Break Through the Noise: How Advocates Can Transform Your Pipeline – Braydan Young, CEO, SlashExperts

Are you struggling to generate enough top-of-funnel opportunities in today’s noisy cybersecurity sales landscape? Are your deals getting stuck or taking forever to close, despite your best efforts? Have you tapped into the real power of your customer advocates—not just for references late in the sales cycle, but to accelerate pipeline growth from the very top? If these challenges sound familiar, this episode will give you a fresh perspective.

In this conversation, we discuss: 

👉 The overwhelming noise and fatigue facing buyers in cybersecurity sales, and how traditional outreach is losing effectiveness
👉 Innovative strategies for leveraging customer advocates at the top of the funnel to build trust and drive engagement
👉 Tactical approaches for matching prospects with peers, using advocacy to both convert and accelerate deals

About our guest:
Braydan Young is the co-founder and CEO of SlashExperts, a cutting-edge platform that connects prospects with customer advocates, partners, and experts. Previously, he co-founded Sendoso, the well-known gifting platform used by countless sales teams to connect with buyers. Braydan brings unique, first-hand expertise in building sales motions and advocacy programs that work for cybersecurity sellers.

Summary:
Braydan and Andrew dive into why the classic demo-driven sales funnel is breaking down—and how enabling genuine peer conversations can ignite pipeline growth and move deals forward faster. Discover practical ways to use your advocates not just as late-stage references, but as top-of-funnel champions. If you’re ready to rethink how you activate your best customers and improve revenue results, listen now!

Links:

• Connect with Braydan Young on LinkedIn
• Learn more about SlashExperts
• Book a meeting with Andrew: 30-Minute Meeting

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan:
When I talk to sales leaders, sales teams at cybersecurity companies, two of the areas that we often talk about, one is how do we get more top of funnel, how do we get more pipeline? And the second area is deals are slowing down. We're finding that too many are getting stuck and too many are taking longer to get through the process than we thought. So I'm always looking for new approaches that are worth trying to to solve both of those problems. Which is why I'm excited to have Braydan Young on the podcast today. Braydan was actually one of the founders of Sendoso, the gifting platform you may have used in the past. It was used by many to send small gifts to prospects and customers during the sales cycle or after the sales closed. At that time, when Sendoso was founded, this was a whole new approach, right. Obviously people have been sending gifts, but actually having a platform to do it was a new idea.

Andrew Monaghan:
It was new, it was fresh, it was different. Now Braydan is the co founder and CEO of SlashExperts, which is a platform that easily connects your prospects with your customers, your product partners or your advocates. This can help obviously down the funnel in the traditional we need slot to our reference, but as Braydan says in the episode, it works incredibly well at Top of Funnel as well. Prospects talk amongst themselves anyway. They do all the time. Why not enable your prospects to easily talk to people just like them who are already using your software? It really got me thinking about what it could do for companies and I think it will get you wondering how it could work for you too. I'm Andrew Monaghan and this is a Cyber Go to Market Talk podcast. All right, Braydan.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, welcome to the Cyber Go to Market podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation today. You've got some unique experiences that I talked about in the intro that mean for an interesting conversation around working with our buyers and through their processes as they're trying to decide what to do or not do and all the rest of it. You know, it's funny when I talk to my ICP, which is heads of sales at cybersecurity companies, some couple of consistent themes here. One is a gut feel that this whole selling thing is getting harder and harder every year, not easier and easier. And the second thing is it seems to be getting slower and slower. Deals are slowing down, deal cycles are slowing down, everything's slowing down. When you think about your experiences at Sentoza and also experts, what do you think is causing all this to happen right now?

Braydan Young:
I think it's as simple as like this the fatigue of the volume of just tools and companies that are out there. It feels like every day there's a new tool or a new AI, something that's built, and they raise a lot of funding and they bring on marketing teams and sales teams. And it's just overall fatigue of getting too many phone calls, too many emails, too many invites to dinners and webinars. And so I think there's just so much noise out there that we all just sort of shut it down for survival. And, like, when you are able to get through, which is great, I think that, you know, typically if you get through, hopefully you do a good job on a demo and build a good relationship, but it just takes time to do it. And, like, you have to hit folks multiple times, you have to invite them to lots and lots of things and they respond. I think for me, like, there's. I get so many emails, I have to choose what I respond to, and a lot of them I just delete because there's so much of it.

