Masters of MEDDICC - How To Build A Diverse Winning Team With Josh Reiner

If you are at a point in time in your career where you may have just successfully progressed because you've done well, but you haven't really invested the time into learning your craft and understanding how to build a repeatable go-to-market sales process emotion and get with people that can go do that, come find a way to get into an organization. Be willing to have your ego take a step down because it's not a step down. You're investing in your career in your timeline. So if you're great but you may not have the right level of experience or you might not have this, find a way based on a relationship that you have. We live in a small world, find a way to have someone sponsor you into the call, find a way in because you're going to have to have that way to get in to have a shot. People follow other people because they get better. We're challenging people to be better versions of themselves and when they have a challenger obstacle, we coach them together to brainstorm together on how to go fix it. As long as you keep that culture of training and development and getting better, usually those people stick with each other for a long time. Welcome to Masters of Medic. Today I'm here with Josh Reiner. Welcome to the show, Josh. You're VP Amir at the Rocket Ship and I know that word is used a lot in this industry but I think it's very true in this example. The Rocket Ship that is where's. Absolutely. Absolutely pleasure to be here. Thanks, Eddie. Good. For those that don't know, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this wonderful world of sales? Well, so for those that don't know me, I recently, well, I guess now five years ago, moved over here from the US to Amir. My first job when I came over here was to run the Go-to-Market for Z-Scaler. Okay. Z-Scaler. And did that for four and a half years and then about just under a year ago took over the Go-to-Market responsibilities for Wiz across Amir. And prior to that, I worked at in BMC software and App Dynamics in the US. So that's short version of my career. Love that. I was looking on LinkedIn and I noticed and I, you know, those regular listers know I'm not the strongest at maths or math as you would say. But I was looking that you were at BMC, I think you started the year 2000. I did. Which it doesn't take a match. You need to work out that means 25 years. That is, yes. How things changed over those 25 years, if at all, like what's new? So lots changed over those years, you know, especially now with the kind of the burst of AI, especially how that's being integrated into how people prepare and get ready for your sales and become knowledgeable about what they want to have done. So just, you know, over the years, and the evolution of, you know, kind of technologies and tools and processes, I think the biggest thing that has changed is the amount of data and information that is accessible to us in a very short period of time. And that is positive and negative because there's, it's positive because there's a lot more information you can have, a lot more knowledge you can bring to the customer about the problems they may be having and how your solution or product may be able to service them. But it's siffering through that noise and information to come out with a coherent message. I think that is definitely something that's changed over the years. The mediums of which people use to outreach is also changed. You know, again, dating the self, you know, email was the sole reason to get out there from a digital perspective. I mean, now, you know, be our branding and digital, you know, linked in to your point of just raising that up. There's multiple ways and multiple touch points that customers use to survey you as a company or a prospect even before engaging with you. So a customer's ability to understand the product and service you have, the amount of research they can do without engaging you is tremendously more than what it used to be. You used to have to go and educate a customer or prospect about all the features and functionalities, the problem statements, and you were the sole guide of information at a lot of the times. Now, you know, by the time they may reach out to you, they've already done 60 to 70 percent of what they think is the due diligence. And that's a really good thing because they're much more educated buyers. But it's also a challenge in a lot of ways because, and I talk about this all the time with my team, when people come to you with a problem or a request, they already have a formulated opinion of how you can solve it. And our jobs at sellers is to make sure that they get the most out of the technology. I was using an example when I'm training my team. How much do you actually use of the Microsoft Office suite? And most people use the email, maybe a little bit of word and Excel. But it's such a powerful platform that a lot of people are using maybe a fifth of the value of. So how you get accompanied to embraces much of the value of your platform is critical. So again, to kind of summarize, people can get a lot more information about what you can do. But it's always in context of probably one small piece of the problem they're having. So our jobs as sellers and working with them is to make sure maybe we broaden the scope of the organization of who can benefit from it and how they can actually get additional value from it, not just the initial pain point that they may see. Yeah, I love what you said that. For us, we look at that from a perspective of what you're talking about is the customer and their decision criteria. And I think we talk about this a lot, but there's this sort of big divide in approach where it's, as you said, the customers are so much more informed. But as much of that is a good thing, like you said, unless all they've been reading in your cases, like Wiz website and Wiz is PR and product marketing, that perspective they're coming to you with is going to be influenced by something or someone else, which in the best case scenario is going to be Ghana, which is good for you because I know you're going to rate well there, but could also be a competition or it could just be a bad opinion. And I think like what's so interesting to, because you seem to have your finger really on the pulse of how customers are coming to you, how do you coach your teams to make sure that they aren't falling into sort of a routine of following what the customer thinks is best for them and therefore aligning Wiz's solution to the preconception of what the best decision criteria the customer has for themselves. So, well, I think, and I'll tell the Wiz journey to a certain degree, because one of the things that Wiz and the rocket ship that we're on, they have the most amazing PR and marketing team I've ever seen and experienced in my life from how they even branded themselves to be security and cyber. It doesn't need to be scary. It doesn't need to be swords and people in hoodies and falcons and evil stuff. It's unicorns and rainbows and fun. And it just kind of created this brand of how do we, how do we, it's fun? Like love. Like people use the word love when they come and talk about the product all the time. So, how, how that market and how that impression goes is kind of the first initial touch. So, Wiz spends a lot of time getting the branding right. We have a, I get 90 seconds and Wiz in 90 seconds and what can it go do and how it can go do for it. It's really taking that down to the next level that's really, really critical of once they engage. So, how we work together as a digital and then I go to market arm, digital and PR and marketing do the job to get the interest to highlight the main statements. But when it comes to you, then you have to make sure you build the team to operationalize it within that company because yes, the value is clear and the technology what it does. But once you take, how do you take that technology and get value from it? How do you, what are the use cases that are going to take cost out of the equation, reduce your, your risk profile and provide that benefit? So, there has to be both to work. You can't just have great marketing and digital branding without people to help execute and operationalize to truly get the benefit from it. So, us working with the PR and digital working with the field sales team and the engineers and the post sales team is a really, really critical handoff to extract the most amount of value you can. I absolutely love that. That makes so much sense. We would sort of describe what the PR and marketing team is doing there as they are taking not just the technical parts of decision criteria but also the relationship parts and they're bringing it back into their positioning. So, they're kind of inspiring and seeding in the market's mind the sort of things that they should look for and expect from not just a technical perspective, which is obviously very important in a technical product, but also from a relationship perspective of if you want to work with an organization, look at what our customers think, look at the vibe we have and that makes that makes so much sense to me. I love that a lot. Yeah, I always try to describe. I've never worked at a company that customers love so much. They use the word love when describing our technology and I think one of the main reasons and especially in today's world and the immediate gratification of where people are expecting and the time to value and the fact that we can highlight somebody's gaps and risks and challenges that they may have and prioritize how they want to go through them. When they start remediating those challenges and they see their security posture improve and they get their criticals down to zero, that's that's that they they feel like they're doing a good job and I think that's one of the things when I relate to any medic type selling or process or framework and how we communicate internally is everything still revolves around the champion that owns the initiative that you're working with. How are you empowering and enabling your champion to to be better, to be recognized for the benefit that they're doing, the reward for taking costs out of the business, the reward for increasing a company's security posture. So while we've got great technology that allows you to do things, helping that champions in our accounts be able to articulate back to the broader organization, here's the impact that I'm having and here's the benefit that it drives. It promotes them in their company and their career and that usually good things happen when when people get promoted and start documenting the benefit they receive. Yeah, I love that. One of the things you were talking about there were you were saying about customers loving the product and obviously there's the momentum that comes with all of that good stuff. Good product. Customers are like you in the growth and you know it's like a perfect sort of crescendo isn't it? But what I've seen happen before and I've been part of a company where I felt like this was a potential risk as well is that sellers can almost find themselves sort of hurrying through. They almost need to like slow things down to speed them up. Do you know what I mean? How do you help your team not get sort of taken with the momentum of customers are like well I used you before in my last organization. I want you here or perhaps you know my best friends also is in security or as a CISO and loves you and says that we need you. How do you make sure that your teams and your leaders that are working for you kind of make sure that's almost like slow things down to make sure we really still get to planting that value? It's well these are good problems to have. I come champagne problems when