03/29/2021

Welcome everybody. We are Gary, nine weeks away from 52, a full year here on the cyber call. Hard to believe. Um, you're getting well. Welcome everybody. And then there were two, so we're without, so just to let everybody know, so Wes is on vacation. There is a chance, uh, he's gonna, uh, actually get some 5G He's on a river and, and we're gonna pull him in and just quick, hello. But, um, Ryan Weeks should be here shortly. Um, he had something Doing security stuff. Yeah, Exactly.

To, uh, to today. Um, Gary, a few quick announcements. Um, one I put a, 'cause we're talking sales today, I put a link, um, from one of your landing pages up. Um, any kind of just quick thoughts on, on the three big mistakes MSPs are making there. Yeah, it's good when we're, we're gonna talk specifically from the perspective of, uh, you know, cybersecurity today, but this just core fundamentals about MSP sales and all of it applies to this.

Yeah, we're using this as the wedge, but MSP sales is still MSP sales, so I would encourage everybody to go take a look at that. Okay, very cool. Another few announcements and I'm, we'll get right into it. Number one, Gary, um, I put a poll, we're gonna have three polls. I put one up. Um, first one is just, I, I'd just love to hear where people are in terms of, you know, their comfort level. Back to events. I've heard different things.

Just love to get your thoughts again on, on where your mindset is there. Um, two, um, this is like an open mic event for us, meaning this session we're going to first talk specifically with Gary on, um, sales issues. What is preventing people from, from selling more MRR, what they can do to change that. And then he's, Gary's gonna inter interact with Ryan A. Little bit because in essence, Ryan is in the sales role at the end of Yeah. He's gotta sell his board on all the same concepts.

Exactly the same, but he just has one board. He doesn't have 30 boards Yeah. To go to like 30 customers like we do as MSPs, right. Or Exactly. My first MSP 180 customers have to go through it. Exactly. But, or maybe this will be really short, everyone will just say, ah, no, we have sales nailed. Yeah. And, uh, let, let's, you know, we'll just tell jokes or something. Fair enough. Okay. So please, um, think about your questions.

We'd love to either a, we'll answer them live here in the second part of the cyber call. Um, or b, we'd love to have you jump, but again, this will be a better call if we're hearing live from you, whether it's a, you know, posting a question in the ask a question section. Actually today, Gary, we'll actually answer their questions. Yeah. As opposed to, normally when we guests, we run right up against time. Okay. So let's get right into it. Gary.

Um, before we get into specificity about today, I wanna set the stage because, um, you've, for years spoke, you know, when you talk to people about sales, sales happens before you either pick up the phone, before you walk into the door and sit down with somebody. Can you, can you give everybody here our community, just some aspects or some perspective on why that is? Why is, why are sales one and loss before those things even happen? Yeah.

Because 90% of success in sales, and this is really hard, this is hard for salespeople to get their arms around, but it's really hard for like just a business owner, business leader who hasn't lived in this world. But 90% of success in sales is attitude, self-image, and self-discipline. It's about your belief system, uh, before you walk through the door. That's an all sales Mm-Hmm. But what's unique about MSP sales and other sales are like this that are where your product is your offering.

It's your service offering something that is kind of intangible, right? And so in that 10% is our knowledge, our packaging, our pricing. And if we don't learn to make that tangible in a way that people can clearly, without a lot of words, they can get the concept of why what you do, uh, is gonna get them different kind of results than they could get from any other alternative. I call that creating separation. So you have to be able to do both. And it's almost that part's more important.

I have many members in my peer group that, um, uh, let's just say they don't follow our sales process to the t as much as I would like them to do. But they've done such a good job at building out their delivery areas, of having their process in place, their belief system in it is so strong and what it costs them to do it and the value of it, that when they get in front of a prospect, they have success even though they're only loosely following.

I have other people that try to follow our sales process by the, you know, uh, by the T but they don't have that belief, Andrew. And, and they, they tend to come up with donuts. Got it, got it. So if anybody out there in the MSP business, it's telling you that you're gonna come to some sales bootcamp and they're gonna teach you a different sales process, uh, and or some voodoo mind trick.

And all of a sudden you're gonna start selling the, the right customers at the right price when you've never done it before. They're either lying or they don't understand MSP sales. Yeah. Very good. And, uh, hey Rob, great. You know, perspective and thought I'm, I moved that into a question. Can Ryan, um, introduce his guest? Yeah, absolutely. Is. And by the way, Ryan, is that one of your security analysts? Uh, yeah, this is, this is my chief security analyst.

Um, yeah, this is, uh, this is Dudley the Frenchy. Alright. He was, uh, very, very cool. He Was a little unsettled, so he needed to be held for a little bit so he can go back to Zoom. Awesome. That's great. Go ahead Andrew. I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, no, no. Well, why, by the way, Ryan came in and we just went over 2,700. So I think we were at 2,600 about two weeks ago now. We're 2,700. So, we'll, we'll keep this going. Awesome. So thanks for joining and bringing that Good go.

Those good vibes with you. Uh, Ryan? Yeah, for those of you just joining by the way and a little late again at the bottom of the hour, maybe a little after, we're gonna actually, you know, either pull people on stage for and answer questions live. Um, and I would highly, uh, take advantage of that. It's not often you get to get one-on-one with Gary. Can we start with this question? Who asked that? I'd like to hear some suggestions about working with clients. Can you read that one?

Is the one I pulled into the ask? Yeah, yeah. So that was Rob, so we can, we can jump into that, Gary. Sure, go ahead. So Rob says, Hey, I'd like to hear some suggestions for working with clients that are having a really tough time with covid issues, uh, or more price driven, uh, or focused on making sure their business survives that find it hard to relate to cyber maturity improvements, migrations, et cetera.

So their, it sounds like Gary, their heads down focused on survival versus, you know, and you're trying to have a conversation about risk and gaps and, Yeah. So, uh, two, two, I have two points on that. The first one is, uh, if they're in that situation, um, are they more likely or less likely to survive an incident, like an incident to someone else who's not in that role and has a stronger business?

