This is the transcript of this episode:

‍

Mark Shriner [0:01]:

‍Welcome to the Grow Fast Podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing, and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go. Andrew, how are you today?

Andrew Monaghan [0:17]:

‍I'm doing great, Mark. It's good to be with you. How are you doing today?

Mark Shriner [0:20]:

‍Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on the Grow Fast Podcast. Let me ask you, where about are you located?

Andrew Monaghan [0:27]:

‍I am on the south side of Denver in Colorado. It's a cold spring day, a little wet out there, a little cloudy. Not the usual blue skies we get in Colorado.

Mark Shriner [0:39]:

‍Oh, gosh, I wish I could turn my camera around right now and show you the beautiful blue skies we have out here in Seattle. And I was gonna say, even though you're from Denver, that means you're probably a Broncos fan. I'm not gonna hold that against you, but...

Andrew Monaghan [0:52]:

‍Well, I'll tell you. So, you know, I follow the Broncos, but I was born and bred in Scotland, so...

Mark Shriner [0:59]:

‍So you play different kinds of football?

Andrew Monaghan [1:02]:

‍Exactly. Football and rugby. One sport we call soccer, one has the same shape ball but a different game. When I moved over here 23 years ago, I got into the sport. But there's something missing when you didn't play it growing up. I don't have the depth of it that maybe some people do.

Mark Shriner [1:26]:

‍I totally get it. And football, American football, there are so many tactics and strategies that if you haven't played the game, it's kind of really hard to get into the nuances of that. That said, we're going off on a tangent here. But I think the rugby and then soccer are two of the greatest sports in the world. If you look at, you know, the global population that plays those sports, the number of countries around the world, and the fact that you can play up until your 50s or 60s in various leagues. I was in Japan and there was a rugby group there the guys were you know, 50 Plus, they modified rules in terms of the amount of contact that was loud and so on so forth. But with American football pretty much after college, you're done with.

Andrew Monaghan [2:10]:

‍I'm glad you said that. I just find that weird, right? You play a sport, probably you're pretty passionate about it and you enjoy it enjoy playing. And then for most people they don't make as far as college so they stop then if they even make it to college most don't make it to the pros. So they stop that and there's no outlet after that. It just seems weird to me. You know, I grew up in Scotland where it's Sunday, soccer Sunday football in the park was the thing you go to any any city any town, run the UK, frankly on a Sunday. And people were playing football everywhere. play rugby everywhere. It's so much fun to do. You don't have to be the fittest and strongest athlete in the world still to play a sport have some fun. So I'm gonna surprise isn't more than more.

Mark Shriner [2:50]:

‍I agree with you. And I have three boys, they all play soccer. I started playing when I was 40. And I can still play now you know, because it's, you're just kicking the ball around and running. I don't need a pad up, put a helmet on. Yeah, I'm going to talk to you because you are the founder of Unstoppable which provides cybersecurity or excuse me sales training to cybersecurity firms and salespeople. You are also the host of the Cyber Go-to-Market Hour GTM Talk Podcast, and you're the Chief Connector of the Cyber GTM Go-to-Market Jobs organization. So you got a lot of things going on. But before we dig into all that maybe we can just start with the level set here. And I looked at your profile, you've done a lot of sales and sales leadership roles before you moved into training. What was behind your decision to go from kind of a sales frontline sales and sales leadership position into a training position?

Andrew Monaghan [3:48]:

‍Yeah, you know, I started selling it was my first job after college 1994 Just to age myself a little bit. And I got into I thought, you know, I'll give it a go for a couple of years now I want to go start my own business was was my whole idea. And I started working for the software company in London. And, you know, it's it's actually Pretty good. I could enjoy this I seem to be okay. I wasn't a natural, but I seem to be Pretty good at it. Right. And I kind of got into the swing of things and start making some money. I thought this is good. I just went off on this career, you know, kind of, you know, runaway train a little bit and held on and went some good companies work for some good people. And then I hit kind of 40 years old, I had my my midlife crisis and I was sitting there going, Okay, I've been doing this for almost 20 years at this point. Is this where I want to do for my next 20 years? Or should I be doing something completely different? And I've still been I've been successful. I went to club President's Club a couple of years, both years prior to my move, but I was kind of in that mode and I hired a coach actually, Mark, I find someone I feel like I need to talk this through. This is especially pretty serious, right? I don't want to give up what I'm doing but I don't want to be sitting in a coffee shop for the rest of my life trying figure out what to do. So I talked to this coach, he really helped me out. And he said, you know, the thing that you really enjoy about being a sales leader is the helping people succeed the the coaching the the transformation that you can get someone, hire someone, get them going and see them achieve great things. That's the bit you enjoy. And the bit that I hated it was the the grain that the forecast thing that, you know, dealing with deals are slipping, and they will the deals that go go dark on you and helping reps get through that as Oh, my God, this is stressful and painful at the same time. But I came to the conclusion that time that you know, there's no job that you can just do the glory stuff and the fun stuff and duct tape. I said to a coach that Yeah, that's great. No, I paid you all this money. But there's no job that does that. Right. And it was just weird as it this big company. And literally two months later, the head of learning and development of the company, I'd got to know, over a period send an email out to only like 20 People 20 People in a 5000 employee company feel that she knew. So does anyone know anyone who's been a sales leader, and might want to make a change and become a coach to the North American sales leadership team. We're looking for someone who could work with you 1520 sales leaders, and help them be more successful and things like that. And I, I just sat there. I called up Lori immediately. I said, Laurie, you're not going to believe this. But yeah, I said, Laurie, this is this is the thing, like, this is what I want to do, you know, let's talk and, you know, two months later, I made the move into what was the time was a coaching role I, I worked at the sales leadership team and one on one, and we help I help them with whatever challenges they had with their team or their business and things like that. So that's why I made the move. And it was you know, and people said to me the time Mark, you know, successful salesperson in software, you make a decent amount of money, you know, yeah. And if people said to me, you don't like making money? What do you what are you doing right? Where are you going over there. And I almost had this idea that I wanted to work for some companies doing it to learn and then I wanted to have my own business, going back to my original thing is none of my career. So that was the idea what I was trying to do back in, Gosh, 2013 2014.

Mark Shriner [7:14]:

‍And when did you actually launch your own training business?

Andrew Monaghan [7:17]:

‍I decided that January 2020, was the perfect time to lose the safety of a paycheck, and benefits and all the rest of it and go off my own. Right before two months before COVID hit.

Mark Shriner [7:33]:

‍In our training, we can't do training.

