Battle Scars of a Sales Leader
Understanding the stories of resilience, strategy, and leadership is essential for success in the competitive sales world.
James will uncover the raw and unfiltered real-life experiences of sales Leaders, exploring the ups and downs and lessons learned in the high-pressure sales world.
Battle Scars of a Sales Leader
Cybersecurity Startup Growth: 0 to 300 Customers in 3 Years
What if the key to success in entrepreneurship lies in mastering every aspect of a business?
In this episode of Battle Scars of a Sales Leader, James sits down with Dane Meah, CEO and co-founder of MyCISO, a cutting-edge security SaaS platform.
Dane shares his incredible journey from selling plastic bags to building a successful cybersecurity company.
In this episode you'll learn:
- Dane's early career experiences and his passion for sales and business improvement
- The serendipitous path that led him to cybersecurity in Australia
- Building InfoTrust from 0 to 300 customers in just 3 years
- The challenges and pivots in developing MyCISO, a SaaS platform simplifying cybersecurity management
- Insights on work ethic, sales strategies, and the five core traits Dane looks for in sales professionals
Discover how resilience, adaptability, and customer-centric approach drove Dane's success in the competitive cybersecurity industry.
This episode is packed with valuable lessons for sales leaders and entrepreneurs alike!
InfoTrust went from zero. You know two guys, no clue how to run a business, but we knew how to sell. So within a year we had 100 customers, two year, 200 customers, three year, 300 customers. What happened next was even more incredible.
James:Dane Meir, CEO and co-founder of a security SaaS platform, business MySizeO.
Dane:You need to divide and conquer. This is a big opportunity with MySizeO, but you're not going to do it as a side hobby. Oh, it'll be fine. I've got this Disaster, we've got enough on our plate. Three hours later, I've got a whiteboard the size of the wall and there's arrows everywhere, and did that translate to results?
James:Thank you for thank you for joining and, um, you know, just to just to kick off, would love to start in in. Yeah, tell us a little bit about you. Know where you are today, what you're doing from a my size perspective, and then I want to reflect back and and talk about about what were you doing 10 years ago and kind of how that journey has been.
Dane:Sure, yeah, no, look great to be here. Obviously, likewise, it's difficult to miss you. So when we, when we first met, you know, equally it was great to meet you and follow your journey as well, building a successful business as well, building a successful business. But look in terms of where I'm at and you know the journey that's got me here. You know you never expect things to end up the way they end up, but you know it hasn't been without a lot of hard work.
Dane:My SISO has really been a business. That's been, uh, really a baby and an idea um of mine and my co-founder, simon um, for a long time, nearly 10 years, um and um, and I'll come back to kind of how it all started. But shortly into the tenure with infotrust and we were pretty much brand new. You know, simon and I had come from a software background and in a product background and I always I always talk about my time at Symantec part of their cloud business, the SaaS business as my MBA because I was deeply kind of fascinated in every part of the business, be it sales, which is what I was paid to do, but marketing, even collections, the finance aspect, seeing why customers weren't paying in some cases or partners had lost track of invoicing and subscription billing and things like that. And you know I really enjoyed that aspect of learning about how to run a SaaS business.
Dane:So I was really passionate about creating a software product when we started InfoTrust but, you know, quickly realized it wasn't as straightforward as I first thought. You know, there's obviously big differences between running a service business, as we were, and a software business. Big differences between running a service business as we were and a software business. And hence the reason why over time the business is kind of diverged and you know, mysizer became its own entity. So, and here we are. But yeah, there's been a lot of other wins and challenges on the journey which kind of help you grow and become better at what you do and incrementally, yeah, I'm excited to tap into a couple of those today.
James:So you mentioned that you were at Symantec and paid as a sales rep but also just had this passion for other areas of the business as well. And yeah, I've been a sales rep and an individual contributor and I personally wasn't interested in the collection side, um, or chasing up customers or looking at kind of behind the scenes.
Dane:So, like that's to talk to me a bit about kind of how that came about and you're not just focusing purely on your number you know I often say to people in the business now, if, if you ask for my opinion, expect to get an answer, because you know I've always put my nose into things. Maybe that I shouldn't, and you know I've always been quite interested in process improvement. You know how things can be. You know problem solving and how things can be done better. Problem solving and how things can be done better. I kind of reflect now more recently at my work experience at age 12. I was put into a balloon kind of party decoration and supplier business for a week and no word of a lie, really got my hands dirty transforming that business. Um, not necessarily on the operational kind of delivery component, but the shop looked completely different by the end of the week, um, which was um kind of indicative of. You know he certainly didn't hire a 12 year old to come in and rebuild, relay out his shop. But I could I kind of just saw that as well. By the way, sir, you know this is not really laid out the best. I don't think you're getting good visibility on these products and blah, blah, and that's kind of what I've carried on doing throughout my career and sometimes it gets me into a bit of trouble.