Brayden Young:
Like, I don't know when cold calling became cool again, but now I get a bunch of cold calls and I'm like, I don't know who's answering these. Apple is like, hey, I know it's a cold call. So I don't know who answers these calls all day. They must be having success somewhere.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, I feel like cold calls going up, emails going up. The traditional channels, let's call them, are going up. Right. I'm wondering what you're seeing at Slash Express that says, okay, well, that was kind of the old way, this new, new things, tactics, I don't know what to call them. New ways to reach your audience is starting to work better for you right now.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I mean, I think people buy from people, right? And I think that what we saw is there's this massive pipeline of deals and people that are doing research on your tool, that aren't going in to book a demo or download a case study. They're talking to their friends, they're talking to their peers, they're talking to their communities they're in, and they're talking about problems they have, or they're talking about maybe they saw your solution at a conference and they're asking about it. They're like, hey, does anyone use this? Have they had success with it? And, like, there's so many of those convos happening that you aren't involved in, nor do you see. Like, call it an invisible pipeline if you want to. And because of that, like, once someone gets the information, they're looking for, then they might come take a demo. So, you know, like the phrase, like 80% of the sales cycle is already done before they come and take a demo. Like, that's scary because, like, you can't control the narrative. You can't make it easy for them to get the information they're looking for.

Brayden Young:
And that's where we're trying to live, is we're trying to make it easy for folks to get the information they want during that research stage. And so, like, that's, that's the place where we're trying to make it easy to insert references. People that are already using you to talk about, you know, how and why they love you or maybe challenges they've had and how you overcame those challenges. I think that's important to have that there, and that's across the board. I mean, there's so many tools in every industry that to stand out is tough. And so you, you have to make sure you have advocates and customers that they love you because they bought you for some reason. Give them the power to talk about you.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I feel like further down the funnel, obviously the role of traditional references have always been a thing, but what we're talking about here is bringing up funnel a little bit. But anytime I hear that, it's like, okay, well, you have to get your advocates working for you. It feels like a lot of praying that this is all going to work well because you're not in control. Right. You're not in control of someone reaching out to someone else, and you're not in control of exactly what they say. How do you pair up maybe outreach with something like that for good effect?

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I think, like, we. So our thesis is you should take your references or your advocates and put them in the very top of the funnel, whether it's like the first or second step. And you're only using the folks that do like you, that have had success on your product. And so I think it's important to remember that folks who haven't had success, like, those are not the ones who you want to have as references. Like, they might be out there saying things about you, and you need to get in front of them and have a conversation. But using folks that already love your tool as references is a great idea. The way that we match people up is by title. So if you're a ciso, if you're a director, if you're a head of sales, then we want to pair you with another head of sales that is using that tool at that company.

Brayden Young:
So we do A lot of matching to make that work. Not just matching by title, but maybe by location, maybe by industry, maybe by language. Things like that is the goal. Because we think that people want to talk to peers. I also think that when you're on a phone call with somebody who's using a product, they're not. They're not motivated to sell you. They're just trying to give you their story. So, hey, here's why we bought this.

Brayden Young:
And like, they don't care if you used it or not. Like, we, we do compensate the customers for doing the phone call, so there is a payment to them of like, let's say a couple hundred bucks, which is fine. And like, most donate it anyways. So it's like a donation, but like, it's. It's cool to connect people.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, Brayden, well, let's get to know a little bit you personally. Believe it or not, I've got 49 questions on my list here. The good news is I'm not going to ask you 49. I'm going to spin this random number generating wheel. You'll hear in the background the sound as it goes around. And this is. It has to be random. So the whole algorithm is protected, it's controlled.

Andrew Monaghan:
A lot of cyber security goes into that to make sure we're all protected here.

Brayden Young:
His SoC2 compliant wheel, the whole thing is there. Yeah, perfect.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, so it's going to pick up some numbers for me. Let me just spin it right here. All right, first one is number five. How did you first make money as a kid?

Brayden Young:
My dad had a landscape company and so I laid sod. So I think I've probably laid more sod than the majority of people out there. And I got pretty good at putting sprinklers in. So, like, it was like always one of those things where I always had a trade to fall back on if tech didn't work. So still to this day, love. Mowing the lawn is like my Zen.

Andrew Monaghan:
You know, it's funny, the amount of people I have on whose whose first real gig was as a kid was something to do with lawns.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, right. It's always like this child labor seems.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. These days you can't do it anymore. Right. All right, let's spin the wheel again. Number 27. What's a memorable or embarrassing moment in your work life?