Andrew Monaghan [7:36]:

‍Exactly, you know. So yeah, four and a bit years ago now is when I decided to go for my own. Wow. Well,

Mark Shriner [7:44]:

‍I want to come back to that in a second. You know, you touched on the you enjoyed some aspects of sales. And a lot of people enjoys the, you know, individual producer roles because they have autonomy. There's clearly defined targets, and this kind of many times that uncapped upside, right. So that earning potential there, draws a lot of people in there, it does come with some baggage, it comes with some pressure as well. One thing that I've noticed is not all the best top performing salespeople can make the transition into the sales leadership roles, or those training roles. Because you have like, sometimes they have this lone wolf mentality, have you? Have you seen something like that? Or and or what are some, you know, best practices to getting people from those, you know, top performing individual performer rolls into a more of a leadership role?

Andrew Monaghan [8:39]:

‍I think is is endemic in the industry. My experience is that just what you said, you'll get promoted, because they're good at selling into a job where selling actual day to day selling is about 20% of the success of the job, you can make it 100% of your job, but then you you're not being a good leader and a good manager at that point. And unfortunately, that's what people do, right? they default to what they know. And you know, I made these mistakes, I say, gosh, if I can just get this team to sell like I did, then, you know, things are gonna be great. And you can go in there as I did, this is 2001 When I got my first promotion to leadership job, I've had them sell my way and it didn't work. Right. And I I remember when I got promoted, the president of the company said to me, so just to you know, Andrew, we've got I've got no time to help you with this, this transition. So you're going to be on your own. And I was like, oh sure, that's fine. You know, how difficult could it be? So I just could have people do this all my life, you know, and I've worked for someone who has done it so I know what to do and what not to do as well right? And sure enough, you know, I go in in the first year and not not that good, right? And I got some feedback from the team and from others. Look, you got to adapt. You got it. change. So I think it's endemic. It was interesting. Actually, Mark, when I made the move to start my own gig doing this, the first thing I actually went with was to say, why don't I become that that trainer for, for our first line managers who have had training, but how to be a great first line manager. So I went to my network, and I said, Look, you know, we all know there's a problem and said, yes, a problem. I said, Okay, well, here's how I can help solve it, that comes all the rest of it. And then it was like scratching of heads and looking the other way and going, Wow, I don't know, we might want to invest our money somewhere else, the reps and, and then it was like, well, that's tough. You used to do for us, you know, three years ago, why don't you come and do that for us? Right? So it seems you're really reluctant to make the change, and is to invest in making the change for people. And, you know, there's some first line managers that make it and do quite well. And there's those that don't, I don't know, if I have a secret success formula, I wonder if you do are some ideas as well. I think that I think people, I think what was different now, frankly, is, when I made the change, there was no real content online to go to and say, Oh, crap, there seems to be this thing about, you know, it's not the same job, as you probably look into it. I think these days, that's everywhere. Now, there's a support structure out there, if you're sitting there going, Okay, I'm about to get promoted, or have done. And therefore I can pick up some things online about what to do and what not to do.

Mark Shriner [11:23]:I agree with you. And it's, it's interesting, because I think you've touched on one of the the quote unquote, secrets is that you can't go in into a leadership role and expect everybody to do every, everything, the way that you do it, right, I want I want many me's everywhere, right? And that's just doesn't work. And I also find that sometimes that I want to, I want to ask you about this, because, you know, I do sales training from time to time, and I've done it throughout my career. And some people are open and receptive to it. But a lot of times you're talking about, you know, wait, people's personal behaviors, their, their, the way they communicate, and these are life long learned traits. And it can be, it can be kind of touchy, when you say, hey, you know, maybe a better way to do that would or a better way to say that would be like this, but I'm gonna come back to that. It's interesting, though, because I find that companies are open to investing in, you know, the, the training of the frontline salespeople, but when it comes to that, those first level managers, and you're like, hey, you know, I can help with that transition. They're like, it's like, they can't connect the dots on the ROI to that, and, and I see the ROI in a couple of different perspectives. And I'd like to, you know, your, your perspective on this is, one, you want to set those people up for success, because what you don't want is them to burn out to lose to get you to leave, right? So you have that, you know, success and retention thing. But also, if you can make them 3% more effective in their role, and they're managing temporary temp people. That's a 30%, you know, across everybody, their improvement, their total accumulated there. So I see it as a win win from from multiple points. But you know, what are your thoughts?

Andrew Monaghan [13:08]:

‍Yeah, I think you're right, I think too often will people will do is default to the well are you helping deals come in and things like that is the way to think about it. But by far, the biggest impact on a first line manager success is the people in the team that they're managing. And if, if you're not good at attracting great talent, and identifying great talent, and then nurturing great talent, I don't care how good a coach or manager you are, you'll fail because your team is just not going to be up to scratch. And yet again, we don't we don't train people on actually how to go do that how to attract great talent. So I'm there with you on that by looking at the ROI of saying, you know, just look at attrition rates and empty capacity. So you empty territories, things like that. The numbers are compelling, and recruiters use it all the time to say, well, that's I can hire people for you faster and fill the gaps faster. I think we need to have the same mentality when you're looking at how you how you support the first line managers.

Mark Shriner [14:07]:

‍Totally agree. So um, let's talk about the nuances of selling in the cybersecurity industry. Okay. I worked in the cybersecurity industry, I worked for a Microsoft Security and Compliance partner for five years. And what I found was that oftentimes not just with us, but with everybody, especially the technology providers, is that they would show up and say kind of scare tactics. You know, this is the threat landscape and we're all gonna die. But if you buy this you might have a chance.

Andrew Monaghan [14:45]:

‍And how did that work for them.

Mark Shriner [14:46]:

‍You know what I what I found very quickly, is that it I couldn't I like to think that I'm kind of intuitive or that I can I can kind of read the read the air as the Japanese said I, and I would see that people's eyes would gloss over and they would say, Here they go again. Okay, another scare tactic. Come on. We've heard this all before we know the threat landscape. That's why, you know, we're talking to you we don't need, we want to know what, you know, we weren't like a real conversation here. That's my observation again, but you know, the cybersecurity industry is immensely broad in terms of the types of services solutions technologies out there, and it's very deep in terms of the level of those services. So over to you, what do you what are your observations?