your product is so good and people move from one company to the next company they want to bring it in. That's a really really good problem to have and and usually what I try to describe usually a champion that you're working with that would come from one organization to another would use a CISO as an example. They did a great job you helped them you know fix all their misconfigurations in cloud and so it drove a lot higher security posture for it. That's great and then they go to new organization and they want to do the exact same thing but part of the benefit of any sort of solution to drive is to get the most out of it. So yes the CISO has a lot of value that you get because you're securing the environment but the application teams that are building applications to release new functionalities to stay ahead of their competitors also get a tremendous amount of value. The people that are looking to triage incidents that are happening in the in the wild there and sometimes trying to attack them they're also getting benefit. So when someone comes to you and they say yeah I want to bring you in that's great but so let's make sure that this gets adopted in your organization. Let's make sure we recognize you get recognized for all the great work that we're going to go do and that starts with getting us access to these other people that are going to provide benefit from it and let's go build a plan to understand their challenges document that was like we did with you before so we understand the before state and the after state and the impact that we're having both financially as well as you know security posture wise and we pull that together as a comprehensive program to then roll it out and then now you're getting benefit and then you're seeing even in a greater light because you've impacted multiple parts of the business. Now what that does to you as a seller is obviously you're providing more value to the organization and generally when you provide more value you can command a higher price point because they're getting more from the solutions and technology and it's they're getting more value exponentially. So it's a win win on both sides of the house so I always use this this term and most people that know me know it I would say I hate leads and what you just described there was kind of a lead. A person goes from one organ to the next but you still can't shortcut the process you still need to go in hey okay so you're going to do something here not because you like me because I can solve a problem you think we can solve a problem together so let's go investigate all the problem areas that we can go have in your organization really identify the pain in the implications of pain and as we're keeping the medic as a common language framework here so what is that okay now that we understand that there's pain in these different areas there are ways that we can improve what are the metrics that we really need to go get down to to to document the before and after state and once you start getting into that area now you're building use cases that are going to document those criteria and you can look at the outputs now you can start showing those pieces back to the organization so they can represent back to the economic buyer here's the value that here's the problem that we had here's the the statement that we released and the technically how we proved it out to show the benefit and here's the outcomes of what that is so I always take a very simple approach when I meet eBs and economic buyers they really care about two things is the product or service that I'm buying is it going to solve the pain that we have identified together and is it going to be adopted in the organization is it going to be deployed and implemented correctly so when I meet with him or her as an economic buyer I always make sure that I articulate the problem statement I articulate the deployment plan the structure that we're going to go do and then I do one step further where I say 60 days after we do this deployment together I'm going to come back to make sure that we're on track and if we're not we can pivot and how we're going to go but we will make sure that these benefits are realized and here's the adoption plan to ensure that it's going to happen I love that absolutely love that well one of the things that kind of sticks out for me here is that what you're talking about is selling from a perspective of approaching opportunities we've almost like an open mindset and one of the things I talk about a lot is that and I think it this will resonate with everyone if you imagine the company you're working for now even you working for ways I think this would be very true when you were in the interviewing process in those even though I imagine someone like yourself would have put a ton of work even with the connections you had inside of wisdom the momentum that came with that a ton of work upfront to do you know not just your research for the interview process but also your due diligence right but I'm pretty sure even with that you might have had a tough time telling me about what whiz costs what the you know if I presented you with a typical customer and say well what's what what's this going to cost on an annual basis you probably would have had a challenge right and that's somebody who's done in your case there hours and hours of research and it's actually you know in the industry you're not far from whiz where you worked at zscaler before right so you have you should have a sort of a bet what the point of making is a better understanding of the kind of cost that whiz would likely to be cost to cost then a customer would right so the customer is either has no idea what the cost is going to be or it's influenced by a competitor or another quote that had saying like that and what I find sells people often fall into the trap of doing is they go well this is what it's going to cost and this is the scope and it kind of falls back to what we're saying moment ago about decision criteria whereas what you're talking about doing there is kind of going in and it's your point about you know you don't like leads is going in with this mindset of okay well I'm very confident we've got a great product and I'm very confident that this great product can bring you value but let's just sort of let's just sort of pause on that one little you know problem you have over there and let's take a broader view here and I think the real point I left to make here is that it's not just about finding more value to make your proposition more compelling but it's around differentiation as well is that it's not just differentiation for value sake but differentiation for customer trust and credibility sake you know what you were saying earlier about building those champions well if you if you can go in as we as in say okay well I know you have that problem let's let's look broad let's look at the bigger pictures look at some of you know some of the initiatives you have in play and what strategies they're supporting what difference it would make if we can support you know maybe there's a new product launch or something like that going on that whiz can help to accelerate or make more efficient launch of then all of a sudden and particularly into your point in the economic buyers eyes all of a sudden you've not only differentiated yourself created new value but you've won this champion who's like I can't wait to take Josh to meet my boss because it's going to make me look great and and all good things come from that right a lot of impact there because you you put out a lot of really good points and one of the things that I always try to train my teams with is don't fall into the trap of a budget don't fall into the trap of you know comparing yourself to something else so I use this line all the time when I go in and meet with how much is your product cost and I say instead of answering the question with you know cost X I say I won't charge you a dollar more or a pound more or a euro more than the value that I can drive in a 12 month period so let me run the process because we have to go find out first of all am I the right solution for you and I can't make that assumption that just because Wiz is great that it's great for you so going through the process with somebody to really understand their pain points to really understand and back to your other point that you said that is really what important what I don't want to miss educated sellers help make educated buyers so when you go in and you say okay you're you're a fintech trying to break in and compete against the HSBCs in the barclays of the world how are you going to go do that well you're going to have to do that by releasing functionality faster and have different features that are capabilities that they don't have and your advantage is speed to market and capabilities that they want to have so to think that I can sell the same solution to both of those companies is naive on my part so the first step that you want to go do is a with you're an educated seller and you go into the organization to your point what are the business strategies that you've kicked off and what are the projects that are underlying those strategies that they need to implement to get to get done so any seller in my organization the first meeting that they have with a champion or a potential buyer we go through what we call the value pyramid where we take a look at the corporate objectives how they're tied to the business strategies that are trying to work on what are the programs and projects that they have and what are the risk to deliver those so when you start talking in customer terms and start these are the niche of these are the projects these are the concerns that you have how let's see how we can go relate to those what are the requirements that we have to go meet those initiatives and then let's go run a proof of value to see if that it makes sense for you because if we come in in this exercise you say your products is very expensive I said well it's expensive relative to depending on the value that we're providing so let's so see if I can provide you enough value to justify the cost that we're going to go bring and the only way you can do that is if you understand the initiatives that they're trying to accomplish and can you help them get the outcomes that they need to have with that that is how a truly educated buyer and seller should be engaging with the customer absolutely love that yeah I love that I think what I think it's funny is we we we we talk value pyramid as well and we've actually internalized the value pyramid to be the way in which we we operate it's our strategy we we call it our codex and so we have at the top level what you'd say is corporate objectives we call it our goals so the top two levels which is you know to have a winning team and then to help our customers unlock their full potential in in the go to market and then we have our strategies underneath which are things like that we have like a big media part of our business and lots of other things like having like really really beautiful easy to use software as another part so we have all the other strategies and then we have anything that we therefore do that would fall under an initiative you know whether it's a new show whether it's a new feature like at the moment we're developing a playbook product that has to then align to those strategies that then should support that goal and the reason why I mentioned that is because if somebody was to sell to us and they were to you know they wouldn't have to necessarily know that we use the value pyramid internally and even if we didn't and we just loosely were doing these things it would be an absolutely beautiful wonderful glorious experience for us as an organization