Brayden Young:
Probably one of the most memorable ones was so in the past, I ran a gifting company and we sent a lot of gifts around and I had this deal I really wanted to close, like, this person was with SAP, and we sent a gift to him, and at the conference, he tripped and he broke some ribs. So I thought it was really funny to send a rack of ribs from, like, a rib place in Texas to him to try to get a phone call to get a demo. And so I sent ribs. He did not find it very funny because he was in a lot of pain, but in my head, I thought it was great. Eventually, he, you know, came around and took a call, but it was probably, like, a little Very memorable and also probably kind of embarrassing that, like, I. That's my sense of humor. And it reminds me that not everyone has the exact same sense of humor.

Andrew Monaghan:
I think that's one of those moments where three weeks after the fact, he might have thought I was funny. But when he's sitting there in pain.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, it's like, what the hell, man?

Andrew Monaghan:
And you're making him laugh as well, which is the worst thing you want when you've broken your ribs.

Brayden Young:
I thought it was so funny, though. A rack of ribs shows up at your doorstep and you broke your ribs. It's great. Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, let's spin the wheel one last time. What is the story behind you getting into this market you're in right now?

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I think the biggest story was while at previous companies, we like the whole motion of taking a demo and talking to sales, this wasn't working like it used to. So we're trying to solve it. And the biggest thing we saw was there's a ton of back channeling going on, People talking to their friends, to their peers, saying, hey, like, does this tool help solve your problems? And so all this back channel was happening, and we weren't picking up on it. So we're like, we should build a way where we can actually pick up on the back channels and make it easier for folks to be able to get the information when they're in, like, research mode. So we built a tool for that, and that's what we've been scaling the past year or so, is like, trying to make that motion easier for other companies.

Andrew Monaghan:
So let's put ourselves in the shoes of. I'm a CRO, let's say head of sales. Anyway, I've got 30 or 40 customers, let's say that, I don't know, 10 or 15 are advocates. They're kind of showing up to the advisory board meetings, the little seminars that we do together, and maybe they've done some case studies, things like that. I've got a team of SDRs who are banging their head against the Wall right now going, oh my God, this is such a hard job. Why did I take this job? I'm getting asked to do all these metrics and I'm getting, I'm not booking meetings and all the rest of it. Right. How would this sales leader say, okay, plan, we're going to move to plan B and we're going to use our advocates.

Andrew Monaghan:
So what actually do they do to do that?

Brayden Young:
Yeah. So first step is I imagine those 10 to 15 advocates are already tired of being asked to be references. So they've already probably been asked a bunch of times to basically jump on phone calls out of the quarter, out of the month. And they're like, I do this already. I do it because I like your tools. Maybe some do it because you give them a discount on their, on their contract. Great. So like, those folks are being overworked.

Brayden Young:
Now you have your SDRs doing outreach, they're doing emails, phone calls, etc. Now my suggestion is come in and maybe one of the steps in the cadence is, hey, you know, ABC Person, like, maybe don't take my word for it, but you should connect with somebody who's a peer and one of our customers who loves us. So click this button and they go to this button and the page pops up a directory of those 15 people that are all willing to have a conversation with a prospect. And they can go in there, they can filter by title, filter by location. The system can also do that for you. And then they can book a call with somebody who's already using the tool. Now you're assuming here that there's some interest has been, like, some intent has been shown and they're willing to have a conversation with someone who's using the tool to solve a problem because you know that this customer has a problem or prospect has a problem. So I think it's important to make sure the right criteria is there.

Brayden Young:
Like you need to know your icp and then like once that's done, then involve that customer. So a call gets booked and it's a 15 to 20 minute phone call with an expert who can talk about their story as to why they bought this tool. And then from there it hopefully goes to demo for sales. We're seeing conversions happen very quickly, almost about 2x more. Just because people are. It's, it's a different outreach, it's using your customer base. Another direction is, rather than email is we have folks who've just added a button. Like every single B2B site's exactly the same.

Brayden Young:
It's like here's a carousel of logos that we work with. Don't you feel a warm and fuzzy that we work with all these great logos? There's a button right underneath that. This is talk with the customer. You press that and all those customers pop up, actual people, and you can book a time with them. So you're taking your customer base, people that are willing and saying, hey, listen, these guys love us enough to do a phone call with you as a prospect.

