Go-to-Market Dispersion: The Hidden Obstacle to Scaling Sales in Cybersecurity Startups

🤔 Questions for the Audience:
- Have you experienced a slowdown in sales growth after scaling your sales team?
- Are your sales reps consistently delivering the results you expected?
- Do you struggle with maintaining a consistent sales process as your team expands?

💁‍♂️ In this episode, I discuss:
👉 The impact of go-to-market dispersion on sales growth and scaling.
👉 The importance of top-level leadership in establishing consistent messaging and positioning.
👉 How conversation intelligence tools can be used to coach and correct sales team behaviors.

📝 Summary: In this episode, Andrew Monaghan explores the challenges that arise as sales teams scale and the importance of maintaining a consistent go-to-market strategy. He shares a story about go-to-market dispersion at McAfee and provides three actionable ideas for addressing this issue. To learn more about how to overcome sales slowdowns during scaling, tune in to this episode of the Cybersecurity Startup Revenue Podcast.

🔗 Connect with Andrew Monaghan on LinkedIn and learn more about his company, Unstoppable. Book some time with him.

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:09]:

I am your host, Andrew Monaghan, and today we're talking about one way that sales often slow down as you scale the sales team. So let me ask you, have you ever had it when sales are growing, revenue is growing, and you start adding more heads into the group, into the sales and or the market team, frankly, and suddenly what you find is that sales growth slows down. You're still growing, but not quite at the rate you thought. Your reps are not producing as much per head as you were expecting them to do. And questions are starting to be asked internally about what's going on. Why are we not doing this in the way that we thought? Right? And when that happens, often what we do is you look to things such as shifts in the market, right? Has something changed in the market that caused this to happen? Maybe some competitors have grown stronger or there'd be more entrants into the market. Pipeline generation is not working. We start casting shadows and looking at pipelines and who's doing what and how productive they're being and things like that.

Andrew Monaghan [00:01:16]:

And then inevitably, after all that introspection, things change. We make changes, we decide to go after new markets, we look at new use cases, new channels, new ways of doing things, and maybe reposition the company a little bit, right? A lot can happen based on looking at why things are slowing down and thinking about other factors going on. But often this exacerbates the problem because it actually doesn't get to one of the root causes. Let me tell you a story. So in June 2007, Joe Sexton joined McAfee as its sales leader. At the time, the sales team was probably somewhere team 501,000 people. Joe joined the team and naturally, as any good leader would do, decides to go out into the field and work with the team, see what's going on, listen to people, listen to prospects, listen to salespeople, and learn. Now, one of the things that his observations was that people were not describing McAfee in the same way.

Andrew Monaghan [00:02:17]:

In fact, I think he said if you ask 50 sellers what McAfee does, you would get probably 60 different answers. And that's not good, right? Everyone's not only singing from a different hymn sheet, they're creating their own hymn sheets and doing it a slightly different way. And what Joe saw in that environment was what I'd call go-to-market dispersion. Go to market dispersion. And that's when, as your go-to-market team expands, as you bring in new people, what comes with new people is their experiences, their style, their way of doing things, their way of doing a qualification, their way of doing presentations, their way of doing demos, things like that, right? And some of that is good and some of it is not so good. In fact, it can be debilitating for the sales team at times. And it reminds me of something that's near and dear to my heart, which is that scaling is not about adding sellers. Scaling is about building and executing a repeatable revenue engine.

Andrew Monaghan [00:03:14]:

But if your sellers are all doing different things, you don't have a repeatable revenue engine to scale. What you have is a whole bunch of people in their speedboats zipping around the lake doing their thing, and sometimes it'll work great, the numbers will look fantastic, and you'll get there somehow, right? And sometimes it doesn't. And that's where the problem lies. The dispersion is when the team deviates from the path that we want them to follow when it comes to executing a sales process. So what do we do about it? Well, let me give you three ideas and three things to think about whether you can do any of these three things better. The first one is lead from the absolute top of the company with messaging and positioning and handling key questions that were asked in sales cycles. And when I say top of the company, I really mean CEO, CMO, CRO, Chief Product Officer, whoever are the leading lights in the company internally, but also externally. People who go on sales calls are involved in sales cycles.

Andrew Monaghan [00:04:15]:

They should all do this, right? They should have the same way of doing things every time. Imagine you go out and you're working with the CEO and he says one thing, the CMO says something else. The chief Product Officer. She says something completely different. You're not only confusing people internally, but you're also confusing the market as well. And they should be modeling the same way of doing things for prospects and salespeople and everyone internally. And it starts with maybe just thinking about sales calls, right? Just making sure that they're all on the same page in that, but also internally as well. When we're talking about these big internal meetings we have, don't assume that everyone internally is as bored talking about the position of the company as you might be, right? The fact that you've said it three times a day for the last two months doesn't matter.