because it makes it so simple it's like we're you're doing the you're kind of doing half the champions job which is to sell internally you're giving them the framework we talk about champion decks but if we get the value pyramid right it is truly the pathway in which the how your champion can connect your proposition and the value it provides to the very top level those corporate objectives you rightly said and you know it's it's almost it's funny to me that that we have these tools these plays if we call them that like value pyramids that aren't being sort of used every single time how does that work in in ways from obviously somewhere that's renowned have really high quality sales execution you only have to look at the kind of caliber of person the team is it is it a scenario where your leadership team is having to kind of encourage value pyramids or are they just part of the regular cadence how does that work I wish we lived in a world where no one took shortcuts yeah unfortunately we don't live in a world in you know one of the again champagne problem is when you have such great technology in such a market demand and it's such a need for what whiz does it sometimes you can take shortcuts and get away with it and and that's you can only stay that way for so long and the reason why I use that analogy is you know before Dali and Mike and Dave and I and and a lot of the people came here they obviously run a rocket ship on their own and their technology and the space and problems they were solving were great but the biggest part of the sales cycle before we came in here was when they showed the technology to getting a purchase order and the reason why it was the longest period of time is because buyers didn't know how to buy you showed them this unbelievable technology that could show all these these risks and vulnerabilities and they they were showing someone fire for the first time like they just get wide eyed and like this is the greatest thing in the world how do I buy this yeah so part of working in an organization is to enable your company to buy a product to solve a problem because they're not used to buying and you have to help them with that process facilitate that process so the sales process that medic kind of as a foundational framework started with but now it's really a communication framework that goes into you have to almost win that first cell with the person like I want to help you buy this so that it gets adopted deployed and the value is recognized and that's getting into the process so it starts by understanding here's the initiatives that you're running okay so now that we have these initiatives how do we you know why are we doing anything and why are we doing it now and and why do we think Wiz is the right fit for that so and but that's how people buy people buy based on that thought process what's my problem statement you know why am I going to do something now and then why is this the right solution for that so as we go through the artifacts that we use to to run a buyer through that journey it's all built on the buyer's mentality to make sure that they fully understand it document it and can deploy and adopt it in the organization because again going back to the economic buyer a lot of eb's have bought things over the careers that haven't gotten deployed so the better you can communicate a plan to get it adopted and the value recognized you have to follow the framework and structure so again back to Wiz's biggest challenge of showing great technology and not being able to understand how to quantify the problem then that that also means they don't know how to deploy it to get the recognized value out of it so having and following that process enables organizations and your champion in the organization to recognize that value and and socialize that value internally yeah I love that and one of the things that's really interesting is Wiz is a great example of this I think you know I forget how many records Wiz broke you know in the first sort of I don't know have a few years of a existence but then there's the the moment I only came in and he said like Mike yourself on that this great you know it's just it was almost like you know there was points I don't know if this is a so many you folks talked about but there's points from the outside in where we were sort of observing and well how long before that person joins and it was almost became a bit so almost parody because then you know that you know it's one of the one of the things about our industry is you know people follow greatness and you never see it the other way around though do you never see like bad leaders follow badly as they know and no matter how bad they are you know not so bad people don't follow bad people so it's a one other thing to see but one of the things I think is not talked about enough in our industry is we define winning and losing incorrectly in my mind because we define in particularly in sales but I guess it's a whole go-to-market motion winning is closed one and losing is closed lost right but what you were talking about there is it aligns with how we think the difference is winning is because you know you should never really lose a deal you just shouldn't you look like if you're doing everything right you should never lose a deal you should qualify out of a deal you see what I mean because you should you should never come as a surprise unless something is misqualified at some point you should you know so the point being then what what what becomes winning and losing is did you win the best possible deal you could have won versus the worst possible deal right and the thing that people think about then is they think well size of deal which is sure that's obviously of you know it's revenue of course but actually we look at it from a sales velocity perspective so we would say okay well not just the size of the deal but how long did it take us to close it because that's the like the forgotten about metric that is as impactful as amount of opportunities is as impactful as conversion rate and it is as impactful as the size of the deal because you know it doesn't take an expert to work out that it takes you twice as long to close something then it might as well be half the value closing for the same amount of time and so it's those things about focusing on not just you know size of deal conversion rate but the time to close it really made the difference and I think that's you know kind of what you were talking about there yeah so again I like using shark and ass statements so one of the statements I've made is I've never lost a deal okay yeah and yeah what are you talking about yeah well you know it I will qualify out of a deal yeah if it's not if we're not set right or if the customer will engage in a way that I know they need to engage to get the value out to make sure that it's going to be adopted it's going to be brought around now part of the challenges that we talked about early on were with all this data with all this information customers are really afraid to engage with companies because they they fear a bad sales process a bad experience and no no I'll do the research and you just tell me what to go do so the biggest sale that any person needs to make is convincing a customer prospect that I want to engage with you the right way and then quickly find out if we're the right fit you've done some due diligence now I've done some due diligence let's see if we want to go together and in that discovery phase where they're analyzing the problem statement they're looking at the challenges that they want to have they're articulating the criteria that needs to be met that process if you go through it early on in this the process and you find out you're not a good match then you you back away or if you get a customer that doesn't want to engage with you that way and you can't convince them to go into that process then walk away because they're not going to get the value from it and they're going to lead even if they do buy you you're going to probably get a low price point it's not going to get adopted the way it should be and they're probably going to have a bad feeling about that experience like I bought ways it was really expensive it's not even really being used no so have the courage to sell the process of making sure that when a customer engages with you in an enterprise size and scale that we are have your best interests and hearts together and spend some time in the discovery process because if you do that well if you understand and document and have the metrics that you're going to go do and if you both think it's right then you can execute in doing a deeper dive question now the reason why discovery is so important in investing that time there and kind of a slow down to speed up analogy you're not really slowing down if you invest more time up front to understand the criteria that you need yeah that the long time is technology the long time is POV so long time is when you start investing resources on both sides of that but if you don't do a good enough job in discovery how do you know if you're going to be successful how do you know if it's going to be enough benefit so do slow down up front spend more that discovery qualification phase make sure you've got enough metrics and criteria that are impactful enough once you both agree then you go into the evaluation and stitch love that I feel like you're describing discovery there from what we were called professional discovery but I think the problem is with discovery is most of our industry thinks discovery is a PDF they download from a guru on LinkedIn that you know starts with like these asked these apparently silver bullet questions which we know don't exist and I think what people miss if I could really really kind of implore people one thing it's that discovery isn't a set of questions that you have like you know written down to ask it's not a script it's not a cool sheet discovery is curiosity and for me one of the things I'm a little bit afraid of for our industry is that one of the things that led to great discovery will always lead to great discovery is the research you do beforehand because it's so important that you're relevant with discovery right you have to ask relevant questions because like you said you're trying to that first instance to sell yourself to the customer who's jaded from you know being asked every time a salesperson walks into office you know what keeps them awake at night or you know who asked cares about whatever those other tired questions are so credibility and relevance is hugely important and the thing I'm a little bit afraid of now is that people keep preaching AI as a shortcut for that and sure don't get me wrong you can definitely go and get if you use AI right you can get to the you know you can get it to pull out topics from annual reports and things like that but for me the pack that the best discovery calls or meetings I've ever been in have come as a result of where I've been doing the research but it's not necessarily the research that has led me to being the right frame of mind it's the it's that it's where I go from that research so I'll read something and my mind will start to wonder I think well that's a little bit like voter phone when we were selling to voter phone and you know and I might be selling you know I'd be preparing for meeting VHSBC it could be completely unrelated but there will be something there about you know it doesn't have to be you know finance to telecoms be something there and I start thinking all that will be interesting and I can and I you know you go one one two free rows of removal away from the the thing you were researching and all of a sudden what you come into that discovery meeting with is a really strong