Scale with Strive Podcast
Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast - the place where you come to listen to some of the worlds most influential leaders in the SaaS industry!
Scale with Strive Podcast
'A Blueprint for Sales Excellence' with Drew Ganther
Welcome to the Scale with Strive podcast, the place where you come to listen to some of the world’s most influential leaders of the SaaS industry. 🚀
I’m your host, Dylan Hoyle, and today I had the absolute pleasure of meeting with Drew Ganther.
Drew is the VP of Sales at Grip Security, a company who are disrupting the Identity Management space.
It was a fantastic conversation, with some of my key takeaways being:
💡 His approach when educating the market on a new way to solve a problem and the evangelism piece that comes with it.
💡 His approach on organizational and interpersonal dynamics, whether that be in deals or within your own organization.
💡 The importance of an effective Channel strategy within the security ecosystem.
Let’s Dive In!
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Watch the episode on YouTube 🎥 – https://youtu.be/lZyxTllZjZU
Connect with Drew here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-ganther-754b282a/
Connect with Dylan here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylanhoyle-saas-recruiter/
Learn more about Strive here - https://scalewithstrive.com/solutions/
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15:24 Strategic Thinkers and Evolving ICP
22:07 Competitive Landscape and Business Sales Approach
33:24 Building Sales Champions with Integrity
41:30 Sales Leadership Challenges and Strategies
50:09 Channel Led Strategy and Patience
Welcome to the Scale with Stride podcast, a place where you come to listen to some of the world's most influential leaders within the SaaS industry. I'm your host, dylan Hoyle, and today I had the absolute pleasure of meeting with Drew Gantler. Drew is the VP of sales at Grip Security, a company who were disrupting the identity management space. It was a fantastic conversation, with some of my key takeaways being his approach when educating the market on a new way to solve a problem and the evangelism piece that comes with it. His approach on organizational and interpersonal dynamics, whether that be in deals or within your own organization, and, finally, the importance of an effective channel strategy within the security ecosystem. Let's dive in, mr Gantler. How are we?
Speaker 2:Doing well. Dylan, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:No worries, it's a pleasure. How was the rubah?
Speaker 2:It was fantastic. January is a great time to get away while everybody is trying to figure out what they are doing for the year, so it was an awesome time to unplug and ready to get back at it Nice good to hear.
Speaker 1:Drew. It's a pleasure to have you on the Strive podcast. Obviously, we've known each other for quite some time. I had the pleasure of meeting you face to face in Vegas in a casino a couple of months back, but I'll let you give the viewers a bit of an understanding of your background.
Speaker 2:Black Hat's a great opportunity to do that. I'm the head of sales at Grip. Before this, I was a part of another startup that was securing network connected medical devices that other Israelis start up. So that was my first view into the Israeli cybersecurity innovation world and got an awesome crash course there. We were very successful, which ultimately landed me the gig I have now. Before that, I actually spent about six years in the channel working for a VAR, a value-added reseller, really aligning to a somewhat set list of customers that I regularly worked with to solve various types of problems. That really gave me a comprehensive view of how the organizational dynamics work within an IT and security org and how that was evolving, how those relationships between security and IT and reporting structures and how that was evolving. Ultimately, that's what drove me to want to subscribe to security as the focus of my career, as I saw that being the big opportunity area.
Speaker 1:Nice. You've had a good experience on both sides of the fence Very quickly. A story that I found funny from what you discussed was your first sales role wasn't necessarily in software or anything IT related.
Speaker 2:Do you want to give us a bit of a background on that? Sure, no, my first foray in sales was actually in college, where my high school crush I was a crush who we never dated until after this, but we never quite linked up. She had a boyfriend or I had a girlfriend or whatever, but we always stayed fairly close. She came home from college one summer and was selling cut-coh knives. She was recruiting me into the business to come do this with her. I'm like you are nuts. There's no way that I'm selling knives as my summer job. I decided to make a deal with her. This is the natural salesman I mean that I guess I always had. I said you know what? I'll come to this interview if you go on a date with me. That was the start of it and did that for actually two summers.
Speaker 2:The two of us both were top 10 in the nation and cut-coh is one of these heavy recruiting businesses where most reps come in, sell a few sets of knives, burn out. Never make it pass that. There's thousands of reps that come through the business every summer as these college kids that go through, but some with the right vision on how it's helping them build their communication skills, understand how to prospect, set appointments, run a professional sales demo. It's actually much more than it sounds. People think, cut-coh, you're selling knives door to door. It couldn't be further from the truth. It's structured very similarly to what a Morgan Stanley financial advisor would do or what a Northwestern mutual insurance rep would do in getting referrals, setting those appointments, selling the value prop and closing deals and then getting more referrals. It's very applicable to a lot of different business to consumer sales. After doing that for a couple of years I just realized I didn't want to do business to consumer. I wanted to do business to business and do large enterprise deals.
Speaker 1:What was the price of those knives? Again, Drew.
Speaker 2:Thousands. I think my biggest order was like $6,000 or $7,000 set of knives. But hey, you know what? They're guaranteed forever. I'll tell you this. Still, I still have a set of cut-coh knives on my counter that I got when I was in college 20 years ago. Yeah, they're certainly. I believed it then, I believe it now. They're well worth what you pay.
Speaker 1:You've convinced me. You've convinced me the next second Expensive lot, but obviously that's how you started your career, right Then, obviously on both sides of the fence, one in a vial, where you got a good understanding of the organizational dynamics, how everything works together within the businesses. You obviously then went over to Medigate and you now at Grip. I know it's been a very interesting last 12 months. You guys have grown tremendously over the last 12, 18 months. I know you've been there for two years or so now. I guess give people an understanding of what you guys are doing in the market, because it's more educating customers in a new way to solve a problem as opposed to replacing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely hey. Let's everybody stop doing things that don't work and start taking an approach that works. So anytime that you're disrupting a approach or disrupting a program or a function and the way somebody's approached a problem space, it takes a ton of evangelism. So we're just coming out of that evangelism phase Obviously still a ton of heavy evangelism, but we're seeing the market turn significantly. I'll talk a little bit about why I say that. But essentially, the problem space is that SaaS is being adopted at a pace that nobody really foresaw.
