Ep.136-Mastering Cybersecurity Sales w/ Proven Strategies for Fortune 500 Level Success- Jason Stein
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Welcome to the podcast, design the fuel your success selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lopresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Polaris and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey everybody, welcome back. As you can see, we’re here in the studio, joined with a special guest who we’ll get to later, because you probably have no idea who he is. You’ve never seen him, never heard from him, first time, probably not. But today we’re here with Mr. Jason Stein, VP of Security at Polaris Stein. Welcome back, man. Thank you, appreciate it. Hey, all right, so today guys, we’re talking about mastering cybersecurity sales with some cool proven strategies that will help you with Fortune 500 level success. That’s a lot of words, but it’s gonna be valuable, I promise, and we got a lot of cover, man. So let’s jump in, buddy.
Okay, so you’ve been on the podcast a couple times before, so we’ve talked a little bit about your backstory. So before we get into some new nuggets here,
tell us a little bit about, since you were on late last year, some of the new projects, new developments, anything you can share with what’s going on.
So we spent a lot of time over the last couple years really working with partners to have a business conversation around cybersecurity. Then we talked about, let’s talk about how you have a methodology conversation, and then we said, okay, now you need to overcome objections. And now what we’re doing is we’re moving into the next phase, which we’ve done quite a bit of, which is gonna be around customer-facing events. We’ve already done about 15 to 20 of them this year. They’ve been well attended. We’ve talked about trends, what’s resonating, what are customers buying, whether they’re Fortune 500 or they’re more SMB related, and just a tremendous amount of success. Every single time we’ve walked away from those, we’ve walked away with multiple opportunities, and a lot of the clients usually say that was time well spent, really enjoyed it. And then I’ve been asked to go do speaking engagements either at their team, or one of the coolest ones is the Dean of ASU asked me to come speak in front of his students on cybersecurity. I thought, that was fantastic. He’s got about a thousand students that he wanted me to come be the keynote speaker on.
Love it, love it. Yeah, it’s good getting this little thing that used to hide behind the scenes, this little channel thing maybe isn’t so little. So I think it’s great for helping partners and being at this epicenter of distribution and where distribution is going. And I think with the complexity of technology, it’s inherent how much value we add and we help the partners add in that conversation to just take these conversations to a whole other level. So love to hear that stuff.
All right, I wanna hear an interesting nugget. So if we flashback, if you guys go back to episode 40, we learned that you were a practicing theologian, turned bartender, let that marinate.
And then I think on episode 104, we found out that you unintentionally worked for the Russian spies. I’m still listening for an accent, wherever I can catch you slipping, but I haven’t caught it yet, but I’m still, eyes are on.
So while those are probably new episodes, we could unpack, I suppose. But for now, is there more? Is there something else here that people don’t know about you? Give us something new, what do you got?
So I guess we’ll stick on the Russian theme to start, which is when I was five, my mom was dating some guy and he taught me how to play chess. And so then in middle school, she needed me to do something after school. So she put me in the chess club. And then next thing you know, I found myself in tournaments and traveling in the world to play chess. And I actually was third in the nation when I was in ninth grade in chess. So every time Dan Foster says, does anybody subscribe to chess weekly?
I’m kinda raising my hand. He hasn’t noticed. And then that turned
into going to college. And some guy said, have you ever played Magic the Gathering? I was like, what? No, that sounds dumb.
And now I have $50,000 worth of cards and have won tournaments all over the United States.
Nerds don’t usually end up broke. There is value to this. So then did you watch the Queens Gambit?
Yes, it was fantastic.
Did you get ultra critical? Was it good? Was it done right then?
It was done right. And I used to think the same way. So I used to be able to play without a chess board. And one tournament I showed up to, we went to the wrong location and neither one of us had a chess board. So we were just in our minds going pawn to E4 and then pawn to E5. And then we played the whole game without a board in our minds. Holy crap. And that’s how you get good. And you know where you’re at is if you can see the board in all those moves. So when she was looking at the board on the ceiling, that’s what I could do in my mind. And that’s what makes the good chess players.