Dane:Um, my first sales job, uh, at the age of? Um, my first sales job at the age of must have been 18, working for a polythene manufacturing company. I remember turning up for my interview school trousers and a shirt that I'd you know, a plain shirt that I think my mum had bought me for a wedding or something. I turn up we do about 15 minutes of the interview and he said now you know this isn't school anymore, so go and buy a suit and come back. So you know, deeply embarrassing off, I went, came back, um with a suit the next day, um 400 pounds poorer, which was probably my life savings at that point. But anyway, I worked in that business, learned a lot over that first month, but you know, really kind of as I started to do what I even did at that point. You know, in that case it got me into trouble and you know that was a short tenured career, but you know, not through lack of, you know, good intentions, it was more. You know keeping your head down as well.
James:But that's like I said, that's just always been something I've done and moving on from that, uh, that role, and was that a sales role? Selling poly polythene, polythene plastic, selling plastic plastic bags that sounds so fancy the first time. So you went from selling um selling balloons to plastic bags um what was the next step in your career?
Dane:oh dear. So, um, I worked in recruitment because I realized, um, uh, uh, the age of 17, had a quite bad football injury which put me into a um predicament. Frankly, um, you know, was about to complete my a-levels, go to university, and had a situation where I had a quite, quite a common but serious fractured tib and fib. Um, the injury meant I couldn't go to university, didn't actually interrupt a lot with my A-levels because it wasn't healing. I started a business at home. So this was really probably my first thing that got me into business, got me trying out new things and ideas, problem solving, and the business that started was really buying and selling online different things consumer electronics, apparel but the genius product was an information product on how to buy and sell consumer electronics and apparel online, which is basically just a few pages context of supplies. And I would sometimes come home from school and I'd have 50 to a hundred pounds in my bank account and all I had to do was send out a bunch of pdfs, which was, you know, probably still to this day, the best, best money, that best margins that I've ever made. But that got me kind of the appetite for sales, the thrill of the chase, and I'd done other jobs in kind of Tesco's and things like that, working on different departments and things like that working on different departments. But I knew I wanted to do sales.
Dane:So off I went walking around the town centre of Stevenage in Hertfordshire in England and finding out who's going to give me a job in sales. Eventually someone said why don't you come and work for us? You don't have much of a sales career, can't really count the month, unfortunately, that you had there. But you know we can see you've got a bit of gusto about you. Come and work for us.
Dane:So I did a few years in recruitment which was, you know, brilliant in terms of learning the, I guess, firstly, work ethic. You know what's required to be successful. You know, in the case of any sales role, you know having high activity. That was drilled into me from a young age. Again, I remember one of the sort of early days of getting into recruitment. You know learning about really starting the day with high levels of activity, so from even sort of 8, 8.30,. You know contacting people that you know nowadays it might be candidates it's more convenient before they get into the office to call them um and the same you know that would continue on into the evening, so I always had that drilled into me from a young age.
James:Um, when you say that was drilled into you at a young age, was that someone else drilling into you or did you just recognize that that was that was required and you figure that out yourself to get a competitive edge?
Dane:you needed to put that in yeah, I would say that's a good question. I definitely worked harder than the people around me. Yeah, you know, that was always the benchmark, not who's um. You know what's the best look like and match that was how do I do more. Yeah, so you know, I was regularly the first in the last to leave, and that was just because I had that desire to to, you know, achieve great results, get ahead. You know I was younger as well, so you know I had more to prove um and did that translate to results?
Dane:you working harder um, yes, I mean ultimately, you know, in those days I was a blunt instrument, right that uh, you know, didn't necessarily have the contacts, the talk, track, things like that, the knowledge of the industry, um, but what I always say is, you know, having um more attempts, having having ultimately more practice, uh sharpens that blade really quickly. And there's another story that happened a few years later, that kind of, um, you know, I used that same approach to get ahead, um, but my next job was in pharmaceutical sales. So I've gone from selling people to selling not even selling, but consulting to doctors on medical research and, you know, presenting medical studies, um, you know, did that for a couple of years. Again, you know that that was interesting. Yeah, I learned a lot about a number of different disease areas, but wasn't really kind of hadn't found the thing that, um, that that I really was feeling passionate about and just on the the note of passion, you mentioned a couple of minutes ago that you you recognized that you wanted to find a role in sales.
