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Josh Schachter:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of [Un]churned. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI and host of [Un]churned. And I am here today with a friend from the East Coast in the tri state area, Mr. Shareth Ben. Shareth is the former VP of Customer Success at Securonics, which is a security company. He’s going to tell us a little bit more about Shareth. Thank you so much for joining me.

Shareth Ben:

Thanks for having me on, Josh.

Josh Schachter:

So just very quickly, very high level pithy, tell us, I know you’re not at Secure onyx, but you were there for eight years, you led CS. Tell us quickly what it is that Secureonics is all about.

Shareth Ben:

Absolutely, yeah. Eight years in cybersecurity and customer success feels more like twelve. But Secureonics is an enterprise grade B, two B cybersecurity solution provider. We help both large enterprises as well as in the mid market customers to defend themselves from some of the most complex cyberattacks and insider threat and insider risk type of areas.

Josh Schachter:

That kind of sounds to me almost like what do they say about bars, like restaurant bars in the time of a recession? They’re popular because people are drinking away their sorrows. And in good times, they’re also popular because people have money to spend on alcohol. You always need protection against cybersecurity would be my kind of top level thought on that one. But 2023 has been a tough year, folks. That’s been well documented, almost a platitude at this point, but it’s true. What has been your experience in 2023? Running CS from a commercial standpoint?

Shareth Ben:

Yeah, you’re right about that. I mean, cybersecurity is mission critical pretty much for every company that wants to stay out of the news, right? There’s a reputational damage. If there is a breach, there could be loss of confidential as well as intellectual property that could get them into trouble. So almost always cybersecurity budgets, especially in the last few years, have been given higher importance. However, what we’re seeing this year is that most companies are stack ranking all their vendors, and typically in cyber there are at least two or three different vendors. They do business with. And they’re looking at the vendors where there’s a higher spend and they’re asking some questions, some very important questions, starting with are we getting the value that we sought out to from this particular vendor? Can we do the same thing elsewhere? Can we consolidate tools? Or is this our long term strategy? Can we go to a plan B and get the same outcomes with much less so these are tough questions that are coming our way and we have to be prepared. So we’ve had some very interesting conversations with customers, but definitely some headwinds we’re dealing with.

Josh Schachter:

So CS in this sense, for these headwinds, CS stands for consolidation, competition and strategy shifts. Basically what you’re hearing from what potentially you could hear from customers, how do you deal with that? What do you do to secure these renewals? And do you even think about upselling and expansion?

Shareth Ben:

Yeah. Regardless of being in Psychronics or not, I could imagine as being the head of customer success, you’ve got to double down on your activities and they can be summarized in one word, which is being proactive. And these activities can be both internal activities, things that you do in order to increase the touch points that you’re having internally, as well as external activities such as getting more airtime, increasing the dialogue that you’re having with the project sponsors. So we did three things differently. One is we prioritized all our accounts which were upcoming for renewals, and we focused on the top 40 accounts based on Arr spend. And we made sure that there were very little gaps when it comes to the service we’re providing or the value that we were giving to these customers. Not only that, we increased the number of touch points we had with these executives just to make sure that we’re being there for them as an advisor or as a friend, just to support them through these difficult times. And most importantly, we also established what is called as a value engineering team, in lack of better words, a SWAT team that’s Razor focused on making sure there is very little gap on the value that the customers were.

Josh Schachter:

So it sounds like there’s three pillars of this. The first is like a gap analysis. Make sure that you’re feeding them the value that they’re looking for. The next is really executive touch points that will stick. And then the third was your value engineering SWAT team. So let’s go into each one then. Tell us a little bit about what that process looked like. As far as this, I forget how you described it, but it was like a gap analysis, right, for each of these top companies?

Shareth Ben:

Yeah, I’ll start with the value engineering team because I think that’s probably the most important area of focus for us. So in cybersecurity, the landscape is continuously evolving. It’s never a standstill moment because the adversities are constantly changing and moving and depending on the industry, you got to be tuned in and what’s going on, especially with the ransomware attacks being continues to be on the rise. And not only that, there’s a lot of email based fraud. And to make things worse, a lot of hospitals and schools are getting attacked around. So what cybersecurity vendors need to do is to pay attention to these changes and continuously assess what are the desired outcomes that a particular customer or organization is trying to achieve, which is typically trying to increase their detection capability and reduce the attack surface and then understand where their current state is at. And that will determine what is the gap that we need to close. So plan versus actual. Right. We’re spending a lot of time, especially with these large enterprises we did in understanding this gap and helping them close those gap, which could mean that as an outcome of the assessment, we’re helping them get them more visibility. Within their network as well as what we found out was that enablement was a key area that we had to double down on, because in order for these customers to extract the most amount of value from your platform, you got to enable them and allow them to use the platform in the way it was designed and meant to be used. And so we knew we had a challenger, and so we had to double down and we had some really good results as a fact of doing this.

