WEBVTT
00:00:00.689 --> 00:00:24.210
Welcome to rainmakers, a podcast about business development, how to do it and how to get started and how to get better. And what I'm really excited about today is I have a guest named Jeff grinning. He's president of cert path. And he's so different than the other guests that guests that we've had. Welcome, Jeff.
00:00:24.780 --> 00:00:25.890
Hey, thank you for having me.
00:00:26.339 --> 00:00:30.329
So, Jeff, you are deep in the cybersecurity space.
00:00:30.839 --> 00:00:42.659
And when I when I think about what you do, I work with attorneys that do what you do, as you know, and, you know, doing business development in your world is so foreign to me.
00:00:43.079 --> 00:00:56.939
It's so different than what I do. You know, it's not the type of thing where you go out and necessarily make introductions and shake hands and attend events, you do something much different. How is it that you develop business for certain path?
00:00:58.609 --> 00:01:14.030
Yeah, you're right. I mean, the the cyber area has sort of this Mystique to it, that the people who are the best, go to great lengths to have anonymity, which is the opposite of building, I suppose, a network of sales contacts.
00:01:14.840 --> 00:01:30.980
Having said that, I think first and foremost, at least in this space, it's all about having some reputation for what you can do, the past results you've had.
00:01:24.920 --> 00:01:48.049
So for me, at least personally, it's not about having a network for sales, I have a network for and we can talk about this at length, I have a network for recruiting, and then I have a network of customers that have been happy in the past, and are willing to act as referenceable customers going forward.
00:01:48.980 --> 00:01:59.930
But I like so you, you work with an attorney named Randy Sebastien at our firm, yeah. Randy's you know, Rob renown in the security space.
00:01:57.170 --> 00:02:08.300
And I've watched him over the years, he does really well at getting himself published. He's published all over the place.
00:02:03.950 --> 00:02:13.430
He's, he's, he speaks at many conferences, so he's thought of as being an expert in his field.
00:02:13.819 --> 00:02:15.080
Do you do some of that?
00:02:16.740 --> 00:02:50.849
Yes, extensively, actually. And this is kind of what I meant when I say you've got to be able to build up some recognition for your own abilities as a practitioner. So Randy, and I definitely run in a lot of the same circles. We've known each other for going on 20 years. And, you know, a big part of being successful in this space is having the ability to kind of get into the upper echelon of the people who are seen as the thought leaders. And so Randy has definitely done a very good job of that.
00:02:51.240 --> 00:03:11.699
So now, I know that you do these things, too. And because of that, people will want to learn about your product and learn about what you do. And and you told me that you're not you go out on just about every sales call. But you're, you're going as like a sales technician talk about how that process works, because you make it rain, but you do it different than I do it.
00:03:13.080 --> 00:03:33.300
Yeah, I definitely got, I suppose a different approach? Well, the first thing is, I think you have to figure out what are you passionate about? there's just there's way too many people doing way too many related things in business today, generally speaking, at least to my liking.
00:03:33.479 --> 00:03:35.460
There's a lot of noise in your space, a ton of
00:03:35.129 --> 00:03:55.080
Yeah, yeah. Or almost in any space. Right? It's noise there's a lot of competition out there. The things that have made money over the last, you know, 5, 10, 15 years, are what's attracted a lot of the talent now, it's where you know, people go, it's like the Willie Sutton thing, right? You go where the money is with the bank robber.
00:03:51.120 --> 00:05:19.529
So in this particular case, I have found that specializing on what you as an individual are good at and deciding that's going to be your role in the organization is the most important thing. And as you said, before I started to start a path. I definitely was doing cybersecurity. I was the chief information security officer at an aerospace and defense concern. And, you know, this building reputation is a big thing. So there I was fortunate to get to work on some cutting edge programs and some cutting edge technology that's still in use today. And through all that, you know, I guess experience at large companies and small companies. I have learned that I am not the best at business development to the point you were making. And that might be putting it mildly. I suspect if the business developed people that work here were part of this podcast, they would be well, concurring strongly. But despite the fact that I really liked IT Security, and I wanted to start a company, that meant that I had to find a way to really appreciate if if not outright enjoy business development, as well. And so this, this is how I've kind of developed the strategy. I've read a bunch of, you know, Harvard Business Review, like everybody else, a bunch of Business Development books. And the one recurring trend for me and all of those was teamwork and collaboration.