James:Different people get into sales for different reasons. What? What was it about sales that attracted you?
Dane:um, I, I'd had that experience uh selling, uh, in my little home business and I'd always you know, if I go back to a few years before I'd started little businesses at home. Um, so, you know, selling generally, you're generally selling a product or something so is that the the, the thrill of the chase, is it?
James:it that satisfaction when you get I just got a deal. Yeah, yeah, exactly, just that euphoria.
Dane:I think the effort reward, uh formula was was the, you know, the, the, but then tuning your effort, yeah, efficient, more being more efficient. You know, that was exciting. And I had this, uh, this business at home which was, you know, earning me some pocket money, um, but I decided, look, if I want to be better, I need to join a business that I can be around people that have been there and done that I can learn from and, as I said, recruitment pharmaceuticals. That took me to the age of about 21. And I had this sort of niggling thing where I've wanted to start a business. So in my evenings and spare time I started a recruitment business. Now, I shouldn't say this to you, I did not know that. Yeah, so I started a recruitment business called Now Recruit. Okay, right, it's kind of Now Recruit, so it's what we do now recruit. So that was the name of the business loved the process of setting up the business, um, went through all of that kind of preparatory stage and then, uh, started doing it and then I realized why I'd gone out of it. I'm not gonna say, uh, I just don't think I'm very good at it. I'm kind of. You have to be a certain breed of person to kind of manage so many balls in the air and so many relationships with, like the market, candidates as well as your clients, and juggling expectations, and lots of things can go wrong. And, yeah, it was at the sort of ripe old age of 21 where I realized I was having a life crisis. I thought, well, richard Branson, by the age of 21, he'd already started Virgin and things were starting to go quite well for him. And here I was looking at a business of one not enjoying what I did, didn't enjoy the pharma industry, and we needed a life intervention. So, uh, I said to my girlfriend, who's now my wife we've been happily married for a long time. Um, uh, you know, I'm feeling really sad about where I'm at in life and she was ready for a change. And almost the next day we met somebody who said they were moving to Australia. It was like a light bulb moment. What's this? How do you do that? You know, can you just move? Is there? What's the visa situation? And, yeah, I guess the rest was history. We booked a one-way flight a week later and we were on a plane within a couple of months, and what happened next was even more incredible. So we're on our way over.
Dane:I'll tell you the short version, because we only have three hours right for this interview. I have three, okay, so the abridged version is stopping off in korea. I walk past an internet computer to check and I think, well, we've got an hour to burn. Let's check my email. Uh, there's an email from my soon-to-be landlord saying sorry, we found someone better. Best of luck.
Dane:Now we're arriving at 5 am on new year's day. I've got nowhere to go. So we messaged the one person that we knew and said hey, do you remember meeting us? Um, that time at that party. Anyway, do you know anyone that will take us in tomorrow? And then close the email. If we went, got the flight. 11 hours later we land in sy, in Sydney, on the search for an internet computer they used to be dotted around in those days Tipped my email go to Milsons Point, alfred Street, and again I said I'd give you the short version.
Dane:Here we go. But that day at the house, on New Year's Day, they happened to be having a barbecue and I met the sales director of Message Labs, which was the company that Symantec acquired, and that was how I got into cybersecurity. I met him by complete fluke, and the guy I was just chatting to him. He happened to be a Palm and an Arsenal fan as well. So we got on quite well. And as he's leaving, he whispers in my ear send me your CV. And I thought who's this guy? I thought he was just my mate, but it turns out he yeah. He had a role for me and I started a couple of weeks later. And how old were you at that point?
James:I was 21, 21 wow sorry, 22, just 22. Yeah, yeah, incredible, yeah, yeah, incredible, yeah, yeah, incredible.
Dane:And yeah, and back to kind of work ethic, that first three months. So it didn't go completely to plan. He wanted me in his sales team. The VP of the region said look, you're a working holiday visa. I'm not putting you in our most successful sales team in the region without a proper visa, um. So I said, okay, you know. I was probably quite close to saying screw this. You know I've. You know I've been selling for years. I can do.