Andrew Monaghan [15:30]:

‍Yeah, I think the the fundamentals of selling are the same. You know, there's not like there's medic for cybersecurity sales teams are our challenge. Yeah, there's nothing like that. Right. But you're dead on right. There's definitely nuances. And one of them is just that I mean, it to me is an absolute, no, no, to walk in. And we call it FUD fear, uncertainty and doubt. Right. All right. It's trying to scare people to say, you know, there's this whole threat area you haven't considered before. I mean, I guarantee you, that the people you're talking to have been in the industry for many years, a lot longer than the salesperson that's actually trying to tell them that, you know, there's something they don't know about. And therefore, it just falls on deaf ears or glossy eyes, you know, as you were saying, so that's something you avoid. And frankly, I got into the industry in 1998, as the first time I sold a cybersecurity product. And even then people will start glossing over a little bit. And that was nascent days. So you just stay away from it. It's interesting, you know, good sales practice as you sell to the biggest pain point or potential pain points someone has. But you can't do that in cyber, right? You can't go in all guns, guns blazing. The Earth mistake that people make is, you know, this company got breached last week with this threat or whatever it might be. We if you had our software, you wouldn't have breached, right? does not go down well, either, right? So you can thread the needle a little bit. So that that's one aspect, you got to be careful of that oh, one is it in a day you're selling to suspiciously guarded people? Right?

Mark Shriner [17:06]:

‍They are totally agree. That's the nature of their job.

Andrew Monaghan [17:10]:

‍They're paid to be.

Mark Shriner [17:12]:

‍That you send them a random email saying, Hey, I've got the latest, greatest and they're like, delete.

Andrew Monaghan [17:19]:

‍I'll tell you stories. First of all, this idea that you send an email to someone in cybersecurity and expecting them to download something, or click something, but they don't do it like that. It's just not something they do. And by the way, and I've talked to security teams that do this, I tell you, it happens is if your company that you're working for you get a name for yourself, at your target, as someone who sends too many emails, or crappy emails or cold calls us to death or whatever, they'll actually go into their, their gateway stuff and block you. So they go into their email system and say, you know, whatever, at bla bla, bla.com. Domain, just block it. You don't even get through it. People do it. So this is where you make careful off, right? You gotta say, okay, these people have very suspicious mindset. And they've got a bit of power to actually block us if we're doing something stupid. So you got to be careful. And then the other thing I always think about with with these people, mark as the stakes are high, right? Totally. So let's, let's contrast this, and this is this is just in the last couple of years, so the stakes are high. So if you're in charge of the website, for a company, let's say you're a retailer, and you deal with E commerce and your job is on an SVP of E commerce, let's say.

Mark Shriner [18:36]:

‍You're winning dollars a day in revenue.

Andrew Monaghan [18:37]:

‍And you're seen as the lifeline of the company and retail, because, you know, they don't make money in brick and mortar anymore, right? And, and the website goes down, right? Let's say that happens, the head of the E commerce is going to get all sorts of scrutiny and, and travel bothered by the website being done, it'll get off as fast as possible, and a black guy to be embarrassed. And if it hadn't three or four times, there'll be like, what's the heck's going on? And if it keeps happening, the worst that happens, that person is gonna get fired. Right. in cybersecurity, the worst thing could happen to you is you get prosecuted. Right, it was the there was a seat that a Cisco chief information security officer a few couple of years ago now Joe Sullivan, he was a Cisco Uber. And they had they had a breach to happen. And he did all the right things. He collaborated with the executive team, the whole thing about what happened, but somewhere in the mix the way they reported it or handled, it wasn't quite right. And he ended up getting prosecuted for it. They didn't go to jail, but that's what happened to them. Right. And,you know, people.

Mark Shriner [19:40]:

‍Good luck trying to get a job again.

Andrew Monaghan [19:40]:

‍Well, that's you know, he's on his own like he's doing a lot consulting with companies now but how not to be like him, right, which is, he's probably probably even do better than before, but, but that's interesting. You know, you're talking to people who are very suspicious of you than what you're selling in the world out there. And their stakes are high and it just makes her very Interesting sales culture where you have to be very careful how you do things, you have to be very nuanced. And make sure when you engage with people that you're doing it from the right mental mindset yourself, of not just trying to sell something but but help someone achieve things and not get fired and things like that.

Mark Shriner [20:16]:

‍So then what is the answer if you are responsible for outbound sales, okay. And I don't even know if that even exists anymore. But because, but it was, you know, when I started in sales, it was a big part of it. And I'm running a SASS company right now. And it's still part of what we do. I'm going to come back to that in a second. Because there's overlap, I believe, between sales and marketing these days. But if you if a portion of your responsibility is to do some kind of outreach, how do you do it?

Andrew Monaghan [20:45]:

‍Well, you still do the same tactics, you just have to adapt to the people that you're talking to. So there's no like, you don't send emails, you just don't send them with links and downloads, right? It's not like you don't make calls. You just don't bombard people with calls. And when you talk to them, it's you imagine all the things that the problem areas that people might have, it's not just they might get briefs, right. It might be for example, that their, their time to spot a breach might be too long, it might be the fact that their ability to resolve incidents might be too long, it might be the fact that they're, you know, they're dealing they have to have 10 people in a helpdesk deal of password resets, because their way of doing past raises is so bad, you have to think about the, the angles around it, which are much more frankly, business orientated, as opposed to just the the cyber, the pure, you know, threats and breaches angle to it. And that's how you can start, you know, picking up things and getting into the conversation that you want to have, when you have those sorts of conversations.

Mark Shriner [21:43]:

‍So you could actually even maybe reach out to a CFO and say, you know, you're probably spending x amount of dollars on password resets, for example, we have a solution that could bring that down to x, you know, something like that. And that that person would be like, hey, that makes sense. Maybe the cyber team should look at this or something like that.

Andrew Monaghan [22:01]:

‍Yeah, I mean, all that except for the CFO side, because, you know, then the day, they don't want to listen to nitty gritty stuff like that, right. So you but right now, usually, the Cisco is someone who reports into the CEO or one dime from the CEO, and has to readily report to the board. So they got a lot of power, I think a lot of visibility inside organizations that much more than I had, like 1520 years ago. So you can go to the security team and start talking about that. But not not just security, but the infrastructure team, depending on what what aspect of cyber you have a solution for.

Mark Shriner [22:34]:

‍Sure. Makes sense. I noticed, you know, when I was reading through your your background is one of the things that you do is you instead of selling your coach your train knees on, instead of selling technical features, you position business value, can you talk a little bit about that?