Total parallel here, I suppose. This whole,
if you don’t have the board, you gotta play the board in your mind. I mean, there’s a playbook for all these things. There’s a good, that’s a great parallel, I think, into this space of the things that we have to go through, the partners have to go through, the pivoting on deals. I mean, the pivoting on conversations, I love that. That’s a great, that’s a good one.
All right, let’s go back 10 years, 15 years.
Hard lesson that you learned from something you screwed up on, great mentor, just something that you can kind of share with the audience.
There was two, one was fail fast. I really like, and I would advise partners to do the same thing. Listen, you know, go and try cybersecurity. If it doesn’t work with that particular client, then you move on and you pivot to something else. And that goes into the second one, which is reinventing yourself. For somebody who has the background that I did, which is a football coach, bartender, pastor, you know, then I got into this industry in the data center space. And then from there, I sold these amazing devices that were never going away, Blackberries. And then I went to another solution that’s never going away, MPLS.
And so then I got into cloud and then cyber. So, you know, just trying to continually reinvent yourself. You remember that show Pretender? I love that in every episode, I was like, what’s it gonna be this time? And that’s what I felt like, is you almost have to pretend who you are gonna be until you, that’s fake it till you make it. And that’s what I always did is I was like, let’s go. And I found myself just taking my pastoral background and going and being a really good presenter. And then by doing that, I just became the lead in anything that I put my mind to.
Well, there’s, I like to follow weird stuff on Twitter and look at some of these data and these statistics and, you know, the psyche side of it in human psychology.
And if you tell yourself, if you’re negative to yourself enough, and you say, no, I can’t do this, the human brain after so many times, I don’t remember the exact amount of times, but the human brain actually believes it. So one has to believe then that the inverse is true with this whole vibe of positivity, I can do it. I can walk into this, I can step into this. It’s absolutely true because if you get into it enough and you try it enough, and you say, I can be successful in this, I can move this to the next conversation. You will be, there’s no way that you’re not. So I love that, I kind of love hearing that path story
because I think it’s proven, you know, anybody can step into anything at the end of the day. I think that’s a great story.
Bring up a great point. We actually have a partner here in Utah that I had a training with, and then they started to implement the cybersecurity conversation into their daily talk track. And they ended up having three or four opportunities right away. And they said, this is so much easier than I thought.
Very successful now, and we’re working on a lot of different things, and they’ve changed their whole mindset to focus on cybersecurity more than just the normal traditional voice and data. So it’s been great to see people overcome all those fears that they had.
Love it, love it.
Okay, so I did some research for this on, you know, the title of this track is about how to understand what people are doing to try to sell to the Fortune 500. Because I believe that if you can figure that out, you can figure it out for anything, right? And we see this, right? Technology adoption in the Fortune 500, inevitably that makes it down to mid-market, makes it to SMB, and you know, it’s always a leading edge indicator of how to have these. And so,
Fortune 500 tips. So there’s five things that we see that the Fortune 500 sales reps do. So thing number one,
building strong relationships. Thing number two, they’ve got tailored and custom solutions. Thing number three, they’re leveraging data and insights. Four, one of my favorites, effective negotiation skills. And number five, persistent follow-up. So if we understand that that’s what those guys are doing, how do you rank for the top three? Where would you advise our partners? All right, if you’re gonna hone in on these three, what’s your one, two, three there? Yeah, first off, I think
it’s having that business conversation. I think we over-end up, overthink a lot of things. And a CIO is just like us, and a CISO, they’re normal people. And so it’s getting them to kind of get comfortable with the conversation. And that’s where, you know, even recently, yesterday, I had a conversation with two different CISOs. And we talked about, you know, how big is your team? What’s their makeup? You know, what are you doing that’s really, really good? And what do they struggle with? What do they hate showing up to work for? And those are some of the conversations that show that they’re human. So then it’s the persistency of staying engaged. But it’s really that conversation track that you have in the beginning to know that they’re just humans. We used to always think that when I was playing football, you know, because the other guy was so much bigger than me, and then you realize, you know, they have their own weaknesses as well. But all these guys are struggling with the same things that anybody else is, whether it’s voice, data, cloud, unified communications, they have the same issues. It is really just such a business conversation. I had a really good conversation, if you’ve heard some of the previous recordings that we’ve done around a Fortune 1000 company, that is a $9 billion entity.