Andrew Monaghan:
And then how do you pitch this to your advocates then that this is a good thing for them to do?

Brayden Young:
Yeah. There's kind of three steps. The first one we thought would be payments. Like, hey, like, here's a couple hundred bucks. Do a phone call that kind of works. People were like, okay, thanks. The bigger ones, we gave them control of their calendar. So they decide when they take these phone calls.

Brayden Young:
So it might be once a month on Friday at 9am and that's the only time they give you. And that will satisfy the contract. They get discount on their software and also satisfy you as being like, they'll be. They're an advocate of yours. So I think like, like that step, the calendar control was the biggest one that allowed us to onboard a ton of people that were just like, hey, like, I get asked for these. If I can just give one time a month, that'd be great. And then the third one was a lot of folks depending on the tool, like, they might want to be seen as an advocate, as an expert in this space. And so they get to be front and center as someone who understands this tool to be an expert.

Brayden Young:
So those three things have helped a lot. It really is dependent on how close your customers are and how much they love your tool. Typically, the calendar one works the best, though.

Andrew Monaghan:
One of the things I find asking for testimonials a little bit differently is first thing people ask, well, what do I say? Right. They get all nervous about, I don't know, going on video or typing things out. Do you have a way to coach them or, I don't know, give them some sort of expectation about how the calls go?

Brayden Young:
Yeah, we give sample questions to folks that they can answer and use. Whenever you sign up for an expert, there's, like, onboarding you go through. There's a video you can record, there's video walkthroughs. Here's what you might be asked. But, like, mostly we tell them, hey, the people that you're going to be paired with are exactly like either peers. And so these are people that you have the same job or Same work in the same space. And they're just looking to solve probably the same problem that you're looking to solve. So a lot of those conversations, what we see after is they'll connect and you're kind of building your own network, which is pretty cool.

Andrew Monaghan:
And then as a startup, we might not have that many advocates. Is there a magic number that says, yeah, you really got to have this many for it to really start getting going?

Brayden Young:
So. So here's. I love that question. So, like, the exciting part is like, you don't always have to have customers up there. Like if you're brand new, like, try to get at least a couple like people that are actual customers. But I think you can also add CX on there. So adding a CSM might be very interesting because it might be somebody who a prospect might want to have a conversation with that's they're not trying to be sold to. It's more just like they're trying to figure out what onboarding looks like.

Brayden Young:
Add advisors, add partners on there to kind of fill it. Like you need a good rule of thumb is at least five to eight people on there. But advisors and folks that maybe aren't like direct customers is okay if you're a small company.

Andrew Monaghan:
I like the idea of people internally though that don't have sales in their job description.

Brayden Young:
Right, right. That we've seen that work really well for like land and expand deals. So like you go and you sell like a big, big company and you build an excerpt page just for that company where it's just like the users there. And then maybe you add like CX and then maybe you had like your CEO, maybe you had like your CRO. Like that's kind of cool. Like if they're. If you work for a CEO is willing to be an expert. That's awesome because like your customer should be able to book a time with them or your prospect.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. And can you say, well, their expertise is this or, or if they are a customer or whatever, or their advisors that. If I'm coming in as a prospect, I'll know what I'm picking. I'm not going to disappoint in thinking, oh, I thought this guy was going to be a customer.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, no, it kind of says it on there because it has their title because we suck in their LinkedIn. So it has their title and where they work, et cetera.

Andrew Monaghan:
Okay. And you said conversion rate increases to remind me what you said again.

Brayden Young:
Yeah. So the goal there is conversion from like, hey, you're a prospect to S1 to someone who's willing to go through a sales cycle we're seeing that be about 2x stronger than take a demo like someone who's kicking a tire. The biggest metric that we're tracking also speed of deal. We were seeing that a deal's closing about four weeks faster with having an expert involved. That's our probably most North Star metric because we want deals to go quicker. We're seeing it go quicker just because references take time.

Andrew Monaghan:
And then. So you're now moving down funnel right from, from top of funnel. Where do you see the dispersion or more people asking for clicking on the button saying talk to an expert at the top or the bottom or what.

Brayden Young:
Are you seeing the top? Yeah typically like so we see us fitting in mostly with top of funnel and with like post first demo. So post first demos like hey like you know you had a conversation, you're qualified and you might get a link from the rep being like you should talk to yada yada and this person had the same problems that you had. So like we see like that that's 80% of our use cases. The other 20% is account management CX where they're trying to expand an account.