Andrew Monaghan [22:58]:

‍Yeah, it's it's an interesting one, you know, we have a plague inside the cybersecurity industry, I'm sure other sectors do as well, where we love our products that we're building, we love the technology that we have, you know, there's 3700 vendors in cybersecurity, roughly 3500 of them have less than 1000 employees, right. So they're smaller companies. And that means, you know, the the founder, the funding team heavily influenced how the things are done, and they're all tend to be technical people. So what tends to happen is when you're a seller, you're given all this technical stuff to go and, and talk to your prospects with. But I think that's a mistake. And, you know, you when you go and engage with people, you got to think about not just the technical fit, but why an organization might make a transformation. And especially right now, in the last couple of years, you know, deals have slowed down so much the scrutiny is, is through the roof, from people, they might not have the CFO title, but there's someone who cares about budget, marginally, that three or four years ago, and they're killing deals or slowing deals down because there's no real business reason to make that change that's happening right there in that. And I saw a quote from a CFO a couple of years ago. And I think he was talking to some sales teams. And he said, you know, you're going to view that the role of the sales process in the sales cycle, is actually to build the business case for change. Right, I thought that was really eye opening for me, you know, it's like, gosh, you know, I certainly didn't do that back in the day, right? I was so focused on like, sell my stuff has got some features and benefits and, you know, all the rest of it. And, you know, I think when you look at the lens through well, how do we how do we help this company, make a transformation that's gonna have a business impact your chances of rising above the noise of the industry for one, but also getting the right approvals and buy in from senior people increases dramatically. And one of the things that I talked to my team is about Mark, just one last thing on this is to say, you know, if you're selling something that they company, would you rather be selling something into the Director of Information security in the cloud world? Because they've got a problem with something they're trying to solve? Or would you rather be selling something to company that's going to help the CEO realize their big initiative to expand the supply chain into Southeast Asia? And they need better and more secure connectivity? In Southeast Asia? Right? I know where I would go. One side has deal oxygen, I call it right, it's got money as a political capital is good people put their careers on the line to go make big changes, and one is some person somewhere thinking, be really nice if we get a bit more visibility into our cloud. Just very different.

Mark Shriner [25:41]:

‍Well, you know, it's funny, because you just answered my next question, which was, Can you give me kind of an example or a use case of, of that kind of tactic of understanding, you know, helping the company make that transition? Versus just selling them whatever's on in your, in your bag? But how do you find that out as a salesperson? And, you know, and what's the, what's the process? Because I, you know, I'd call the guy and say, Hey, I've got stuff for, you know, intrusion detection, and, and I'm going to talk to this person, but I would prefer to talk to the CEO about this, you know, their their overall, you know, higher level objectives. How do you do that?

Andrew Monaghan [26:23]:

‍Yeah, what I talked to my clients about is, you don't have to know perfect information, you have to have a defendable value hypothesis. Right. So let's, let's take the Southeast Asia thing, right. So you might find that out in any public companies and all sorts of public places, right? Maybe the CEO did a speech, maybe the CIO did a talk or interview somewhere. Maybe in their annual report, or 10k. Q, things like that. They talk about some initiative that they've got going on, right. And then what you can do is look at that and kind of squint a little bit, because it doesn't say, we need to get into Southeast Asia. And by the way, we need some cybersecurity products to help us do that. Right. Right. So what you have to do is kind of squint a little bit and say, Okay, how might, how might we help with that? If I was to sit down with a Cisco tomorrow, and I didn't want to talk about my product, I want to talk about how I can help him. Could I say, you know, I was thinking about the what your CEO said on the analyst briefing three weeks ago, he said that the expansion of Southeast Asia is critical for the growth targets for the next couple of years. And it means you're taking on you know, 2500 more suppliers in that spot. I was wondering if, as you're looking to enable that, you're thinking about how do we securely bring them into our environment and share information, but only the right information? Things like that? Is that something that you're thinking about as well, but how to enable that? That's how I go about doing it, right?

Mark Shriner [27:53]:

‍Yeah, I like it, you warn, you've demonstrated that, hey, you know what you are paying attention, you've done your research, right? You care. And to you bring up the fact that whether it's a CEO or some other high level executive in the company, right away, you're gonna get their attention. Okay, so what what did you hear them say, right, and a three year you know, you're talking about some of these relevant when I list with the Microsoft cybersecurity life partner, we actually did that in a couple of cases. Because we were selling managed services, a lot of what we're doing and managed services, if a company is expanding into one of the markets that we covered, it was kind of a no brainer. So what are you going to do there for your services, right, it would be versus a global technology infrastructure platform, which maybe they already have, you know, hey, we're on AWS, or we're on Azure, or whatever it's done. But with with managed services, a lot of times they're managed services provider would only cover one specific geographic region. And there's tons of opportunities every time a company wants to expand.

Andrew Monaghan [28:55]:

‍I think you also may have services mark, right, maybe you'll validate this, there's a lot of people trying to do minute services. And frankly, if I'm a little critical, not doing it that well build the ability to not try and differentiate on Well, we're a little bit better, because our response times better is maybe one way to do that I wouldn't do but then think about well, how can we be more strategic for these organizations? And we might be something we can be a partner for them over time and all sorts of different ways, and have that conversation versus the lower down. When is that? Is that kind of where you're going with, with what you're doing when you're engaged?

Mark Shriner [29:28]:

‍Yeah, yeah, totally. And, you know, by the way, we can differentiate ourselves here locally, but it's more difficult because there's 1000s of providers, but of those 1000s How many of them that can actually provide support the same level of support local language in Brazil or other South American countries or in Asia right and now all sudden that that group or that it becomes a lot smaller, right. And so then then that Yeah, so what? We talked to her a little bit earlier in terms of of the the the overlap between sales and marketing when it comes to prospecting, what are you seeing in the cybersecurity space?

Andrew Monaghan [30:09]:

‍So, prospecting is a challenge. You know, a lot of companies I talked to are, you know, in some version off, I need more pipeline. And the old ways don't work as well as they used to do. Well, I'll give you an example. So when I moved over from the UK in 2000, I took a territory in Silicon Valley, and identified you as a good salesperson does my ABC accounts, targets, you know, and I had 25 accounts in my, my a list, and in the first three months, I cold call and got meetings with 17 of the 25 security leaders in that group, right? Very different environment, right, I don't know the exact number, I'm gonna guess there might have been 100 vendors, or maybe 50, vendors in cybersecurity, with, you know, maybe one rep covering that area. Even back then people weren't comfortable doing cold calling. So I knew if I like a good, you know, I'd probably rise above. But these days, there's three 700 vendors, and there's lots of people bombarding and things like that. So, you know, that kind of old way of well, I'll just kind of make some calls, and I'll get there isn't working so well, our emails and again, through as much as they used to, but I want to my thought about this morning, is maybe a little bit different to some. I think the key question we got to ask ourselves, is, if things are not working, as well, as he did before, we got to say, well compare to what he says okay, saying, well, cold calls don't work as well, our emails don't work as well, or LinkedIn messages don't work as our networking, whoever might be, you know, slot in your, your statement that people make these days. My question is what compared to what right? I mean, if, if you're, if your response rate, an email goes down from 2%, to 1%, but still, it's better than everything else, it's barely everything else. Right? And you got to figure that out. So I think that's one thing, you know, as people are thinking, but it's just be cautious off, right? Just because something's done doesn't mean to say you ditch it, right? It might still be as good or better than something else.