Speaker 2:When we talked about shadow IT seven, 10 years ago when CASB was first introduced, we were talking about the migration of existing applications that used to be on-prem and used to be loaded on a server and dealt out to whoever based on role-based access, and we got to define very clearly who was getting what software. It was easier to maintain that was changing because it was going cloud-based and people could just go access it. But the technologies that were put in place to understand what's out there was really designed to control that stuff that we know of and then block people from doing anything else. Basically say, look, if we didn't give it to you, the answer is no, you can't use other stuff, and that's the way that most of the technologies in place today, before Grip. They were built with that mentality in place and what changed is that eventually, saas adoption got to a point that people realized they were failing, with a block approach, saying thou shalt now use that tech. And there's all kinds of human psychology, human behavior, stuff that goes like, in retrospect it's like, yeah, that didn't work and of course, we should have known that that wouldn't work. People are going to find a way to use whatever they need to use when they need to get their job done. They're not trying to be malicious, they're trying to get their job done.
Speaker 2:So eventually, business leaders outside of IT started becoming tech savvy enough and aware enough to realize, hey, there's actually a lot of value associated with our users, who half of our population, our user population, our employee group, grew up with an iPhone in their hand. Like they know how to go out and find an application that works to get their job done. Why are we fighting this? We're adding cost and complexity by having a team that has to review everything and configure everything. This is the SaaS world. It's built for people to easily go and get the productivity they need to ultimately drive competitive differentiation and innovation within our company to go drive the bottom line. There's a value associated with business led IT.
Speaker 2:So what you saw is this shift from the gardeners of the world calling it shadow IT and that term still exists, and in certain contexts that exists but you started to see the emergence of business led IT, and this you know. It's the same problem. It's exact same problem with a very different lens. When you call it business led IT, because they're trying to capture the fact that, hey, there's value associated with the business leading what they need to use to go be as productive as possible and getting their job done. Along with that change in naming convention of what the problem we're talking about is, we realized that there needs to be a different approach to solving the risk equation associated with that problem. If businesses are going to start supporting the business, adopting whatever they want and supporting these outside of traditional process of approval and you know if that's going to evolve so should the tech that governs the risk associated with the business bringing the stuff in and that's where grip came to market to say there's a better way to do this.
Speaker 2:The network's a messy place to live and not everybody even hits the network anymore.
Speaker 2:The work from anywhere approach, the work from any device approach, makes it really difficult to just choke network traffic to figure out what everybody's using.
Speaker 2:So grip takes an identity centric viewpoint into if they're using their corporate credentials to sign up for that application, they're doing so to support their job function.
Speaker 2:So we're going to look at the corporate credential, the, the, the idea to say, hey, this is my identity I'm using to sign up for the service. Therefore, grip will say you need to know that this is something you should go manage, but it's not by taking the approach of let's block them from happening. Let's empower them to happen, to allow them to do it, but apply some automation to put the appropriate guardrails in place to reduce the risk. I'll kind of wrap all that up with like the mantra that we use is you don't put brakes on a sports car to go slow. You put brakes on a sports car so that you can go as fast as possible safely. And so everything that grip builds is really to allow for a business to go fast as possible and adopt as much as they need to adopt to create competitive advantage and drive the bottom line. But you need to have those brakes in place when things get out of hand that you can pull levers to to reduce that risk.
Speaker 1:Nice, good stuff, and it's a very similar situation to what a lot of founders or a lot of sales leaders or a lot of early stage reps are finding themselves in is that the SaaS industry is typically used to solving a problem in one specific way, and then we've got to go with the evangelism piece of, like the education, trying to educate customers that that's not the most efficient and effective way of solving that problem. There's a lot more that goes into it. Hence a solution like grip, I guess, with the evangelism piece, what was some of the key either surprises or struggles that you found earlier in the journey, like what were the key learns from those struggles?
Speaker 2:I don't know that it was a surprise, but it is a constant struggle, that I think a lot of sales leaders deal with this and it's a more of a macro level.
Speaker 2:Problem with our industry as a whole is that we think that if we sell to the executive, the CISO, that that person's always going to think strategically, they're going to be, you know, very business minded, and it just isn't the reality.
Speaker 2:Not all CISOs are business minded, and so the big challenge is figuring out who should I be selling to right, who is the right persona and it's not always the right title and trying to understand who, within any given organization, understands the importance of aligning to the business and reducing the friction between security and the business, not just for the sake of Kumbaya, but for the sake of increasing the support for the function as a whole, for the programmatic like what am I building from a security program perspective?
Speaker 2:And when I reduce the friction with the business, not only does that give me support for the grip, you know, business led IT or the all of them trying to push forward, it actually builds bridges to help get support for all the things I want to do for my program when I can find that individual that thinks that way, we have a home run, you know. But the challenge is that that's not always the CISO. So how do you put together an evangelism plan that you're making sure you're finding your right market, your right audience, that you need to get that message across, that there's a way to do that and a very tangible way to do that? That's tough and I think that's our biggest challenge is finding those people.
Speaker 1:And the way that you found out? Is that a lot of trial and error, or is it a different approach that you guys use?
Speaker 2:No, it's trial and error. Unfortunately. It's brute force, it's activity, it's recruiting a sales team that's full of energy, ready to go and, you know, just getting out into a ton of events and speaking engagements and you just got this. This is I call it, a macro level problem because everybody hits this where the CISO is an evolving role. I think, and like with the SEC making requirements, you have to have a board level security representative.