00:05:19.529 --> 00:05:26.730
hat's, that's my big secret in his space, at least a high evel, I run a company and pproach business development.
00:05:27.089 --> 00:05:59.310
n particular, much like, I was ust watching football this eekend, so so like a uarterback who's acting as his wn offensive coordinator. So I o on many of the sales calls, ike you said, but I'm, I'm rying to throw passes up the ntire time for my Business evelopment Professionals to, ou know, to catch and take it nto the endzone, I want to be he most highly paid sales ngineer in the Beltway, I iterally don't want to close ny sales, if I can help it.
00:05:59.759 --> 00:06:07.470
hat's not my specialty. And if ou consider what that approach ooks like, from the optics of he customer, I'm a vendor, and ou
00:06:08.980 --> 00:06:12.129
Take me through the whole sales process, because I find this fascinating.
00:06:12.750 --> 00:06:19.110
Sure, sure. Sure.
00:06:12.750 --> 00:06:19.110
Sure. So well, we go in. And
00:06:19.798 --> 00:06:27.119
where's the first one? Where does the lead come from? Jeff, do they read about you? Do they hear you speak does a sales guy call cold?
00:06:27.629 --> 00:07:05.519
Yeah, there's, there's no, you know, one size fits all, there's there's always going to be sort of a myriad approaches that are used. But the one that happens the most often nowadays is I've hired business development people that have really extensive networks of their own. And then we have pivoted a good deal of our product pieces to a channel model. So we've got very expensive, very experienced business development coupled with a channel that's driving an awful lot of the leads for us.
00:07:00.689 --> 00:07:44.009
But we still are at a point where even though our channel is producing a lot of leads, we get involved in doing the sort of education part of that sales opportunity. And that does lend to this idea that it can benefit from either having someone like myself or even other people here and sort of half go in and do some talking, do some sort of, you know, technical credibility, to help the sale along, you know, these sales, whether the product or the services side, they tend to be larger engagements or larger product sales. It's not something where somebody is, you know, putting down a credit card on the internet typically.
00:07:45.019 --> 00:08:20.540
So I, I'm looking at your bio here, you started this almost 18 years ago, you've got you've got these huge companies that are customers like Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and so to build something from nothing into as big of a company, as you have with all these, you know, customers, even the federal government, your customer, you had to have been pretty good at developing relationships in business. And I just want you to kind of take us through how you went from leaving, you know, your last big company that you're with and starting this thing?
00:08:21.560 --> 00:09:19.789
Sure. Well, first and foremost, I saw a need that I didn't think was being addressed. That That goes for any business that's being started, if you don't have that you probably shouldn't be starting a business. Now, to your point, though, at that, and those times in those days, I was focused on creating relationships with other peers or people I would consider peers, you know, the people who were cybersecurity practitioners. The problem is that those people can always do a sale, but they very rarely can say, yes, and it might even be hitting their budget, but there are infrequently the the approver. And so, you know, my my Rolodex was good enough to get me in the door. And my Rolodex was good enough to maybe get some senior people at the meeting. But you know, I only ever had, I would call it limited success. I had enough to keep 10, 15, 20 people employed.
00:09:20.029 --> 00:09:39.919
But to take it to the next level. Like I said, I have found that even whether I'm getting the lead, which is infrequent these days, or somebody else's, is that mixture of bringing a couple different people to a sales call that I think is so critically important, right?
00:09:36.679 --> 00:10:38.750
Because then the customer gets the sense that you are a really polished organization. It tends to be very little chaos and those sorts of sales calls. You give the impression that you have tremendous bench depth, that everybody has a role to play, and you know infrequently, I find that They're, you know, I'll be getting along better with the technical people in the room, and the decision maker or the VP or the president or whatever, even though I may be the president, this organization, you know, everybody sort of picks their peer that they feel comfortable dealing with. So I'm happy for my business development people to go and spend any time and all time that they possibly can, you know, with whatever level of the organization, and you'd be the opposite of sort of the Japanese culture where I'm supposed to sit directly across from the president of the other organization, I don't use that approach at all. I think my business development people do much, much better with typically the leaders of other companies.