Andrew Monaghan:
So if I'm the head of sales again I'm, I'm probably thinking maybe we could do this just by getting some videos and putting them on the website or sending videos to people and having it kind of, you know, one to one way rather than bi directional. Have you tested against that? Is that part of what you do?

Brayden Young:
We have. Yeah. I mean like so we do record these videos and so like, like if you want to have them recorded it's optional but like if they are recorded you have all this really great content that you can use as testimonials and as videos on your site from someone talking about your product. So there's that direction if you just want to have videos on your site. I, I think that the thing that we're trying to not stay away from but like the, the organic conversation with somebody goes a long way because like, like there might be questions that are just way out there that a video is not going to answer. And so that's what we see. Convert really well. But I think eventually we'll use a lot of this data to help build the chat tool to help have more video content for sure.

Brayden Young:
Because there's a lot of first party data there.

Andrew Monaghan:
I was kind of wondering if I'm coming in. I'm sort of kind of interested. Let's say there's some intent, but I'm not just ready just to jump all over the salesperson and all the rest of it. Right. I might be a little bit nervous about clicking a video or clicking a book. An appointment with someone, especially if you've got a decent title going. I don't want to waste their time. I'm not even sure I'm that interested.

Andrew Monaghan:
So I'm wondering about the flow there and whether there might need to be that step first if you've tested that.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I mean that's a good point. We haven't tested that enough. I think it's interesting to have almost a flow where maybe you just want to chat with somebody. I think chat is a really cool feature that we could build where you can send a message to somebody and get your questions answered. It was a customer. I think that's interesting. If you recognize somebody on there, that's the same title and you want to build your network. I think having a 15 minute phone call is typically.

Brayden Young:
Okay. We haven't run into that yet. But I like the idea of making even having almost like a less. Not intrusive but a less. A lesser thing you could do.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. Now I bet there's going to be a camp out there that says gosh, AI could do all this.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, that's right. Like hey, like AI can answer all these questions. And I think that like I don't think they're wrong. I think, I think AI for sure can. I think the interesting part is people still buy from people, especially enterprise deals. I think that like granted there's exceptions. If you look at like an aws. Yes.

Brayden Young:
Like people spend millions of dollars there. They don't ever talk to a sales rep. But I think if you're selling a tool that is over. We see $20,000 in ARR. Like there's going to be a human conversation at some point. I don't think AI replaces that anytime soon. Only because there's questions that people think are. That are more unique that you just answered by a human.

Brayden Young:
And that's why I think conferences are becoming more and more popular because people are kind of hunting for that face to face conversation.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. As you were saying, like you spend all your time in your home rather than commuting, you don't have the chance to interact with people.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, right. And like my, my wife and kid doesn't. They don't care what I do all day. I'm like, no, it's right. They're like, I don't care. And so I think like it's important to have, I think like that human to human contact. But with AI, I think you mentioned like there's, there's a lot of tools that are, you know, growing in like the PLG motion, like hey, sign up the 14 day free trial or they give you a month for free or whatever have you, which is really cool to see those companies scale. But at some point you're going to have to try to upgrade them from a pilot to an actual paid account.

Brayden Young:
And when that happens, a human typically needs to be involved because there's unique cases, there's unique integrations, there's unique questions. And I think sales is important and you can use your customers for that because the ones who've already converted.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, it feels like as deal sizes increase, expansions happen, the stakes are higher at that point and you want to be as in control as you can be about the process and what happens and what is said. Even though maybe humans aren't always the best answer to that.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I think what like 90% of AI companies right now are all selling. It's all pilots. It's all like three month pilots, four month pilots, which is great because everyone's testing it, but I think at some point there just has to be questions answered by somebody. People want a connection, especially if you're selling a very expensive product.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah.

Brayden Young:
Granted there are exceptions, but I think those are the anomaly.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, yeah. So I'm wondering, as you were building, slash experts, as you were building it, as you were starting to make progress, what was the biggest surprise that you came across?

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I think like the call recording, which I think, and like I mentioned that because of your audience too, like there's a, there's a lot of people that are not okay with having the call recorded. And so I think that like that's fine with us. I mean like especially finance companies, like heavy security companies are like, hey, I'm, I'm talking about, you know, why we bought this tool, what it does for us to a prospect. And like I don't want to record the phone call. So that, that was surprising. Which we've had to figure out a way to like still capture the data from that phone call. So we do surveys or things like that. But so like that, that we, I think I live in the B2B, go to market tool space and so everything's recorded.