Dane:You know you should have a highly proficient 22 year old yeah so and then I had a little talk to myself as I was walking up the street up in north sydney. I said look, no one's watching, just keep your head down, work hard and you'll they'll realize pretty quickly where you should be. So I started off in telemarketing and I worked um, like I said, same work, work ethic, first in last to leave Because I saw it as a hack. It was like a little secret hack which was I can call into New Zealand from 7 am and I can call into Perth up until sort of 7, you know, 8 o'clock at night, depending on the time. Now I wasn't doing that every day, but quite regularly I'd be like right well, now is my perth is. You know, after five o'clock no one. No, most, most cold callers are calling from sydney or melbourne, but no one's calling at that time. So it's perfect time to call them.
James:And not a lot of people phone perth from the east coast after five. So that's my point.
Dane:Yeah, that was my yeah, so very quickly. You know the, the, the, the lead target was just being blown out of the water. You know I really used it. We had good trainings. We learned about spin. Selling was the foundational kind of learning that I got, which was fantastic. I read a whole bunch of other books. That was kind of. You know that was the start. My my sales career really was was learning applying. What I learned, um, and you know I did four months in telemarketing and then got got the jump into into, yeah, the call up, the call up, yeah, the call up for the quota, and there was a big kind of dip in the rest of everybody else's sales performance after I left telemarketing, because you know the leads are dried up right, but no, I'm joking, but it was um, uh, that's so, funnily enough, simon, who's my business partner, was I was his telemarketer.
James:No way oh, that's incredible. Yeah, so you became a rep, um a successful rep. How? How many years were you working at Symantec as a rep before you jumped out and and set up info trust?
James:so it was about six and a half years all up and, and I guess so, you were there for six and a half years and there was a catalyst, I assume, for you saying, hey, now is the time for us to you know, I see an opportunity of some sort for us to take the take the leap of faith and do something on our own. Can you talk a little bit about that, that whole process and experience and what you saw?
Dane:you know, timing is everything. Right when starting a business, there has to be, there has to be, um, a a clear need for what you're offering in order to make life a bit more comfortable. Right that, ideally, you've got some favorable circumstances right that make your you know, for example, you know, having come from an adjacent space where you have a lot of relationships, that's, you know, a good leg up. Space where you have a lot of relationships, that's that's you know, a good leg up. So, um, the the kind of journey, the journey for me, uh, semantic, was, as I said, working in this subsidiary for the whole seven years or six and a half years. Uh, message labs, later rebranded as sas business unit and then cloud. Um, the the kind of journey meant what went from managing smb to enterprise, large enterprise, and, um, building a lot of relationships with, um you know, some really prominent businesses around australia.
Dane:Um, I'd become, I'd realized as a account manager that I had to be constantly reinventing myself, adding value in different ways. Now, with a quite narrow product set. It wasn't always easy, but I always made sure that I remained relevant. So if, whether I was walking into a tier one bank or you know major manufacturing companies. You know all sorts of different businesses. You know I would generally be able to gain access to this you know whether it be the cso and that executive team just through being highly valuable, right? So we? The way that we did that was being an advisor, providing, you know, insights into how they can derive more value from the products that they already had. That was a big focus for me. I had the benefit of having the key accounts, of having a client service manager and other support, access to the best people in the business, know the best people in the business. Um, so what had happened with semantic over the past oh sorry, incrementally is they make an acquisition and gradually rip the, the winning formula, apart. You know, no one would be uh, I don't think you'd find many people that disagree with that, and it was ironic when broadcom acquired them, but that was starting to happen within our business. But, with respect and credit to Brenton Smith, who's the managing director, he was extremely protective of that unit and kept us going to the point where we were still right up until the day that we were made redundant, which is also incredible. It was the highest performing team in the region and that you know it was the winning formula of customers, what's later known as customer success.
Dane:Obviously, having good products is required, so the catalyst was we could see what would happen in the US and in Europe when they got rid of the cloud team. So, no surprise, customers left. Competitors came in and swooped in and said hey, you're getting the support that you want. How's the product? And we were already under a lot of pressures from other competing solutions. So you step away or you get rid of that team. Then millions of dollars just leaves the business.
Dane:So that was kind of our moment, which was we started InfoTrust initially and we made a value proposition to Brenton and said look, we get it. You have to make our team redundant. Row in with the strategy for the rest of the global business. You've held out for two years but it's not going to last forever. So Simon and I wrote a.