Andrew Monaghan [00:05:04]:

It's the fact that the person who just joined or joined the last few weeks or wasn't at the last meeting kind of forgot a little bit, and it's your chance to bring them back together. So that's one thing. Lead from the top, get on the same page with how we do things, and model it for everyone to see. The second one is we live in an interesting time right now where conversation intelligence tools have become pretty normal. Now I get it in cybersecurity, some people believe that we shouldn't be using these tools because it'll put prospects off. Let me tell you, there are a lot of cybersecurity companies recording a lot of calls and analyzing them and getting better by doing that. Now, not every prospect agrees to have the call recorded. But we have these tools at our disposal, so we should use them.

Andrew Monaghan [00:05:49]:

If you're a first-line manager, you know what you should be doing, right? It should be coaching. It should be encouraging good things and coaching and correcting the things that we're not expecting to happen, such as going off a brand on messaging and how we're doing things right. I think in larger salesforces sometimes the CRO or the SVPs or VPs, I don't know whether they don't believe it's their job to listen to calls or they just can't seem to find the time. I would challenge you, if you're one of these people that are senior, to say could you spend 1 hour per week going into Gong or Chorus or something, whatever you have, and picking out a couple of examples of where someone did something great and a couple of examples where not so great things were happening. For the great things, just send emails out to sales all and say listen to what Johnny or Jane said about this, this is awesome. And then for where things are not done so well, back channel it through their manager. Message them directly and say, Look, we've got a set way of answering this question What does the company do? And you didn't do it. How can we help you get on the message and do things the right way? Right.

Andrew Monaghan [00:06:57]:

So I really challenge you to use the tools at your disposal to go into that level of detail and make sure it's done. What I often see in sales teams is people doing the encouragement and the call out for things that are good, which is great. We should definitely be doing that. But last, people are doing the corrections and that's what we need to focus in on when it comes to this. The third idea is as soon as you can afford it in the budget, bring someone in who's a specialist for enablement or for sales effectiveness, something like that. You know the titles that you're looking for, right? And there are two ways to do that. You can bring someone in as an employee or you can bring someone in as an outside consultant. I think on the employee side, you need to be just a little bit careful.

Andrew Monaghan [00:07:44]:

I see three different levels of people in that role. One is quite a junior one, right? You're tempted by a package or a commitment for a budget that's not that big, right? We can get someone in and they'll do a decent job. I would really encourage you not to go cheap on this. What you're going to do if you bring in someone cheap? You'll bring in essentially a program manager or project manager who doesn't have much credibility with the sales team. They're often known as being great people and nice and all, but they don't have any credibility when they're trying to construct programs that really make a difference in transforming how people sell and helping them get on the same page as the rest of the sales team. So you'll have a great person, they'll keep the plate spinning in the day, they won't move the needle. So I would encourage you to look at someone more middle to senior and pay the money to make sure you get those people coming in because they're the people that will make the difference for you.

Andrew Monaghan [00:08:35]:

I'd hate for you to do this and six months later you're sitting there going, well, enabled didn't work for us, right? Enabled is not as effective and you're basically tarnishing a whole practice that could be really effective for you with a brush because you brought someone in quite junior and then of course you can look to outside consultants. That's what I do. I will just be very specific about what you're looking for, make sure that person has domain experience, make sure they've got even sales experience in your domain so they really can talk to what they've experienced over the years and talk the same language as your reps. They'll have a lot more credibility when they're trying to transform how people sell if they've been there and done that before. So there are three ideas about how to try and avoid this go-to-market dispersion. I'll leave you with one thought though, and is that this is all about the 80% and I think the best analogy to give is thinking about traveling from one place to another. Let's say the goal of the company is to get from San Francisco to New York. Let's say I'm just going with the analogy, right? What we want to do is everyone going in the same direction.

Andrew Monaghan [00:09:42]:

What we want everyone to do is to be on the same right. They don't have to be in the exact same lane, though, right? You're always going to have people come in with their great experiences and their unique way of doing things and their style and just ways for us to get better. We can't ignore that. You don't want to bring in great sellers and somehow tell them, no, you have to do this word for word, right? They're going to walk out the door immediately if you try and do that. We want to embrace what's going to be unique and exciting about having them, but for 80% of the time we've got to be on the same page of what we're doing when this goes bad, when things don't work out. What you have is everyone going from San Francisco to New York, but they're all taking different modes of transport, right? There are planes, trains, and automobiles. Some are flying, some are driving, some are in a bus, some are in a ferry, some are cycling, some are in a know and everyone's kind of just doing their thing, figuring out the best way to go. I take a motorbike because I love driving my Harley, right? Or I took United Planes on one K and therefore I get upgraded and all the rest of it.

Andrew Monaghan [00:10:42]:

That's not what we want, right? We want everyone going in the same direction on the same freeway with some leeway to be in slightly different lanes. So that's my challenge for you, is get everyone on the same freeway and keep them there.