And he only had 14 on his IT staff, which, you know, to most people, that seems huge. But when you’re trying to manage 25,000 employees, I gave him a chance to say, you know, what do you guys do really well? And then what are some of the struggles that they have when they show up every single day to work that they wish that was not on their plate? And they started talking about compliance. They hated that security awareness training, because nobody wants to do it. They started talking about, oh, our CEO’s constantly deleting emails, and I have to go fish and find it, or re-image his computer because it’s something he did. So, you know, it’s really, they have the same frustrations that we all do. It’s just figuring out how to have that conversation around it.
So it seems like, kind of based on what you’re saying then, you’ve got probably the building strong relationships at the top, which, I mean, that’s a double down, right? That’s the foundation of this channel.
Maybe number two is that persistent follow-up on, let me help you with that. And it seems like maybe number three there is kind of leveraging that data and insight. So here’s how I’m helping others. Here’s what I’m hearing others are struggling with. Is that a fair ranking on top three?
I totally agree. The relatability aspect is really what people look for, is can I relate to this person? Have you worked on a couple of these things in the past? Can I trust you with some of these security measures that I’m looking at? And that’s the most important thing, to show that you’ve been doing this. But it’s not something that you need to overthink. It is definitely still a business conversation. These guys are reporting to boards. And what’s the consistent theme with most board of directors? There are not typically technical people sitting on those board of directors. They want it simplified.
Yeah, yeah, there’s good, I mean, not that, I mean, effective negotiation and tailored and custom solutions kind of come with the next steps, the next stages of the deal. But there’s great books out there. And if I remember the name of it, we’ll bring it up. But one of the things that they talk about in these books is identifying and labeling the emotions. So often we hear from the customers of, no, I don’t need that, or yes, I need this. And we go, okay. But then what these negotiation books teach you to help is, okay, you told me that you needed that. What’s driving that? Help me understand that, right? So you’re getting from that layer one of labeling the emotion, if I hear you saying that, and you’re getting down to that sub layer of, you said this, yes, or you said this, no, because of why. And when we understand that why, that’s the, to me, I think that’s the science that takes it into, we just turned it into a business conversation. It might have been an emotional reaction from the customer’s part based on an outage, based on what a C-level told them that they had to do, or what a peer said that they had to do. But if we can start to get into those, labeling those emotions, that first layer, that second layer, and go that, hey, you said this thing, what’s driving that? Why? And I think we’ve proven that, you know, we talk about this a lot, you don’t have to be the expert to know that, whether you even have an engineer with you or don’t, you’re sometimes in that conversation, and you can pull out the, what’s driving that? Okay, cool, great, let me go take that back to the team. Let me see if we’ve got anything that we can help. We’ve probably got some other customers going through the same thing. Let me check on that for you.
I love that you put it that way. I love the, what’s driving that, or how does security play a role as you’re making some of these decisions? Do you feel like you have the team capable of being able to manage that yourself? Or is that something that you think your team may not have the expertise and you may need some help? And that’s really where our team comes in and says, let’s talk about a couple different paths. It’s almost choose your own adventure. You can do it yourself, but what we’re seeing Forbes say is that more companies are getting comfortable with outsourcing their cybersecurity because they are worried about keeping people employed, there’s constant movement, people want to take a vacation, and they’re not experts, let’s face it. What’s the average threat that gets through all your security measures? Is it something that everyone’s seen before? Is it something brand new that no one’s seen before? It’s brand new, it’s a zero day. So would you rather have novices going, oh great, I see a new threat, let’s take care of that. Or would you rather have experts who know what they’re doing that can absolutely get that out of your system, eradicate it, and get you back up and running as quick as possible?