Mark Shriner [32:11]:

‍I recently interviewed John Barrows, from JB sales. In fact, I think that episodes gone live today. And he was coaching one of his mentees, who was getting a kind of a lower response rate on LinkedIn. And he goes, he said, you know, you got to take the long view on this. It's, it's, it's not day to day, hey, you know, it's like, you're, you're planting seeds. And after a while, the things start to grow. Right. So you got to take the long view, and unless you have something else that is much better, what else you're gonna do?

Andrew Monaghan [32:43]:

‍Yeah, I think that's a great point. I mean, I, I think that your back and what I moved over, it was short, sharp, short term view, let's get those meetings and go. I'm totally with John on that, right, you could just think longer term or strategic, I'll give you an example. So, seven, eight years ago, even I was at a startup, we were pre product. And we were trying to get to the Cisco and talk about how our product was gonna change the world and all the rest of it, right. And I was trying to get into Cisco, and the Cisco at Cisco at the time, he was known as being someone who could have hated salespeople and all the rest of it, right. But that was my target, one of the bigger companies, my territory had to go after it. And I started doing the things that you do, you know, I call them like, email them. thing getting back. And then I started just going round and right, not random above them, but just figuring out, you know, who else knew them and turns out that one of our board members knew him and he put up a call and nothing got back from that. Another person we knew, you know, the system was on the board as a company, he didn't get back from that. And we're just trying, because structure is good. This is kind of weird. But, and, and then I was one day, I started searching in YouTube. And I found a video of him speaking in a conference like three years prior to that date. And literally you in like, the 22nd Minute, he was asked a question, and he said, our value prop, right? He basically said, you know, I think the industry needs to move towards this the thing, right? And I just stopped dead on the spot. So I picked in the email. I said, John, I know you won't click on this link, but if you search on YouTube for your speech, or whatever, and go to 22 minutes and 23 seconds, if you still believe what's right there, we should talk because that's what we're delivering. And I remember his his response back was within half an hour and he said, Andrew, you have me surrounded. That's awesome. So I think, you know, he got the messages from the board members. He saw my emails and heard my calls and then finally, the straw that broke the camel's back was that relevance for what he said? Right, and we got going I think these days, but to your point, or John's point about you know, play the long game. I think you have to think like that right? Is not trying to hit 100 people a week. It's okay, this way Here's five to 10 people, I really want to figure out how we have a conversation with how do I get each of them surrounded with all these different ways to try and reach them without being obnoxious about it. Right? But how can I just try the different ways?

Mark Shriner [35:13]:

‍Totally agree, in fact, go back to John for a second. He's he spends for his business, an hour a day prospecting. And the majority of that hour is spent on trying to figure out how to get into one prospect or the so you know, it's really kind of a deep dive versus a you know, kind of a shoot spray kind of thing or,

Andrew Monaghan [35:31]:‍

yeah.

Mark Shriner [35:34]:

‍Let's talk a little bit about the the kind of training that that you provide at Unstoppable what what are the different programs? And how do you engage with, with your your customers?

Andrew Monaghan [35:44]:

‍Yeah, I have two main programs. I only work right now with cybersecurity companies and the sales team to CyberSecure companies, not because what I do is only for them, it's just is where I'm most comfortable. I remember a few years back, I was at a company and we brought in a very, very high ticket trading company to help with with something. And the trainer stood up in the first minute and said, you know, well, when I sold fax machines at Xerox in 1990, or something that I just remember all the super experienced people in the room on leash like, Oh, my God, this is not gonna be good, right? So anyway, I focused on cybersecurity, because when I stand up, I walked in their shoes, I probably sold the products that they've sold, selling right now. I have two programs I work with.

Mark Shriner [36:27]:

‍And you've dealt with the personas that they're selling to, which is hugely important, I think.

Andrew Monaghan [36:33]:

‍My stories are about the Cisco at Cisco, not about the office manager. Wherever. Right, right.

Mark Shriner [36:39]:

‍Here's a guy in charge of buying fax machines. Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan [36:42]:

‍And yeah, I see people leaning in and saying, oh, you know, let's pay attention. So anyway, that's why I do that. So the two programs I run one is think of it like an outsourced sales enablement. You know, there's lots of companies with Team sales teams of let's say, 10, to 20 to 30, people just can't quite justify having a person full time on board and paying them all the money and all the rest of it to help the team get the team needs help. Right, right. So you know, wouldn't it be good if there's someone that they could bring in almost like a fractional, outsourced enablement person who's done the job before sold the stuff before it could help them. And that's what I'll do, I'll go in for a longer term engagement and help them with a bunch of different things. And then the second program I run is my value selling program. That's a, essentially a three month program I go in, and I help people transition from selling features and benefits into selling your business value business outcomes, and having the behavior change and the assets change, things like that, to go with that. So those are the two programs that I probably do, you know, 95% of time.

Mark Shriner [37:47]:

‍So the first one, it I guess it would be really dependent upon the the customer you're dealing with in terms of what their current situation is, what their market looks like, what their team looks like. And you kind of figure out where you can bring some value, and they probably already have some ideas. You know, marketing teams do this. And our sales team do something completely opposite. We need to get them aligned, or our salespeople are all going out there, you know, saying different things to the market, or, you know, we need to align our prospecting methods. Yeah, but with the second one, which sounds more like a defined, you know, set program, how does that work? Is it like, a couple hours a week for that three months? Or would you have like a kickoff session? That's a half day or what do you do?

Andrew Monaghan [38:26]:

‍Yeah, the first, probably two or three weeks are a bit more consulting rather than training, we need to figure out what the assets are that the team has available, and how we need to change them. Often, we have to get clarity amongst leadership team on some key things like how do we differentiate? How are we truly different things like that, right? And then it goes into a weekly training for the team. And then I do small group coaching. So it's groups of three to four reps at a time. And we do coaching to support what happened in the training. And what's cool these days, of course, is your most companies have access to one of the conversation intelligence tools was gone, or course. Sure. And they actually bring snippets and calls to these these coaching sessions. They Okay, Andrew, I tried what you said last week, and it worked or, you know, it was terrible. helped me out here, right, what do we do? What do I do wrong? Wrong? Yeah, so I took through a combination of, of tailoring it upfront. So, you know, essentially, their words and languages and my frameworks, with with some good interactive training, I do workshop training, I don't do lecturing training. So we're working online in collaboration tools, and then the small group coaching that I found is a good combo to try and get the behavior change that you mentioned before, right. But you know, the way I think about it, Mark, honestly, is that you get a team of, let's say, 100 sellers together. You probably get fit to 20, that will never change their ways no matter what, right though, they'll rather get fired than change their ways, it's kind of their thing, you're going to have a group in the middle of as 60 years or 70, who are really open to change with the right message and the right focus and, you know, talk to them that way. And you got 10 or 15, who are present who are, you know, all I'm Amen to any change that makes me better. Right, the they're ready for this, they're sponges.

