Cybernomics: Where Business Meets Tech

Go-to-Market Strategies of a Veteran CIO

• Bruyning Media

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We explore how to sell to CIOs who are flooded with pitches yet hungry for real innovation, and how sellers can move from vague benefits to clear outcomes and CFO-ready cases. Carl Mosgofian shares how to frame differentiation, map to the stack, and help champions win internal approval.

• CIO and CISO partnership realities and reporting nuance
• Vendor fatigue contrasted with desire for useful innovation
• Common pitch mistakes and the single validation slide
• Lead with what the product does and where it fits
• Differentiation tied to concrete outcomes and costs
• Shifting from discovery to internal selling mechanics
• Building a three-slide CFO case with credible ROI
• Budget thresholds, approvals, and tool consolidation
• Using networks and reference CFOs to de-risk buys
• Practical phrasing to ask for next steps and help

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If you want to learn more about Bruning Media and what we do, check out Bruyning.com. That is B R U Y N I N G dot com


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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to another episode of Cybernomics. I'm Josh Blooding and I'm here today with Carl Moscovian, who is a veteran CIO. And you know, I've been wanting to really talk to uh a CIO for a long time, mainly because in the cyber security community, we keep hearing that the CISO reports to the CIO, and oftentimes, especially when it comes to go to market, we often forget that. That the CIO at times controls the purse and also controls technology strategy within the business. It's not true for every company, and please don't come after me, CISOs. You are the person who oftentimes, you know, says, This is what we need to do for security. This is what we need to do for um, in some cases, even IT. Not taking that away from you, but in a lot of large organizations, what we're finding is that the CIO often controls the strategy and that funnels down through security. So you've got technology, security, those guys work together. Carl Moskofian, welcome to cybernomics. Really looking forward to this conversation. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself being a veteran CIO and what that means today?

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. Happy to be here. And yeah, I have a long time career as an IT executive doing a lot of different things and ultimately becoming a CIO. And uh it's been a great ride. At this point, I've shifted to more advisory work. So I'm now working with a lot of startups, talking to them as much about go-to-market as anything else, everything from product pitch, uh, you know, techniques for getting off to try for trying to actually reach C-level executives. So I'm having a lot of fun working with some working with some great companies. And it's interesting that you talk about the reporting relationship. The thing is, I've seen every possible model. Um, security often reports up into CIOs, but it's sometimes not, and every everything in between. But regardless of the reporting relationship, the CIO and CISO need to really have a great relationship because really neither of them can do their job without the other. So it regardless of the reporting, it's really such a tightly linked couple of uh couple of areas between the the infrastructure uh of the company, the business applications, and the security. And now, especially with AI, everything's gotta be really well integrated.

SPEAKER_01:

All right. So today, what we're really talking about is go to market. And that is your forte. And so the reason I wanted to talk about going to market today is because there's this disconnect between the buyers and the sellers within the security community. And, you know, often that has to do with just them not listening to each other, right? The buyers, so the CIOs, the CISOs, are overwhelmed and just inundated with the number of salespeople, vendors, and just the market is so large and fragmented that they're just like tuning them out, right? I don't want to talk to you, don't call me. We're gonna go to our relationship model. And what that has done is it alienates the really good vendors and the really good products that are out there that might otherwise provide some benefit and some value, right? Sometimes smaller is better. Sometimes it's better to work with a smaller company. Um, and then on the other side, which we're notoriously famous for, I'm in tech sales myself. Uh, we're not listening to the other side. We're not listening to the SISOs, we're not listening to the CIOs, and that lands us in hot water because we're just tone deaf. We don't understand the market. And so, CISOs, if you think I'm throwing you under the bus, I'm throwing myself under the bus here as well. I'm guilty of it, right? And I've had to learn over the years that it is so important to listen. And so I find that your role is so critical here because you're looking at both sides and how do we mediate? How do we talk to each other? So let's start there with the seller side, with the vendor side. What is often the biggest mistake that you see with companies, new software products going to market in terms of being able to understand their buyers?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, first of all, you know, the interesting irony is if you talk to CISOs and CIOs, they'll tell you on the one hand that they are overwhelmed with vendor pitches. And on the other hand, that they really want to hear about cool new technologies, right? They wouldn't be in the job they're in if they didn't have genuine passion around using technology to solve problems. So it's this funny contradiction. On the one hand, leave me alone. On the other hand, I do want to hear about the good stuff. And so the trick, I think, for vendors is how to figure out how to get through the noise so that people can actually find you. And then when you get your shot, to make the most of it. And I guess that's the thing as a buyer over the years, has been a little surprising to me is that someone does it, they manage to get a meeting with me, but they don't really take as good advantage of that opportunity as they could. Aaron Powell Well, what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01:

What is what is a good taking advantage of a good opportunity look like?

SPEAKER_00:

Aaron Powell Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is that there's they're very common mistakes that I think a lot of people make, and for understandable reasons. So one thing that's very common is that vendors have a tendency to spend a lot of time telling me about my problem. And I understand where this comes from, especially with startups, because the decks that they've been building and the communicating they've been doing has largely been to VCs to try and get funding. And so those decks start by defining the problem and then saying, here's why you should invest in me to go build a company to solve that. The thing is, it's my problem. I'm living it. So you do not need to spend a lot of time telling me about my own problems. And in fact, when you do that, if we're on Zoom, I'm multitasking, right? Because you don't have to tell me my problem, I'm living it. So there are often multiple slides. People are trying to build a whole story about the problem, but they don't need to, and in fact, it's counterproductive. And in fact, you're putting it that at the beginning of your deck, which is right where you need to grab somebody. If you lose them early, now you got to get them back. Right. And by the way, we're good at like multitasking without you knowing it. So you think we're engaged, but no, we're not. We're somewhere else. So my recommendation to folks is look, a single slide that lays out the problem. What we hear from most people is these are the kind of issues that they have in this domain space that we're talking about today. Does that resonate with you? People can read the slide. You don't have to read the slide. By the way, that's that's presentation 101. Do not read the slide. But a lot of people read the slide and you're just you're dying. You're sitting there going, yeah, yeah, yeah, get on with it. I glanced at the slide. Yes, those are my problems. At most, a single slide, here's generally the problems. Does any you probably have similar stuff? You're looking for the head nod. Is does one of these stand out to you that's especially top of mind for you? Or do you have something that's not on this list? That's like, hey, you missed something, and this is really a problem for me. That's now, first of all, they're engaged. They're not just passively listening to you. You're getting some useful information and you're just validating the problem, right? Um, so that's thing one. Uh thing two is people generally take way too long to tell me what it is. Like what do you actually make? So first people tell me my problem, and then they read some book or or they heard from one of us, to be fair, that we need to understand the business benefit of your solution. Right? Don't talk to me about technology, talk to me about the business benefits, right? That's okay. We need a little bit of that, but people overdo it, right? So they first they spend, they have 30 minutes. They spend 10 minutes telling me my problem, they spend 10 minutes telling me how good it would be if that problem was solved, right? They tell me the business benefits, and now I'm 20 minutes into this thing and I don't even know what you do. I don't know who you are, I don't know what you do, I don't know why I should care about you. And you haven't told me anything that I don't know. Because I know the business benefit. Yes, obviously, if you solve that problem, this would be yeah, I can figure that out. So my recommendation is very little time on what the problem is, and very little time in the first meeting about the business benefit. I get that we need that, but the thing is, is that I only care about that if I think I actually care about you. So the bulk of that first meeting should be this is the thing we have, and this is why it's different. That's the other thing I think people miss a lot. They're like, hey, here's a generic problem. We have a generic solution. Here are all the business benefits if you could solve it. Great. Again, you haven't really told me that much. Why you? It's funny because if you really think about it, that's what selling is. But people don't actually do a lot of selling. They do a lot of high-level 30,000-foot talking, but I actually need you to sell. Like, don't be afraid to say this is why we're really good. For whatever reason that is, by the way. And again, I don't necessarily need like a technical deep dive, but I need to understand, like, we have a particular approach to this problem that's different than other people. Or maybe you don't. Maybe you have a solution that looks a lot like a lot of other people's solutions, but you have to have some differentiation. So maybe you come in and say, listen, a lot of people have solved this problem, but we have a unique pricing model that makes us much less expensive than other people. That's okay. Don't be afraid to, but you got to give me some differentiation. You got to tell me why I should care about you. And so that's my recommendation to people for for the first, that first meeting, if you're, if you're lucky enough to get it. Later on, we can talk about how you help me sell this thing internally. And that's where I do need to talk more about business benefits and things. And we can we can talk some more about that because I think that's kind of an interesting topic as well.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, they're gonna listen to this podcast and they're gonna go, the sales guys, I mean, they're just gonna go a hundred miles an hour in whatever direction you just said, and then you'll be back here next year talking about uh they yeah, I understand why they did this because they listened to me, but they overdid it. And honestly, it is true. It is true. And I'll I'll maybe give you a little bit of insight since we're on both sides of the fence, right? So I'll I'll be an advocate for my tribe. I'll tell you why we are the way we are. One, we always talked about ourselves. And so we were told don't talk about your solution, don't talk about yourself, don't talk about the product to a point where people just say, we don't care about your product. We care about a solution. All right. So then we have to figure out what that means. So we went so far in the other direction where we said, we're going to talk about your problem and demonstrate that we understand your world better than anybody else. Well, now with Chat GPT, everybody can understand your world just as well as everybody else, right? So it's not a differentiator anymore. So now, you know, I think that's where we overdid it. We didn't we had too many slides just on the problem because we wanted to show off.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I I I think I think that's a really good point. And and I under I totally understand why people went went in that direction. Um the the other thing is I should be I should be very careful here to uh to explain. When I say I want to understand what you do, I do want to understand what the solution is. In other words, I think what happened is in the past, salespeople were in talking about feeds and speeds, and they were getting into a lot of technical details. I was like, no, I that I don't need. I don't need the 30,000 feet, and I don't need the 5,000 feet. I need somewhere in between. I do understand what the solution is. I want to understand at a high level what you're doing that's different and fundamentally what you're doing and what it is, exactly where you fit into the stack. I need to be able to fit you into a mental model that I have of my whole environment. Right? Um uh but but really what you're looking for is that balance. So I'm not saying that people should go back to the days when they would overwhelm me with a lot of high, you know, very granular detail about products. I'm an executive. I have people on my team who will get into that level of detail. But also the 30,000-foot sort of motherhood and apple pie. Gee, managing applications is hard. And if you could manage them better, life would be better. Like, yes, I know that. Obviously. Let's let's move on. Let's go.