Yeah, just looked up the name of the book, couldn’t remember it, it’s by Chris Voss, and it’s called Never Split the Difference. So I would, I highly encourage everybody to go take a peek at that. The first couple chapters of that book are great, because what Chris talks about in that, he comes from this weird, he stumbled into business, he started out with this counter-terrorism, CIA, FBI background doing,
negotiating lives for money in counter-terrorism to try to save people and things like that. And I think what he learned was that as you negotiate with these people, there’s a process, right? You’re saying these things, here’s what you said, but let me understand the why, because I can’t get to the root, I can’t solve it, I can’t help you, I can’t relate to you until I understand the why, and kind of what you’re going through. And there’s a couple great chapters in the beginning of that on labeling that I think everybody would love to go check that out, it’s good stuff in there. That’s awesome. Okay, another book reference. We really gotta get some book deals on these things. Royalty. So Grant Cardone, this is the name that’s out there, right, and if you don’t know, Grant Cardone is kind of this rags to riches,
grew up in the automotive world, got into car sales, hit rock bottom, and said, okay, he put together this methodology, now he’s worth a billion, he’s in real estate, he’s got more private jets than my kids have toys. And so he’s got this theory of 10X, and that was his claim to fame. And the thought is people grossly underestimate the amount of time, energy, and money, and effort that it’s going to take to get to a target. So if my target is X amount of sales, then I think that’s 100 cold calls. The reality is it’s probably 1,000, right? Or if I think it’s gonna be 1,000 dollars, it’s probably gonna be 10,000 dollars. That kind of methodology. So anyway, he talks about this.
How would you relate that from a parallel to R space?
Because these customers already have so much on their plates, right? Everything that they’re already going through. What’s the tie here to this track?
You know, every time, Kobe does a really good job, Kobe Phillips, of showing this, what are CIOs responsible for? And every time I show that slide, CIOs go, yeah, and more. And a lot of those bubbles that they’re trying to fulfill, either in network or cyber security or virtualization, they’re in red and you gotta move them to yellow and green so you can pass your audits or they’re checked off. And that’s the tough part, but what’s great about cloud and cyber security is that most of the customers end up buying more within six months. And so that 10X rule applies even better, but I like to relate stuff to sports and I think most customers really want that home run. They always want that big deal and they’re trying to go after that enterprise customer and they forget to do singles and doubles. And the singles and doubles add up to those home runs quicker probably than the home runs. They close quicker, they have more need. Most of the customers that we deal with in the SMB marketplace have one, maybe two people on their IT staff, maybe one dedicated security. And so what I realize is that partners don’t do a good enough job of marking time on their calendar. How do you get good at raising kids? You read about it. How do you get good at your fantasy football? You study and do research and you spend that time going to ESPN or going to news outlets so that you can talk to your friends around the water cooler. But what people don’t do is they don’t spend time preparing. They don’t go to the job boards and see what’s out there on their own customers before they make a call. They don’t go and read up on tech. I mean, Jeff Hathcote’s constantly spending the first 30 minutes to an hour of his day reading on really cool technologies or breaches that happen and how they happen.
Even going to TikTok and watching some of those things in the morning will educate you on whether or not aliens are real or how we build their pyramids.
Yeah, careful on the TikTok rabbit holes.
But overcoming objections, do you do it in your mind? I start to think about what would I say. So if we’re talking and you’re a customer and I go, hey, Josh, I would love to help you with your cybersecurity. Oh, we got that covered. We’re good, I got it seen. I outsource to an MSP.
Fantastic, you know what? I really love to align with MSPs. Is there a chance I could get introduced to them? I would love to see if there’s a way that we could fill in some of those gaps on things that they’re not doing. And oh, by the way, is there anything that they don’t do that they said that they would? We know that most people come back and say that they’re good, but then when we peel back the onion, we see that they actually do have things that that MSP is not able to do. So I love to go that singles and doubles approach and really see if there’s ways that we can help organizations even with a small aspect that they may not have thought of.
Yeah, I love that.
And you know, the funny thing that comes out of that sometimes is when we see the partners ask that question and they do get in and have the conversation with the MSP, it starts out as, whoa, this is scary. It’s gonna be competitive. This is my turf. This is your turf. And then we see that these MSPs don’t, they obviously can’t fulfill everything. And it turns into a referral partner relationship in some instances of like, wait a minute, you could help me with more accounts. You can do, we can keep these counts sticky together. You’re, you know, we’re not gonna step on your toes. You’re not gonna step on ours. Well, yeah, let’s, okay, then let’s account map, right? So that becomes its own gift that keeps on giving. So I love, love that strategy.