Dane:First of all, I approached Simon. I said look, there's a window of opportunity here. We've got 6,000 customers in Australia, we've got new businesses wanting to buy this product and series of products and all the knowledge about these solutions is leaving Symantec and the customers are mostly direct, are not going to have any support or proactive support, and that was our value proposition to brent and we said look, we can continue to bring your rock star sales team, but working for ourselves, how does that sound? Uh, twitch is like that sounds fantastic. Um, you know, would love to keep you in the ecosystem.
Dane:So, basically, the first year was approaching, either approaching customers I had great relationships with who wanted to continue a service, or being brought in by semantic as the specialist cloud partner, um or you know, for new, new business deals. Uh or uh, where there was a churned customer, really unhappy customer of all sizes, we would get called in to save the account. So it was using that knowledge and ip that we already had built up over many years, uh, to kind of grow the business. So info trust went from zero. You know, two guys no clue how to um run a business to, uh to, but we knew how to sell. So within a year we had 100 customers. Two year, 200 customers.
James:Three is 300 customers um, and initially it was selling maintenance and support agreements, both kind of reactive and proactive yeah.
Dane:So we called it the info trust way, um, and it was a value proposition that was, uh, I'd reverse engineered the uh, the buy-in cycle from spin selling, nil rackham's buy's buying cycle where you know traditional or kind of weaker sales people will engage. When a company is reviewing the market, reviewing opportunities, they call and say, now, what your requirements? Well, you know, we're looking at email security right now. Now that's the worst time to engage, right. Of course you wouldn't pass it up if it came to you, but you want to be engaging, not one step before but two steps before that. Now, the step prior to that is, uh, recognition of needs. So when you recognize that you've got unmet needs, you kind of go.
Dane:Things aren't quite working as I would like, um, and the stage before that changes over time changes to the threat landscape, changes to the infrastructure, whatever is in the given solution area. So our kind of engagement model was to map to this. The InfoTrust way was to map to the buy-in cycle and actually be highly engaged with businesses as changes were occurring, advising them on how they can derive more value from their investments, how they can tweak the configuration, what's coming, how they can address new threats that are coming into the ecosystem. Customers loved it.
Dane:It's really a consulting, very consultative, but delivered by me, by Simon, and we trained our team up to do that. That was, uh, that was kind of core to our value prop and that customers got on board with it. Um, and you know that that kind of gave us that start off in in business and so that was the two of you nearly 10 years ago now.
James:Fast forward info. Infotrust has done incredibly well. I think they've got 100-odd people in the business. Now, when you reflect on the I guess different milestones of growth, is there any stage that stands out as particularly memorable for either a positive or negative reason?
Dane:Probably keeping it um, humorous, but the just just between us, just between us, between us, I've got one that you don't tell anyone. I won't. No, so look the um. Our first employee was, um, we, we got. So we started the business in April. It was about, I think it was July, august.
Dane:We'd done some great business and great deals brought on. You know well, as I said, 100 in the first year and it's getting. We're two people and I think we'd hired, or we're about to hire, a seller in Melbourne. But we were like we haven't invoiced most of these customers and we were straight on the hook. It's not that we wouldn't pay, we just hadn't got around to invoicing them. And so the first hire was a temp. I said let's just get a temp in. This was at like 9 o'clock on a Friday morning, so we put it out on LinkedIn. I said anyone know a temp? I said let's just get a temp in. This was at like nine o'clock on a friday morning, so we called, put it out on linkedin. I said anyone know a temp agency? Someone comes back, call the lady, we can have someone interviewing this afternoon. So, um, that was.
Dane:That was a turning point because it was our first hire. But the lady comes in, we, we interviewed her for about 20 minutes, thinking it's a temporary role. We just need you to pump out a bunch of invoices. She is now still working for us and has been, you know, so integral to our business. Uh, lady by the name of francis, who you would know, um just just an amazing, can-do kind of good soul of a person, um, and look the that's kind of those. Those are the things that actually, um are more rewarding than any deal that you might win is. You know, bringing people in and you know building not just the business but people's careers, having fun in the process. Of course, lots of ups and downs you know, looking back over the years.
Dane:But yeah, definitely that. That's. That's the fun part, yeah and for for you.
James:you know what I'm picking up is you've your, your mind is often going on. You know this entrepreneurship sort of journey of how can I do things better and identify a problem, and I think that's a massive opportunity. But also, do you get distracted? How do you not get distracted? Because you've obviously done incredibly well with your career InfoTrust, what you're doing now with MySizo how do you stay focused when you've got your mind going in a million different directions? Like what did you just say?