Brayden Young:
And so that was like a big surprise that folks are like, I just don't want this recorded at all. That was one, I think the other one was like how bad email and phone call Response rates are right now. Like when we built sendoso like 11 years ago, like we relied on email. Like, that was all we did was email. And now it's amazing how bad that is. Like, I think that I didn't realize how bad those conversion rates were until we started doing new Outbound for us.

Andrew Monaghan:
What's working for you for Outbound then?

Brayden Young:
It's a lot of references. It's a lot of advisors, a lot of partner selling. A lot of conferences are massive for us. Like we have the conference roadshow starts next week with Inbound and Dreamforce and go to Market and the Pavilion. So there's like, shows are great. Like, shows are fantastic for us.

Andrew Monaghan:
More the, the in person side. You know, it's interesting as you were saying that. So our big show in cyber is RSA. RSA is the big one. Second one's play black hat and you go to RSA. There's usually, I don't know, three or four hundred companies exhibiting at RSA. 99.9% of them are shouting loud about here's what we do and we're good at it. And it's got buzzwords and all the rest of it.

Andrew Monaghan:
What was cool about. Just something to think about. A couple of years ago when I was there, there was one booth where actually the whole booth was about their customers. And they had quotes up there and they had the wall of Heroes and it was all their customers talking about stuff. And. And when they had speakers at the booth, it wasn't the vendor, it was the customers who were doing the speakers. Like, they completely flipped the whole thing around. I thought it was really cool.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I mean, like, so we see there's two use cases there. We see a lot. One is customers using their experts page at the booth. So rather than like them trying to type with their product, it's like, hey, like, here's all of our customers. A lot of them are here and you should book a time with them. So like your CTA becomes book a book an actual meeting with a customer versus talking to a sales rep. And like that works incredibly well. It's the same kind of motion you're talking about.

Brayden Young:
The other one is we're finding people use ads leading up to shows where rather than the ads, like, hey, book a demo or contact us, let's talk to somebody who's using us already. And so that's been kind of cool to see that grow too. Like before shows and after shows and.

Andrew Monaghan:
When you talk to the buyers, the prospects as they're kind of, you know, Trying to use your solution. What are you seeing as the trend going forward about, you know, more buyer led growth or buyer led sales cycles? And how does a salesperson try and get ahead of that and really embrace it?

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I think a salesperson needs to be almost a closer to a sales engineer because I think that like, as more companies spin up or and there's more trials as they talk to their peers and like someone's ready to purchase something. Hopping on a phone call with a sales rep these days and having somebody walk you through a deck or walk you through like this is the vision of the company is horrible. I think a salesperson needs to be very, not very technical, but technical enough where they're able to like answer questions that an AI couldn't answer and get in the weeds as to how your integrations work. I think that is where sales needs to move towards. So when they do get a shot at goal because of someone, you know, whatever path they came through, you need to be able to walk the walk there. Like hopping on a sales call where you have a salesperson, an se, a csm and like you're the one person you're looking at this tool. I don't think that works anymore. I mean, like I used to sell like that and I think that like the salesperson needs to know exactly where you're going to guide the conversation or be able to answer those technical questions.

Brayden Young:
Because if they can't, then you should just skip them and talk to a sales engineer.

Andrew Monaghan:
I'm kind of torn on this, I got to be honest with you. Because you know, in cyber it gets technical very quickly. Right? You're sitting there with people who've been in the WWII's technically for 20 years and then what you've been selling for a while, then suddenly you're trying to be the glorified se. You're getting yourself in trouble very quickly.

Brayden Young:
Totally. Yeah. I'm saying I think you need to be trained in it for sure. I think if you're someone who's not, who can't walk the walk, I think people can tell very quickly. So they're like, oh, you don't know what you're talking about, especially in your world.

Andrew Monaghan:
I can think back to examples where my SE afterwards said, yeah, that's not how you pronounce that word.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, right. Then you're like, oh man.

Andrew Monaghan:
Simple things like that. Oh shit. That's why they're all nudging each other during the call.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I agree. I think that like there, there needs to be. If you are a salesperson who is trying to guide that conversation and you just. You can't fake it. I think you have to learn it over a period of years, for sure.