Um, it it, they might survive it and it might be literally might be a, a death march if it was to happen to them. So I almost would say it's more important right now. 'cause the last thing they need is to deal with, you know, uh, a breach or some other security or interruption to their business or to their reputation at this point. And when, you know, we heard Justin come on, um, from tech rug who deals with the claims and he's telling us factually, it's up 600%.

You know, having said that, maybe there's other ways you can work with them to say, listen, you need to do this. You already have the cost of this risk, especially now while you're struggling. So here's what I'll do. I'll do the contract differently.

What if we put it out and let's make a three year deal and I'll, and I'll back load some of it, I need to get made whole over it, but I I, I'll be creative and work with you and not giving them things, but maybe redoing, extending the contract a little bit, making it away so you can meet their, 'cause really it's cashflow needs is what they're, they're talking about. So do those two points make sense? If you tie 'em together, it's really powerful.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's a really good idea. Um, Rob, let us know your, you know, your thoughts there. I'll, I'll keep an eye on chat. Um, good, really good suggestions, Gary. Second piece. Um, you know, so first we talked about the actual, you know, human element of our self-image, our self-discipline. And that applies to every aspect of life, but it's Everything. Yeah. Everything in, in life. Um, but it really shows up in sales because it's, it's you, right?

So talk to us now more, let's zoom out a little bit on why MSPs as a business struggle. And, you know, again, when I first started working for you, um, many years ago, I'll never forget you saying, um, you know, you, we, we'd have call after call and business owners would say, Gary, you know, I hired a salesperson. I hired three salespeople. I and I'm gonna hire more salespeople. And I always remember you sitting there asking 'em how much they spent so far.

And then you'd say, lemme ask you a question. Have you ever consistently added a customer or a month, you know, at around 150 bucks a seat Back then 150, right? Yeah. Back then, 150 a seat. And the answer was almost always no. And you would say, you can't give somebody something you don't have can. So can you talk to us about process sales engine sales process? So again, conceptually people can get the sense before we drive, jump then now into cyber. Yeah.

I, this hap, I had this conversation yesterday with an MSP who said, um, you know, they've been in business for like 15 years. They have like a hundred thousand dollars a month of recurring revenue, not great profitability, but their goal is to triple in the next three years. So I'm like, okay, so, and now they're, and they're joining our peer group and I'm like, look, I got good news and bad news. The good news is you're gonna fix a lot of things and you're gonna reach your potential.

The bad news is I'm not a magician. You know what I mean? I don't have a magic wand. And you have to learn that there's steps you have to do. 'cause the idea that his initial thing was, well, I'm just gonna, I'm finally gonna focus on sales, so I'm gonna go out and hire a salesperson, like that's gonna solve it. He hasn't sold recurring revenue at the right price in all his years in business. And he thinks somebody he's not met yet is gonna solve the one problem he's had for 15 years.

It almost sounds silly when I say it, doesn't it? In most of the cases, if you're listening and you're not selling enough recurring revenue at the right price, okay, which is so important with security, we're gonna tie it back to that. 'cause you can't secure people if you don't. Um, it is almost every case is sales is not the problem.

It's a symptom of where you are, of how you designed your service delivery, how your packaging and pricing reflects it, what your belief system in that is before you walk through that door. Once you get there, then activity level, sales process.

Um, and you know, we use calculators to figure out your average MRR to figure out, you know, with peak economics, figure out your, um, your, your, what you need to do in terms of sales based on your goal, your close rate, your average deal size, all the math and science take you through how to handle the first call, second call, how to control it, all of it. But it all starts, it all starts then making sure.

Um, Tim Fitzpatrick, who's been with me for over 20 years, he was my sales person and at both the MSP and, and here, what he always says is he, he's been successful in sales because in both of his cases, he always had such a competitive advantage. He had an unfair advantage that he didn't need to be as good of a salespeople as, as maybe some others who didn't have that because we had a competitive advantage as an MSP that we built. And we have one at at true methods. Yeah.

We, in both cases we do things better. Some, we always make sure we do something better that anybody else can do it. Yeah. Well, and and Gary, aside from that, you know, I would, I would just, again, I wanna message out to everybody, you know, before you start hiring salespeople, right? Make sure a, you can, you have a process where you're doing it yourself, but b, focus on, you know, your sales engine. Like, again, do you have a process to get in front of people consistently?

Because people go out and hire salespeople, spend a ton of money, and you ask 'em, okay, well what's your database like? I don't know. We got, we got our clients in it. Okay. Do you have any prospects in there? Like, so, so there's a lot to, to do and a lot of factors. So that's, that's all I just wanted to say. Yeah.

I mean, look, if you're not, if you're not gen, if you don't have a way of controlling to some degree the amount of leads that you get, people you can get, you know, at least to start the sales process with you. 'cause they only come from referrals when they come. Um, you, you better start to do some of those things. We call it warm lead generation. You gotta put those activities in place, um, so that when a salesperson comes in, they have a chance of being successful.

Otherwise, again, without these building blocks of your offering, your packaging, your pricing, um, and, uh, how you approach warm lead generation, you're bringing somebody in, uh, to a situation that it's not really fair to them. Yeah. Okay. Well let's, let's, now let's drop into the actual, um, on the cyber side of things, Gary, and you like to start off with the landscape.

What's the current landscape in, in, when you are speaking with, you know, a sales pro prospect or, or, or, or, or an existing customer? And, and in essence, because you have a lot of, obviously business owner friends, you know, you've pretty much been able to ask them these questions. So yeah. Can you give us a sense of what you mean by the security landscape and how everybody can use that right now?

Yeah, I'm gonna take people through, like, I'll try to organize this and I do it in different ways, but I thought of a simple way. Today we're gonna talk about landscape and how that translates to business impact. Then we're gonna talk about solution, how you present a solution and how you leverage a framework. And then finally those results and how they end up at shared risk when we get to the act, right?