Dane:I can't lie right because there's people watching this that know me, um, but no, look, I I do get distracted, um, I think a lot. It's weird because a's weird because there's different personality types. So I am someone that likes to keep things quite full in terms of the bucket, happy to work on multiple things at the same time. So you know someone that does get a bit excited and does get a bit distracted from time to time. But systems and processes, you know, if I go back to my sales days, you know I I would have the same personality, uh, but I never.
Dane:You know, my, my systems, my processes made sure that, at least outwardly, I was extremely organized. You know, follow up every meeting within ideally the same day, but certainly within 24 hours, summarizing notes. I had a good system for keeping notes. So you know you've got to put those systems and processes first.
Dane:You know, make sure that that might have meant sometimes I didn't leave the office until 8 o'clock because that was a promise to myself, that that might have meant sometimes I didn't leave the office until eight o'clock because that was a promise to myself in terms of my integrity and what I would deliver, that I would get things done, but sending a follow-up. So I know, as soon as you leave it to the next day, it's possible. It's the chance of it taking three days. Uh, it's times 10, there's a multiple versus just getting it out while it's fresh in your mind. You have your notes there. Um, so, to answer your question, yes, I do get distracted, you know, have weaknesses like that, but, um, yeah, processes and systems to keep me on track is, you know, fundamental it's.
James:I've taken a lot away from that because I notice I'm the same in the sense of um I I will get distracted, think of something else and regularly say I'll do that this evening after the kids have gone to bed. I don't think I've ever done that the kids went to bed, but I always think really positive when I've got energy. Um, but. But I like your line of like, having integrity of what I say I'll do and holding yourself accountable and you are your word, yeah, um, so you can control that. You. You built um. You built info trust um. Talk to us a little bit about my size, oh, and how that has um evolved and grown out of um of info trust yeah.
Dane:So going back to 2015, we're a one-year-old business, we're just starting to get some traction and we noticed a lot of customers were calling us. It was the year of CryptoLocker, so 2014-15, which, for anyone that's not familiar with that, it was one of the earlier forms of ransomware. So we had all these organizations calling us. Some of them were new customers, some of them were prospects that we'd said hey, we're a specialized cybersecurity. In the days before that was really a thing Before it was cool, before it was cool, before it was cool, um, and they said we want, we need to know, because we've just been talking to our buddies down the road, competitor, or with some of the board there's been another company like us that's just had a ransomware incident or we've just had one. We need to make sure we ransomware ready. So I was like, okay, well, straight away, my mind goes into problem solve, um. So you know, I spent some time reverse engineering the ransomware attack chain um, from usually a spoofed email, you know, going backwards through the attack chain for the email gateway, the web gateway, the user endpoint, backups and ability to detect and respond to the incident in the first place All of those things. And then we built solutions around them, but I actually knew that because we were getting so many people asking us. We built a self-assessment tool, which was an online tool that we plugged into our website and used it as a value add for our customers or anyone visiting our website, and people used it. Was pretty basic. It presented all of our as the results, all of our solutions, as you know, the recommendations but it just got me thinking well, if we could do that for basic assessment, what if we can do a much more comprehensive assessment and a kind of consultant quality report as the output instead of just a spreadsheet? And that was the beginnings of it.
Dane:About a year later, we hired a GRC practice leader at InfoTrust, someone to run the consulting and advisory practice, and during the interview process I said look, consulting's part of your job right, that's the traditional part of your job. This is another project that I need your help with if you're the right person for that, called MySizer, and it's a platform that will sassify what the consultant does, so we don't need to use consultants. It will allow the user to develop and run their cyber program from a dashboard instead of spreadsheets. It will allow them to generate reports in seconds instead of days or weeks, and that's just the beginning. That was the idea and credit to the guy who said I know exactly what you want to do. I've been thinking about doing it myself. He was quite an entrepreneurial guy and off we went. That was in 2017.
Dane:Three years later, and I'd said to someone in one of the media, I said we're launching in July. Three years later, we did hit July. It was just the wrong year. So there we were, july 2020, middle of COVID, and we're in beta. The customers in beta were saying this is fantastic. I'm like feeling so good. You know, this is going to be big.