Mark Shriner [40:20]:

‍I think one of the best mindsets that people could have enroll, but in particular in sales, because you know, you do face a lot of obstacles, challenges, refusals, denials is you have to always be worn, you have to have thick skin, just, you know, let stuff roll off, you don't take it personal. But But beyond that, you always need to be learning. And in as part of that learning process, you can get this cognitive dissonance, where this is my belief, this is my belief, and you get the signal that is incongruent with your belief, and you kind of push it away, I think you need to be open to that. And I think it was Marc Andreessen said something like, I have strong beliefs, super strong beliefs that are loosely held. And and I love that man, because, you know, he's, I don't know how old he is. But even you know, he gotta imagine that, like, the ego was somebody like that, and the amount of knowledge, but he's willing to let go. And if he's willing to let go, and change and pivot, I think we all should be because, you know, this is the way it was always done. I used to always call people and you know, get the meeting, things have changed. And there was a LinkedIn while now now LinkedIn is evolving. So I have to evolve. And if I can't, it's not going to work.

Andrew Monaghan [42:21]:

‍I'm sure you've seen this as well, as you get the people that in response to something you say, there are those that say that will never work. I've heard that so many times, my my market, my territory, my, my clients, my whatever is my right, that will never work for my clients. Right? Yeah. And then you get the ones that say, I'm not sure about that. But I'm willing to learn and listen and try. Right. And, you know, I'd much rather be working with the ones that are open to a conversation. I'm not saying that everything that we train everyone on is gonna be life changing for them, but at least one of them to take it on board and say, okay, yeah, I can see how that might work for me, let me give it a try.

Mark Shriner [43:08]:

‍You know, it's funny, because I spent about 20 years off and on leading businesses across Asia. And I've heard that that specific argument applied to in Korea, it'll never work. In fact, in 1997, I was with a company a publishing company that was ahead of what Alibaba was doing. At the time, we were taking all of our print content from trade magazines and putting it online that company was global sources, Republican 2000. And I was managing or running the the office in Korea in 1997 98. And the Korean office, we said, hey, we're gonna take all the print content, we're gonna put it online, you're gonna sell, you know, product placements, and you're gonna help, you know, help these exporters promote their products all around the word the buyers, and they said, in Korea, internet never worked. And it was like everyone I was, I think, 32 at the time, 33 and I had an office of 45 salespeople, and they were all in Korea, it's very hierarchical. The older you are, the smarter you are, the more authority you have so on. And I was like, it's going to work this is the world is changing. I have but not in Korea. And literally two years later, Korea became one of the most wired countries in the world, right? And it was just, but it wasn't me making the change. It was when they collectively as a culture and as a country decide to change they went lightning fast, right? But I learned very early on and as a as a kind of a change agent. You it's not a one and done it's a process. It's a continual thing. And I think with with sales training, it's it's similar with a lot of people you have to kind of, here's where we're gonna go. And here's what you know, just kind of keep going with it.

Andrew Monaghan [44:21]:

‍You know, essentially you say that I've actually got one of my bigger clients, we're rolling it out to the APJ team in May so I might come back to you for some tips about how to get past the inbuilt biases about things working or not working, but it's just the nature of people humans, right. Yeah, yeah, chain were resistant to change. And I've been doing things a little long way a certain way I get I understand it right? But that doesn't mean to say a new way might not work for you.

Mark Shriner [44:51]:

‍Totally. Tell me a little bit about the the cyber GTM talk podcast.

Andrew Monaghan [44:30]:

‍Yeah, you know, I started off in 2019 it was the fall of 2019. And maybe like you mark I I'd be listened to podcasts for a while. I wasn't early early, but probably I started listening to 2012 13 and like that, and it took me six years to go well, I might just do one of my own. But I started off my philosophy was at least things is is ready, fire aim right

Mark Shriner [45:03]:

‍Am I right? That No.

Andrew Monaghan [45:08]:

‍Don't Don't waste six months trying to be perfect before you start just No.

Mark Shriner [45:11]:

‍In fact, in your analysis

Andrew Monaghan [45:13]:

‍You know what I started off, you know, it was very different than what it is. Now I started off and I, I had no idea what I was doing. I was like, Okay, I'm gonna get a microphone. And I was talking and I didn't know how to prepare to do a podcast listener stuff. Are we nervous? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I was nervous. And I had impostor syndrome as well, right? I was like, I can just go on a podcast and start preaching about selling, right? Who am I to do all this? So actually, when I started off doing was, I'd be reading sales books, I would just read a paragraph of a sales book. And then I talk about it, I'd say, you know, so like, like, one of my, one of my favorite books is, let's get real, or let's not play, right. And I say, Okay, on second chapter month talks about this, you know, here's my thoughts about it, right. And it was just a very easy way for me to get into it, right. And then I started doing more of my own content, purely. And then I started interviewing people. And now what I do, is I oriented around the question of how could a cybersecurity company grow sales faster? And when I bring on guests, so when I talk, it's there's some variation or subset of that question. So I often right now I'm interviewing CROs Chief Revenue officers that it's cybersecurity companies. I started doing chief marketing officers, sometimes CEOs, and then sometimes experts, you know, like I had, I had a guy on this is really cool. Actually do these hidden gems, do you find this more but these hidden gems that you find that so? I, one of my things is that if you're a busy market, like cybersecurity, and you substitute in most markets these days, how you actually position the company and use narrative to do it can really matter. Right, you can get a lot of impact if you do it well. And it can really hurt you if you don't do well. So I've been on the lookout for people who do that, who are really good at doing that positioning stuff, right. And I talked to a guy called Andy Raskin a couple of years ago. And he's one of the Diane's of, of narrative. Anyway, I hit up a CMO at a company a couple of months ago and said, Do you want to where do you come on? And he said to me, Andrew, I might do but honestly, the person you want to talk to? Is this guy called Shlomi Ashkenazi, he works for me. He's the guy, right. Okay. And I told salami, I said, you know, my first reaction is okay, I'm getting passed down, right. And we've been in sales, we know what but yeah, and I thought, God, I hate getting past. The big name. I want the big title, right? But I thought okay, I'll take a look. So I looked at Salamis, LinkedIn. And like, it's first second line and there's a bio section was in the last five years. Salome's reposition 60 companies. Wow. I don't want there's my guy, right. So I talked to him and brought him on. He was awesome. I said, so if I was in what I do, actually, one thing I do on this podcast mark is, is rather than talking generic stuff, we made up a company last year called Cyber donor. And cyber donors a series a company has got 10 sales reps and a couple of people in marketing. They're, they're trying to get from customer 30, the customer 60, you know, things things to do to do that. So I said to slow me, I said, Okay, let's talk about how the management team at cyber donut might reposition the company. Let's get some specifics in here and make it real. It was awesome. I loved it. So I love these conversations I get to have as part of having the podcast.