So if we start with landscape, look, this is, this concept is why MSPs are selling more recurring revenue right now at the highest price ever. Because you always need to be able to, both with customers and prospects, create a gap between where they are and where they need to be. And security just gives us a, like the simplest way we've ever had to do it.

Not the only way, but it's, but it's a simple way to do that, to be able to make sure that two parts to it are, do they understand what's changed? All the things we have been talking about over the past 43 weeks on the cyber call, especially over the past couple months, right? With all the, the, the recent, uh, breaches and things that are out of the control of an MSP or an MSSP, right? Right.

Um, they couldn't control that piece of it, only the response to it and how prepared they were, uh, for it. And so when you start a, you start to explain it to them, and then to turn it into business impact, you need to ask questions. They could be simple ones and you can think of, of the rest of them. But I give you the concept. But like, you know, Andrew, if you, if your team didn't have access to email for three to six business days, what would, what would happen?

What would be the impact of your business, Andrew, if, um, if you had a breach and you were at a business from a technology standpoint for the same period of time, are you prepared and what would it mean? And then based on those answers, you go a step further, Hey ha, if it's, if it's a prospect, look, have your current vendor, if they, have they ever told you about what happens when you get breached?

Like what the process is, what they need to do step by step, what response looks like and what our true methods customers are telling us that in almost every case, the answer comes back to they have a backup, they're gonna back up. And then when they start to explain to 'em how it's not that easy, and then they, you know, sounds like more like what, you know, uh, Chris Lahr talks about it. The, the answer a hundred percent of the time from prospects is always they wanna learn more.

And what do you mean is almost all. So step one is you want to be able to explain the landscape and the same thing is gonna work with customers, right? Um, you wanna explain how the landscape has changed and then what they need to do differently with prospects. It's creating a wedge between their current solution and their results and how they view them compared to the, the results that you would get. Excellent. Gary, does that make sense? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

I'm gonna bring a question in here for in a minute, but I think the way you ask the questions is really important. Um, for example, I've had a lot, I've spoken to a lot of MSPs, you know, at peer group I've run around, you know, more, more mature MSP to MSPs. And one was struggling because he would say, they get into an assessment, paid assessment and they would start talking about, you know, what are the most critical assets? What are your most critical systems?

And that's hard sometimes for a business owner or somebody. They don't, they don't necessarily think in that mindset. I said, well, maybe taking it from a different approach. Assume you're, assume you're down a hundred percent. You, you know, the old magic wand, right? You had a magic wand. What would you bring up first? Well, why, what would the, why is that the most critical thing? Because then they'll tell you specifically what, how that impacts their business, right?

How it impacts their reputation, their customers, on and on and on. Yeah. And, and a lot of times the answer is that they, they just say, well, yeah, but our, you know, our, our people back us up. I'm like, well, let me ask you a question. Can we just take a recent example? Like, this is what happened with this Microsoft Exchange breach. And there was some period of time where they didn't even know how far they had to go back. They didn't know what a good backup looked like, right?

It didn't have the data to do it. And then also, here's what has to happen, uh, when, uh, you, you need to make sure you're not destroying right. Your trail and your evidence. Like, and you start to say things that, like, has your vendor never had that conversation with you? Let me ask you a question. That sounds like a symptom, not an issue, a symptom of of it. You know? And if we get that far, I can tell you, well, my customers don't experience the same risk.

So we want them to attach themselves to some result that we build. And the goal always in sales, especially in this sale, you wanna try to accomplish 80 to 90% of the sale before you present. When I say present, that's when you tell anybody how great you are, right? And what you do when you start to tell them how you approach it differently, we call that the presentation. It's only to verify that they want the results and will make the investment that they've already agreed to.

It is not to sell them, it is to verify that. Yeah. And if you can get to that conceptual sale, people think in concepts. And if you are gonna go in, and this is why people listen, I'm, I'm not saying if you're doing this today and you're having success, then I, I tell people to always stick with what's successful.

But if you're going in and doing some big technical, you know, um, kind of assessment upfront, and then you're going in with a decision maker and diving right into it, and you're telling 'em about your, you know, about your endpoint security and this, you can sell, but you don't have to do all that. And business owners, the people that we really want to sell to, they understand concepts much better. And then we can always get to the technical stuff to support it if, if we need to. Yeah.

And um, Hey Gary, just a few comments. Dustin. Dustin, what I mean, and for those of you out there in the poll, what I mean by cyber MRI mean attached to Dustin. So for example, if your current plan's 150 a month and this, this customer never had, you know, any type of Sox sim solution, you never, you know, now you're starting to advance some kind of EDR, uh, DLP, whatever it may be. I don't mean, hey, those are this, you know, bolt on thing on the side.

I mean, you know, you being able to take somebody from X controls to y controls based on the gap analysis of a framework. That's that's what I mean. Yeah. And, and I'll tell you what I see. Like what, and, and this is really, I mean, we're working every quarter on this with peer members 'cause it's changing rapidly. But trying to look at and decide what are those things now that we need to make sure that every customer has and make sure that they're in our, you know, core offering.

And then the other stuff that we're not gonna put in there, let you use Soine. That's a good one. 'cause it comes up a lot. Am I just gonna resell it? And at what margin am I considering the fact that it's just not like in let's say use perch, it's just not the perch cost. I have labor costs associated.

When I turn that on and with all of the tools, am I considering that and am I just selling 'em soe 'cause they don't care about soe or can I take that, can I bundle it with some other services, right? So that it becomes an offering. So now we have our standard offering, which by the way, for most of the security first MSPs, they're at like one, a minimum of 1 65 or one 70. Most of 'em are 180 to $200 a seat now standard.