Dane:And my glc practice leader comes and resigns. He's going back home to his home country. Look after his dad. Disaster. Like, we've got enough on our plate, covid. We're working, navigating the choppy waters of covid, work from home, work, all that fun stuff, and I really it was the last thing. I needed to be perfectly honest and, um, our advisors have been saying for years boys to me and simon, you need to divide and conquer, right, this is a big opportunity with my size. Oh, but you're not going to do it as a side hobby? Oh, it'll be fine. You know, I've got this. No, no, just the first.
Dane:So what basically happened and sorry, the outcome of that was I had to take over from same interim. I jumped into it. I'm like this product is horrible. I take one, look at it, how do you use it? Every time I click, next popping up with an error message saying you need to do y. So I called. I said look, before you go overseas, can you come back and explain to me how this thing works? He comes in three hours later I've got a whiteboard the size of the wall and there's arrows everywhere and you've got this data object relates to that. Risks, you know, relate to controls and and. And I had no idea how complicated this thing was going to get.
Dane:And that wasn't the brief. The brief was about simplifying cybersecurity for the IT manager yes, the CISO, but make it more accessible to all. And I said thank you for coming back, really appreciate your time. And I realized we're never going to launch that product. So Over the next couple of months I changed the hiring strategy from a GRC leader to a CX-focused product owner.
Dane:So customer experience and I found Phil. Phil had worked in big finance companies banking large tier one banks, creating apps like mortgage application forms, websites, that kind of thing. Now those tools have to be seamless and simple on the front end, but there's massive complexity on the back end. So we took that approach to my size and initially he said we can rebuild it, I can work with it. Six months later loads of wasted effort we'd scrapped it and we started again. So we're getting on for four years worth of development. By 2020 mid-2021 we scrapped it completely and started again. It's actually more than four years, but within three months and we tripled our development resources and I had stepped out of infotrust and working full-time in my my size from the start of 2021. We'd caught up and we were miles ahead of where we were six months prior. So that was kind of really the conviction that we had to have to be successful.
James:And when you yeah, yeah, I appreciate you're saying time you came in and it was focused and you accelerated, and that absolutely makes sense. What were the types of activities that you were doing that allowed you to accelerate the development?
Dane:Yeah. So first of all, finding the right team. Yeah, you know that, both software development and product managers. You know building, laying the foundations to scale the business. So I was heavily involved in I saw my role not as the kind of determinant of the features and functions, but more about being the customer advocate. Obviously I know security well. I've been in this industry for a long time, but I'm not a GRC consultant, I would never claim to be. So my role was sanitizing it to make sure that we didn't make the same mistake again.
Dane:Keeping it simple If it made sense to me, it made sense to my target market was my approach, and that was primarily. There was a lot of time spent designing the software which Phil and I worked on together. And then the other side was building the back end of the business, which I'd done over many years at InfoTrust, but this time I didn't have many years. So all the systems and billing and all of that sort of stuff that we kind of went well, okay, how do we want to take this to market when we're ready to launch? So I spent a lot of my time on that side of things initially. Yeah, and also, you know I was out presenting wireframes right and you know, getting customers basically excited. For six months before we launched um, you know I was sometimes doing seven meetings a day. You know it was. It was intense because there was no one else, it was just phil and I, um, and obviously a few others, but you know yeah, that's, it's awesome stories.
James:And again, from the outside, yeah, even I and I've got to know you over the years I didn't realize that there was that much heartache and and pain that you went through to get there and having the resilience to actually and the resilience, but also the um, the wisdom to to chop it and start all over again as well. And if we, you know, let's fast forward a couple of years and you're now building out your go-to-market team, there seems to be traction, momentum, product market fit seems to be there. There's the referrals and the case studies that you're getting are just phenomenal. So, you know, congratulations on transforming it. What wasn't a product a couple of years ago has now got product market fit. When you, when you're looking at your go-to-market team, um, are there differences in the sorts of people that you want in your software business than, say, in the in the services business, and what are the sort of characteristics and traits that you're looking for?
Dane:Not fundamentally different. Right, it boils down to you know, if we're talking about technical capabilities, you know the core capabilities you would need for you know risk management and you know the sort of GRC From a sales perspective. Broadly the same. But at the same time, if we compare InfoTrust to my size, the profile if I was going to say is slightly different would be we're the experts at what we do. We only have one series of products but we're one vendor, whereas an InfoTrust or an MSSP salesperson is going to need to know a little about many solutions and customers enjoy working with MSSPs because of that, because that account manager will have a broad knowledge of different technologies and solutions. So you know our team.