credible point of view that where the customer actually goes oh actually okay not only is this interesting but and this is something I think that's really important you to be able to have got to that point of view you must have put some work in ahead of this meeting which tells me either you're stupid which clearly you're not because you've just come of a really strong point of view or you must feel very strongly a confidence that you have a compelling reason why we should be talking and so it's kind of that air of confidence that the doing the research does gives you that comes across the customer and therefore they go oh actually this person's a serious person this is you know and it's I always sort of liking it to you know the the consultants you know the top tier consultants who do have a very similar job to an account executive in that they go into a scenario where an organisation is trying to get to a better outcome the difference is we get to the better outcome by charging for a technology typically and the the consultants the management consultants get they just come up with the idea of getting there and they kind of they almost you know they they sell like a bit you know we we'll put together a business case and we'll put together you know POC's and POV's and all that good stuff we don't sell it we we we we we give it free in the hope that they have therefore buy into our technology but it's not that the similar so there's a few points that you raised there and and the first thing that I'll say is data is your superpower the more you know the better off you are to service your customer so what I do think AI and and some of the technologies you know back to the early days of thing you're dating me on the 25 years there appreciate that you know I I had to read the 10k's I had to read the 10k's I had to read the annual reports I had to had to do a lot of research on what you know the organisation cared about in the strategies you can build that quite quickly so there's shortcuts you can take in leveraging technology to make you more efficient to to have more meetings faster but it doesn't shortcut the fact that you need to get the data and you need to have a point of view yeah you need to come in and when we look at a sales process you know obviously we start with the value permit and we come in and we articulate that as we discussed the next phase of that is to getting into the three wives that we talked about so when you sit down with someone like just want to make sure like how do this these business strategies that you're trying to accomplish in these programs you're trying to you know why is this important what are the impact statements how are we going to quantify these benefits to them and I always when someone gives me a three-wise document or we do a deal review I always look for names because people say they well who's they I want Andy yeah I just Andy care about this well what is a champion care why does Andy care about this and you know why are we doing anything is the most critical thing that you want to go do it then that quickly translates into why now and you know we were talking earlier and one of the things that we talk about is again people come to me oh this this accounts in so much pain they have all this well they've been living in that pain for so long so what is the what is the impending event that is going to finally get them to do to take action to break the inertia to make a change and to drive some of those things so again I want educated sellers and educated sellers make sure that they're aligning to the outcomes of what the customer wants they're about ensuring that it gets deployed and and and go not into production so the value is realized that solves so many other challenges and problems that you have but it's all underlined by a common language and framework and it's what I like about medic starting as a qualification tool now moving to a language is when you talk to anyone in my organization regardless of what ecosystem team you're in we're always talking to each other in the same language well where are we in the process have we done you know how we validated the decision criteria that's it that's a black and white question that you can go well no okay let's go back and validate the decision criteria do we understand the decision process they're going to go through to make an evaluation do we have enough differentiating criteria in our favor that's unique to our platform or service that we're selling that is going to separate us that would justify doing a price proof of value because we can just by the price like those are the questions that we ask each other as leadership team and sellers to make sure that it's a right fit and so going back to have never lost a deal if you go through and you've got differentiating criteria that your product or service can can only deliver and then you can prove it in the in the in the in the proof of value and deployment technology then the output for the eb that the mean that you have they're going to go forward with it because they want that problem solved and they want that benefit realized yeah I love them that the common language things and interesting ones get into with whiz because you know your channel first right so you're having those conversations you so aptly describe there how does that expand to your channel partners are you taking that same language to your conversations with them yes so there's a there's a couple pieces with the channel that we'll talk about one making a channel first commitment is a big commitment it it it shows that we are not going to use you for fulfillment partner we're not going to use you as a convenience we're using you as a partner to truly drive together and the reason that that's important and you know there's thousands and thousands of customers that are out there I can't hire thousands and thousands of people to go service those customers but if we partner correctly with regional based partners with global system outsourcers with you know cloud providers that are coming into the market they do have the coverage so there's not a customer out there that doesn't have a partner or a cloud provider because that's what will sell with sales so they're already in there so when I use medic and the other shocking off-rays and actually Mike didn't like this when I said it in front of the whole world sales training or the kickoff in San Antonio I said never call a customer yeah never ever call a prospect and he's like what are you doing you're leading sales leader and you just told their entire sales team never to ever call a customer and the reason I said that is if you're a channel first and you're going to go you're going to run your product sale through the channel why would you want that person that intimately knows that customer already in the first new business meeting with you why would you make a lot of effort to understand with them already because they understand the strategies they understand the projects they understand some things and the nuances of the people in the organization use medic to help qualify here's why we should go in there together because here's what you're doing you know channel provider here's what the cloud providers doing here's the issues they're working the three of you go to a new business meeting together what eb or what champion want to have their cloud provider their channel provider that they trust and the product or service that we're representing jointly brainstorming and an outcome that we can all achieve together we're coming you you have these strategies you want to release these functionalities here's the outcomes we want to see if we can help you drive do you want to engage with all of us to see if we can have enough metrics and benefit to justify the cost of doing this they love it it's yeah the best way to go to market yeah I love that so much as well that what you're talking about because I think so often in channel we talk about co selling motions and of course you know to your point medics brilliant for that because it's the common language so we align you know even and this is the thing we work with a number of companies that have channel first strategies or very strong in the channel and they you know they see medic as that common language for co selling but some of their partners don't don't have medic implemented but the beauty is it's so common sense that if I if let's say you've never heard a medic before but I start talking to you about the champion you will know what that means if I start talking about the customer's decision criteria process etc you know what it means so it works we know as a beautiful cohesive succinct way of us communicating on the things that we know matter but what I loved about what you're saying there is it sort of shifted to what we would classes moving from co selling which is like this is the customer and we're communicating to how we're going to sell together to that customer to selling to the partner so you're describing there is basically what's in it for the partner because you know many of your partners and probably the majority of your partners have other ISVs they can be working with and so if you just as much as I'm sure most of the wisest partners if not all wisest partners put customer first they still are a business and they still have their own interests and so if they if you're approaching them of a perspective of I'm going to be talking to you about you know what what pain you have as a as a partnership's business you're in your business what pain you have the whisk can help yourself do you know that our customers love us you know do you know that you know we are committed to to our channel you know these are again relationship decision criteria things that maybe some of wisest competitors may overlook is they're not thinking about it as deeply as you are they maybe just think about the technical decision criteria or the economic decision criteria or which cheaper than wins you know you get higher margins than wins not thinking about bigger picture like you are when you're your son's his partner saying yes okay we've got the best product we've got the you know the faster development we're going to you know we're going to broaden there's going to be opportunities for you to expand with this organization not to mention the product really works so you know you're going to have not going to have unhappy customers they're not going to have a big sort of support issue or anything like that and so I think keeping in mind that medic not just as a language to co-sell to but also sell to partners will help all channel teams to make sure they're just considering the interests of the partners as well I learned this the hard way where without going into a long story short I was working on a big transformation opportunity when I was at Oracle and long story short we had both Accenture and Deloitte's backing RBID which was this you know this sort of best of breed lots yeah I think there was something like 80 different people would have been paid if we if I'd close my deal it's one of those like you know bits of every stuff everywhere and the alternative was a best of breed of at the time it was you know there were different companies it was like NetSuite sales force and but it's company sales also basically acquired all of the companies that were separate at the time going back to when this was and but Accenture and Deloitte were on our side they were they were bidding the Oracle bid and then one of the vendors went say which changed changed sides and it kind of obviously disrupted things a lot and the VP for Amir for Oracle went for dinner with a partner that was you know overlooking that that's past the business and suddenly I tried to sort