: You know, and of course, of course, I delivered my pitch, obviously. But you know, we might be able to do that we want everybody to be able to go into the platform, know what it does speak to it. And not, you don't have to know everything about it. But be able to do that demo, wherever you are, you know, in especially SDRs, they should be getting product training tailored for them, they should be able to get hands on with the product, not delivering demos by hands on the product to be able to speak to it just that much better.

Kerry: I love that. Going back to the personalization, you know, for SDRS, for your SDRS for your website for all this content you're building and personalising you mentioned well not and how important that is, and how helpful that's been. But you also mentioned white papers, you also mentioned content on the website in terms of getting started there. And that personalization elements, and all these tracks you're sort of creating, how do you tackle that, especially with a lean team? Do you have a content person in house do you output like, and how do you prioritise? Like, where do you start with content? And that that personalization element i?

Josh: Yeah, no, that's a that's a really good call to website personalization. That is on my wish list. I would love I would love like a chooser and adventure, right? Are you a thief? So are you an engineer, like I would love that, that's very expensive to implement, by the way.

Kery: So, but that's a pipe dream. But when it comes to content creation, it's, you know, we use a mix of in house and external contractors, for a lot of our content. You know, specifically, you know, blogs, the longer form content,

blogs, I do a lot of our blogs, we have about, I think three or four of us who produced at least one or two, like internal blogs a month. And then the rest of them are usually shipped out to our to our third parties. So it's things that are very product specific stay in house, but larger kind of industry trends that we want to write about that oh goes out to all of our to our third parties. And one of the biggest things when it comes like personalization, you know, in the content you send out to a prospect. This is where we actually had to, we adopted another tool called Story doc. And this is because you're sending out that people want presentations, you're going to be presenting something, oh my god, if I had to go personalise a PowerPoint and save a whole new one every single time, that would be the biggest pain in my butt and

We can't, you're not gonna get analytics from PowerPoint either. So what story doc allows us to do is actually create interactive web pages based off of our PowerPoints. So that now we can get really rich analytics, we can personalise it a lot easier for that prospect.

And, you know, when we personalise, we're not changing a whole lot, you know, we change it, you know, what their primary use case is, you know, we add their logo, we add in just information that we have.

And, you know, from there, it makes life really easy on STRS, to send out really, really nice looking content, that, you know, we can get analytics on the marketing side, to really see what sticks. So that's been one of our biggest

one of our biggest helpers, and getting a lot of you know, personalised content out.

I think this is so helpful, because as a lean company, it feels really hard to add those personalization elements, but you've brought to the table, so many important tools that can really allow you to do that in a really thoughtful way.

And really speak give your audience what they're looking for, you know, you're talking about leading with curiosity, and really thinking about what it sounds like, what you're really thinking about, you're saying, selling with curiosity, it's not just the seller sitting there in the questioning, but think about all the possible questions your customers going to have? And how do you how do you give them as much information up front for them to answer those questions in a really impactful, powerful way of how your product will essentially answer those questions. Yeah, and a lot of it to on the on the customer side of getting them to kinda is getting them to open up to think more, have them get curious about what it can do, oh, I can do this, but can't do this to you want to be able to kind of get that, you know, that safe kind of environment to where you know, there are no dumb questions. You know, you can ask, you know, from a sales perspective, anything you want, customer can ask anything they want, it's really about getting those kinds of leading questions that will get those gears going to help you get deeper, you know, and build that relationship better with that prospects? Yes, definitely on the seller side, ask whatever you want, you know, if you, you know, get that kind of line of questioning going. So that customer can just easily fall into it, and you get all the information you need, and you can better support that customer.

Kerry: I love that. I'm so grateful. Josh, thank you for joining me before we close out today, I do have my people first question because you are more than a marketer? Yes. And let's help people get to know you beyond that. So tell me, have you picked up any new hobbies in the last few years given COVID and change of the world?

Josh: Oh my gosh, I love this. Oh, I have a very bad habit of picking up hobbies for like two months and then ditching them and spending a lot of money on those habits, or on those hobbies.

Josh: The first one, I'll talk about kind of two, I guess. I actually got into soapmaking. During COVID. It started because we wanted to buy a house, we're looking to cut some expenses, and I still make soap.

Josh: And I was making like laundry detergent making all of our cleaners because that was you know, one of our biggest bins, but to actually start making like Artisan soap, and actually did a little Etsy shop for a while I had to shut that down because it was it was a lot of work, which was a good sign. I did get the good practices and make good sales there.

Josh: And other than that, I we've we've kind of shifted to being outdoors a lot more. You know, really sick of being cooped up, you know, just working it's it's part of it, but we passed three, four months ago, we actually picked up some kayaks. So we we go kayaking a lot, you know, probably about you know, two, three times a week. You know, we do a lot of camping, hiking, just kind of really anything outdoorsy, you know that that kind of helps us to branch out. But no, I there are too many hobbies I picked up for me to name so but those are probably my favourite two. I'm still going but yeah, the giver was nice, though. Let me know.

Kerry: Yes. I love that. Josh. This is amazing. I'm so grateful. Thank you for joining me.

Josh: Of course. Thank you for having me. This meant LaFawn

Outro

That was my conversation with Josh Martin. If you'd like to learn more about go to market strategies as it relates to the tech space, especially in cyber, you should definitely reach out to Josh at hear more about how he uses walnut. I'd love to know now Josh, how's it going for you? And if you've come up with any new tips on using this platform already do platform, so I will tag Josh and my LinkedIn so head on over there and be sure to join in the conversation. So good. So good.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Tea Time with tech marketing leaders if you liked this episode and you found it helpful please like subscribe and share.

Yeah, so grateful to have you here.