SPEAKER_01:

Where would you say the bulk of the call should be? So I walk in and I say, hey, Carl, here are a couple of problems that I'm seeing with other CIOs. Typically, this is what we're seeing. Does any of that resonate with you? Is there anything that I'm missing here? You go, nope, there's nothing you're missing, Josh. You did your homework. You understand my world. Right. What where do I go next to spend all of my time? Is it is it a back and forth or is it a presentation?

SPEAKER_00:

To me, it's exactly here's how we solve this problem.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. So that is that is the differentiating, like spending the time in differentiating is worth it to you.

SPEAKER_00:

I I think I think you need to tell me what you do fundamentally. Like we solve this problem in this way. We sit here in the stack, we we specifically do this stuff. Again, not at a high granular level of detail, but I need to understand what you actually have. It is amazing how far you can get into people's decks. And they're talking about the moon and the stars, and they're gonna give you all this great business benefit. You're like, yeah, what is it? Is it magic beans? Is it a magic wand? What the heck is the thing that you're actually trying to sell me? Right. Um so you gotta pretty quickly and you wanna catch people. So don't save the best part for last. You know, give them the best part right up front. We have a unique solution to this problem because we've do we're doing something different than other people. And here's here's why we're excited, and here's why we think you should be excited.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a way to even compromise with this where you can talk about your solution or your product and how you're different and tie it into the business problems. So if you have that knowledge, if you're armed with that information, why not do that? I think you know it seems like that was important.