Dane:Now we're building out the go-to-market. We've recently hired a marketing manager, a senior marketing manager, who's been fantastic. The sales team we have about six in the sales team now. They're all specialists at what they do. A big part of their role is to know the product inside out so that they can speak to new prospects, demo the platform themselves and we're needed bringing a technical resource from a pre-sales or service perspective. But generally, you know, it kind of starts and ends with the salesperson. So they need to know they need to be really competent at presenting the platform demoing a little bit more technical than perhaps some sellers in some vendors where they would have an SE with them at all times.
James:And from a um, a characteristics perspective, that the sort of dna that you're looking for in your team. Yeah, what is your slam dunk fit in terms of a rep?
Dane:okay. So, um, I always say there's five core traits that I look for. Um, I've already mentioned activity. You know it, it it's. It's not sexy, right, as a sales trait, but it's fundamental. And so we look for activity and not just I can do it or I will do it, but you know I enjoy it. I get up kind of to you know, and charge at the day rather than you know, crawl into the day rather than you know, crawl into the day. So that's number one.
Dane:Number two we spoke about organization being highly organized. You know that's important from a salesperson perspective because that helps you give the customer a good experience do what you say you're going to do. If you're organized, you write things down, you get things done. Number three, and this isn't in particular order, by the way, but rapport. I did a poll on the four attributes because LinkedIn only allows you to choose four options, but I omitted activity. But and everyone said rapport was the number one, like by a country mile. But rapport is an important one. I think the reason why a lot of customers chose that is because they like people they like. But the reason they like them is probably that they're good at what they do and they follow up on time and things like that. But rapport is another one. So being able to go into a room and strike up a conversation easily maintain that relationship.
Dane:The other two, so product knowledge. Now, I don't just call this my product, I mean all products in that area. So knowing the competition, knowing the market, being knowledgeable someone that does enjoy reading the subject matter of your company, whether it be, in our case, frameworks, is kind of the DNA that underpins our business. So knowing the difference between NIST and Essential 8, that's a fairly basic level of understanding. You would know that. So product knowledge is key.
Dane:And then, last but not least, is sales acumen. Now, this was ranked the lowest of importance, admittedly, because a lot of customers have answered the poll they don't want to be sales acumened, they don't want to be sold to, they don't want to be sold, they want to buy. But what they don't necessarily realize is someone with strong sales acumen delivers them a better experience because they've asked the right questions to deliver the right product. What does sales acumen mean? Yeah, so sales acumen is um, for example, there's a number of factors to it. Uh, discovery, right, number one.
Dane:You know I mentioned spin selling. You know, foundational for me as a 22 year old seller learning about not just asking what do you need but asking about problems, uncovering those problems, uncovering the impact of those problems and, um, you know the implication that it has on the business, on the person, etc. Etc. So that's one aspect to it. Another is handling the negotiation, because often in a sale you're going to be, you're going to get to a certain point. The customer can't move ahead. You know that you need to be able to have a non-awkward conversation about how do we navigate a path forward. That's a win for both of us and there's many other aspects to it. So so obviously you know just reading buying signals and things like that in sales is important.
Dane:You know identifying where there could be objections. You can usually tell. You kind of develop an intuition in sales when you're speaking to someone and you know you don't feel that they're completely comfortable with you know the information you provided, to know when to flesh out objections and then how to handle those objections to satisfaction as well. So there's a whole bunch to sales acumen. It's a life kind of journey in terms of skilling up and, you know, sharpening your skills. And, to answer your question, what do I look for every look there's? I would everyone's different. I'm not going to look for 10 out of 10 in every in every category. It's for me it's um looking at what could work in our business in the role um for where we're at, you know. For, for example, if I'm hiring account managers, you know I want someone that's got definitely got strong rapport. Yeah, relationship management, you know perhaps the sort of outbound kind of activity based attributes less important.
James:That was incredibly valuable. I loved hearing your. It's been amazing to look at the frameworks that you've applied throughout your life, to look at the discipline that you've had, and also to take away so many actionable tips as well. If anyone listening does want to learn a little bit more about my SISO or InfoTrust, or even just connect with you, how can they get in touch with you?
Dane:Yeah, sure, so come and find me on me on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect. We share a lot of updates via that channel. Check out our website as well mycisoco m-y-c-i-s-o dot co. And yeah, we'd love to connect with anyone in the industry. Anyone wanting to look at the platform, reach out and we can arrange a demo for you. Definitely Brilliant.
James:Thanks, dean, no problem, thanks, james.
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