00:10:35.480 --> 00:10:46.370
Now, it happens to be a very technical company. Sure, that's great for me, but then why are they buying my service? Right, I'm doing a technical service, typically, for companies that aren't that technical.
00:10:47.668 --> 00:11:14.099
Well, now that you've dug into this a bit, Jeff, what how you do what you do, and how I do what I do aren't that different? I was thinking that we're just now that we've dissected a little bit, I think about it. So I've worked for an accounting firm, I've worked for a law firm. And I can tell you that a, an accounting client, or a legal client is not going to close without an accountant or a lawyer, which I'm neither right.
00:11:10.109 --> 00:11:54.239
And so so that lead could come in from, you know, a tax accountant who's who's, you know, well renowned for their tax capabilities. But they want to bring in the business development guy, because I bring the relationships and the connectivity to the to the table, and they bring me to help close the deal. Or, you know, it could be a lawyer that's well renowned and doing their practice. But, you know, there's, there's several practice groups that need to be brought to the table. And and I'm usually the one facilitating the conversation. But I've got the technical people there, you're just playing one of the technical roles in your company.
00:11:48.479 --> 00:11:55.408
So I kind of get that put in, put in that context.
00:11:56.409 --> 00:11:59.559
Yep, that's true.
00:11:56.409 --> 00:12:13.000
And I mean, it is true that, you know, you have to wear multiple hats, if you're going to be the head of a technical company, you can't be entirely socially awkward. I don't mean to suggest that I would assume that I don't mean that at all. But I do mean that I play to my strengths.
00:12:13.210 --> 00:12:31.509
Hmm. That's, and it's good to do that. So I want to just take a step back, and we have some students listening to this podcast. And, you know, a lot of times they're getting ideas about what they want to do in life. And, or maybe it's somebody just, you know, starting out in their career.
00:12:32.440 --> 00:12:46.330
If, if somebody is listening to this, or saying, Wow, this Jeff Nagourney, I really liked what he does and how he does it. What advice would you have for those people who want to aspire to do what you're doing? What should they be doing now to prepare themselves?
00:12:47.940 --> 00:12:55.830
Well, if you want to get into cybersecurity now, it's a little different than when I started when I started, it wasn't even a thing.
00:12:56.620 --> 00:12:59.379
You were studying Information Systems back in the day, right?
00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:56.179
That's, that's right. And I just was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. And you know, caught some bad guys doing bad things and got the bug that way. But for anybody starting out now, there are any number of schools with really advanced programs in this but but even before you get to the collegiate level, there are any number of coding camps and cyber summer camps that I've seen being advertised all over the place. There are a bunch of internships, especially that the Aerospace and Defense Contractors like Northrop Grumman's, I've seen MC Dean has done this in the Washington DC area, these are amazing opportunities to get involved with it, I would have killed for you know, growing up, I, you know, I was having to just sort of figure out how to do all this on my own and reading something called byte magazine, and nobody would even remember anymore.
00:13:51.919 --> 00:14:13.250
That was as good as we had. So nowadays, I actually think that if this is an area of interest, there are tons and tons of resources available to you. That doesn't mean that there isn't more competition. It does come at a price. That's absolutely true. But you can find out far more quickly, if this is an area of interest, you know, for you.
00:14:14.090 --> 00:14:45.500
Just doing some of the things that we just talked about. I also think that if you find that this is an area of interest, I wouldn't sweat where you do your undergraduate work too much. I think a lot is made of that. And it's unfortunate. It doesn't mean that if you've got the grades and the aptitude that you should just focus on a community college. I don't mean that at all. But I think that the brand of college is not as big a deal, especially anymore. Obviously, we do a lot of recruiting here.
00:14:45.649 --> 00:14:51.679
And that's just not something that we're overly concerned about. we're much more interested in in the tracks.
00:14:51.679 --> 00:14:54.409
Somebody has taken the internships that they've done.
00:14:55.919 --> 00:15:03.750
Well, Jeff, that's great advice. I appreciate you doing the show today, Jeff Nigriny, president of CeriPath, Thank you.