Speaker 2:If you're a public betrayed company, that doesn't always mean it's their CISO internally, because maybe their CISO can't speak at the level, maybe they don't really talk about business impact, right? So you just don't know. Nobody gives you a database to say these are the strategic CISOs and these are the tactical CISO, like you just don't know until you go. So, unfortunately, the only way I know and if any listeners want to message me with a better way, I'm certainly open to hearing it but as far as I know, there's no better way than just getting out there having the conversation, teaching and training a really dynamic, skilled, open to listening sales team that can identify these personas and these personality traits and how these individuals operate, if they operate at a strategic level and a mindset that it doesn't matter the title, just get out there and have the conversations and find these people and then over time, you find more and more trends and you know in specific verticals. They tend to live in this area, within the org and whatever.
Speaker 2:But there is still no hard, vast way to say this is where they sit in this organization. They are at every level, even entry level. You'll find strategic thinkers that are I mean, dylan, you're a great example, right, you're not super late in your career, but your strategic mindset. I work with a lot of recruiters and it's rare to find people that will put the time into strategically aligning to what I'm trying to do and understand why a certain profile of seller is what I need to bring on. And so you know there's people that have been doing it for 40 years that can't do that. That means they probably never will. Same thing applies in a security org. There's brand new, fresh out of college strategic thinkers and you just got to identify them and figure out how to empower them to make change, impact, change.
Speaker 1:Nice. I appreciate the plug there, drew, and what you're talking about is obviously it feeds into like further defining the ICP and a lot of founders and a lot of early-stage sales leaders that constantly trying to define their ICP, understanding who's the right persona, what's the right industry. Where are we going to gain the most traction? Obviously, grip, you managed to go for all C, series A landed series B four or five months ago. Is it a case of like? The ICP is consistently evolving? Is it still changing even now? You've got a repeatable sales model or did you find this a year ago and you stick into it?
Speaker 2:I think ICP always has to evolve in every business, the more mature I mean. If you look at a technology adoption cycle of these thought leaders, early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and you look at this from like a marketing business case study of who's adopting when I think that at each stage you're going to have different revisions and refinements on your ICP. As you're later through that, those phases, you're going to better understand exactly who your ICP is and you're going to be more strict about not straying from that ICP. If you're going to invest resources one way or the other when you're early on, you've got to be very open to whatever your theory on your ICP is. It's not a scientific law. You don't know until you've got a great idea, but you need to go validate your mentality and make sure that you're on. If you don't have that mentality, you're at high risk of driving the business too far down one direction that you can't recover from. We've been very fortunate that our ICP has come into focus. What got me really excited about coming to GRIP is that the TAM, the Total Adjustable Market, was.
Speaker 2:A lot of companies will say oh, it's unlimited and investors hate that. It's like saying you have an unlimited TAM. It's like you don't know what your TAM is. You can't say you have an unlimited TAM. Grip is as close as I've seen because SaaS is so pervasive. I would challenge people to say if the TAM isn't unlimited, show me the business that doesn't have a problem with SaaS. For all of business like SaaS adoption there are a few. There's some like air gap networks that are super locked down on everything and three letter organizations. There's plenty that don't really fit, but for the most part we have a very, very broad Total Adjustable Market, which is fantastic from an evaluation and a future growth potential perspective. That presents a problem for identifying your ICP, but the last kind of thing it worked for. We knew exactly who our ICP was from day one and it drove easy alignment and easy what should we do. We knew exactly what to do from a very, very early stage of the company. That's unique, but it hurt the valuation long term because our ICP and our TAM was shrinking. So anyway, I took this job to see what it looks like and to take the challenge from the opposite spectrum, which is great.
Speaker 2:Since starting, the ICP has really become. At this point I define it as any heavily regulated industry. If you're a business in a heavily regulated industry then you fall within our ICP, and I say heavily regulated industry because all of the auditors and NYDFS was. I think they're kind of leading the charge here as far as I know and I'm not, you know, I don't keep good enough TAMs on all the moves that any regulatory body is making, but they tend to lead a lot and they're doing a really good job of leading the charge on what businesses needed to understanding the SaaS usage. And is there non-public data that's going to these applications and, if so, are you placing MFA around those applications? Do you have them under your control?
Speaker 2:So, because the regulatory bodies are starting to put more and more of their take on, how should a company control and govern the use of business led SaaS that lends itself to driving budget for grip. So if you don't have regulatory concern, it's cool tech, right, it's a better way. It's a cooler way to do something Maybe you're already trying to do and you have technology in place. In a bad economy, people aren't really looking to buy cool tech. They need to have a compelling reason to break out budget to actually partner with an organization like grip. So regulatory concerns and compliance and audit like this is what's driving the most of our deals.
Speaker 2:When you talk to a tactical or engineering mind of like, well, we already have a handle on shadow IT because I have a CASB or I have a SWIG and you know I've got. We already got it done. I already know everything everybody's using. Yeah, you might have visibility into most of what people are using. What are you doing with that data? Nothing, because you can't just choose to block or allow. It doesn't work like that. How are you going to apply it? How do you, you know, automate the process? So anyway, when somebody's heavily regulated, they fit well for us, because they know they need a better way to meet the requirements that are being pushed down on them, without adding 10 bodies to sift through network logs and send around spreadsheets and try to chase down the business owner and figure out what the heck they can do, because they can't interrupt productivity. So they have to find that balance and the legacy technologies just aren't built to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and something that you touched on them was obviously a lot of it is audit driven, with the business led out IT, shadow IT. Do you foresee that becoming a budget line item in the future? So you're always going to be this way audit driven?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it'll be a budget line item. So oftentimes it starts with compliance, like this, and then once everybody realizes okay, well, that's happening, then more and more entrants come into the market. This has happened. Grip has like eight different defined, well-defined direct competitors that have come into the market since we, you know, came out and started evangelizing this approach. So when your competitive landscape gets to a certain point, then the gardeners of the world start acknowledging it as a market space. And so you have the problem space that's defined by the auditor saying you gotta address this. But the auditor doesn't say you gotta buy grip or something like grip. They say that you gotta fix the problem. Show us how you're gonna fix the problem.