SPEAKER_00:

Hey, I don't want you to not talk about solutions. I absolutely want you to talk about solutions, but I want you to talk about solutions in terms of this is the thing we have and this is how it solves that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Okay. So it should be solution focused, but it should be very specific to your product. Like don't have me be 20 minutes into the call and I still don't really know what you make. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I'll tell you, I when I'm on the on the phone with with uh executives, and again, you know, I sell IT services and and um software. And so that is a question that comes up quite a bit. You know, I'll I'll talk and then they'll go, Josh, let me stop you right there. What do you do? What is it? Who are you? And there's there are two schools of thought in sales where one, you can sort of gauge, and I think you might be a counter to this and maybe opposed to this, that if you've gotten far enough to where they resonate with you and they're like, Yeah, yeah, I understand. Um, that's great. By the way, what do you do? Like, who are you? We may see that as a win because we're like, hey, we've been talking about business problems, not who we are. And then the other side, it's well, if you get to the end and you don't know who I am, I must have missed something huge. But I'm guessing uh if I'm I'm making an assumption here that for you, maybe the truth is somewhere in between.

SPEAKER_00:

Right. And look, uh I don't want anyone to overreact to anything. And by the way, this is my. This is my opinion. Feel free to take it with a grain of salt. But I just think, yes, obviously we need balance, but these are consistent things. And by the way, I am part of a local CIO group. We do a thing every year where as a fundraiser for actually a really cool thing that we support uh at Merritt College here in the Bay Area that helps underserved populations get started in a tech career uh at a community college, which is an awesome thing. Um and we do something called the CIO marathon. And in that um, startups donate money and then they get time with a big group of executives. So I've seen lots of startups presenting to you know anything from a small group of 10 to a large group of 50 CIOs. What I'm telling you is consistent feedback that comes from all of the CIOs to these startups. So on the one hand, this is just my opinion. On the other hand, it's pretty validated by a lot of other CIOs that that I've I've heard give feedback. Um so it is about balance. Uh but you know, the thing is that the relationship is good, right? And I get it. You're trying to build a relationship with me. But at the end of the day, you have to deliver something. Otherwise, we're gonna have a great relationship. We're gonna go to lunch, we're gonna have a great lunch. I'm not gonna buy anything from you. Uh you know what I mean? So, you know, you need to be careful not to get so caught up in building the relationship that you you miss like the qualification stage of like, hey, do I actually have a solution that matters to you specifically? Or are we just generally having a nice conversation about business? Right.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. And that's that's the other part of it is you can go really far in that direction just building a relationship. And, you know, because we hear people buy from people they like. So you try to be super likable, you try to build rapport. And Zig Ziglar famously said, a lot of people do that, but they never ask for the order. You know, they they never and you can't get to the order unless people know what it is that you do.

SPEAKER_00:

So but I think I think the other nuance there is people buy from people they like, but not if they don't need the stuff. Like they only buy stuff they need. Now, the stuff they need, they would like to buy from people they like. Yeah. But you know, if it really solves the problem, they'll buy it from people they don't like. So there's an interesting thing. I worked for a long time at GainSight, which makes uh you know customer success software. And so I sort of lived and was immersed in that customer success world. And we used to have this slide, this two by two, it was my favorite slide. I thought it just captured the world very effectively. And it was customer experience versus customer outcomes. So if with your vendor you get great outcomes and you have a great experience, you love them, you advocate for them, beautiful. Life is good. Uh if you get terrible outcomes and you hate working with them, you turn them, right? Obviously. That's pretty straightforward. But the other two are interesting to think about for a second. So there are vendors you love. Again, you go to lunch, the guy takes you out, you know, you have a great relationship. Um, and maybe you even like the software, right? Maybe if you were filling out an NPS survey, you would you would rate it highly. You're like, I love that stuff. But the outcomes are not there, right? At the end of the day, you're not actually getting like when you bought that, you had a an ROI document, right? You had a business case, you're not actually getting the value that you expected to get. You will churn that vendor, and that vendor will be shocked. They'll be like, but we had such a great relationship. We had such nice launches, your NPS scores were good. Yeah, but you weren't getting the outcomes. And that's why the whole customer success thing exists, because it's not good enough to just make the sale, and even it's not good enough to make people happy. They have to have the outcomes. You have to be focused on outcomes, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Would it work if you had the outcomes, but not the great experience?

SPEAKER_00:

Let's say you're you're a vendor. So that's the other quadrant in the two by two, is you get great outcomes, but you hate those guys. So we I everyone, I know so many people who do business with companies like, for instance, Oracle, who they don't like working with. If you gave them a choice, they would say, nope, would love to not work with those folks. But they're selling good stuff, and I've been using it for years, and I get the outcomes, and so I'm gonna hold my nose and I'm gonna renew with those folks, and I'm gonna do business with them. So the point of that slide is that outcomes are everything. And and and that's true in a customer success, you know, standpoint. But I think in this conversation, it's also good to think about that at the end of the day, you're coming and meeting me for the first time, you're telling me about the outcomes you can bring me. Right. And not just at 30,000 feet, you'll sell more stuff. You'll sell more stuff in this particular way with our product because we do something special. Right. Unless you can establish that, we're we're probably not going anywhere.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

You're gonna be churned. You will churn or you're not the median in the first place. If that's your if that's your first meeting and you can't get me hooked and make me think, oh, if I bought this stuff, like I could have some outcomes that I need. Yes. Yeah. If you can't get me thinking that way, then I don't care about a lot of the other stuff that vendors want to talk to me about, right? Like, oh, we have lots of logos, oh, we have this, we have that. That's great. But uh first I have to actually care about you in the first place, right? Because if you tell me, look, this is what we do, and I'm like, yeah, I don't need that thing, then gotta tell you, we can talk all day if you want. It and it's not bad for you to make sure I know what you are, because who knows, six months from now I could be in a new job, and maybe I do need that thing. So it's not, it's not a total waste of time for me to hear about it. But if I don't need that thing, then you need to know that pretty quickly, frankly. Because you have a limited amount of time. Time is your inventory, right? So you've got a limited amount of time to spend with people where you're trying to sell something and they just don't need it.

SPEAKER_01:

All right. So, Carl, I've got you on the hook. I've done my homework, I've presented a balanced picture, you've got the need, you're bought in, and all by all measures, we're gonna move on to the next step, which would be selling internally, right? So, how do I help you sell this thing that we both agree you need, but is not gonna go anywhere unless you can make that business case for the people that, you know, the other stakeholders that are involved. How do I make that case in a way that benefits you and takes us through to the next steps?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think that's a great, a great conversation. By the way, there's a piece, just to be clear, I think sometimes people think they can sell directly to the C-level executive. There is a piece where the more detailed conversation happens with the team, right? I am never gonna buy anything unless my team looks at it and says, hey, boss, this is the thing. And by the way, I'm always gonna ask, you know, what are the three to five things you looked at and why did you choose this one? So again, I think sometimes vendors come in and they think if I meet with a high enough level person and I convince them this is wonderful, they'll just buy it. They'll pull their checkbook out and write, write a check. That's not how it works. I'm not shoving anything down my team's throats. And by the way, I have way more stuff that people want to buy than we can afford to buy. So it's got to be something that my team is actually begging me for, right? That they're saying we absolutely have to have this. But if you're lucky enough to sort of get through all those hurdles and I'm at a point where I say, yes, I have this problem, you have a solution, I want to move forward with this, you're not done yet. And anyone who's in enterprise sales understands that the gauntlet is long and painful. Because maybe if it's inexpensive enough, I can just sort of slide it in. But if it's of any consequence in most organizations, I now need to figure out how to get this into my budget. And that means talking to a CFO, maybe a committee somewhere that signs off on new purchases, maybe even a CEO, depending on the circumstances. So I've now got to sell this internally. And some CISOs and CIOs are better salespeople than others, right? If they were great salespeople, they wouldn't be IT or security executives, they'd be in sales, right? So this is something where we really need your help. And we may or may not ask for it, but trust me, we need it because we've got to go sell. Let's say to our CFO. So you wrote a deck that's to me, but I need an internal deck that's to my CFO. And your deck to me was 30 slides. My deck to my CFO is three slides. And it's got a different focus. So remember there's different levels, right? Let's say a security practitioner has a security problem, they talk to vendors, they choose a vendor, they say, here's a problem, here's a solution, I want to go spend X dollars. To solve this, they're solving a security problem. That problem bubbles up, let's say, to a CISO. That CISO, by the way, has 10 different groups or 10 different problems that are all proposing a solution that costs money, and and maybe they can afford two of them. So they've got to make a prioritization decision around where they think the greatest need is. But then their two things have to go, let's say, to a CFO, and the CFO is not making security decisions. So the CFO is getting the two things from 20 different departments. So they've now got 40 things on the list and they're not making a security decision, they're making an investment decision. And I think it's really important for everyone to understand that. Also, in those security practitioners, they need to have that perspective. They need to understand, right? Because sometimes they're sitting there going, what's wrong with these people? Why won't they buy me this thing? Because it's clearly solving this problem. It's a real problem. And they're missing the bigger picture, which is that ultimately it's a tough job. I think you've got to have kind of empathy for people at every level. It took me a while to get to that point of actually sort of having empathy for the CEO. But what I learned from my own experience was yeah, it's tough. It's tough prioritizing, it's tough choosing. It's not easy. There's so much that needs to happen and so little that you can actually afford to do. So that's where we need help selling internally to say this is why, not why this is a good security solution, let's say, but this is why this is a good investment for the company. That's a different deck. That's about ROI. It's about business benefit. That's when that business benefit thing really kicks in. Earlier on, I just need to know that those things are there, but later on, I need to get into them in a lot more detail. Because now I'm like, listen, my CFO needs to see a spreadsheet. I need to really break, I need to make this a credible story. I can't just say, hey, boss, this is going to sell, this is gonna save us a million dollars. They they need a little more meat on those bones, right? They need to see enough that they say, okay, I see what you're telling me. This logically makes sense. I can believe in this. So, you know, look, big companies will have a whole group called something like the value engineering group, which does nothing but help their customers come up with those kind of metrics and information and walk them through to help them write that deck. If you're a smaller company and you don't have, you're not big enough to have a dedicated team doing that, you've got to carve something out for that. And if you're a sales rep and you're kind of on your own, you need to build some of those muscles. And by the way, the you know, one of the easiest ways to do that is just to have that conversation with your champion, right? Right. What do you need to do now internally for us to actually Actually, get this over the finish line. Oh, I need to create a deck for this committee. Do you have a template? Uh yeah, I have a template. Can you share it with me and see? I'd love to help you with that. Most people, I think, will say, fantastic. I would love to help. And then help them roll your sleeves up and get into it and bring your sales skills to the table in helping them build something that's really going to be effective internally.

SPEAKER_01:

Aaron Powell Yeah. Do you see the CIO in that picture that you painted within this context? Is the CIO the champion? You just mentioned. I just want to make sure that I've got that right.

SPEAKER_00:

So it depends on what level you're you're selling at, but I think ultimately if it's a significant purchase, you're going to need that C level, whether it's a CISO or a CIO, you're going to need someone pretty high up to be willing to go to bat for you internally. Because again, it's it's hard. It's hard to get back.