Then they have another offering on top of that with some of the other things that you, that you talked about. Maybe it has some additional with, you know, incident response, uh, like, you know, kind of more of the CISO type stuff, uh, along with maybe sock and seam. And they try to bundle that as like they bolt that on top. And some customers might just be that. Does that make sense? No, it makes a lot of sense.

Um, I want to get this over to you and Ryan, but the last thing I'll say there, Gary, you brought up an interesting point right now, which is what's non-negotiable? And I think that came out really strong having Justin on last week in that hey, if you, if you, we all need to be in a defensible position. So again, we'll use MFA, I know we've beaten it to death, but you can't have a client down the road here with it and a client down the road here without it.

Or you better have a very compelling reason documented. I, I Don't think there is a reason right now. Yeah. 'cause the only reason is you weren't able to explain the risk to somebody and that's your responsibility, not theirs. Right? Right. That's the only reason why someone wouldn't do it. So I don't, I think we're past that point where we were even six or, or, or, or eight months ago before we, I wanna talk to Ryan. I wanna mention just two other things. Um, one on pricing.

I said this before on other calls, but I wanna make sure I'm saying it exactly to you. If you are charging right now for a full fixed fee offering, like less than even 1 65, your customers are not secure. And I can say that with confidence because I, I see the micro economics, the the cost per seat on 150 customers. Like I know exactly what it costs. You may not, everyone may not know, but I on a unit cost, I know. So I'm not saying that to clunk anybody over the head.

I'm saying like, if, if Gary's saying that and it's not his opinion, uh, it is my observation, then I just want to give you pause to, to dig in and ask why, why don't I see it that way? Why don't I believe that if you don't, Right. So let's just talk about this and I'll turn it over to you and Ryan and then this questions are starting to, and Then I had one more thing I wanted to do before we move on that I wrote down. Alright, Go ahead.

Oh, you now or, Um, well, yeah, just to tag on, 'cause we talked about customers. Okay. And I want, and I wanted to mention the, the top questions I get. That's, that's what I was gonna ask you about. Okay. Yeah. When they, when they go to their customers top questions they get are, wait a minute, you wanna raise my prices? Aren't you already doing that? That's number one. Number two is, if I spend more, then am I safe? And then the, the third one is, is this it?

Why are you gonna come back to me again in another six months or a year? And so the answers are, yeah, we were doing everything we needed to do for threats that were here six months or a year ago now. The landscape has changed and we can talk through it and our response has to change. And again, I love this and I'll say it over and over again 'cause I think repetition's important, this concept to customers and prospects. Look, I'm not ra raising your price. Your costs have already changed.

We're just responding to it in a way so that you are approaching it in a more reasonable way. Right? Your risks have already increased. I was gonna say, so that has nothing to do with me and, and my MSP that has to do with your business and the environment that you're in. I was gonna say, can you extrapolate that when you say your costs have already changed for those out there, you started to just talk about it from a risk perspective and work from home and all those other things.

But can you just give a quick narrative on that? Yeah. The idea that they had relatively low risk, let's say a year ago with what you were doing, your offering, your services, your tool set, um, and now without changing that, they have a much, much greater risk of a business interruption and there's a cost associated with risk. And as that, and as that risk goes up, that is a cost to your business. And so investing a little bit more to mitigate that in a reasonable way.

And that kind of leads you to the next question. Um, you know, will I be safe once I do this? The answer is no, you won't be completely safe. And part of what you're investing is, is so we're prepared when something does happen because there are risks and issues that can impact your business that you don't control. And frankly, I don't control them. And we can give 'em a couple examples, right?

Have happened with, with SolarWinds, with Azure, with exchange, and are great examples right now that explained no matter what they do. And then the last piece is the fact that you have to talk through that and realize that we can't assume your risk. We can help manage it for you, but we gotta be in a shared risk scenario. And we have to talk through not only how we protect you, but exactly what's gonna happen when there's an issue. 'cause at some point there will be, and are we prepared?

Are you prepared to know what's gonna happen then? Uh, so that we feel like we, we are gonna handle that in the best possible way. That's the part that we control. And when you have these kind of conversations with customers, they never go poorly. Gary, uh, Jason brought up, I like what he asked in chat. I hear this objection a lot. If the big guys spend millions and still get hacked, uh, how are you able to protect me? And Yeah, we're not, And basically like, am I just gonna get hacked anyway?

Like what's the use? Yeah, well, well one, you can reduce the risk. There are things you can do that you have in your control that can significantly lower those chances. But we can't eliminate it the same way. No one else can eliminate it based on the way that, um, the attacks work today. Right? We can, uh, you can, you know, you can use buzzwords like you can reduce their attacks surface, right? But you can't eliminate it. But also we're gonna make equal time and equal investments to prepare.

And Andrew would like to say in the assumed breach world of what's gonna happen. And together when we do that and we use framework, we can use the NIST framework to simply explain the concept at a high level. They don't need to know about EDR and they don't need to know about SOC and se they just need to understand these concepts and why these investments.

And on the back end, what you're doing with roles, with process, with standards, with tools, with all those put together to be able to give them a risk profile that is defensible. I love that word now, now that Jason gave, or, or that Justin gave it to us. I've stolen that from him. Well, and I, and, and I think it was perfect.

Jason, I think it's a perfect time to talk about, um, you know, being in a, um, um, in, in, you know, what's resilience, you know, what's Ryan's kind of really honed in on throughout this, um, you know, through the cyber call and a lot of the talks he's done, it's like, Hey, I'm glad you brought that up. You're right. So let's talk about when that happens and if that happens, what resiliency looks like. 'cause that's the, Yeah.

And Ryan, this is a good, uh, why don't you pick off with what you were writing in there. 'cause I think that's a perfect segue, dude. Yeah. And basically what I was saying is, um, you know, there's a, there's an, there's an assumption in the question which is wrong, which is that it is preventable for anyone. And so that, that goes back to landscape.