Speaker 2:When you then have a market of you know X number of competitors, gardener can say, okay, there's obviously enough funding, enough customer backing, enough market response. That this is. We can now build a quadrant. Right, and now there's a magic quadrant. And then you've got executive leaders that are building out well, where are my gaps in my portfolio? And there's this quadrant and all this traction behind this SaaS identity risk management space. I need one of those tools. So now I'm gonna evaluate the top three of the quadrant. That happens at a much later stage. Right, that happens, in that maybe early majority phase is about when that happens, but we're probably a couple of years off from that still. But yeah, when that's already happening. We're not quite there where we're finding a lot of budgeted projects. I think in the big enterprise we are we're starting to see more and more of it, but it hasn't gotten down unless you they have very, you know, thought leadership, oriented security or CIO or CISO. It hasn't made it down past like Fortune 100 or Fortune 500 maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well that was gonna be my next question Is it influenced by the size of the enterprise in terms of? Is it influenced if this enterprise is strategic, 10,000 employees in a board or 10,000 employees below? Is it influenced by that?
Speaker 2:A little bit, just because I think they tend to be more heavily regulated, but they also they need to be in a regulated industry. Like size is not as impactful as the industry they play in. You know, like there's plenty of really large organizations that are not as heavily regulated, that are behind in a lot of different ways compared to smaller players in a more heavily regulated industry are gonna have far more maturity or other security practice than the big player, right, and so that I think a lot of sales know how to identify that and know what I'm talking about. But yeah, I think it's more influenced on the level of regulation and not so much the level of size. With that said, we are tending to get deals done in the larger enterprise because as a startup that you can go and do you know $200,000 deals and it's a good size. You know that's like a big deal still For a large enterprise.
Speaker 2:You know that has, say, you know 15, 20,000 people to break out a couple hundred grand as like your. Hey, let's try this for a year and see if we can be successful with that and then if we can see value, then great, we'll pay the real price and you can still do a lot of that right, and that's where you know, in the past couple of years we've been doing plenty of that like partner with us at a lower price and set the expectations that eventually we're gonna charge you more. But let's work together to really set best practices and make change. We have the luxury of being able to do that as a startup. I think that that's changing fast with the expectations that are put on grip and that's all good. But that's part of you know, that's part of the maturity cycle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And it feeds back into one of your, I guess, superpowers, drew right, one of your superpowers is that you always operate with a certain level of integrity. In actually anything you do, whether it's relationships, whether it's any business proposals you're always acting with like extreme integrity. I imagine in the earlier days as a startup, particularly with grip, you're in a situation where you're meeting a huge amount of clients some are, but a huge portion of them aren't a fit and you're having to have those difficult conversations where it's like, well, probably not a fit right now. How do you manage that? Because I imagine it's a little bit sometimes demotivating to do so much at the top of the football and it doesn't necessarily materialize.
Speaker 2:It's not demotivating if you're approaching it the right way, and I think that because of the way that I view integrity so you know integrity is I think it's important to define integrity. Integrity isn't just about being honest. Integrity is about knowing how to set appropriate expectations and when to insert expectations and when to realign expectations, and knowing that you can deliver on the expectation. So the seller is in control of the expectation they set. And I think a lot of people think otherwise. A lot of sellers think I have to sell enough features or enough value for them to get over the hump on the value of the product I'm putting in front of them and they get ahead of their skis on promising things that the product's gonna do. Because they can't, they don't know any other way to sell to the person in front of them. When you're that early on, you don't need a ton of customers. You know you're looking to get your first 10, 20, then your first 50, then your first 100 customers. When you're talking about getting your first five to 10 customers, you shouldn't be selling a feature set that's beyond your skis. You should be selling your vision on the features that you think are the right features based on what you're hearing, but you need to be very open with your prospect on where you really are. And you wouldn't get funded and you wouldn't be at that A round to scale, to even build a sales team, if you didn't have something of value. So you're selling the something of value that you know you can nail, but really what you're selling is the vision of what can we do with that, something Like what are we building on this? What's the vision of the product? And I'm selling a partnership and what I'm trying to find is I'm not finding people that care if I have this feature or that feature. I'm finding thought leaders that really understand the value of the disruption that Grip is bringing to market and how needed that is across all industries. And when I find that people, there's people that are excited about the disruption that Grip can make and wanna support the evolution of how they and their peer group can address a problem, now I've got the right person. I don't have to sell them features that we don't have. I'm selling them the opportunity to also give us advice that we're gonna take and we're gonna bring it to market. And I need to just ask them by the way, I need some money because, yes, we are in business to make money and if I can't give the investors what they want, then how am I gonna get more money to build the features that you're asking for, right? So it's more about having a business discussion at that early phase and setting an appropriate expectation that this is the partnership. We want your feedback, we wanna.
Speaker 2:We're not there today. I'm not selling you a bag of goods. I'm telling you, like, test it. Like every single early stage company, I, you know, one of the things that I look for when I go to a startup is how easy is it to do a proof of value? And if it's not easy, like if you can't do a proof of value for every customer that you're before you bring them on board, I'm not interested. You know, I don't wanna have a misalignment on how somebody may have interpreted what they thought I said or didn't say. Like they need to test it and know exactly what they're buying from that today and then they need to buy into partnering with us for tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it sounds like you obviously understand your value prop and the feature set to a certain extent, where you can really like you can get into the mindset of the individual buyer and you can really understand your value proposition through the lens of what that buyer is looking at. How important is that in them? So scenarios it's paramount.