Mark Shriner [48:29]:

‍That's awesome. I am I have a long car ride today. And I'm going to put that episode on listen to it. So that's awesome. And I think you said you've recorded well over 200 episodes. Right? Right.

Andrew Monaghan [48:42]:

‍I think we're about 240 tuned in three days and like that. Yeah, that's

Mark Shriner [48:45]:

‍Awesome. Going back, I remember when I recorded my first podcast, it was with a friend of mine. And we were going to do one about like working out or whatever. And this is before I did the secure talk, podcast and anything else. And I remember just, and this is a friend of mine, like from high school, and I was like sweating, because I was like, oh my god, it's nobody's listening, right? But I was like, Whatever, man, I love it.

Andrew Monaghan [49:08]:

‍What did you start doing the secure talk one and start doing the this one?

Mark Shriner [49:13]:

‍So okay, so I started because I started doing secure talk because I was in that space. And I wanted to learn about space. And I thought one of the best ways to learn about it is to talk to a lot of people, but how am I going to get a chance to talk to all these people in kind of in a long form, you know, like one hour at a time. I'll do a podcast and then I started getting at the beginning I was interviewing people kind of in our just little circle, but then I had it didn't take too long. And I started having publicist reaching out to me and saying hey, we've got CEO of this company, what they want to be on and I was talking to he's a really high level people and I didn't know much at all. It's still don't know that much about cybersecurity. But I faked it until I made it and if the show kind of just took off. Long story short, though after 161 episodes, I you know, move into this co founder CEO role of a new SAS startup, I consult with a different couple different companies, I also do some sales consulting, and I just had too much on my plate. And the passion and interest for cybersecurity was kind of waning, I still think it's an amazing industry. And there's so much going on there. And it's so important. But you know, you've only got so many hours in the day, I put a post on LinkedIn saying, Hey, we're looking for new leadership for the secure talk podcast. And I was approached by a couple different companies, and a company called State strike graph, decided to take over, you know, ownership of it. And I did a transition with Justin bills, the CEO, and he's off to the races right now, he's kind of repackaged it and taking it in, in New Improved direction, and I love it. So

Andrew Monaghan [50:43]:

‍Yeah, that's awesome, that he's able to hand it over. Usually, if you search through podcasts online, suddenly, you just find a podcast to stop.

Mark Shriner [50:51]:

‍Yeah, you know, I wasn't sure. But I thought there was some value there. And, you know, because all that content in the if you're in the sales and marketing side, especially the marketing side, you look at all that content. And it's like, wow, this, this could be some value. And like I said, a couple different organizations felt the same. And yeah, it worked out. Let me ask you about the cyber GTM jobs, you know, because you are the chief connector. And I'm assuming the you know, you're you're working for organizations, providing sales, training and consulting, you're also doing the podcast. So people may be reached out to you and say, Hey, we're looking for this kind of position and quit.

Andrew Monaghan [51:31]:

‍You know, the Genesis, Genesis of it was 18 months ago or so, there was a slowdown in tech, I don't know if you experienced that as well. But everyone was told, stop spending money by their VCs, you know, there won't be more money for a couple of years. And the first thing to do is start laying people off, right, so a bunch of layoffs. And it's still going on, frankly, you know, 18 months later, my father time was, like, I know, there's jobs out there, there's not as many as there was, but there's no one place to go and look at cybersecurity sales, jobs or marketing jobs, I should probably start doing that, right. And, you know, I just said, Let's just give it a go. Then it kind of evolved has been through a couple of different generations. And now what I'm doing is thinking this could be a leg of my business as opposed to something I just do for for a bit of fun and to help out. So So my thought is that I want to have that one place to do go to defined all go to market chops, where there's marketing, sales, customer success, the whole lot. And right now in the mode of taking jobs off career sites, and then start to talk to people, you know, talent acquisition ta folks like these companies saying, you know, why don't you do a sponsorship, why don't you do more than just let me take your jobs? Well, eventually, I have the podcast. And the reason I haven't LinkedIn and things like that, is I can put together a package, right? I can say, look, not only what do your jobs, but you know, I can promote them in different ways as well. And people tend to like that sort of stuff. So I just saw my friends and people I know in industry getting laid off for no reason except the company to numb as much money as they thought they did. And I wanted to help out and see if there's a way to get people back into jobs.

Mark Shriner [53:13]:

‍So is it? Is it a full blown portal at this point? Or is that that's where you're kind of moving towards?

Andrew Monaghan [53:18]:

‍No, it's a full job board. I actually, there's 600 jobs getting loaded up today, while I'm on to it, and yeah, it's off to the races. And, you know, I don't know if your listeners go into cyber Athol. But if you're interested in that type of job, you can go in there and put your your ideal job in and get alerts sent to you once or twice a week. Because as jobs in your area, your sub market or your type of job come up, you'll get the emails coming through with

Mark Shriner [53:42]:

‍what's the outlook look like, because a couple of years ago, everybody was saying cyber is the place to be there's a runaway of 1015 years of growth and development here, obviously that, you know, things fluctuate in the in the, in the short term, but the general trend and trajectory is upward and onward and upward.

Andrew Monaghan [54:00]:

‍I mean, unfortunately, as a market, I think is bullish, and I see unfortunately, because it means that bad things are happening to companies and, and things like that, right. And one of the one of the unique factors inside cyber is there's people actively trying to tear you down, rather than attack us from all over the world. Often those attackers adversaries are much better funded than you are, as you're you're running your cybersecurity program inside these large companies, some places nation states, right, it's Korea, North Korea is China with doing things that we wish they wouldn't do. So there's always going to be that changing, morphing, growing and Versary out there. As long as there's that then companies need to invest to protect themselves against it. And one aspect of it is the tools Another aspect is that people and their aspect is the processes they use. So as you say, there's gonna be ups and downs and turns left and turn right here and there but I don't know unless something completely changed in the world. dynamics of the world geopolitical environment, there's always a need for for more tools, different tools, better tools.