00:00:00.689 --> 00:00:24.210
Welcome to rainmakers, a podcast about business development, how to do it and how to get started and how to get better. And what I'm really excited about today is I have a guest named Jeff grinning. He's president of cert path. And he's so different than the other guests that guests that we've had. Welcome, Jeff.
00:00:24.780 --> 00:00:25.890
Hey, thank you for having me.
00:00:26.339 --> 00:00:30.329
So, Jeff, you are deep in the cybersecurity space.
00:00:30.839 --> 00:00:42.659
And when I when I think about what you do, I work with attorneys that do what you do, as you know, and, you know, doing business development in your world is so foreign to me.
00:00:43.079 --> 00:00:56.939
It's so different than what I do. You know, it's not the type of thing where you go out and necessarily make introductions and shake hands and attend events, you do something much different. How is it that you develop business for certain path?
00:00:58.609 --> 00:01:14.030
Yeah, you're right. I mean, the the cyber area has sort of this Mystique to it, that the people who are the best, go to great lengths to have anonymity, which is the opposite of building, I suppose, a network of sales contacts.
00:01:14.840 --> 00:01:30.980
Having said that, I think first and foremost, at least in this space, it's all about having some reputation for what you can do, the past results you've had.
00:01:24.920 --> 00:01:48.049
So for me, at least personally, it's not about having a network for sales, I have a network for and we can talk about this at length, I have a network for recruiting, and then I have a network of customers that have been happy in the past, and are willing to act as referenceable customers going forward.
00:01:48.980 --> 00:01:59.930
But I like so you, you work with an attorney named Randy Sebastien at our firm, yeah. Randy's you know, Rob renown in the security space.
00:01:57.170 --> 00:02:08.300
And I've watched him over the years, he does really well at getting himself published. He's published all over the place.
00:02:03.950 --> 00:02:13.430
He's, he's, he speaks at many conferences, so he's thought of as being an expert in his field.
00:02:13.819 --> 00:02:15.080
Do you do some of that?
00:02:16.740 --> 00:02:50.849
Yes, extensively, actually. And this is kind of what I meant when I say you've got to be able to build up some recognition for your own abilities as a practitioner. So Randy, and I definitely run in a lot of the same circles. We've known each other for going on 20 years. And, you know, a big part of being successful in this space is having the ability to kind of get into the upper echelon of the people who are seen as the thought leaders. And so Randy has definitely done a very good job of that.
00:02:51.240 --> 00:03:11.699
So now, I know that you do these things, too. And because of that, people will want to learn about your product and learn about what you do. And and you told me that you're not you go out on just about every sales call. But you're, you're going as like a sales technician talk about how that process works, because you make it rain, but you do it different than I do it.
00:03:13.080 --> 00:03:33.300
Yeah, I definitely got, I suppose a different approach? Well, the first thing is, I think you have to figure out what are you passionate about? there's just there's way too many people doing way too many related things in business today, generally speaking, at least to my liking.
00:03:33.479 --> 00:03:35.460
There's a lot of noise in your space, a ton of
00:03:35.129 --> 00:03:55.080
Yeah, yeah. Or almost in any space. Right? It's noise there's a lot of competition out there. The things that have made money over the last, you know, 5, 10, 15 years, are what's attracted a lot of the talent now, it's where you know, people go, it's like the Willie Sutton thing, right? You go where the money is with the bank robber.
00:03:51.120 --> 00:05:19.529
So in this particular case, I have found that specializing on what you as an individual are good at and deciding that's going to be your role in the organization is the most important thing. And as you said, before I started to start a path. I definitely was doing cybersecurity. I was the chief information security officer at an aerospace and defense concern. And, you know, this building reputation is a big thing. So there I was fortunate to get to work on some cutting edge programs and some cutting edge technology that's still in use today. And through all that, you know, I guess experience at large companies and small companies. I have learned that I am not the best at business development to the point you were making. And that might be putting it mildly. I suspect if the business developed people that work here were part of this podcast, they would be well, concurring strongly. But despite the fact that I really liked IT Security, and I wanted to start a company, that meant that I had to find a way to really appreciate if if not outright enjoy business development, as well. And so this, this is how I've kind of developed the strategy. I've read a bunch of, you know, Harvard Business Review, like everybody else, a bunch of Business Development books. And the one recurring trend for me and all of those was teamwork and collaboration.