The worst thing that you can do is assume that you’re not gonna step on your own. So Kobe Phillips brings up a great analogy in one of our things. And it’s a real story that we have a customer in the Telerus ecosystem that’s working with three different partners. And he said, why are you working with three different partners? And he said, well, the first partner, we had a CX need, and they said that they do CX. So they fulfilled our solution. The next time we had a need, it was around cloud and that partner didn’t say that they did that.
And another partner come in and they were the ones that sold us the cloud solution. Then we had a security one and neither one of them talked about security. That customer is now billing over a million dollars a month. Three different partners because none of the partners said that they could do it all. And so we have to be able to talk about all the things that we do in our portfolio. Don’t assume that an MSP is doing all those because I’ve worked with thousands of MSPs and they do one niche. They don’t do the whole solution set. It’s too hard.
Okay, so you get to see a lot of these examples. I mean, we’re going down this theme of tactics that are working to approach the Fortune 500 and bring that into every level regardless of what size of account the partners are going after. So anything that you’ve heard that’s leveraged some of these tactics, successes that partners are having, I wanna hear what you’re hearing and see if we can have other partners leverage that same thing too.
Yeah, I was just on the phone earlier today with one of our partners from the East and it’s really great for the Fortune 500 but it’s actually going down to the SMB as well, which is Gartner says that this year, 40% of board of directors are actually putting together a cybersecurity committee that’s gonna report to the board. They’re gonna talk about trends, they’re gonna talk about what’s resonating, what products they should be looking at, build a roadmap for them and then they get pushed down to the CIO. And one of our partners is actually serving on three different boards. He gets paid $10,000 a month to serve on those boards and he’s been pushed down to the CIO and he’s getting over $40,000 in monthly recurring for just cybersecurity by sitting on those boards. And some of those boards are actually offering M stock options. So, it’s a great way to position yourself differently. There’s a lot of boards this year that are not technical. The CIO doesn’t sit on the board and they need that committee to advise the board. And it helps give checks and balances to the CIO who comes in and says, “Oh yeah, we got it covered.” So I think that one, aligning with board of directors, how that conversation track could go is you call a CEO and say, “Are you reporting to a board? “Do you have a board of directors? “Fantastic. “Are you like most customers according to Gartner “where you’re putting together “that cybersecurity committee? “I would love to be on that board “or serve on that board or put together a team of resources “that can advise the board on that.” One of the great avenues is in Platinum Equity. PE firms are buying up all these organizations and they have a bunch of different boards but the master board manages all of them. I was just in Utah recently and sat down with a bunch of CIOs and one of the CIOs sits on the board and advises the board. We were talking a lot about risk and things that they needed to do from board of directors standpoint but he’s managing all the rest. Now every single person in that room reported to that one CIO. So whatever he said, all the rest of them bought. So getting that leverage, starting to position yourself as somebody that’s an asset to a board of directors and you have Telerys’ support and help will take you to different levels with Fortune 500.
Yeah, I like that and Fortune 500 or Fortune 500,000, I think that strategy is the same because we look at, if you think about, if you remember when you were a kid and you play the game telephone and by the time it’s obviously, it’s a completely different message when it gets to that third, fourth level let alone the last person. But if you think about that, but if you think about that, that’s kind of how some of these conversations have to go when you’re dealing with something that’s delicate as security, right? I’ve got to, we’ve got to uncover the problem, right? Whether the partner’s in there, the partner’s got our engineering team, our architect’s in there. We’ve got to help them uncover. We’ve got to introduce what the business problem is, who solves that, how they solve that, how the budget aligns, where this aligns with risk and other things that the C levels are going through. But I think we’re getting asked even at the engineering level, can you help me prep for this board meeting? So the board, we do see those points definitely meeting. And I think the more we can help people understand the risk. Risk is such a critical piece of this. I think it relates as we can help them prep and create budget for now, create budget for the future. I love hearing that. It’s good to see that resonating.
What’s even better is that most of our partners are worried sometimes about that cybersecurity conversation. Board of directors are not technical people. So it’s all business. And they want to hear from a business professional that’s been doing this.
100%.
All right, I’m going to push you for more secrets.
So we’re talking secrets of the 500, secrets that can transcend to any level. What’s our best kept secret in this space, anything that we haven’t touched on yet that’s going to help the partners,
maybe something that you don’t see people doing enough of?