The landscape that you exist in the world you live in is no longer one where there is this concept of people that are safe and people that aren't safe, right? And so security has changed to, again, doing things to minimize the likelihood, not make it zero, but then also working on the other side of that coin, which is what are we gonna do when the bad thing happens to make sure you stay up and running with as minimal damage and impact to your business as possible.

Um, because that's the part you have more control over that. Yeah. I mean, but this goes back to what, remember what we said in the, in the keynote of the, the, the, the summit, um, a month or two ago, whenever that was right? Left of protect and as the attacker advantage, right? Of detect, respond and recovers the defender's advantage. And in when you're, when they come to that point of boom and you're now working right, of boom, they're in your house, they're on your field, right? Right.

That's where you need to be investing in capabilities. And, and you know, that's a very simple framework too, to have the conversation. Well, you're, you're assuming that like, that the only thing we do is stop the bad thing from happening, but there's this whole other world, right, of the bad thing happening that we can help you with. And that goes back to what Gary was saying. How would your existing m ms P handle this for you? Here's an example. Do you, do you know how they would behave?

I can tell you how I would behave Or have You, I can make you resilient to this. Or have you had, had they had this conversation with you? 'cause if they haven't, you're not gonna like the answers. And you know what I will say, right Ryan? Like, just the fact that if they had, if you, if they're having this conversation in perspective for the first time, it's already a huge, it's already a huge, uh, red flag. And I love that.

Uh, I love that concept that you use about how the adva if you do this right, the advantage can shift, right? Once they're on your home turf, if you're prepared, you can start to have an advantage. We don't have one. They have all the advantage when we're trying to protect from every possible, you know, issue that security issue that's out there. So that's Gary.

What it, what it also does everybody that's part of our community, you know, I think we are giving hope this come out wrong, but I think you're in the a, a unique advantage here and in the minority, because I think most companies out there, IT providers, MSPs, are more talking on the preventative side. Some are moving to the detective side, but very few, as you've said, are having conversation of, okay, when the breach happens, what does that look like?

And as Ryan articulated, what does respond and recover look like? How do you stay resilient, right? So that was Yeah, Being proactive to reacting. Yeah, exactly. That's the new proactive. Now Gary, take it away with, with Ryan A. Little bit because Ryan's in a sales role really and, uh, with his board fair. And that's true. Yeah. Let, let, let's go through those questions a little bit and then let's get into, we got some great questions coming in, uh, in the queue that really wanna Huh.

And, and talk to a few people maybe. Yeah. I'd love to bring, like Dustin's been up here before Dustin Bond's been up here before. Hopefully we can get like a Dustin Bolan, um, any of the other, any folks out there that are, that wanna come up, uh, just maybe say it in chat and I'll, and I'll keep an eye out for you guys and we'll see if we can get you up here. Alright. So go ahead Gary. Yeah.

So Ryan, the first thing I wanna talk about is, and I wanna talk about it from your perspective first with your job at Datto, and then we can relate it to the MSP and their customer. Yeah. But you know, they're ex datto board management. They have some expectation about security, the thing that you're responsible for, and they're expecting that you're gonna reduce and eliminate risk. So you have to have those same conversations about a shared risk, or they'll fire you if something bad happens.

Right? And you haven't had that the same way an MSP gets fired. So how do you approach that to be able to have, manage those expectations and between you and the people you report to having kind of shared risk? Yeah, I mean, the most important thing is to start the conversation and realize that, you know, your audience, you within your company does really wanna understand, but might not have the same level of context or, or awareness that you do.

So step one is actually simplifying the problem or the message for them. And that's where using some type of framework, whether it's a custom framework that you are using to communicate risk to them, or some well-established framework to say, you know, Hey, here's where we are. Here's where we ought to be. Here's what it takes to get from where we are to where we ought to be. You know, how do we wanna prioritize that amongst everything else that we're trying to do?

And so, you know, one of the things I, I did a couple years ago at data was, um, in order to help with this conversation was actually start the enterprise risk group, which doesn't just study cyber risk, it studies all business risk. So when I show up now and I say, we have X amount of cyber risk, I can show exactly where that relates in terms of all the other enterprise risk that we're carrying. And we can make trade offs about how we're investing in those things. Right?

And so, you know, you say I'm in a sales role, which is interesting 'cause I, you know, I actually often say I'm the world's worst salesman. Um, because really all I think really where the benefit comes in is I, I'm passionate about educating people about the risk that they are carrying that they may not understand that they're carrying. And that is really what it comes down to.

You know, whether you're selling to a board or selling to a customer is let me help you understand the world you live in and let me help you figure out how you can operate more safely within it. And that's, that's how I view my role in almost every capacity.

Whether it's dealing with customers, SMBs, dealing with the board, dealing with the execs, um, you know, even, even my team, you know, if they don't understand something like that's the primary job of an information security professional is to, to listen, to be pragmatic and to uh, to educate Yeah. At, at a level that they can understand. And so, um, even back, going back 20 years, I had something that I did in every sales call for someone that I thought was qualified.

And I, I called at the box in the blob. I would draw a box on a piece of paper. I wouldn't even have it pre-printed. 'cause I, I like the effect of drawing it, get a piece of notebook paper and I would draw a box and I said, look, these are our standards. Now, back then they were dynamic digital services standards. 'cause we didn't have all of the security standards that we have today.

And then I would draw this blob around it and I said, that's your environment and those places where you're out right of alignment. They have some risk associated with it. It's different for every business. But our job is to constantly be able to try to move you closer to be in the box as much as possible. And, and because no one's ever gonna be completely in the box 'cause they don't have unlimited budget to making sure we're making good decisions.

And that, you know, you know, what's acceptable risk for those things that aren't. And so that's kind of what you're saying. You're doing a box and a blob using some security frameworks that are either customer, uh, or, or ones that we talk about on here to be able to make that conceptual sale. So that any specifics you need to get budget for or make decisions or priorities on, they, they, they've already conceptually you've got 'em there. Yeah.