of win it back but basically got then you know got into what went wrong and nothing had gone wrong it was that in that consultancy business they'd they were finishing a big project and there was going to be all of these sales force consultants that were going to be sat on the bench who needed a you needed a project so yeah they needed a new home and so the you know but the the point there is that perhaps perhaps there's more I could have done if I had made sure I had made it very very clear the differentiation that Oracle had over the best of breed and and almost made it very difficult for that that consultancy to to switch sides because they would be going back on you know the criteria that we have identified the customer needs fill value that we had promised but that's the best case scenario worst case scenario I would have just seen it coming and I would have been able to maybe you know double down more with the other partner or something like that but the point being it was a very hard lesson for me to take because I was like that's not fair I've done everything right and life uh yeah learn to the hardships you say you definitely do and you know the biggest challenge that a lot of people face in and independent software offenders ISVs is noise and if you go to the channel whether it's a value added reseller whether it's a cloud native whether it's a global system elsewhere there's 1500s I have the opportunity to speak to the entire AWS uh go-to-market leadership team last week in Amsterdam and we were sitting down with the the geo lead for the dock business in the in a in a in Allison for the UK business and she said we have 1500 ISVs that try to get our time why are we giving you time yeah and so just think about a customer or a prospect how many how many CSOs you know are waiting for someone to call them they get inundated with with areas so again you have to use the tools to beat to distinguish and separate yourself from that and part of the strategy that Wiz has and part of the strategy that we're going to market with is I send that channel for strategy so part of that is a commitment to understand how the channel goes to market how do they make money how do we together create out great outcomes for their customers that is mutually beneficial for the services or products that they're selling because if you don't understand how the channel makes money it's the how the the value added reseller is going to profit from this how this is going to grow additional areas and aspects for them then you're not going to be able to align to them correctly because you haven't applied a medic qualification to that understanding and analysis so just like you do a lot of research to get ready to talk to a customer you have to do that same amount of research to talk to a partner now there is metrics there and one of the other things that I always encourage people is to think bigger and Wiz sells based on cloud workloads that's that's what we are doing today our target audience is obviously companies that are consuming a lot of cloud now the cloud providers themselves like Wiz because once Wiz comes in and provides a nice little security blanket over them they can they can deploy new capabilities like AI to to better further their business or they can they can expand and release applications faster so it's a really really great thing for them now the cloud providers love it because they start customer start increasing their workload consumption by 20% faster than what they want so Wiz customers all of a sudden now the cloud providers saying wait I want Wiz and every single one of my accounts so we have that so using that metrics and sitting down with these geoliters you have to stop talking about technology and start talking about outcomes that's the great thing about medic because understanding the pain and the champion and the metrics that you want and tying that to the outcomes of what they want to achieve in those business strategies if you can align the resources that I mean Wiz is cloud provider channel a CPPO program and how we go to market but whatever you're doing whatever business you're in what is the outcome of the people you're going to market with together how do you jointly benefit and how do you drive the right outcomes to the customer use medic is that common language and framework to get that that documented once you have that documented then you can start making sure that you're making progress in our direction I love that it's what's fascinating and it was from the very first thing you said or how you described your roles as you you were talking about the roles you took on for your career you were talking about go to market let's go to market you know I took to believe the go to market in this company that company and then as you started to talk about your impact and in some of the anecdotes you talked about from Wiz you're talking not just about go to market but the entire customer life cycle it comes across and everything you do and it's interesting because we were talking about this internally in our company recently that in I think it was 20 I figured it was 20 21 or 20 22 but when we had our first medic on we had we were sort of announcing for the for us for the first time where we were talking about how medic should be a common language for the whole team and we kind of came up against this sort of conundrum where we were like is it the whole because we were saying it's more than just sales when we were sort of saying it's the revenue team because that's the word that everybody uses but it's not the revenue team it's the go to market team and I think it's 20 21 I might be 20 22 but either way it's a few years ago and I can remember this this this angst of if we call it go to market that's the right thing to do that's the right way to refer to it but we also are going to have to explain what that is do you see what I mean and so it feels like in the last few years the time go to market it's gone from a little bit of a not a mainstream term to being like a very strong you almost on sort of the so much of bordering on buzzword now I can see that so go to market to me is you know who the company hires to provide benefit to the customers in the process so sales is always the tip of the spear for the one that has the number and as the court of attached to it but your engineering team your customer success organization your professional services organization your marketing organization there's there's so many people that get brought together to go drive benefit and value and to ensure the products get delivered to what they want to get done and having those tight relationships with the go to market then span out to the broader parts of the organization how are we tying into product how are we capturing the requirements in the enhancement requests that our customers are commonly bring into the table and how are we bringing those back to the table so one of the things that we focus on is again communication and transparency is key generally people get afraid when they don't know so the more you can communicate your strategy the more that you can be transparent about where you're trying to accomplish more that you can align to a common goal or a nor star that you have and then every time you interact with anyone of the organizations you interact with them in that language in that nor star direction and where you're going so the reason I'm reaching out to you product is because we're going to market and we're hitting a common requirement that we're going to go through this has this level of impact because we think we can drive this level of outcome this additional revenue can come from it this this stream but you're going back to them using medic as a kind of a framework what is the pain we're solving what are the metrics that we need to qualify what is the business case that you're taking internally to that team to prioritize your list so the reason I like medic so much is it allows that communication vehicle to enable you to collaborate and be transparent with one another and they know I'm going to talk to them in that fashion when I talk to them I'm talking them in terms of a medic framework they're going to respond back to me because that's how again people buy people look and rate those things yeah yeah I love that we we we we tie that into the decision criteria so we would say that when you're ideating a product you should be thinking about rather than requirements or you know any of the language that product teams use you should be thinking from a decision criteria perspective because by the time you pass that to product marketing they then want to start surfacing that up as inspiring the market as to what is the specification what are the requirements but what is the decision criteria the customer is going to need to be able to get that value and the beauty as you you touched on there is that once that's out into the once that's out into the selling motion to be gone from positioning the value to to the selling motions we can start to then see well where are we winning you know what why did we win that deal well it was because we had this well that's decision criteria there's these decision criteria which is very useful because it tells the product team they they're high-profises was correct but also it tells the marketing team oh we've got something here let's let's elevate it let's organize a webinar about that feature let's organize some you know marketing spend behind it let's put some volume some amplification behind that feature or the complete opposite which is why did we lose that deal it's because we didn't have that thing product if we how if we can get this in here's the pain it's going to solve and here's the value we get from solving that pain and it starts to bring that that that loop and the way that we sort of see is because we we we sort of roll these we roll value into what we can wear more in terms of them freeze the beauty of that is marketing teams can start to see via use case which use cases are resonating you know when we position those use cases how many clicks does it get on the website how often those clicks result in leads how often those leads transform into opportunities and then when we're actually you know in front of the customer selling that that use case as it were how often does that then turn into one the customers very interesting suing so we end up doing p of season p of ease around it through to closing it and then when we actually go to deliver that use case what value are we delivering and so it it becomes this full cycle to your point where go to market team is all together in one and it's some for the first time I like I did say it was becoming a bit of a buzzword but I think that's because everyone's kind of hearing it being said but the way you described it is absolutely spot on it's pretty I think it's a I think it's some it's a big jump forward we've made where we can now start to bring the teams together by removing what I think has been always a bit of a blocker which is that each go to market team speaks the same thing in different languages you know using a real life example and and and was was no different when I came here we everyone wants to be great and what they do and everyone works tirelessly at this company it's the one I don't have a will challenge at all actually I maybe to have a couple people could take some breaks every now and then because they they work so hard but what they they're lacking is going to cause a attrition if we don't get it right if we don't understand what somebody does and how they're going to market and what impact that they're having then they also feel they don't have that sense of satisfaction that sense of completion it's just like what I