“3 Proven Paths to Faster Sales Cycles” with Safebase’s CEO and NEA

Please welcome to the stage Hillary Koplow McAdams, Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates, and Al Yang, CEO at Safebase.

Good morning. Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us today to talk about 3 proven ways to faster your sales cycle. Joining me is Hillary Koplow McAdams. Hillary is on our board. Uh, we are Safebase. We are a scalable trust center that helps you streamline your customer security review. Think about those time-consuming security questionnaires dragging down your sales cycle. Hillary is a go-to-market savant. As an operator of many, many years, she was an executive at Salesforce, so she's definitely seen it from the enterprise side. And she joined New Relic and became the president and took New Relic public when New Relic was relatively small, and she's on the board of Toast, HackerOne, Beyond Identity, and obviously SafeFace. So today I'm super, super excited to have Hillary teach us some of the best practices as it relates to how to fasten your sales cycle. Thank you.

Thanks, Sal.

So let's talk about statistics. We know, and we hear this all the time this year, oh my goodness, sales cycle is dragging out, macro economy, maybe that's a factor. And some of us think, oh, it's only for the big enterprises. Some of us think it's only for the small companies. But really, when you look at statistics across the board in different segments, from enterprise all the way down, this is happening. So Hillary, can you give us some insights? Because you're on the board of companies that are both small all the way— you're in the boardroom, you're in the war room. Can you give us some insights as to why this might be happening?

Yeah, happy to do it. I'm sure everyone in the audience is experiencing these slow sales cycles. So I've got some good news and then I've got some watchouts as part of my advice here. I mean, obviously the macroeconomic environment has made a huge difference in how companies buy. But if I can kind of up-level how companies are thinking about their dollars today, dollars are really dear for them to go out and borrow capital. It costs about 13% from an interest rate perspective today, and that is radically different than what it was even 2 years ago. So CFOs are basically in charge of making dollars go further, which means every decision is scrutinized deeply by companies. And I think you've all experienced this in the last 12 months. The good news is I sit across too many boards to mention. It feels like people are figuring out how to buy again. It feels like people are figuring out what are the priority projects, where are we going to spend our transformational dollars. And that maybe cycles will accelerate again a little bit with— but with a lot of depth in terms of how they evaluate new technologies. So I want to talk about that, especially around new deals, because if I look across our portfolio or my portfolio, what I see is it's easier to sell to existing customers today than to new customers. And part of this is a new customer who takes on a new solution is going to change the way they work, and that looks like risk to them. They have to really believe in the solution. So getting a playbook that complements like a method, a sales methodology like a MEDDIC to really help you figure out what is the role of every player on your team who's engaging with a customer on a new deal is really important. And one of the most important roles on the team in a new deal in addition to the AE is the sales engineer or the solutions architect. Whoever is doing the technical selling is actually carrying the biggest burden because they've gotta get the customer to go from, you know, either no technical solution or a new technology approach using your technology. That's big. And being clear about the playbook and the role that person plays and how they demo the product and articulate the value prop becomes really big. But there's another big change that people have underestimated, and that's the security evaluation. At the end of July, the SEC announced new rules that apply to all public and private companies, that if you have a material vulnerability, in, you know, a breach, a hack, you now have to disclose that proactively within 4 days of the event. And what this does is forces security teams to be accountable in a way that, as buyers, we would want them to be accountable, but to really clarify if they've had an issue. And that's really changed the decision-making process. So where I've seen sales continue to be slow is on the security evaluation, where sellers don't anticipate that there's going to be a lot of scrutiny by the infosec team, that the questionnaires will be extra long, that the diligence will be deeper, and that sales that— where we get the technical win and then we go to security and procurement and legal, that that's where we hit this stalling pattern. And I think that's something we should talk about today, Al, in terms of how to get past that.

Yeah. So one of the first takeaways— there are 3 proven paths— is to win a new deal, right? The new deal is the hardest one to land. Hillary already talked about getting the front end, right? You got the seller who's the AE. Think of this person as a quarterback driving a funnel, driving from the beginning to the end. But there's also the back end, and the back end of the sales funnel— and my personal goal is to bring signal to the backend, because you know where you stand in the frontend. So the question is, onto the next point, are there any advantages to data-driven insight when it comes to sales cycle? Anything you can push the boundary on so that you can get that signal where the deal is going, both the frontend and call it the backend, which will be the security review, the procurement, the legal review, some of the HR review, finance review.

Yeah, this is great. You know, most of you have benefited from the telemetry that we've brought to the frontend of a sales process from the funnel, all the way into the selling process. You know who your customer is. The data's been enriched. You know what digital properties they've touched. You have a lot more information coming into your CRM system. There's good news on the security front in that you can now publish trust centers for customers, and you can see where the security team is evaluating your solution, which is great. You can actually watch them sort of traverse your security posture, what you've published, And instead of the security evaluation being a black hole, you can actually get visibility to where they are and where they're pausing and spending more time and getting that same kind of telemetry. On the procurement side, it's a little trickier. Procurement teams have a great advantage today in that pricing, perfect information around pricing that's published in these pricing platforms that procurement teams subscribe to are becoming becoming readily adopted. And so often your procurement team knows a lot more about your pricing and your business practices than you would think they would. And so my best advice on this front, Al, is that you should assume that your procurement team knows a lot about what your pricing looks like and you need to be on top of that. I think the other piece related is getting back to the security evaluation. So you've got the technical evaluation, you have the security evaluation, and then you have the commercials, which consists of legal and procurement. You're going to want to try to parallel process these as best you can, and I know everyone in the audience is thinking, "No, that's hard. The customer dictates the order in which we make these evaluations." But the truth of the matter is you can at least front-end the security discussion to be a parallel path to the technical discussion. Yeah, I think that's a huge advantage.

And maybe you can tell us what you did at Salesforce. Yeah, it's such a good job with it.

So we learned a lot of lessons at Salesforce. We were one of the first cloud vendors. We were basically saying to customers who are used to their data being on-premise, hey, put it in our cloud and it's safe. And frankly, they didn't believe us. And so we struggled in our early sales cycles. And this is part of why we kind of went upmarket, is smaller customers had let— you know, they considered this a less risky decision. But large enterprises were particularly reluctant to embrace the cloud in the early days of that architecture. So what we decided to do was be very transparent about our security posture. And in fact, for the sales team, what I would tell them is the first slide of any pitch to a customer was why we exist as a company and why we espouse this no-software cloud architecture. The second slide was about what our customers say about us. And our third slide was about our security posture and pointing to trust.com, salesforce.trust.com, which I think a lot of you are familiar with, sort of set the standard for what transparency looked like. And the reason that we did this, Al, was we knew that this was going to be an objection. So we wanted to get in front of it and go on offense with this objection. So that customers really engaged with us early and also knew that we had the confidence in our solution about how we secured their data, but also data sovereignty, which is a big topic, how we clarified how we handled your data around the world from a regulatory perspective, that, that helped us get on our front foot in those discussions. And it was huge in terms of transforming our sales cycles.

And not everybody has the internal resources that Salesforce does, but the best practice very much exists. And today I see this done really, really well with Asana, security.asana.com. They continue to build an ongoing security relationship with their customers by bringing security up front in every buyer conversation, every customer conversation. And that's the whole idea of the 3 takeaways today in terms of how to really shorten your sales cycle. Have a clear playbook, instrument and automate the backend, and very much so, lead the buying conversation conversation with the most persistent topic, like security, like legal, and bring that to the front. We see it with Salesforce doing it. We're seeing it across the board. I hope you guys enjoyed this talk. Thank you again for being here with us.

Yeah, thank you everyone.

Take care.