My, my board and my executive team have no idea what an EDR is. And they don't need to, they need to understand. Everybody hear that? Everybody Hear that? That's really important. Can you repeat that again? Yeah. My board and my executives have no idea what an EDR is. And they don't need to, they need to understand the investments that we need to make to prevent, detect, respond, and recover from cyber threats. And that's how we frame it. Here are the things that we do.

Here are the capabilities at a high level that we have. Here are the programs we have and here's where we need more investment. Um, what are some of the mistakes you've made as you, like, you know, growing up in, in, in this, what are some of the mistakes you made when you look back about how you used to manage expectations and, you know, manage that piece that we're talking about compared to now?

Yeah, I mean, the early mistake, and the one that I still have to consciously try to avoid falling into is specificity. Trying to be too specific or, you know, whether it's, you know, with the quality of the data that's being presented. 'cause sometimes you have to make good decisions with imperfect data. Yep. Um, and also trying to really get in the weeds. Like sometimes you really want someone to understand the nuance of something that you understand, but they just don't need it. Right.

And so, um, you know, my, me and my team actually, when we, when we start thinking about how to present a problem, we work through multiple decks. We do a technical deck, which is for the people that need to understand the problem technically, right? It's the biggest deck we have. Then we have the deck for the security committee, which is, uh, business people from all different units of the company that get together to understand security and how they can support initiatives.

We have that cut, then we have an executive team cut, and then if necessary, we have a board cut. The technical cut might be 50 slides, the board cut is three. And so the higher you go up, you need to refine your message and lose specificity, but continue to drive your point home. And there, there's one tactic which I use, um, which I actually stole from the government.

Oddly enough, there's um, there's a psychological thing that people do where, um, you know, like, let's take taxes for instance. They'll send you a notice and they'll say, Hey, you haven't paid your taxes yet. 79% of people have paid their taxes. Here's your slip. Please pay your taxes. Right? And what happens is everyone's like, whoa, seven, I haven't, 79% of people pay their taxes and I haven't, I don't wanna be part of that. I wanna be part of the 79%. Right? Right.

And so one of the things that can be really useful is not only benchmarking yourself against where you are and where you wanna be, but trying to find some sort of peer benchmark and communicating that here's where we stand relative to X in our peer group. And whether it's in terms of investment, in terms of maturity, in terms of risk, they're all just three different ways of looking at the same problem. But that benchmarking, if you can get the data.

And so think about this in terms of your customer. If you can, if you can benchmark all of your customers and your, your, you know, your bottom 10% of your customers, you can go to them with a visual that says, here's how every other customer we have that's like you looks, and here's you and here's the difference and here's what we can do to get you there. That can be a really powerful conversation as well. Yeah, that's awesome.

And you know, it's funny you say that because, um, in Q4 we do special projects every quarter, um, with our peer groups. And we did one that, um, it was like a, we call it a security jumpstart. So we have a template in our software, my process, it's little combination of the different frameworks. Um, but it's for the MSPs for themselves. And we had e everybody in the groups do it. And it like jumpstart at the con, we call it a jumpstart. It jumpstart those conversations.

'cause soon, as soon as they saw where they were, were relative to the other people exactly what you're saying. And now they came out in Q1 with much more defined goals and make sure they had the budget to be able and the resource to be able to do that. So, and, and so let's just, one more thing I wanna do and I wanna leave a few, you know, time for questions, Andrew. Yeah. But Ryan, let's just take it a one step further.

Take everything you said, now I'm an MSP, that conversation that I have to have, I have to have it with every customer and every prospect by the way. 'cause I need to bring in. So I have to have that same thing. So I would say maybe people should take your advice. I'm gonna steal this from you now because that's how I get everything that I am famous for. Um, I steal it from someone smarter than me, which is almost everybody.

But, uh, maybe when you think about where you are in security, there's one cut of how you approach it that is for your entire company. There's another cut that is for your, your security committee within the company. Then there's another cut for the customers. That should be more like when you're going, you know, when you're going to your executive team board, that should be the simplest, the least technical, right? So almost they can look at it in the same way.

But you see why they struggle, Ryan. Like you just have to do it with one team. They have to do it with everybody and they have to get budget from everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, yeah, it's, it is a lot nicer to have a single, like, well, to have to go to and fight for the, the investment, right?

Um, and so like, you know, I think there, there are maybe some parallels, you know, with DA and MSPs, but, but generally we're not going to you and saying like, Hey, we need to implement MFA so we need to charge you four or five more dollars a month, right? Yeah. We're just like, no, we're just going to do this and we have the benefit of operating at scale, right? So we can actually eat some of that cost if it's the right thing to do. Um, and we do.

Um, and so yeah, I I, I definitely appreciate the, the, the challenge of that. Um, I don't claim to be an expert in it. I've, I've been presented the problems enough to appreciate them. Um, but I have never actually sat in your chair and done what you've done. Um, right. I'm just trying to help build secure technology that you can use. So Andrew, do you think everybody heard the parallels there?

How everything that Ryan went through in that logic is the, at, at, at its core is the same logic that we need conversations to have with our customers? Yeah, no, I think it was spot on that Come through because to me it's crystal clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, just give us a why or n could you guys in chat, but Ryan, one of the things I heard you say, they really just need to, you know, understand, identify to detect respond recovery.

And one thing that came to mind was Sunil Yu and the cyber defense matrix, which he talks about here are the things we care about, you know, our users, our data, et cetera. Here are the things we do and I gotta believe, you know, that's in essence what you're saying. Not exactly, but you know what I'm saying? Like, hey, we've got, there's risk here with our data. There's risk here with our users. We've got gaps here in our protective detective control, whatever. Yeah.

Does that make resonate with you, Ryan? Yeah. I mean, I think it's probably still a little too specific, right? Um, yeah, That's good internally, right? Yeah. I would say that's good to measure internally, but I don't think it's required in our customer conversations. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, when I try to communicate where we're at, right? I just kind of have a heat map. Like, here's every part of the security program, right?

