One of my favorite talks at RVASEC 2024 was one I was most surprised with, called “Social Engineering the Social Engineers” by David Girvin at Sumo Logic.
If you work in a technical leadership role, you should absolutely view this talk, because 1) it’s funny, and also 2) it will really help you understand the relationship between you and salespeople, the ways salespeople are incentivized, and how you can leverage the sales process to inform better decision making around tooling evaluation.
The net result of this enlightenment should be a shorter evaluation to deployment lifecycle, enabling you to extract more technical value out of your tools. Girvin broke a lot of my assumptions about sales and I’ve already started putting some of his tips into practice to good effect.
I want to pause for a minute here and say that I have worked with some truly great salespeople and some of them have become friends of mine. I have also worked with very poor salespeople. Tech sales is a tough job and I respect it, but I also have my own job I need to do.
Anyway, Girvin makes a big deal out of transparency and not keeping the competition a secret. In retrospect, that’s actually an obvious tip that goes back to Kerckhoffs’s principle, and it’s not like vendor A is unfamiliar with competing vendor B. They “know the system.”
I had a unique opportunity to put this tip into practice, and did an experiment in radical candor when my org had a popular enterprise security product up for renewal. The scenario was essentially “hey, we have this tool and it’s up for renewal, we need to put cost pressure on them.” Worst case scenario was we couldn’t get pricing, and we’d just apply indirect pressure – after all, “this is my best and final offer” usually isn’t.
So I contacted two competitors. Vendor A and Vendor B. I contacted them through the sales intake forms on their websites. An SDR responded to me from each vendor “wanting to know what we were looking for.” Here was my response:
Thanks for getting back to me. I want to be transparent about the outreach – we are currently $EXISTING_VENDOR customers, we are pretty happy with $EXISTING_VENDOR, we are probably not looking at an extended demo or POV, and our focus is getting comparable and competitive pricing.
Of course, if it’s a slam dunk, there might be something here, and although right now we’re doing a primarily numbers/market-based evaluation, we’re happy to get a product/feature overview.
Vendor A played ball on this. We had a conversation, it was a good product, we got the product overview and a brief demo, and the next day we had a quote, and it was in fact lower, though not by much, than the existing product. Vendor B did not get back to me after my email above. But we only needed one response. We also now know that we were talking to a legit competitor, and even in this biz, relationships are king.
During the call, I presented this as us doing a “rapid-fire RFQ” (request for quote), and it became clear to me that the SDR thought this was an unusual tactic. “Do you do this for all of your renewals?”
Well, we do now.