started to have the conversation the biggest time was between when we showed the product of getting a PO because no one knew how to go buy something because they did go through process if the marketing organization doesn't know how you want them to service you and that was the best strategy based on the decision criteria that you're trying to get into how you want to go to market the problems you're trying to solve like they could be your biggest asset if you give them and help them point in the right direction take all that energy that they're going to spend regardless leverage the medic framework it is a communication vehicle to say here's where I want you to engage in why now all of a sudden that that energy is being well utilized very efficient versus being inefficient where you have all these people going off in their individual streams now you're all rolling together in the same boat going much faster together and that's just enabled by a common language I love that there's a couple of things you said there in the same boat we're going together everyone sort of points in the same direction pulling together forwards yeah I think is really really important but also everybody wants to be great I feel though that as though something we don't talk about enough is how a players are driven primarily by greatness by this insatiable appetite this this it's not even an appetite it's a it's a need it's a requirement it's a must have it's oxygen to create to to achieve the version of themselves their spy to be so I think every a player inside themselves has a aspirational goal of their potential that they are striving to become and that by the way you never get there like you you you know it's like the carrot and the stick on your head you know you're always is always going to be this far away from you but you're constantly striving towards getting there which mean you know which is all about you know coachability it's all about constantly being proving and having that drive for greatness and I think our industry gets this wrong because we think that people are motivated by money I feel like money is the way we keep score of how well we you know it's a way of kind of sense checking I'm in on this mission at Wiz you know I'm getting what I need I feel like I'm growing I'm getting the reward the satisfaction am I am I doing all right yeah okay salary checks out commission checks out I'm still yeah I can feel like I'm in the right lane and that that that inner drive I'm being able to achieve that is is something that I don't think we talk about enough but everything I've heard from talking to people in your team everything I've heard from listening things you said before says that you are like like like almost like you know if you were like Woody and you had a string on your back the your catchphrase would be all about coachability all about your team all about you know to sort of rise and tie it together if I got that right is that so it players don't care about money because they have it because they they constantly do the things that they need to get done to go do it and you know I I only care about making people better and I and people that want to get better are generally a players because they push themselves into hard situations they push themselves to be uncomfortable I remember like and it also requires a great leader and you know in my career I've had the luxury of having a great leader and and Dali and one of the things that that Dali always pushed me whenever I started getting maybe a little too comfortable in the spot I'm in he's like I need to push you harder you you're getting comfortable and so you need to go harder so he's like go from the US go run UK Ireland and go figure that out because that's the challenge you know as simple as learning to drive on the other side of the road are learning new aspects of the like new challenges come so a eight players want to have it they were going to drive they're going to constantly do the things that no one asked them to go do they're the ones to do that extra little thing that no one asked for that just makes it better and and though they constantly trying to just be great now if you combine that with the great leader that helps inspire them that helps guide them that that works with them every week and I I always say this time no one ever left the leader that makes them better you know 52 times a year because they're sitting them down every week making them better it's it's that's what you need to have so it's a mixture of both great drive mixed with great leadership and then giving the vehicle and the plan and the the ability to execute a common language that we're talking about those are the main ingredients that you have so recruiting great coachable people that want to challenge himself want to get better leading them and retaining them by training them every day and every week and and then the output is revenue and a players don't have to worry about revenue because they're consistently making their numbers yeah because they consistently do the things that are not asked of them they just do them because it's the right thing to do yeah yeah I have the saying that I came up quite recently which is a players are uncomfortable being comfortable yes I love that yeah and it's so simple but so true right and I think you know I'm sure maybe you've not had the I've had it in my career where in fact if you were to sort of take a data printout of my performance as an individual contributor in sales and to find the where I was the highest performance it also correlates where I was the most unhappy and that had nothing to do with my performance had everything to do with the environment I was in where I felt like you know I wasn't growing I felt like and almost the not just I wasn't growing a frustration that those around me were not like to your point about being in the same boat wearing the same direction they they I love being a part of a team where I feel uncomfortable because I'm looking around getting oh that's a good idea why didn't I think of that or like I'm not doing that I need to do that I want to strive to be the better version of myself and if you can't see that around you then you know that's it's it's it's a little bit like a different way of looking about not being the smartest person in the room not saying I was the smartest person that room but I certainly didn't feel like I had the opportunity to look around and learn and sort of level myself up from it so that was yeah really the I didn't even stay I think I I didn't in my first quarter I did my number and then left you know before finishing Q3 you know it was just a wasn't the right environment either though financially and on the scoreboard I was doing great and I always think about that I wonder if everyone else could have that same experience whether they would sort of see things clearer you know what I mean the only thing I'm sad about is you said that on a podcast and it's recorded so that is your statement I can't stick I can't take it because great people are uncomfortably uncomfortable is exactly right yeah yeah and this this is sort of an evolution of thought where I came to from realizing that in our industry we talk about imposter syndrome and and what I realized with imposter syndrome is there's there's kind of two parts you have to have to have imposter syndrome one is growth you know you don't feel imposter syndrome if you're not growing and the second is you have to be self-aware if you you know you could be growing but if you're not self-aware then you won't feel imposter you just feel like I should be here and you know there's something beautiful about imposter syndrome it's it's you in a gray area between where you are now and your potential right and so I felt and I there's been a few times where I've gone from having you know as a first time CEO massive imposter syndrome to actually being like actually feel right about a moment and then you realize this is not a good thing this is not a good thing at all being you know in a in a in a professional role without imposter syndrome means that you're stagnating you're not getting better so I love I I thrive for it I don't enjoy it I don't think anyone enjoys it but I I need to have that I need to thrive for that I think we should talk about stuff like that more because I feel like I feel like people almost use it not it's not a stigma there's no negativity associated with but people almost embarrassed to say it because I they will I think I think they think it reflects on a lack of confidence in themselves but it's more just a I think I see it as self awareness I couldn't agree more I would like to change the word the phrase or the meaning behind imposter syndrome is from a negative to a positive now again because you're pushing yourself you want to feel uncomfortable and you also want leaders around you to push you in the right spots to give you enough because too much is you you can fail and so you have to be careful and educate on the leaps that you go do so doing that with people that you trust is just as important to yes I'm going to push you to the next level and you know at whiz you know I recruited somebody that was an excellent frontline or excellent contributor for a long period of time and I said time you're brilliant you need to make the jump and he's like I'm nervous I'm scared I don't why would people respect anything that I go do and I said well the good news is I'm not just going to throw you off the end of the dock and hope you swim we have a framework that you're going to plug you into you already know our process you know how to do big deals you you know how to do this now I'm going to teach you how to become a great leader and to lead those other people to go do that and six months into the job you came back to me and it was that it's the best decision I've ever made in my life and it's giving enough people pushing them far enough to where they feel that imposter syndrome but giving them the framework and trust that development week over week to make sure that they can they can do it so it's not it's never a big journey and you know I can remember who you use this phrase but you know shooting the elephants easy eating it bite by bite is what takes time so like how do you how do you do that week over week to make sure that that mountain isn't so insurmountable to climb or that goal is not that too big to accomplish yeah we we first met at an evening the Wizz organised to to to fill some of the big opportunity that you have for finding new candidates and I talked a little bit there about how I see our industry as being a little bit like sports leagues and you know particularly the the UK football leagues where you have you know or European football leagues we have the Champions League which is the the Krim the Krim the best two three or four teams from all the leagues in Europe if they you know they finish at the top two three or four they get to the Champions League then you have the you know the Premier League championship and so on and what the point I was making there was that in your career you want to find a Champions League club and you want to sort of hit your cart to that all the players of that team in this in this analogy and Wizz is for sure an example of a Champions League club you only have to look at the numbers that you guys are putting out and all that all the growth that you're enjoying there for someone listening to this because I get asked this all the time but there's somebody a million times better to answer this than me sat here right now if someone just listens to this and saying you know I know I know there's there's like levels to this game of sales and I want to I want to make sure I attach myself to the highest level