Here's, here's where we need more, more investment, and does that investment need to come in the form of people or technology, right? Because people drive process, um, and then, and then you're, once you have that you can bring in technology. So we have a good framing for it. We have a good internal framing that we have for the conversation, but it took us education in months to set that up. Um, you know, the thing is, when you have a pitch with a new prospect, you got one shot, right? Yeah.

Um, and so you gotta get that pitch kind of. You can't, you can't necessarily have months of time to educate your prospect. You gotta figure out how to, how to make that very highly digestible for them in the first shot. Excellent. Really good. Great stuff. Cool. So we got Dustin Bond here. Dustin, can you hear us? And can we hear you? I also asked Matt, Matt Hoper to come up if CBE can come up. Let's, can we hear you Dustin? I can hear you guys, can you hear me? We gotcha. Yeah.

Start with your question, Dustin. I thought it was Good to see you, Dustin. So, uh, good to see you. Yeah, like likewise. Thanks guys for the, the content today. Like I mentioned that it's got my wheel spinning on how I can, uh, I can be better and different. But Gary, you mentioned a few times your sales process probably two or three times early on, and obviously that's a big portion of it, right? Your secret sauce.

But without having to get into too terribly much detail and obviously your secret sauce, like can you shed some light into maybe what that looks like specific to like a net new customer? Yeah. And so what I'll say is, um, nothing is secret for me. I'll tell anybody who will listen as much as they will know whether they pay us or not, because it's not really the secret sauce. The secret sauce is your belief system and what you actually build and deliver. That's each MSP secret sauce.

The, the sales process is just a framework, and I break it into two pieces. What happens to get in front of someone who's qualified, right? That's the kind of the, the, the marketing and pre-sales, and then the sales process once you get there, you know, and it is like, what are you trying to accomplish on that first call? How do you control the next step? How do you qualify people?

And really having those basics around uncovering pain, money, decision process, like all the things that are like the three legs to the stool of every single sale. So if you can learn the sales process and what that looks like, and I'd be happy on a future session to do one just on that, Andrew. Um, if you can understand that, that's kind of like the guidelines and that helps you explain what you do to people. It helps them teaches them how to make a decision.

Because if you can't uncover pain, if you can't relate it to whether they would change and what the investment is, you, they don't know how to take what you're telling them, even if they like it and turning it into a go no go decision on it. So that's what the sales process does. It's more generic and then what you bring to it is, you know, your personality and how knowing that process, how you build those wedges into your offering and your belief system. Does that make sense? Yeah. Thank you.

I I would, uh, if if there was a vote, I would nominate walk, have you walk through the sales process on when it respects the timeline of a future call. That'd be my, I'd give you a thumbs up. Yeah. If they wanna do that at some point or on an off session, Andrew, I'd be happy to share the true method sales process. No, I think all it'd be great. Yeah, fine. It'd be great. Uh, thanks Dustin for that. Hey Matt, I know I just pulled you out of the blue.

Um, and you know, you always have some fantastic, and by the way, anybody that ha isn't following Matt on uh, LinkedIn, I'll have him put his, uh, LinkedIn. He, he's fantastic in terms of what he puts out on LinkedIn every just about every day. Um, did you have anything on your mind, Matt? I know I just put you on the spot here and, um, you know, any, any questions? And I'm trying to bring up, uh, seeing if Stuart, uh, waltz will come up. Michael said he wanted come up. Did you see Michael?

Um, so back over, one of the things that I found, uh, surprising is your last poll where you said I struggle most with and then getting appointments is, is I mean, the overwhelming response, I guess the question that I have for you guys is, is, is it still, is Covid still really impacting this or are we kind of through that and, and, and people can, Appointments are up not down. Again, I get to see it across 150 companies. Let me tell you what's so interesting about this poll.

70% of the people said their issue is getting appointments and a hundred percent of the time for those people, that's a symptom. I'm confident in saying it. And that only 6% said packaging and pricing. It should be the opposite. It should be the opposite. It's just that they don't maybe understand those concepts.

Um, everyone who has the right offering, who can, who has separation and because of it other alternatives and has belief in it, can, can get more appointments a hundred percent of the time. I've seen it a hundred percent of the time. And so again, I can't solve everything in, you know, seven minutes here with people. And it's not because I don't wanna share secret sauce, it's because I can't do it in, in seven minutes.

But that, I'm so glad you brought it up because that poll is the reason why people continue to struggle. They're working on symptoms and they haven't addressed the root cause of why they're in that spot. Yeah, that's excellent. Gary. I think we definitely should get in, we'll have a maybe a session on sales engine, right? What needs to be in place there, why it's not the, the main issue packaging and pricing. Yeah. Lead generation is one, how that works and why people fail.

And then once you get the why people, why appointments are the result of all the right things that you do. And then what? And then the easy part is once you get the appointment and we have a sales process, I can take people through. Cool. Michael, can you hear us? Yeah, I can hear you guys. Hey man. And likewise, great to have you up here and coming in from, uh, from, from a boating region by a theater near you. Is Wes good to see you? We Hey guys, how's it going? His phone works.

This fancy camera set up. That one's fine. I'm telling you. Yep, it works. I can't believe I actually have service here. I'm on the, uh, crystal River. Uh, wish you guys are here. That's Awesome. Great to have you. Wes ahead Michael. Hey, you know, it's great to be here with you guys. Um, you know, one of the problems that we've, we've run into, especially here, like in southern Wisconsin, which we're a little saturated, um, is actually, you know, getting in front.

And, and I know that other MSPs struggle with this, which is why I asked the question. Um, you know, it's fairly easy, easy for us to talk to new or, uh, to existing prospects, but to get in front of new prospects and actually start this comparison between, you know, like what we're doing compared to like their current MSP and how to, you know, seriously try and get a conversation where we can start to drive that wedge is, is a real stumbling block for lots of us.