Josh Schachter:

Can you talk about those results?

Shareth Ben:

Yeah. The best test for any of our customers at that point to get the value is to make sure that they’re doing a Red Team exercise where they would simulate an attack to see how well the defenses are holding up. And we would always, almost always end up scoring high, especially when we put a company through such a value or a gap assessment.

Josh Schachter:

So we talked about the C’s and the consolidation competition and shift in strategy as three headwinds that renewal teams can face. In those plan B’s of we don’t need your product, we’re going to build our own, we’re going to buy somebody else go cheaper or whatever. How do you, tactically speaking, handle those conversations with those customers and executives?

Josh Schachter:

In those Plan B’s of we don’t need your product, we’re going to build our own, we’re going to buy somebody else go cheaper or whatever. How do you, tactically speaking, handle those conversations with those customers and executives?

Shareth Ben:

Yeah, I think this is why you got to get creative and as well as be the advisor that Customer success promises to be. Right. And let’s think about it. The project sponsors are also in a tough spot. They rather continue with us, but they’re forced to consider other options because of budget or because of other external factors. What I found to be always useful is to be there for them as a trusted advisor and educate them as much as possible. When you educate them and let them know, here are the pros and here are the cons of your decisions that you’re potentially considering. And that what happens is then they start to realize that they end up reevaluating the decisions before they move to Plan B, because what happens is, when it comes to Enterprise B, two B software, typically the switching cost is very high. I mean, it took our project sponsors several weeks, if not months, to build up the program, to build up the technology and the processes around it. And now they’ve been asked to leave that behind and move into a new territory. That’s a lot of work, and that actually pushes them behind. So when I educate our project sponsors about the switching costs in terms of not just time but money and resources, they really start to reevaluate the decisions to move away, and in some cases, in several cases, they end up considering staying with us.

Josh Schachter:

Shareth you’re on a little bit of a sabbatical right now. After taking a deep breath from Securonics, what do you think is the horizon for CS? And where do you want to play in that?

Shareth Ben:

Yeah, the last eight years has been such an invaluable experience for me, truly, with respect to learning a lot from talking to customers, building high performing teams, and most importantly, building the collaboration or alliance with internal stakeholders. So there’s a lot to take away. I’m going to push back and reflect and learn and come back, and CS is my passion, so I’m going to continue to push forward. And there’s so much happening in the CS world out there. It’s so exciting, and I feel this is such a promising future for folks in CS. So a lot to reflect on, but at the same time, a lot to be done as well. And so I’m absolutely looking forward to coming back in the future.

Josh Schachter:

And what are you most excited about right now during your sabbatical? We’re recording this now. You’re just about to take flight into it. What are you most looking forward to?

Shareth Ben:

If I can summarize, what I’m excited about the most in one word is to go explore. I feel like having the exploratory mindset is so important today, given the plethora of information and news and so many things happening both at work professionally as well as what? Just getting the exploratory mindset is something that I’m looking forward to because I think that’s going to open up my horizon and my opportunity into other areas that I can bring back and apply and transfer those skills back to work. So that’s what I’m looking forward to. Lots of travel coming up, as well as spending time with family and friends.

Josh Schachter:

Well, I wish you the very best in your explorations. Sharath, Ben. Thank you so much for sharing your stories and insights from eight years at Securonics and the experiences and the headwinds of 2023 that we’re all facing.

Shareth Ben:

Thanks, Josh. Thanks for having me on.

Josh Schachter:

Hey, guys, it’s Josh. Don’t hang up if you enjoyed this episode, you know what, even if you didn’t, I’d love for you to give us a rating in itunes or Spotify. And after you do, email me Josh at Update AI with the name of your favorite charity and my company. Update AI will make a donation on your behalf. I’d love to connect with each of our listeners. Send me a LinkedIn request and I’ll accept it immediately. Just go to www. Update. AI slash LinkedIn and it’ll redirect to my profile. Thanks.