00:05:19.529 --> 00:05:26.730
hat's, that's my big secret in his space, at least a high evel, I run a company and pproach business development.
00:05:27.089 --> 00:05:59.310
n particular, much like, I was ust watching football this eekend, so so like a uarterback who's acting as his wn offensive coordinator. So I o on many of the sales calls, ike you said, but I'm, I'm rying to throw passes up the ntire time for my Business evelopment Professionals to, ou know, to catch and take it nto the endzone, I want to be he most highly paid sales ngineer in the Beltway, I iterally don't want to close ny sales, if I can help it.
00:05:59.759 --> 00:06:07.470
hat's not my specialty. And if ou consider what that approach ooks like, from the optics of he customer, I'm a vendor, and ou
00:06:08.980 --> 00:06:12.129
Take me through the whole sales process, because I find this fascinating.
00:06:12.750 --> 00:06:19.110
Sure, sure. Sure.
00:06:12.750 --> 00:06:19.110
Sure. So well, we go in. And
00:06:19.798 --> 00:06:27.119
where's the first one? Where does the lead come from? Jeff, do they read about you? Do they hear you speak does a sales guy call cold?
00:06:27.629 --> 00:07:05.519
Yeah, there's, there's no, you know, one size fits all, there's there's always going to be sort of a myriad approaches that are used. But the one that happens the most often nowadays is I've hired business development people that have really extensive networks of their own. And then we have pivoted a good deal of our product pieces to a channel model. So we've got very expensive, very experienced business development coupled with a channel that's driving an awful lot of the leads for us.
00:07:00.689 --> 00:07:44.009
But we still are at a point where even though our channel is producing a lot of leads, we get involved in doing the sort of education part of that sales opportunity. And that does lend to this idea that it can benefit from either having someone like myself or even other people here and sort of half go in and do some talking, do some sort of, you know, technical credibility, to help the sale along, you know, these sales, whether the product or the services side, they tend to be larger engagements or larger product sales. It's not something where somebody is, you know, putting down a credit card on the internet typically.
00:07:45.019 --> 00:08:20.540
So I, I'm looking at your bio here, you started this almost 18 years ago, you've got you've got these huge companies that are customers like Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and so to build something from nothing into as big of a company, as you have with all these, you know, customers, even the federal government, your customer, you had to have been pretty good at developing relationships in business. And I just want you to kind of take us through how you went from leaving, you know, your last big company that you're with and starting this thing?
00:08:21.560 --> 00:09:19.789
Sure. Well, first and foremost, I saw a need that I didn't think was being addressed. That That goes for any business that's being started, if you don't have that you probably shouldn't be starting a business. Now, to your point, though, at that, and those times in those days, I was focused on creating relationships with other peers or people I would consider peers, you know, the people who were cybersecurity practitioners. The problem is that those people can always do a sale, but they very rarely can say, yes, and it might even be hitting their budget, but there are infrequently the the approver. And so, you know, my my Rolodex was good enough to get me in the door. And my Rolodex was good enough to maybe get some senior people at the meeting. But you know, I only ever had, I would call it limited success. I had enough to keep 10, 15, 20 people employed.
00:09:20.029 --> 00:09:39.919
But to take it to the next level. Like I said, I have found that even whether I'm getting the lead, which is infrequent these days, or somebody else's, is that mixture of bringing a couple different people to a sales call that I think is so critically important, right?
00:09:36.679 --> 00:10:38.750
Because then the customer gets the sense that you are a really polished organization. It tends to be very little chaos and those sorts of sales calls. You give the impression that you have tremendous bench depth, that everybody has a role to play, and you know infrequently, I find that They're, you know, I'll be getting along better with the technical people in the room, and the decision maker or the VP or the president or whatever, even though I may be the president, this organization, you know, everybody sort of picks their peer that they feel comfortable dealing with. So I'm happy for my business development people to go and spend any time and all time that they possibly can, you know, with whatever level of the organization, and you'd be the opposite of sort of the Japanese culture where I'm supposed to sit directly across from the president of the other organization, I don't use that approach at all. I think my business development people do much, much better with typically the leaders of other companies.