I like aligning with OEM technologies. So the OEM providers are, let’s just say Palo Alto, Carbon Black, CrowdStrike, Fortinet, and they’re all in these massive companies and they don’t care whether or not the customer buys the software direct or it’s bought through a service provider. But to talk to a customer and say, what technologies are you looking to adopt and for them to throw out a technology like CrowdStrike and then for you to go, okay, fantastic. Are you working with CrowdStrike Direct? Are you working through a managed services provider? Could I get introduced to them? And then aligning some of the companies that they’re looking to go after and see if they’re in your ecosystem, I think that that’s huge plus some of those OEM salespeople are going to be the partners of tomorrow. I don’t think that we’re doing that enough. The second one is I alluded to it earlier,
around that singles and doubles, but if you think about the colleges, Coro did this really amazing thing where in Chicago they invited me to come be a speaker on trends and tech and they invited 120 people registered. They were all cybersecurity majored college students and they all came and they sat for an hour and they provided pizza and beer and they all stayed for another 30 minutes and started chatting about it. So what I did is I took that conversation track and said, okay, first off, here’s the trends. Now, if you’re in front of a CIO, here’s how you differentiate yourself. They may be looking for a security admin, but then you can say, hey, how are you overcoming the fatigue on security awareness training, knowing that employees don’t wanna do it, but yet 90% of all breaches are caused by humans. How are you working on that? How are you keeping up with AI? So if you can differentiate yourself in the interview process, now what I wanna do is say, let’s get our partners to go to all the local colleges across the nation, go start to have these conversations align with those deans of the artificial intelligence or deans of cybersecurity, start to have these conversations, bring in one of their CIOs and say, here’s what I look for in the interview process. We’re gonna get those employees before they even are ready to take a job. Now, these one are all most likely in the cybersecurity space or they have an IT job, their friends are all on IT and they’re the buyers of the future who don’t even know that the TSD model is in place. So once they get hired, they say, hey, you know what? I have a whole team that can come and advise us and help us. We don’t have to do this on our own. It was great.
It’s good. No, a lot of good nuggets in there. I love that OEM alignment.
My favorite thing that I get to see is some of that account mapping when that stuff happens. I mean, it’s absolute gold. It’s just, there’s always this preconceived notion that it’s like, ah, the wall’s gonna be up and it’s really not. Everybody’s open, everybody wins. High tide raises all boats. A lot of good stuff there. Great nuggets.
All right, so there’s a lot of obviously productization in AI, a lot of money getting thrown, private equity getting thrown into AI. So, I mean, as you think about making the security products better, what are you seeing some of our providers do?
How are they investing in that that will ultimately make the products better for the end customer so they see value out of it?
I was just on a conversation again today with another supplier and we were talking about it. What’s interesting is people think, oh, AI is brand new, because it’s a buzz. But machine learning and artificial intelligence, we’ve been doing this for a decade in cybersecurity. But there’s a big push for it now. And I think artificial intelligence is where cloud was 10 to 15 years ago, where we’re trying to be early adopters and organizations are, but we haven’t figured out how to secure it. There’s a bunch of different ways. But when I was chatting with this supplier and picking his brain on what’s their strategy and roadmap as artificial intelligence is becoming more of a talk track. And we were talking about the push for more advanced MDR, that human element, that sock element, faster incident response. We all need incident response, whether you’re doing cyber insurance or there’s a breach. We need to make sure everyone’s on the same page. But with AI, we can actually get a faster response time to a threat or something that’s living maliciously in our portfolio. And then how do you balance the human versus the artificial intelligence? You can’t abandon all the AI, you can’t abandon all the human. We still need it, it’s like the umpire.
Even though we wanna move to that human, get away from the human and do the technology strike zone, what if the pitch bounces? So we still need that human element to kinda see that. And then the last thing is, it’s interesting because we’ve always talked about
customers are looking for layers of cybersecurity. Now what I think’s happening with AI is that the suppliers are looking for more layers of cybersecurity. And we’re seeing suppliers not just be one trick ponies and just have EDR or just have a SIM. They’re now layering more security measures in place so that they can catch the bad actors quicker. And that’s where artificial intelligence is kinda changing the direction of the way that our suppliers are attacking that marketplace.