Speaker 2:I think that that's why I've been a successful, you know, like that, that's what's made me successful is a level of empathy that allows me to really speak to the person that I'm selling to it where they want to be spoke to, right, Like how they want to be communicated with, how, what type of value are they interested in? And that's different across all people, right, and I know there's not just one type of value stream that grip sells there's. When you're changing an approach to a problem and you're programmatically shifting how a company should approach the problem of business led SaaS, the problem is not going anywhere. Right, this is already. This is like a rising tide, Like you're not going to stop the tide from rising. This is happening. So, when you're really when you're selling to people the opportunity to a wine, to something that's going to happen whether they like it or not, and start to take that problem in a way that puts them in a position to succeed with the expectations that they're setting internally, versus continue failing with what they've been doing for 10 years, you got to understand where that person fits within that value chain and what they care about.
Speaker 2:They may be the person that just you know they're. They're sick of responding to the alerts that say somebody's using an unsanctioned app and I'm going to shut them down. And then I get a help desk ticket that says Why'd you shut me down? And then I got to reopen it back up and I'm just playing whackable and I'm just so over it and oh my gosh, okay. Well, I need to understand that that's their mindset and I need to help them understand how we're just going to not have that same problem.
Speaker 2:Verse, if I'm talking to somebody who shows me, through the way they communicate the questions they're asking me, that they're a strategic mindset and that same problem. What they care about is not the time they spent whacking moles. What they care about is when they go into the executive meetings and they hear from other business functions of you're slowing me down, then like why do I keep having to open these tickets just to get access on again. Like what are you doing? We got deadlines to hit. Y'all got to stop this. What they care about is removing the friction from the business and aligning the business to allow the business the speed needed to execute. And you just have to listen to people. You have to have real conversations and hear where they're coming from, to know how to communicate back with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is often why a lot of deals, particularly in the early days, is often why a lot of deals stall is because, like a lot of people who were selling whether it's a rep, whether it's a sales leader, whether it's a founder that they can't get in the mindset of the economic buyer and therefore a lot of deals are stalling. They don't understand how to move them deals. What advice would you give to someone like that? They're in a situation of a founder trying to land my first 20 logos. I've got deals that are stalling and I can't figure out why. What are some of the pieces of advice that you give to someone in that situation?
Speaker 2:You have to find the champion and you got to know how to identify a champion, test your champion to confirm that they are in fact going to operate as one, and enable and empower your champion. If you can't do those three things, then you got to expect deals will stall and you're kind of guessing on forecast at that point. I think that there's a lot of sales leaders. Look at medic as a seller. You know if I'm gonna have a dealer or not. The most important component of medic is, in my opinion, champion.
Speaker 2:Everything else can line up, but if you don't have a champion saying I need this and I need this now, and here's why you as a seller can only control it so much you're not going to be in every meeting that they have internally. And if no one stands up to say I'm the one that's saying I need this now, you're going to get stalled, you're going to get delayed. It's not going to happen, especially in a bad economy. So it's all about building the right champion and having like, real focus and real you know. Look in the mirror. Are we empowering our champion to the degree that we need to? Because they're not a salesperson, so do they have the confidence to stand up in that meeting? Do they have the know how, when they stand up, and what to say and what they can commit to? Have I empowered them with the degree that's needed to get it over the hook? And yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's fine to champion and build that champion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, something that I personally struggled on a little bit earlier in my career, and probably still struggle to this day, is that, like, sometimes I'll feel like I have a really good champion within an account. We have a great relationship. We speak about personal things, they trust me with certain sensitive information. However, sometimes, when it's come to a certain point in a negotiation, I don't necessarily feel like that individual is fighting my battle when I'm not in the room. What are some of the methods that you do to test the champion?
Speaker 2:Good question. And what you're explaining? You have a coach, not a champion, at that point. Right, that's a coach and not a champion, and I think the difference tends to fall in. Did you do a good enough job defining the gap? So there's another sales month at all. You know gap, and I think that gap is all about what's your current state look like. Is there enough pain in your current state to act? And if you act and buy whatever I'm selling, is your future state outcome enough to move right to get you excited and compelled to make to take action? And so, typically, when you have a coach that's not bridging the gap into champion land, it's because you haven't defined the gap well enough. And maybe you have in your mind.
Speaker 2:But this goes to your question of testing the champion. Does you, can your champion, articulate the gap that you think you've identified? And if they confirmed, yes, that pain is real and yeah, it's enough that it's keeping me from getting home on time to pick my kids up from soccer or to have fun. Right, it's got to be some kind of personal thing. Most people are not. Like well, it's impacting the stock price, like that's not what most people care about, right, like they care about. You got to figure out, like why would they move? How is it going to change their, their, their situation, right, why is it compelling? And that needs to be something that isn't just heard by the sales rep and you think you know and then you're selling to that it needs to be explicitly confirmed and have your who you think is your champion articulated back to you and then, if they're willing to take your coaching on, I don't, you know, I don't think the way that you're explaining that's the best way to explain it. What about? This is what I do for a living. Let me help you a little bit. Like, what do you think about taking this tact? Or, you know, switching that up a little bit, when they're open to that feedback, and then and you can see them using the feedback and you know the difference If they're like hey, whatever, or like they want it, they're engaged.