so that I can grow the fastest and fulfill my full potential so for someone whether they're you know whether they're an SDR whether they're maybe in their first or second a E-roll maybe they've been in an E for a while but they feel that they they haven't found that Champions League club so to speak like Wizz what's your advice for that person so that they can kind of get your attention first and foremost what are the things they should be thinking about doing in their current role to to sort of elevate their skill experience position to be able to find that you know that that transfer to the Champions League club like Wizz. It's a great question and I'll answer it in a couple different ways. One, make sure you have a good self-assessment of who you are and what your strengths are what training you've had to date. You know just two days ago I talked to an individual that was a second line leader and we spent about hour on the phone together and after the hour he's going to come in as an individual contributor because he knows he hasn't learned our process. He hasn't learned truly how to sell now he's a second line leader at a major company but when we went down and talked about what his goals were and what he wanted to accomplish he said I need I need to learn it from the ground I need to learn I need to run a sales process campaign from start to finish following your your process so that I can teach it to somebody else. So he was mature enough to say I've gotten to this point in my career because I work hard. If I want to get to the next point in my career I need to to follow a process I need to be really good at learning then I need to be really good at teaching. So if you are at a point in time in your career where you may have just successfully progressed because you've done well but you haven't really invested the time into learning your craft and understanding how to build a repeatable go-to-market sales process emotion and get with people that can go do that come find a way to get into an organization be willing to have your ego take a step down because it's not a step down you're investing in your career in your time mind. Now for and I get a lot of the second one which are people trying to get into the organization because you know they want to be part of these these you know champion league club the best ones find a way and it's no different than you find a way into a CISO or a CTO it's relationships it's understanding a pain statement it's finding a way in the door and you know we teach a lot we're we I like to thrive and we're a teaching-based company and culture so we teach people how to recruit we teach people how to retain and do one on ones but when we we teach people to come into an organization it's I always don't I try not to have people recruit for the outliers but because I said the outliers always find a way so if you're great but you may not have the right level of experience or you might not have this find a way find a way based on a relationship that you have we live in a small world find a way to have some sponsor you into the call find a way in because you're gonna have to have that way to get in to have a shot or you're gonna have to have the experience to get there yeah either way great ones always find a way yeah I was laughing because I couldn't agree more by the way but I was laughing because I recently upset a bit of a hornet's nest on LinkedIn because I advertised we were hiring for a couple of accounts executive roles and I made the point of calling out what it clearly says at the bottom of our job description that the easy apply button on LinkedIn will like if you hit that you'll be ignored like we we don't we I mean we're not whiz right we're a 40 odd person company right but we had over 750 applications for an A E role 700 and fifth like it blows my mind right and but we we very clearly say you know a big part of sale and we say more particularly than I would now but big part sales is standing out we love people to capture attention we don't like people that take shortcuts so if you hit the easy apply button you'll be ignored now some people don't like that and I understand if they read through the job description go well okay I like the easy apply button I'm not gonna apply fair fair enough you do you but if you the only other reason you could be upset about that is if you haven't read the job description and then you're just hitting the easy apply and you're upset that you know you've wasted your time clicking that button or you've been overlooked because you didn't read but you didn't read the what does that say about your your approach did I good did I great yeah but to what you were saying there those that and so you know if I think about you know we've we've got a great great new A he started from this this this campaign called Tom and you know he made sure he he stood out he went the extra mile and it's been the same with every candidate we've had that has made made the mark and it's we actually do we do we're not quite as harsh as ever was but we do have that description in job description and this would really upset the people in LinkedIn they knew this because people were kind of questioning our culture and things about this but the best people we've found they they always make themselves standout even outside of sales because it's yeah we work in a intention economy and you know we want to make sure we capture people's attention so it goes back to the the shock statement that I say never call a customer yeah because you calling a customer cold or applying cold the chance of success is very minimal so just taking a look at it from a data perspective how many emails get responded back to its 0.01% or something ridiculously low so that's the easy button but if you want to get your attention or my attention you know if you talk to Alice Carlyle it runs a UK for me and she says Josh you need to go meet with Andy White I'm gonna meet with Andy White because I trust Alice's opinion so find a way to get to Alice find a way to get to somebody just like you do any other way so it goes back to great people find a way because great people do the research great people find out who are my trusted advisors great people find out the things that are really important to me and they they find a way into my diary yeah and and in particular I wouldn't say that's very hard to do because I look at you only have to sort of look and link to and look at your leadership team here in Amir and you know I think I think fair to say the majority of your leadership team you've worked with before is that would that be fair to me? Majority it's about half and half but majority have worked with and majority are new ones that I'm going to work with forever as well and I hope this has been an interesting thing to look back on in years to come I bet you the half the working week for the first time we'll find out in the future they will work with you again if and when the next rocket ship comes long in in many years to come of course I'm sure that'll be that'll be a thing because people tend to follow people what what what is it that both sides what is it you think that the likes of Alice like to marine it like those people that you've worked with before what what what is it that you think that will make them move from extremely successful roles they've had in their previous companies to following you to you know a new rocket ship as we say so I'll use a real-life story because so I practice what I preach I have one-on-ones with my leadership team and Alice is is a direct report of mine running the UK and speaking in the German language she came in and she had a non-negotiable on a PG culture we are going to PG we're going to PG as a team and we're going to drive a pipeline generation culture across the business and then she just started implementing our process and the non-negotiables the process then she goes into value permits every first meeting you go on you have to have a value pyramid and remember people that haven't learned the process or haven't seen it work it's it's a big jump for someone to say why am I spending all this time the tech just works just show the tech the tech is great she insisted on it and so she made what I thought was a little bit of a mistake she took Pete Stedman who's I've worked with before and he creates the Picasso of value payments it is there works of art and so she had Pete show her entire team this work of art and then she said okay who wants to go next and everyone else but I'm not following that like it's it's too hard and so like Alice was pushing pushing pushing people to get driving done so when we sat down she was frustrated I was like why are you frustrated she's like why can't they see the value we know how important it is to understand your customers objectives to win their mind shares to enter into the sales process and I said we have to make a third idea so how do you make somebody on your team think that this is the best way to go do it so how do you show them how do you take them on a first meeting and then see the client's eyes light up when you talk about their business and what impact you can have and the areas that you want to explore further once you see something and then that builds up from the bottom up once it's their idea because people do 100% of what their ideas are they may do 20 to 30% of what you tell them to go do so that management coaching that coaching atmosphere that we talk about that runs throughout the entire organization so again people follow other people because they get better now you obviously have to enjoy one another to a certain degree which I enjoy all the people that we've talked about before but I also enjoy because we're challenging each other where that that leader that they use that dolly analogy where he pushed me to take that next step because I was getting slightly maybe a little too comfortable and and that's what we do here we we're challenging people to be better versions of themselves and when they have it challenge or obstacle we coach them together to brainstorm together and how to go fix it as long as you keep that culture of training and development and getting better usually those people stick with each other for a long time yeah yeah I agree with that totally I love it you've got quite a quite a diverse leadership team I take great pride in that that is that's brilliant is that something how does that you know because it's it's a obviously something we all know is extremely important you know the the upside and the benefits of having diverse teams of course goes out saying well how are for someone listening that feels the same but hasn't had the same success that you've had what sort of advice could you give for that topic well a couple of points there I'm lucky father of three daughters so having three daughters not practicing what I preach would be a little bit hypocritical but you know Marina Aiden you know she's she's working she's coming together and writing a the female sales leader book for the sub a couple people and I've been lucky to work with her on some content on that but you know having a diverse team just like any any part of your career it takes a plan and we have a plan in place where we have to hire and see the equal number of candidates from diverse backgrounds so that way by default you end up with a very diverse team and once you have a very good diverse team it's easier to continue having a diverse team because that it perpetuates itself in in perpetuity but I can't tell you the the excitement you get when you have just wide variety of opinions that are coming in and and and challenges that you can overcome and different perspectives to look at how do you want to be the best team on the planet if you don't