SPEAKER_01:

That's that's really interesting, Carl, because the way that we and we salespeople often on the vendor side, we we're really looking at the champions, and then we want to get to the decision makers, but you're adding another layer to this pyramid here, where we often stop at the CIO or the CISO and we go, we've got the decision maker. This is the person who's gonna, you know, they they have control over the budget. But what we fail to, and I'm embarrassed to say that I'm realizing this now in real time, that what we fail to realize is that the company is an organism and the CEO typically is the head of that organism. And everybody's trying to, and I would even say that the C there's another level of beyond that, which is the company itself. The CEO has a mandate to make prudent decisions that will benefit the company. And so it's turtles all the way down or all the way up, depending on how you want to look at it, which is fascinating. It's absolutely blowing my mind that we often miss that. Is that was that a Yurtle the Turtle reference? I don't know. I thought it was some like uh I don't I can't remember where I heard that, but I think it's like some philosopher back in the day that said that.

SPEAKER_00:

If you've never read the Dr. Zeus book Yurtle the Turtle, you should uh you should check it out. Maybe that is where there are probably some leadership lessons there.

SPEAKER_01:

Dr. Zeuss, honestly, there's so much that you can get from Dr. Seuss books, and just I'll go down that rabbit hole. Don't get me started.

SPEAKER_00:

And by the way, again, I don't want people to overreact to what I'm saying. If the amount is small enough, then yes, as a CIO, I can just kind of slide it in. Okay. Yeah. It's when the numbers, the bigger the numbers get. One way to think about this is every organization of any size has a series of thresholds for sign-off. Right? So if it's under X dollars as CIO, I can just sign it. If it's over X dollars, the CFO has to sign it. If it's X over this amount, the CEO needs to sign it. So the bigger the number, I mean, just mechanically, if you right, because I think salespeople usually do understand, like there's a mechanical process and you need to understand who needs to sign off on this thing. Right. But that's kind of what it comes down to is the bigger the number, the more I'm gonna have to sell this internally. And so I'm probably gonna need some help with that. By the way, the best thing you can do if you want to sell something, 100%, is tell me what you're gonna take out. Right? Because if you say, I want to sell you something for$100,000, but I'm gonna let you churn on this other thing that's$200,000, I'm gonna save you$100,000 a year, fantastic. You just got fast tracked. So if you're coming in trying to sell something and you can't tell me what you're gonna take out of my environment, you're at a disadvantage right off the bat. Because by the way, that's the first thing my CFO is gonna ask. Because my CFO is also, and I guarantee you this is true of 99.9% of CFOs out there, they're looking at these technology leaders and saying, why on earth do you have so much stuff? I'm looking at this list. You've got 300 SaaS vendors. Surely we don't need that. There's got to be duplication. There's got that this can't possibly be true. So when you come and say, no, no, I want to add 301, I want to add another one to that list, they're pushing back. And in fact, in some cases, they'll say, Great, tell me the two things you're gonna take out when you want to buy one thing. This is crazy, right? So that's what you're up against. That's what I'm up against as an IT executive, and that's what you're up against trying to help me sell that internally.

SPEAKER_01:

And this is why, ladies and gentlemen, we sign an NDA when you start getting into it. Because these are really delicate conversations that you have to have. And um how do you broker, how do vendors broker that question? You know, you if I wanted to to to just know who else is involved, who do you need, for a lack of better words, you know, who is gonna ultimately be the decision maker here? Is it gonna be the CFO, you know, whatever? I can go based on the number the you know of the the the cost of the thing, the way you said it. I can't remember exactly how you said it, but but how do I ask that question in a way that's graceful?