Speaker 2:When you see that now you've got a good champion right, you can also test your champion in putting them in uncomfortable positions. You know, and you got to be careful about not too uncomfortable, but you have to find where is their boundary, whereas they're, you know, and a really common one is like hey, can you get me a meeting with your boss? It's a really simple way to test your champion. And if they're a coach, they'll say oh no, I don't really feel comfortable doing that. Like, you can reach out if you want, but like I'm not going to no, I don't want to do that. Then they're not a champion. Right, and it it you could have a chance.
Speaker 2:It says, no, we don't need to do that, but here's why we don't need to do it. That's just going to screw things up. Trust me to navigate here. Like okay, now we're. I'm in a different conversation. Sometimes they don't necessarily they're coaching you. That it's not the right approach. Not, I'm just not comfortable with that. Right, if it's that's not the right approach, fine, it's not a disqualifier as a champion. But you get the point, like you. That's an example of how to test your champion. Ask them for things that if they're not, they'll be uncomfortable doing it. They won't do it.
Speaker 1:So let's say we're in an account and let's say we think we've identified a champion. We've gone to test that champion and we that individual turned out to be a coach. We don't feel like they're the right person. Is there a way? Well, two things. Is there a way that we can get that coach to become a champion, or do we look at identifying a totally different person in the business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this goes back to integrity. So this is like you have to be comfortable. Well, first you need to have the realization that if you don't find a chair, you're not going to deal that Right. So, like you have to be comfortable with the potential risk of when you approach your coach with this, you piss them off and now they're not even a coach who cares Right, who cares? You're in no different position than you would have ended up with. So you got to go to your coach with integrity say, hey, listen, I understand where you're at. Right, this isn't valuable enough to you to go do the things needed that we need to go and get a deal done. No love lost, All good man. Like, I'm not trying to put you in a position that you're. You need to be something that you're not right or I need to fabricate value that you don't see or pain that you don't have. That's fine.
Speaker 2:I do appreciate the relationship we build and like your willingness to share with me on how to navigate. So who has the pain within your organization? That you think is enough that they'd want to go? Actually, you know, take action and like, put their name on the line to go work with us and go solve this problem who is that? And just ask them directly, right, Like identify, when they're not going to be your champion and it's, you know, just reset, reset and leverage the relationship that you've already had to say, hey, it's all good. No, we're not mad at you, I just I got a job to do here. Can you help me navigate? Who is it? Who should I be? You know, build enough that we can get a beer black.
Speaker 1:And I noticed that, because you had a lot of people you've not necessarily done business with, you will have an a lot of beers with them. In in black, in and around black.
Speaker 2:Those are all eddies, though those are all eddies, you know kind of not alcoholics.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so the three things we've mentioned operating with integrity, understanding your value prop through the lens of the individual buyer. And then the last thing that we talked about is understanding the organizational and interpersonal dynamics that make a deal move or stall, and then figuring out how to best position. I've known you for quite some time. I've placed a lot of people in your team and I also know the feedback from what people in your team say about you. The common denominator is that you empower them, you trust them with a lot of information, you're transparent about what's going on in the business, you don't give them any BS, you tell them how it is and you help them figure out a different type of way. Those three things that we discussed a bit of a different tangent, I guess. How does that all translate into you being a leader? Because I imagine a lot of it is transferable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's all the same. It's the same skill set. I should say it's the same mentality of what I'm trying to do and how I approach. You know, running a deal cycle and closing a deal. I apply all that same stuff to how do I recruit, train and develop a sales rat and coach them through navigating our own landscape, right, and so it's really just a matter of taking that same skill set and applying it through a different lens.
Speaker 2:And I'm not coaching a champion. You know, with a sales rep, I'm treating them similar to how I would treat a champion. I'm being really transparent with them. I'm being really honest with them on if they are aren't, and like, if I'm finding out they're a coach and not a champion, or find out that they're a deal, you know a deal collector and not a. You know somebody who's gonna go and like create the deals, then you know I'm telling them I'm worried about you. Yeah, you're not gonna make it here, but anyway, the it's really using those same principles and same mindset, because you're also, sellers are all great, sellers are all Mavericks. They all know best. Right, and it's good. I want them to know best. I want them to push back on me and say, no, that's BS, I don't believe that, I don't buy it.
Speaker 2:But as a sales leader, I need to create a repeatable, scalable function, right. And so in order to do that, I do need people singing the same song and approaching it at least with then certain guardrails. Nobody has to be the same, but within certain guardrails they need to subscribe to. These are the guardrails, and like, this is what we do, and so I have to sell them on operating within those guardrails, and so that's. I use the same like sales and then the same sales acumen that I would apply to a prospect, I apply to my own sellers, right, I know that I'm selling them on doing their job, the way I'm asking them to do their job, or, you know, having the motivation that they should have to take advantage of the opportunity in front of them, and you know all those different things.
Speaker 2:That is not that different than selling to a prospect. It's just applied through a little bit different lens, but the goal is the same. Like in an enterprise deal, you're herding cats to all sing the same song and what the value prop is and the impact that they're going to have on the organization if they partner with grip Same thing here. I'm bringing everybody together that has different experience and different walks of life and different approaches to how they think it should be done, and I'm saying, oh, that's great and fantastic.
Speaker 2:Thanks for the feedback. Everybody gets your ass on board. This is how it needs to go, and it's not just about whether you're right or wrong. It's about the value of having everybody moving in the same direction, dancing to the same drum, because when you have that again doesn't matter if you're right or wrong, or a little bit of this and a little bit of that would be better or worse or whatever. It's about having a unified approach that gives everybody positive impact from how we as grip, approach the market and then how you, as a grip representative, are received when you have a prospect in front of you. So you know, when people really understand the power of that level of teamwork and willingness to buy into a process and a culture, then good things happen.