And, and I was wondering if ev anybody has any tips on, on, you know, how to actually get those conversations going in the first place with somebody who really doesn't know you and has been working with an established MSP that may or may not be doing their due diligence? Oh, oh oh. Does anybody have anything they wanna add Before I get started on that? I do. Go ahead. So, uh, I, I would say the easiest thing is start generating the conversations now.

Like, um, understand to command the voice of a market, it takes time, right? To be seen as somebody that's a thought leader locally. It takes some time to build that. And so don't be afraid when you start pitching things on LinkedIn like Matt's doing. You start doing local events and you're getting in front of people talking. Um, when you're, you know, all the things you're doing locally to generate attention, it takes time.

There's probably weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks ago before someone finally picks up the phone and says, Hey, I've been listening to you for a while. I want to hear more. I want to know more. It doesn't happen instantly. So I would say just build that pipeline now, Gary. Yeah, almost all the MSPs we work with that are awesome, whether it's owner led sales or whether they build a sales team. The one thing they all have in common is they're rainmakers. They're out in the community.

They're building what we call COIs, centers of influence. They're finding other people that have the same prospects that they do and they're making relationships with them. They're educating their customers. Their goal is to always add value and help people first, not call 'em up and just say, are you ready to buy? Are you ready to buy? You wanna change your vendor ready to buy? It's gotta be the opposite. You just go out there and you be the person that's a connector.

And when you're having, and, and it just quickly, within months of doing it, it starts to build momentum and things then start to come your way. And I remember when it happened in my first MSP going to one of my peer group meetings and telling the guy that ran the peer group, I said to him, I felt like I was like pushing this uphill for a while and now it's running downhill. I literally can't stop it. Like we are the center of everything that is this, you know, right now.

But it just took every single day having a playbook. Here's what I'm gonna do on LinkedIn. I'm gonna meet with, you know, uh, one potential new center of influence every week. I'm gonna do these with events. Like it's a playbook of things, um, that you're doing to build your database and build a better relationship. My goal was never to sell 'em, it was to have the best relationship with more people. We call that the warm two 50.

So that I have all these companies that are, I've never sold and they're giving me references. Right? Right. And they'll pick up the phone because I have something interesting to say and they know I'm gonna help 'em. I'm not just going to ask 'em if it's time to buy from me yet they'll tell me. Alright. And so many times with this process, I've heard people say, Gary, do you think you could help us? And I would say, maybe, I'm not sure I can interview you whether you're good for us.

But that's where, that's where you want to be. You want people to say, do you think you can help us? This is helping you. 'cause this is, it's a big concept. And again, if we have more time, I can tell you the, like the actual playbook and, and kind of what it looks like for most people. But at least in the time we had, I wanted to, am I helping you or confusing you? I think that's, that's really helpful. Gary.

You know, we've, we've spent a lot of time and money and, and uh, and effort on, on getting a real heavy LinkedIn presence. Um, that's working. We're out there. Um, you know, uh, Wes and and Andrew have commented on a lot of things that we've, we've put out and, and, and a lot of the various things we're also leveraging powered services and various other things from the channel. Um, but I, I agree with you.

I guess it's just the more that we have to get out there and, and just be in front of people. 'cause you know, my job as the CEO isn't necessarily to try and sell anyone. I've been trying to just build relationships and have conversations. Yeah. And that's really all I've been trying to do.

Um, it's just, it, it becomes very difficult sometimes to even get people to want to talk because they're so narrowed in on what's going on right now with COVID and whether they can open back up and all these other obstacles that we didn't have a year ago. Yeah. It's just great. This is what's great if you understand this process, we've gotten so much stuff to use to make it, to leverage and make it easier to use right now. It's the best time ever to add new recurring revenue at a right price.

And I'm just sad that I'm currently between MSPs. Hey Gary, we're at the top of the hour, but I, can I just sneak in? Can you ask, uh, Kelvin what the quote was he was talking about for the watchman? 'cause I, I know the watchman. He said I accidentally used a Watchman quote. Oh, okay. Maybe tell us Calvin, Gary, LA last question if I could sneak in there.

It's on, you know, from Stuart Wallace run, they run a great MSP, he asked about what's the average, what's the average range in A ISP all in C price you're seeing for new deals in, in a including cyber. So obviously that, that's a broad topic, but Yeah. Yeah. So lemme say this. If we take out, like, what I see most people's core offering and the core offering today normally is not including, you know, SOC and sea.

Um, for the successful MSPs that are selling the most, they're between a low of one 60 to a high of 200. That, that's the range that they're in. The people that are in that range are selling more recurring revenue. The people that are in a lower range. And the reason is they figured it out. They did the things they had to do, they know what it costs. They have the belief system. So when they get in front of a prospect, boom. Yeah. Awesome. So, um, Michael, Matt, uh, Dustin, thank you so much.

All the questions that came in today. Would you guys just let us know in closing with a why was, is this, is this, do you like this format? Getting questions? Just let us know in closing, um, Gary, maybe can just, uh, a closing thought. Everybody, go ahead. What's up Michael? I said thank you for having me on. I appreciate Thank you. Great job man. Congratulations on your business. Thanks Gary. Close us out. Yeah.

Uh, I just wanna say like I, I, I wanna try to look, we gotta do a lot of stuff on this cyber call, but I wanna make sure that besides showing people all the risks and all the things or changing and today was a chance to highlight the, the unique opportunity that we have and Andrew, only about 20% of MSPs are gonna really take advantage of it. And then some people are gonna flounder in the middle and then the bottom 25% are gonna go backwards 'cause of all this. But it's your choice.

Everybody has, if you just have the knowledge you can be part of, of this, you know, gold rush that's happening right now for the best MSPs. Excellent. Wes. Hey, thanks for for jumping on here. I know you're with your family on vacation. It was great to have you with us. Sure. He is not the Suez Canal Or maybe it's just a green screen and I'm pretending to be on Gary everybody next week. Take care. Thanks.