Love it, total telemetry play. Good stuff there. Okay, final couple thoughts. So if I’m a partner, again, I wanna step a little bit deeper into this.
Help my customers with some of these transformations, some of these deep risk conversations. What’s your advice to help them continue to learn?
I would say first, don’t overthink it. It is a business conversation. We have lots of tools and lots of resources. Your goal is to start the conversation. You have a lot of support behind you. You don’t need to do this on your own. So we’re dumping a lot of effort and energy and conversations and talk tracks and learning into our LMS. So please go to our university and you’re gonna see cybersecurity is gonna have 101 on different product sets. You’re gonna see 101 on how to do the sales and how to have the technology conversation. Then we’re gonna get into the advanced solutions on 201 and then the super advanced on the 301. And so you’ll have a lot of those, do a lot of reading, get aligned with our team and we can start to provide you nuggets of talk tracks. How do you have a business conversation? Then remember that once you hear a customer say that they have a cybersecurity need, you don’t need to stop the conversation, but you can say, “Hey, listen, it does sound like you do have some cybersecurity interest. I’d love to bring in one of our engineering resources with Telerus. We’ll white board your environment. We’ll talk about where we see gaps. We’ll talk about best practices. We’ll talk about other companies that are in similar size, similar industry, and we’ll help you create a roadmap. We’re not here to sell you anything.” The other thing is, what’s interesting, I’ve had a lot of conversations with CIOs and I say, “How as a CIO are you able to keep up with the technology now that you’re out of the weeds and you’re managing people?” And most of the time they say it’s very difficult. You know what I’ve actually offered was, do you have a phone or friend? Do you have anybody that you can pick up when you’re evaluating tech that you can have a conversation with, judgment-free zone, and they say, “No, everyone’s always trying to sell me stuff.” And I usually say, “Now you do. You have 20 resources that you can pick up the phone, have a business conversation. We’re not here to do anything but talk trends and tech and make sure that you’re not missing anything, talk about the pros and the cons, and you’ll see that it’s such a different conversation when you align that way differently with your customers.
Love it, yeah. A lot of great tools, a lot of great energy going into the LMS, you got the quick solution assessment, you got the engineers, you got an event. There’s a plethora there. Good call-outs there for sure. All right, final thoughts.
We don’t have a crystal ball. We really gotta get one for effect of this, but over the next couple years, take this anywhere you like. Any innovations that you’re most looking forward to, things in the market that you wanna raise awareness on?
So I love that True You popped up. We log into our phones with our face now. Remember, first off, we never needed a password, and then we had a six-digit password, and it’s really hard to type in while you’re driving with your knee. And I love that True You has now adopted this, being able to log into your computer and get rid of passwords by logging in with facial recognition and then getting more access based on how you position your mouse. So more technologies like that. I think there’s gonna be advanced behavioral analytics. Everyone wants analytics. So how do we get into those behaviors and study patterns and study artificial intelligence and where it’s heading?
You think about AI socks. We’re gonna start to see socks that are, like we talked about, half human, half AI-driven, and how do we get more advanced and let the AI do more of that
data discovery for us and look for those anomalies better than we’ve ever seen that advanced anomaly detection in the tech products, I think is what’s gonna be that next line of defense that we haven’t seen yet. There’s all these things that Gartner comes out with, XDR, and we’re constantly changing acronyms, but more security around AI is going to be super exciting, and that’s what I most look forward to, those products that are gonna be the unique differentiators that are gonna separate our partners from anybody else who’s trying to call into a customer because we have unique talk tracks that customers haven’t heard of or that they would love to adopt. They just weren’t aware of them.
Love it, good. My man, that’s where we wrap. Mr. Stein, appreciate you coming back on. I think we realized you’re an onion at this point. We’re peeling back many layers.
We’ve made it through the theologian. We’ve made it through the bartender. We’ve made it through the Russian spies, and now a chess master over here. So I don’t know what’s next, but as always, good, entertaining, lots of nuggets, man. I really appreciate you coming on, buddy.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that wraps us up for today. We’re talking Fortune 500 secrets here. I’m your host, Josh Lapresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telerus, and this is Next Level BizTech. Until next time, go subscribe and follow.
Next Level BizTech has been a production of Telerus Studio 19. Please visit Telerus.com for more information.