Speaker 1:And is that becoming a little bit more I don't want to say difficult, but of a different challenge, now that, for example, grip gripper now going into the next phase of growth? Obviously you're starting to implement the second line and it's now going to a bit of a different type of scale. Is that a challenge or is it just a new thing that you need to overcome in terms of you've got to spread that vision, you've got to get everyone involved, but there's now a few more layers between people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a major challenge. You could see how many companies stall in this space, right, because there's two ways to approach sales, and I'm not making this up, this is like a well-known thing. There's Hero Ball, right. There's the hero approach, where you're just finding a way to get deals done and you're shifting and moving and just going to look different every time and whatever. And you're doing that by design early on because you need to be flexible with what the market's telling you. You can't say, well, I did it once, then it worked this way and that's how it's going to be forever, not the case, right? So you need to do that to a certain, to get a certain amount of data on your market who you're going after and how. Eventually you have to evolve that into a systematic approach. And you've got to stop playing Hero Ball, because Hero Ball is not scalable. The company can't keep up with 20 sellers playing Hero Ball. It'll all fall apart. So at some point you have to make the transition. It's a huge challenge that most can't make. A lot of companies, most companies cannot make that transition and so you know, underplaying the challenge associated with it would not be doing it in justice on how big of a challenge it is. We're lucky to have an executive team that communicates really well together, that, you know, can say the hard things to each other, and you know, I think, that my style of transparency.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of sales leaders are scared to tell their team that the company is at an inflection point, that there is huge risk associated with us not making this transition. They're scared, they don't want to tell the rest of that, and I think that that's one. I think that's just wrong approach. And two, I think you're robbing your sales representatives the opportunity to grow and learn about how a business evolves that you just don't know, in any favors of doing it. So I think that my approach would be to really transparent with them. It not only helps them get on board with why we need to, you know, follow the process, but it also fosters an environment where they give feedback to the process.
Speaker 2:It's well thought out, you know, it's not just like complaining, right? It's well thought out that they're saying, hey, this sucks, this isn't working, and if we do it this way, I think that that helps us all do it the same way and get you know, and I get a lot of that from my team, which is I'm full faith that we will. We're already making the transition and it's we're well on our way, but it's tough. You need a really strong team that has a clear understanding of the task at hand and the challenge in front of them. If you think you're going to, you know, fake your way through it. Not going to make the turn. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Transparency invokes and transparency, like I've seen it so many times, even with my personal self or other people that I'm closely with, when their manager or their boss trust them with pieces of information that other people wouldn't trust them with, we're more likely to trust them and give them that feedback, and what you mentioned then was that that feedback so actionable in your business. I don't think this is going really well. Sometimes you're too far away from it to actually see it happen. Therefore, you need the feedback and the transparency from that individual to take action on it and again get over that challenge.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, yeah, that vulnerability as a leader. You know about telling your lead like I don't see it all, I'm swamped guys, like there's probably a ton of stuff that I have no clue. I need you to tell me or I can't act. You know, I can't fix it. Opening that forum for people is really important as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, amazing, and one of the other things as well that I wanted to mention, drew. Obviously it's interesting because you've got you've got an understanding of both sides of the fence, and what we're referring to is is the channel led sales versus the direct sales element. You've obviously worked on both sides of the fence once in a bar and also in a vendor In the earlier days. We, a lot of us, have to be direct sellers, we have to go straight to the logos, but whereas as a business look to scale, what I'm seeing is a lot more businesses becoming a little bit more channel led in the strategy. What are the key benefits of moving towards a channel led emotion and why would a business choose to go in that direction?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the benefits are very clear and obvious to all sales leaders, all investors, all everybody build a business. The how to do it is like the code that everybody tries to crack. I'm fortunate that I spent so much time there that I didn't wait to implement that. We started as a channel led company, so we did. 40% of our revenue in the first year was channel led, meaning we didn't even know about the deal until the channel brought it to us. That's very unique for a startup, but that's you know because of the background that I have and the and the relationships that I have. They they starts on trust. Right, the channel moves at the speed of trust. They have to trust you and how you go and build that trust is really important. The benefits are really clear. I mean it is not cheap to go and source leads and to go and, you know, find deals and the amount of money that startups spend evangelizing and just getting to a qualified opportunity that they could even test is a lot. That's where most of the money goes right, aside from salaries.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I think that when you have an effective channel, you make similar investments early on that you would to like marketing events or paid search or all the things that goes into marketing to generate sales. Call-in-file needs, the channel. You invest in a similar way of having feet on the street and building the relationships and spending time and all you know doing events with the channel. Whatever Actually the channel starts to operate for you without you having to pour in. It's like non-linear growth. At some point the channel catches fire and channel reps that you never even talked to heard from another channel rep that if they're not doing this they're missing the boat and you know they should ask their customer about because they're probably doing it and somebody else is eating their lunch, and so those dynamics start to play in your favor.
Speaker 2:But you have to start early and invest in the channel and understand that it's going to take a little while before it starts to pay. But when it starts to pay, your cost per lead, your cost per opportunity, your pace of you know, your ultimately your sales cycle shortens because they're well qualified deals with the right relationships and the right ability to navigate how to close a deal on that account that your seller is not going to know because we sell them once, right, maybe a few times if you're upset or whatever the value of having a rep that closes 100 deals with them a year. I mean what that does is shorten your sales cycle and alleviate a lot of the challenges that go along with the Kierman and Yadiyana. It's really clear cut and that it's the right approach for most businesses. But yeah, there's that can be a whole other podcast on the new off that right. Yeah, the proofs in the pudding as well.
Speaker 1:I fed this back to you. Last week I was on the phone with someone introducing grip and they said, oh, I've come across grip. And I was like, oh, where have you heard of them? He said, well, I've now spoke to two people in the channel that I work really, really close to you and they said, if you're going to evaluate moving, you've got to look at this company. The product is amazing, the leadership is really good and they treat all this as a priority. So, like the proofs, the proofs in the pudding already, which is which is great.