Mark Shriner [55:06]:

‍Absolutely. I just got a couple of questions. Top two or three tips for anybody going into any sales role in a b2b context.

Andrew Monaghan [55:18]:

‍I'll tell you one that it's gonna be hard for someone to do. But if you're strong you can do it is your go into a b2b experiences in tech. So I'll talk to that mark, if you don't mind. So my experience in tech is you go into a company, and their version of treating you up for success is to tell you how great they are for the first week. Right? This is what we do. This is the amazing products that we have, here's what competitors but they all suck, and we're awesome. We beat them. And do you know that we, we weren't 100% of our POCs. And, you know, all this stuff kind of comes at you, right? And in fact, what I would advocate is, if you go join a company like that, is go waste neck deep into the problems, your prospects have to understand the prospects understand what the day to day life is, like, figure out what gets them hired and fired, what gets promoted their fears and frustrations, things like that. Focus on that. And then you want to know, what does your company do and how you can help with those things. I think unfortunately, I think of it like never seen those. That experiment where the professor's at the front of the class, he's got a big glass beaker, and he gets a bunch of rocks and he fills the thing. He asked his students, you know, is there any room for more they go no, as well, here's some sand and the sand is I feel like you know, when you join a company that's like your brain, right. And I think we make a mistake, if we if we fill someone's brain, the beaker with all this stuff about us first, and then fill in the gaps with you know, some of the prospects do though Iran, right, fill your brain full of the prospects of their problems, and then fill in the gaps with the products and things like that, that your company sells. So I would do that first. And then the second thing I would do, whether your company has a program for this or not, is go find out the five top sellers and buy them lunch, dinner, whatever it might be, and go hang out with them and say, Well, you know, short cut things from that he might not do exactly what you do. But tell me what you do. And if you're in my shoes, you know what, what what should I avoid doing that is a complete mistake. You see, the company might try and get me to make and just learn, learn like that is how I would do

Mark Shriner [57:29]:

‍So some great advice, I remember my first real sales role. And I met with the country manager. I rarely would have a chance to meet with him. But I just said, you know, what advice would you give me and He gave me two things that I still remember to this day in terms of how to organize my day. And which type of prospects I should go after and how I should present myself and he did it. This is all like in a 10 minute conversation. I took notes of it and I did it and guess what it worked? Okay, what about you know, be part of sales is personal productivity, whether that's time management, whether you know, it's learning or it's, you know, investing in yourself, you have any personal productivity tips.

Andrew Monaghan [58:12]:

‍Something that I know, I need to get better at, I'm going to tell you a couple of things I do reasonably well is I start off the week and I try and figure out what my big nuts are for the week where the big things are coming up. You know, make sure I have a clarity in my mind about what those are, rather than having them hit me in the face as I get all crap is Thursday morning. You know, I've gotten this meeting with tribes. So, you know, I want to make sure I'm sitting there on Sunday night or Monday morning, okay, I've got some, I've got some plan to to get through that. I'm a believer that I try and do things on the go as well. So So for example, I'll tell you one, these conversation intelligence tools, I talked about Gong chorus, there's a whole bunch them now where they record your calls. One of the things I started doing was making sure I got the app on my phone so I go for a walk or go for a drive. It's just me, I don't listen to music, I'll sometimes just k my client is this company here. I queue up four or five calls and I'll put the snippets from the calls on that and listen to as I go along. And it's really powerful actually when you do that and you could get ingrained into their their way of doing things though actually sitting there in my office going let me carve out two hours to listen to calls.

Mark Shriner [59:33]:

‍I find that some of my best most productive listening is when I'm walking and whether it's to audio books or to to podcasts or other things but i Jean Jean Bri listen to your old episodes ever.

Andrew Monaghan [59:51]:

‍I try not to know what Yeah,

Mark Shriner [59:57]:

‍Cuz sometimes i i relearn lessons that I forgot. Every time I talked to somebody I learned, you know, and I take notes and everything that I circled is something new learned. And there's probably, I don't know, 810 different circles on here. So these are like new things that that I've learned. And sometimes I forget these lessons, right? And so it's nice to kind of, you know, listen in. And also sometimes, I recognize that I gotta quit talking so much stuff like that, you know?

Andrew Monaghan [1:00:24]:

‍What do you do with those circles? Do you have a way to then put them somewhere, so you can always go back to them?

Mark Shriner [1:00:28]:

‍Yeah. So what I do is I typically will rewrite the notes. And I keep this because I'm, when I write the show notes for each episode, I have a reference of things that we talked about. And then but I typically will rewrite them and then throw them someplace that hopefully I can find, sometimes, I'm trying to get better with his personal productivity thing. That is not going to be news to anybody except for me. But I'm trying to start to kind of be more systematic about using Evernote, for example, and organizing my notes so that I can go back through it typically, I'll do spend a couple hours on the weekend reviewing, it could be notes from a couple years ago, because somebody's like, oh, light bulb, I forgot about that. You know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. When

Andrew Monaghan [1:01:06]:

‍I read things within the podcasts, you get to learn from people, right? But you get a better system, the idea of being able to collect those learnings.

Mark Shriner [1:01:13]:

‍You got a system don't always follow the system. But in theory, here's I'm gonna ask you, you said you're from Scotland. I grew up here detect much of a Scottish accent. Is it still there? It's still there. If you go home, is it you just does it?

Andrew Monaghan [1:01:29]:

‍There's two environments where it comes back. When I go home, and when it's when I've had a few drinks.

Mark Shriner [1:01:34]:

‍Okay, yeah, good. So you're not having drinks and you're not at home. But if you're on the spot, could you do a Sean Connery impression?

Andrew Monaghan [1:01:41]:

‍Oh, I'm the worst. No, no, no. No, I It's terrible. I got some friends who are great at it. But no, I have never been good at mimicking or doing accents.

Mark Shriner [1:01:54]:‍

Okay, so you've done noise, what the plan B will be that we'll have to grab beer some time. And then I'm sure I'll get to get it out of you. So that's the thing. That's the thing. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the broadcast podcast really enjoyed the conversation. And I really hope to cross paths with you one day, so

Andrew Monaghan [1:02:13]:I like that to mark a great time. By the way, I didn't say this, but this is the first time I've ever been interviewed on a podcast. So even though I've done 200 And whatever it is 40 Odd episodes of my own. This is my first interview. So thank you for making such a good experience for me. I really enjoyed it.

Mark Shriner [1:02:27]:

‍Likewise, cheers.

‍

‍