Welcome to Nawab Deals it’s a pleasure to have you thanks for having me yeah and uh I guess we’ll start with a quick introduction in terms of your background uh so Pat has been running cyber security companies for over 20 years each one in a different aspect of cyber security and each one having a different route to Market process that allowed it to grow successfully he has extensive experience in
both domestic and international sales marketing and operations with companies in the information security segment during Pat’s career he’s developed and implemented multiple global distribution strategies that catapulted dozens of companies to record-breaking Revenue growth and
A Brief History of Cybersecurity
profitability he also spearheaded the launch of new technologies in the marketplace and oversaw the integration of more than 15 Acquisitions and past background is mainly in Revenue growth and strategic planning that I uh cover all the bases there Pat yeah makes you sound great fantastic yeah it was it was quite a a full CV according to your your LinkedIn starting with um with your first company back in
the day which kind of caught my attention because I I feel like I’m in the same position now here with lapide um taking my first foray into the cyber security space as a as an account executive actually so um I suppose the the first question would really be you know how how have you seen things change in the last
15 to 20 years of working in cyber security from company wow it’s a great question and so much has changed if you go back 20 years ago the way you approached prospects was one way the full cyber security kind of infrastructure in terms of the people you called on didn’t exist csos weren’t the thing
necessarily you had cios or ctOS and people that may have rolled up under their their organizations you didn’t have socks or sock teams right it’s that escalation of who your buyer is has dramatically changed as as cyber security has become more and more and more important so you’ve got And if you want to secure your system than use VPN for cyber security.
How Cybersecurity Threats Have Evolved Over Time
different types of buyers the way you approach these buyers has become different you’re not knocking on doors anymore and it’s not about you know a phone call to an office you know a desk phone anymore it’s it’s you’ve got to be able to gain their attention through digital media because a CSO is
asking somebody on their team to go research a particular technology uh because they they believe it’s relevant and that person doesn’t want to reach out and talk to a sales person they’re not holding on to a paper brochure anymore I mean so many things have changed in the way you engage with your buyers definitely and something that we’ve noticed a lot recently is kind of the changing procurement
process as well whereas you know a few years back it was maybe two or three or four decision makers or stakeholders as it were now it’s somewhere in the range of 15 to 17 to get a sign off yeah in the bigger the organization the more people that are involved and you have specialized teams that handle anything from malware teams to your your Sam or you know who deals with your Sam who deals with your socks
you know you’re sore and so it’s it’s a broad organization and a lot of people touch a decision today which kind of breaks some of the sales models of who’s your financial buyer who’s your user buyer right who’s your technical buyer it’s like wait a second there’s a whole bunch of hands in this pie
Common Cybersecurity Threats and Their Impacts
today definitely yeah obviously over the years you’ve seen it all and uh you you’ve led the growth of a lot of these companies and including planning and the strategy around those um something our CEO likes to rant about a lot is um I think he must have read predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross um the sales force uh employee guy and uh he’s always talking to saying you know we need predictable repeatable scalable
uh business you know sales processes um do you subscribe to this approach or Implement some of these um kind of thoughts in in your approach yeah and I think that really is the the SAS Revolution is how do you get to predictability and revenue for a software company and the old days when we were in the firewall business we were selling our software on an appliance you know creating a an overall
The Role of Technology in Cybersecurity Defense
Hardware software-based firewall solution and that was a Perpetual sale plus maintenance right and the only predictability was along the maintenance line not on your your product line um you know we started getting into you know web filtering you know web monitoring which was a subscription service so we
started blending it then but you know 20 years ago they were talking about predictability of Revenue and that’s been a big a big stride that SAS has been able to help with the harder part of getting to predictable revenue for a lot of the early stage guys is just getting to revenue in the first place right it’s the the buyer now fully understands and Embraces the operational purchase of a subscription and they’ve
AI-Driven and Sophisticated Cyber Attacks
been trained to do it starting from the antivirus days all the way through to now and many other aspects of their software you know technologies that they use it’s it’s getting that engine running so that you can build that predictability of Revenue right do you understand what it takes to create Revenue what does it take to create an appointment which creates a discovery call which creates a demonstration a proof of concept a quote in a sale do you understand what it takes and that’s kind of people fall down at trying to
figure out that math but you really need to understand yeah I was reading about another book recently actually the the sales acceleration formula and it goes into that a lot especially the the relationship between the marketing and the sales process um and outbound versus inbound where you know if it’s more outbound you’re you’re looking to if you if you were to imagine a funnel you’re looking first at the
Key Solutions in Cybersecurity: Tools and Techniques
fit and of of the company uh or the ICP and then narrowing down to the pain whereas the inbound you’re you’re Gathering the pain uh through you know the outbound the the marketing effort um and then classifying or qualifying the fits uh so yeah this is definitely various approaches that’s wrong radiates were a lot of companies particularly in the early stage fail is they try to do everything right so one of the things I always recommend is do your research don’t prodify who you think you are get understand who you are
today in what your MVP solution is and then what are the right verticals to focus on because you can’t do them all right what are The Right Use cases that you want to focus on because you can’t do them all within those verticals who are your icps because you can’t create enough content as an early stage company to make everybody happy so you got to focus you have to have a starting point and then figure
Conclusion: Staying Ahead in the Ever-Evolving World of Cybersecurity
out whether your pricing methodology is relative to cut the competition goes about it can you create a competitive Advantage by simplifying the pricing there’s a lot of early stage guys make it super complicated and then when there’s a balance right and very rarely are people ringing the phone is it a
total pull type sale and it’s off the hook and all you can do is fill orders right you’ve got to create some form of Market Dynamic and that’s through getting in front of them eyeballs and then you have to make sure that your the content that you have is supportive so that you can move that person that the CSO said hey go look at this through the buying cycle and make it easy for them to engage with you.