have more out you more ideas coming at you more different thoughts and opinions coming at you so if you want to be the best you have to diverse hire to have the best yeah yeah I love that I love that what's what's is there something that having a more diverse team has taught you that you perhaps wouldn't have had the benefit of knowing without getting to work with such a broad rare people. A diverse team has taught me I was joking internally that my my family has trained me well to have a diverse team and and and just the passion and the challenges that come with it I think the the biggest thing that a diverse team teaches you is you you have to make sure that you know your customers are diverse and they want to have that experience of working with a team that is going to be taking into considerations you know the work life balance that the things that they bring to the table that they're working with an organization that they want to partner with just like all companies want to have an ESG strategy to make sure that environmentally you're aware like we want to make sure that we're running a business that is respected that is diverse that is that providing good to a lot of the people in the organization and other people feel that when you you bring that to the table as well that's that's it it's either it's a powerful and impactful thing that you can bring to the table that I think if you don't have it and you're just singly focused you're missing out on lots of different areas but that diversity broadens that scope and makes life much more enjoyable. Yeah and that self-fulfilling thing he talks about I think is very true that you mentioned Marina's book she's right with Penny and Lucy as well theme ourselves it that was a major I think incentive for the book was that you know if we want to you know there's a lot of great positive momentum about trying to get more women to sales we know but I think what what we felt was missing was that the more women in in sales leadership and when we looked into the data that it there wasn't as many women going to sales leadership as men even in the you know relative numbers and what we saw was that women would move into a customer success leadership and other roles as well as that and I think one of the things we felt was that was missing is role models you want to be able to see yourself you know in the job you want to do and so I feel like you know what you're talking about self-fulfilling there I think is fantastic I think you know you've got I know of at least a couple of extremely talented high performing AEs in your team that perhaps you may not have it may be fair to say that are that are female that you may not have should you not have such a diverse leadership team. Yeah if you when you have a diverse team that you if you just hire males you get 50% of the in workload to go after if you hire a diverse team you have everybody to go after and you highlighted the exact point like how much great talent do we have in our team because we have such a diverse policy and embracing culture to have that couldn't agree more it's a it definitely separates us from from other competition yeah so one last point I wanted to get in with you because you're kind of famous for being a bit of an expert at how to write a resume or a CV that captures somebody's attention and I think this would be you know to our point earlier if there is a recent podcast such as this where you are giving the advice of how to capture your attention and someone it's almost like it's a it's a this is going to be a qualification tool for you because if somebody doesn't take the advice that I'm expecting you now to perspore onto the audience then they haven't done enough research so what are the things because I'm fascinated by this because I think I'd probably never I don't know I mean I'll put when it comes to writing a resume CV I would probably put what I think to the right thing but I wouldn't I wouldn't know I think I'll probably do a bad job so I'd love to hear what you what you think are like the key points and what you look for it yeah and and again back to a teaching culture I we teach how to read a CV and and why and what to look for and the reason why we do that is because when we interview somebody and we we're testing intelligence we're testing character we're touching coachability and we're doing that all based off of the CV itself so the question funnel that we come up with to test someone's intelligence test someone's character has to be derived from the the CV itself so when I look at a CV and I train and teach people how to read a CV this is probably going to increase the number of CVs I get by the way which is a good problem again champagne problems I always read it from the bottom to the top so I always look at education to start and even simple nuances of did they put their grade point average or their scores are not if they didn't put their scores on there one of the questions that I would ask to an interview would be I notice I even to this university why didn't you put your your attainment statistics on there for it because a CV has to have data and statistics because that's that's the meaningful metrics that we're engaging off of so that again so you're taking a look at the CV for the data to then ask the right questions in the interview process so if it's not on there that would be a typical question that I'd ask then I start to take a look at does your CV logically make sense so did you go to university as an engineer and then the first job you had was in sales okay well what happened there like what what the difference was so if you want to if you come in front of me and you have deviations like that you probably should have a really good explanation that's to why you decided to change course or where you went to so again does the logic flow make sense of the progression from what you had and where you're going the the the success aspect of where I like to see I do like to see stints of decent chunks of time in roles like if someone was an SDR for three months in an A E for nine months and then an RD for you know they know you're not you're not learning anything that you're you're going so faster that organization is is so fast like I want to see people learn to craft I want to see show them consistently when you come in have you mastered your craft and I think a lot of people when they come in that that that fail eventually because if you don't learn something eventually it will catch up to you so if you're an RD for a very short period of time and then you come a second line leader and you haven't really struggled as a first line leader you haven't had someone quit on you you haven't had you know a surprise happened or something then you don't know how to handle that challenge so I again I look for have you stayed in companies for a long time in a position in that company for a long enough time to to master it and then once you've mastered it to then okay maybe you stayed there for seven years as a salesperson like maybe that's a little too long to have there so are you challenging yourself are you comfortable in the job and coasting a bit because maybe I don't want that because I like people that constantly get uncomfortable when they're comfortable to steal my quote so those are the things I look for so to you know education is the first step does that logically translate into your career is that career have a logical progression so are you in the job that you're in as a you know using a sales profession do you start as an SDR are you in that job for six to nine to maybe 12 months because that's a shorter stint usually then you get into an AE does that get you into the next level are you there for a year two years and then is that promoted with senior a like if I'm looking for the logical times at the then if you make a switch to another company why did you make that switch so if I see you go from one company to the next company okay and again we use me as an example like I've been in the same company with the same leaders for the last four years are you also are leaders taking with you did did you follow somebody because they went to somebody or did you jointly go with somebody that other question so those are questions that I'm going to ask of when you progress through your career why did you progress what relationships did you build what people did you you take with you as you went along those journeys so I can't give you all the secrets and tips and tricks of when but you know essentially you know good people master a craft before they get to the next craft good people generally follow and get promoted to the next role and that's a good step up for them then they generally go to the next company not because they were head-tunted out and it's another question I ask and this is going to spoil a lot of my interviews so maybe I shouldn't ask it but I always ask the question how did you get to be in front of me and then they said well Ben Fairhall called me up and said you got a great profile we want to bring in front of Josh and everything else and then I say so one of the most important decisions you can make in your entire life is the company that you work for and the people you work with and you completely left that by chance it Ben Fairhall hadn't been the greatest recruiter in the world and got you in front of me so you just completely led your life to chance so what is your plan for your life where do you want to take your life where do you want to go and everyone that has that feeling they're like oh yeah I just walked into that one yeah but those are the reason why I say those questions is because I do want people to have a plan for their life I do want people to get better every week I do want people to have that next level of earnings and careers and where they want to go and so people that kind of meander through life and get lucky and maybe do some things those are generally either I can convince them to come into the process like we talked about taking a second-line leader getting them to come into to learn the craft with the people that they want to or I want to find people that have a plan for their life that are that are working with others to make that better those are people that I can have a massive impact with versus having someone that just hey I got a recruiter called me and I want you like no I want people that sought me out I want some of this done the research that's got in front of me that is making this part of their plan not me making you part of my plan wow so well what an incredible conversation thank you so so much I appreciate it as well we've said many a time on this rocket ship you're always going to be looking for talent whilst that you know why was you gaining altitude so to speak for those that are wanting to well I'm not going to give them the shortcut no go hit the easy button and only at the easy button but should people be looking to reach out to you what kind of rolls you what kind of rolls you have open at the moment in what locations and yeah what's the opportunity so obviously the major markets we already have UK in Nordics in Benelux we have Doc in Central we'll be opening up an office in the Alpine region as well we have France we have Spain we have Italy and we're going to be opening up entities in the Middle East so panamea we have growth and coverage models on a lot of the rolls are posted already and I look forward to you know please apply for the job if you're interested in and join in the rocket ship just don't hit easy apply just don't hit easy apply thank you so so much Josh it's been enough to pledge to have you on and yeah I call wife people see this I think it's gonna be an absolute great I like what you're doing so thank you very much for your time