00:10:35.480 --> 00:10:46.370
Now, it happens to be a very technical company. Sure, that's great for me, but then why are they buying my service? Right, I'm doing a technical service, typically, for companies that aren't that technical.
00:10:47.668 --> 00:11:14.099
Well, now that you've dug into this a bit, Jeff, what how you do what you do, and how I do what I do aren't that different? I was thinking that we're just now that we've dissected a little bit, I think about it. So I've worked for an accounting firm, I've worked for a law firm. And I can tell you that a, an accounting client, or a legal client is not going to close without an accountant or a lawyer, which I'm neither right.
00:11:10.109 --> 00:11:54.239
And so so that lead could come in from, you know, a tax accountant who's who's, you know, well renowned for their tax capabilities. But they want to bring in the business development guy, because I bring the relationships and the connectivity to the to the table, and they bring me to help close the deal. Or, you know, it could be a lawyer that's well renowned and doing their practice. But, you know, there's, there's several practice groups that need to be brought to the table. And and I'm usually the one facilitating the conversation. But I've got the technical people there, you're just playing one of the technical roles in your company.
00:11:48.479 --> 00:11:55.408
So I kind of get that put in, put in that context.
00:11:56.409 --> 00:11:59.559
Yep, that's true.
00:11:56.409 --> 00:12:13.000
And I mean, it is true that, you know, you have to wear multiple hats, if you're going to be the head of a technical company, you can't be entirely socially awkward. I don't mean to suggest that I would assume that I don't mean that at all. But I do mean that I play to my strengths.
00:12:13.210 --> 00:12:31.509
Hmm. That's, and it's good to do that. So I want to just take a step back, and we have some students listening to this podcast. And, you know, a lot of times they're getting ideas about what they want to do in life. And, or maybe it's somebody just, you know, starting out in their career.
00:12:32.440 --> 00:12:46.330
If, if somebody is listening to this, or saying, Wow, this Jeff Nagourney, I really liked what he does and how he does it. What advice would you have for those people who want to aspire to do what you're doing? What should they be doing now to prepare themselves?
00:12:47.940 --> 00:12:55.830
Well, if you want to get into cybersecurity now, it's a little different than when I started when I started, it wasn't even a thing.
00:12:56.620 --> 00:12:59.379
You were studying Information Systems back in the day, right?
00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:56.179
That's, that's right. And I just was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. And you know, caught some bad guys doing bad things and got the bug that way. But for anybody starting out now, there are any number of schools with really advanced programs in this but but even before you get to the collegiate level, there are any number of coding camps and cyber summer camps that I've seen being advertised all over the place. There are a bunch of internships, especially that the Aerospace and Defense Contractors like Northrop Grumman's, I've seen MC Dean has done this in the Washington DC area, these are amazing opportunities to get involved with it, I would have killed for you know, growing up, I, you know, I was having to just sort of figure out how to do all this on my own and reading something called byte magazine, and nobody would even remember anymore.
00:13:51.919 --> 00:14:13.250
That was as good as we had. So nowadays, I actually think that if this is an area of interest, there are tons and tons of resources available to you. That doesn't mean that there isn't more competition. It does come at a price. That's absolutely true. But you can find out far more quickly, if this is an area of interest, you know, for you.
00:14:14.090 --> 00:14:45.500
Just doing some of the things that we just talked about. I also think that if you find that this is an area of interest, I wouldn't sweat where you do your undergraduate work too much. I think a lot is made of that. And it's unfortunate. It doesn't mean that if you've got the grades and the aptitude that you should just focus on a community college. I don't mean that at all. But I think that the brand of college is not as big a deal, especially anymore. Obviously, we do a lot of recruiting here.
00:14:45.649 --> 00:14:51.679
And that's just not something that we're overly concerned about. we're much more interested in in the tracks.
00:14:51.679 --> 00:14:54.409
Somebody has taken the internships that they've done.
00:14:55.919 --> 00:15:03.750
Well, Jeff, that's great advice. I appreciate you doing the show today, Jeff Nigriny, president of CeriPath, Thank you.