Speaker 1:Obviously, there's a whole number of podcasts, the channel led strategy, but one of the things to know is that, like it doesn't pay ROI really, really fast. It sometimes takes a little bit of time to catch fire and like, for an early stage, vp of sales, where the turnover for VP of sales is usually pretty short. I think the average tenure over the last three years for VP of sales is 18 months. And one of those things is board expectations. The board expects a certain number at the end of the day, and if you're not delivering to that number, if a company does choose to go with a channel led strategy, how pivotal is it to like communicate to the board or communicate to the CEO that it's like we're not going to see ROI from this straight away. But trust me in the process.
Speaker 2:I think so. I think that actually I'll refer. You will see ROI from the right away If you're doing the right things early on. It's a matter of how you're investing in it, what you're investing in it and communicating accordingly to the board to set clear communication on how you're investing and what that should, what return you should be getting. You Everything you do in a startup, you should be getting a return. That's how you measure the return and did again back to the integrity piece. It's like can you appropriately set expectations with the board on what it's going to look like? And then, are you going to be right? How far off are you from what you, the bet you placed and what you're going to ultimately deliver? So I don't think that it's the right mentality to not expect ROI. You will definitely get ROI. It's how it changes over time. It's not the. Initially it's just like linear growth ROI with the channel of like very tactical build some relationships ground level, get a few deals done, get the proof going, expand on a yada yada. It's a while before you get the wildfire spread where deals are pouring in right which ultimately, if you're doing a right, will happen.
Speaker 2:But I think it starts by in the recruiting process. When you're hiring sales or one the BPS sales needs to understand the value of the channel and be savvy on how to work it. They need to have their own relationships that they can start with and then when you're interviewing a recruiting sales reps, it needs to be part of the recruiting process. Are they somebody who understands the value of the channel? Do they already know how to work the channel? Are you going to have a battle selling them on why they should shift some of their the way they operate to be channel friendly? And I've interviewed some amazing, clearly talented, you know, very articulate sellers that I'm sure are super successful and not channel led companies. That I've passed on because I'm not going to fight people to get on board with the channel. That's right. It's like I just won one bad egg spoils a bunch, right, you know how it goes, so I just don't. I think it's one bad apple. Anyway, you get the point. It starts in the recruiting process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I got it Well, are you right? It's a whole nother conversation, the channel and strategy. But I think if you do it right and you set it up for success in the early days, you managed to pay dividends further down the road. But I guess we're sort of coming to the end of the episode, drew, and I always like to tie it up with a couple of questions. Let's say you were given advice to a younger Drew who was just starting out in that career. What's the one piece of advice you'd give to your younger self? Oh man.
Speaker 2:One piece of advice.
Speaker 2:I'd give to my younger self. Yeah, that's a tough one. I think I've made some mistakes in my career that stem from a lack of patience with other people, you know. So I think my biggest piece of advice would be to find a way to exhibit patience and display patience and grace, and I still struggle with it. It's just not in my nature to be patient. I'm very driven and urgent with everything, and so it's not in my nature. So it's something you know.
Speaker 2:Going back to cut-code knives, the biggest thing I learned and took from that aside from a structure of how to build, really the most important thing that I gain is how to control my emotional response to rejection and how to stay driven amongst rejection, and that's something that was just amazing to learn at that stage in my career. If I also learned at that stage in my career how to display patience when it's negatively impacting my bank account, there would be some, there would have been some strategic missteps that I would not have made Right. So, yeah, I think patience is interesting because it's got to be a balance with urgency. You got to display urgency, beat the drum of urgency, you know, inject it everywhere, while also offering patience and grace. And you know, and that's a balance. It's tough, but if I had started earlier and finding that, I think I'd be even better off than I am now.
Speaker 1:As an A player, it's sometimes difficult to understand that not everyone's going to be on your wavelength, and you've got to give patience to that. And last question what's the best piece of advice that you've been given from one of the great leaders that you've been mentored by?
Speaker 2:Customers respect being pushed. So when I came out of the channel into the startup world, I was a little too heavy on managing the relationship and give them time and give them space and it'll come around. But you just you don't have the time for that necessarily. And what I learned and started to adopt what Tyson Hemple was my head of sales. He runs sales at the Ciro, at Hunters. Now what I learned from Tyson was injecting a level of professional press to get a deal done where your natural tendencies think that the customer is going to be really uncomfortable with it, with the customer that's going to buy anyway. They respect that you've got a job to do and if they don't, they probably weren't going to be a customer anyway. There's a time and place to give people space, right, and you have to be smart about how you do it.
Speaker 2:But I adopted an understanding of real executive leaders in these big companies. They have a sense of urgency as well and finding a way to harness that and press in a professional way. I mean that was something that I had to learn in my last gig that when I really cracked that code, things took off. So I definitely that's 100% Tyson. He's the guy that embodies urgency. Anybody that knows him is probably laughing. I mean, he is super energetic ball of energy and urgency. It's great to the point where, coming out of the channel, I was initially like I don't know, man, this is a little much. But man, when I finally got on board, it just changed the game. So thanks, tyson, if you're listening.
Speaker 1:So, drew, what you're saying is, when I ring you 10 times in a row because I need something to happen, you're not going to shout at me, right?
Speaker 2:No, I think I've offered that up to you. I told you if I'm not answering, it's not because I don't care, I'm just busy. Keep going, keep following. I give people the hope to do it. I'm like, hey, I'm not always going to respond, but I respect the hustle.
Speaker 1:For sure. Well, drew, it's been an absolute pleasure. Great chat, really enjoyed it. Have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks, nilly, talk to you soon miss. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and if you want more information about the podcast, head over to our website, ScaleWordsDrive.