SPEAKER_00:

I you know, I I think um I think that's an easy question to to ask if you've built the relationship. So now we're back to the relationship. You do need a a champion that you've walked through a series of events with to a point where they now say, I want to do business with you. And and now it should be easy to say, listen, I think you want to bring us in. We would love to partner with you. We think we've got a solution for a problem that you have. We would love to do that. How can I help you? But I think that's the way to put it. I think when it's how can you help me sell to you, it feels a little different. Right. When it's how can I help you make this happen? Now we're having a constructive conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Yeah. You might not even need to specifically call out the cost and the price and who else got to sign. If you just say, what else do we need to do to help you get this across the line? You're gonna tell me when who else is involved.

SPEAKER_00:

Now you may need to prompt them a little bit because you they may hear that question and think in terms of, you know, their answer may be, well, cut your price in half or something. Well, okay. That's a Well, that's not gonna happen. You know, but but you do need to listen to them. But also, like, so what do we need to do mechanically? Who needs to sign off on this? Who do you need to convince internally and what can I do to help you with that? And by the way, be creative. If they say, Listen, my biggest blocker is the CFO, right? There are all kinds of things you could potentially do. You could help them build a deck that will convince their CFO, but also maybe you've got a happy customer somewhere and you go to your champion there and you say, Listen, uh do you think your CFO would talk to this CFO and tell them that this has actually worked out really well for you? Because boy, the the power of that is huge. Right? So think about the network effects, because executive selling is all about networks. And how do you leverage that to really try and help you put things over the finch line?

SPEAKER_01:

I could talk about this all day, Carl. Like this is just amazing, such a wonderful conversation. And I would look, there's an open invitation if you'd like to come back, because I think that this is crucial, being able to talk to both sides and understand both sides. Even I've learned some things here that I'll implement. And before you and any look, if you're a salesperson and you're listening to this episode and you're making a bullet list of all the things you're going to do tomorrow and follow Carl's instructions here, there is an element to this, which you've alluded to a number of times here, Carl, is that yes, there is the structure and there are the elements, but at the end of the day, this is a dance. This is something that you have to think about. You really have to understand and know how the parts fit and how to configure them in such a way that is beneficial to the business. And that is real go-to-market strategy. And so, Carl, I appreciate you coming on cybernomics, laying out the go-to-market. You get the final word.

SPEAKER_00:

I think you're right. This was a great conversation. And I think the world needs more of these conversations and in both directions. So if you're a technology executive and you're frustrated with sales, have a conversation with them about how you're frustrated and how you think they could do it better. I sort of got into this advisory stuff because for years I would take the time with startups that would come and pitch to me and I would give them that kind of input. And that sort of led to where I'm at now, which is actually instead of doing that for free, doing it as my job. And anyone who's who wants to contact me and talk more, feel free. But also for people who are in sales, there are CIOs and CISOs out there who will have these conversations with you. I think if you if you approach them and say, you know, I I don't want to talk about sales for a second. I just want to talk about this process and how we can all like work better with you. I think a lot of people would be, would be happy to have that conversation. And by the way, too, it's a funny thing. A lot of people are in sales in companies where your company has a CIO. Right? So have you ever gone over and talked to your CIO and said, hey, we're both on the same team. Can we have like a real conversation? Can you look at this deck and give me some input? I am amazed at how few companies really take advantage of their in-house expertise because they think of them as quote unquote just the IT folks. But if you're selling to IT folks, they're also a perfect sounding board for you to test your pitch, to talk about some of these kind of things. So I think this was a great conversation. I think there should be more of these conversations, and everybody should be looking for opportunities to think about this more and have this kind of collaboration. And it's good for both of us because again, you're trying to sell stuff, but I'm also trying to have meetings with vendors that don't drive me crazy. So it's good for everybody.

SPEAKER_01:

Yes, the more we talk, the better it is, the more efficient the market becomes. Carl, I appreciate you coming on cybernomics. If you're listening to this uh and you've made it this far, thank you for sticking with us. If you want to learn more about cybernomics and what we do, check us out uh across all podcast platforms, also on YouTube. And if you want to learn more about Bruning Media and what we do, check out Bruning.com. That is B R U Y N I N G dot com. Thanks for listening to this episode of Cybernomics. Bye bye. Wow.