Andrew Monaghan:
It's funny because I've worked with people where, I mean, they literally couldn't even tell you what some things in the product did. They were much more in the outcomes and things like that. And then I've worked with people who didn't want to, but they could have hold their own as an SE and being both of those groups of people highly successful. So I guess you have to kind of figure out what your strengths are and how to go about using them best.

Brayden Young:
Yeah. And I also think if you. And there are sales people that are really great at looping in all the right people and they navigate a deal like they have Gantt Chart in their heads as to how the deal should go and be structured, and they're helping you sell as a champion internally. And those are amazing salespeople. I just think I've come across enough salespeople that can do that, but also are very untechnical. So, like, you're not sure when you have a question, do you go to the salesperson or if you go to the sc And I think that, like, the person who can champion everything and, like, knows some and knows where they don't, you know, where they need answers are the best ones.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. One thing I mentioned at the start was this idea of deals slowing down. I think, you know, getting out of the status quo in cyber. People aren't short of tools. I think someone did some research a few years ago and said the average company might have as many as 70 cybersecurity products in place. They're no short of ways to protect themselves. And yet somehow we got to convince them to make a change and the status quo or things slow down and things like that. I'm just wondering where the role of that customer, that advocate might play in unsticking a deal or overcoming some resistance somehow.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, I think that, like, if you have gone through a sales cycle and the deal stuck, it's always a good time to loop in maybe somebody who went through the same problem and like, solved it using your tool. I think it's. I think it's a much better outreach to stuck deals rather than send a case study to offer an actual reference. I think is a way stronger and like, it's a reference that's relevant. Like. Like not to offer someone who's in some outside industry, but someone who's actually more relevant. I think is important to unstick deals. I also think like that might work well in land and expand deals deals where maybe one department bought you and you're trying to go sell another one.

Brayden Young:
And like using that person that bought you in that department as a reference across the entire company is really important. I don't think ams do a good enough job of that. I think some do, but I think if you had a, a easy page for them to be able to book time, I think it'd be better. Like that might unstick some deals. But yeah, sales cycles are also slowed down too because you're no longer selling to like one person. Like there's no like top down approach. Typically you have like what is. I forget the number.

Brayden Young:
It's like 11 people now that like touch a deal and like 11.6. Yeah, yeah. So like there's. So you need to get really good at being the internal, like finding a champion who we love, who wants you and then you gotta empower that person all day long. I think that's the hardest part of a sales job right now is like you're actually not doing the sales so you need to give that per. Like a person needs to be able to pitch you like at the end of a one on one with their manager for like the last five seconds. Like there needs to be a quick five second pitch to say hey, why I want this? And like you gotta train them on how to do that. Which is, which is tough.

Brayden Young:
Like, like that's a tough part of the job for sure.

Andrew Monaghan:
It feels like if you've got that champion and you know they're used to being the champions sometimes, right. They've done it maybe two, three times a year and they're just going to put their not going to say job on the line but go and talk to someone senior and say we need to do this. Maybe that'd be a great place to drop in. The advocate, right is to be able to say look, well here's Johnny who did it six months ago at his company, why don't you talk to Johnny? And then that would just give the confidence to someone just like them and they get some nuggets or whatever about how they justified it or whatever internally.

Brayden Young:
Yeah, it's a great point where it's like hey, these guys did it here was their outcome. I think that's a really good point. There's some really good strong things you can do internally. But like that's, I would say like that's where most like a lot of deals die there. Or like you get, you have a really strong first phone call, and then, like, they have to go sell it internally, and then you never hear from them again. They're like, I love this idea still. But, like, I just have to. I have 15 people I gotta.

Brayden Young:
Or 11 people I gotta loop in, and, like, it's a different pitch to each one of them. And I got 10 other things to do.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. That's the whole basis of the challenger customer from, gosh, what, 10 years ago now? Right?

Brayden Young:
Yeah. Right. I remember reading that. Yeah. Absolutely.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, Brandon, listen, I've enjoyed the conversation. If someone wants to reach out and talk about what you're doing and learn more, what's the best way to do that?

Brayden Young:
Yeah. Check out/experts.com. also, I'm the only Braden Young on all of LinkedIn, so connect with me there. My parents were creative with the spelling of my name, so B R a Y dash A N. So find me there also. And I'd love to connect and go from there.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, let's do that, then. Thanks for joining us.

Brayden Young:
Thanks, Andrew Sa.