Kevin Moore, Chief Revenue Officer at Abnormal Security, gives his masterclass on how to get your first customers and how to sell enterprise software at a startup. He covers everything from how to find the right person to contact within an account to how to convince companies to work with startups. Kevin is the Chief Revenue Officer of Abnormal Security, where he leads worldwide revenue generating activities. He brings strategic and operational experience with over 20 years of success leading global, high-performance sales teams at companies including Vectra AI and Proofpoint.
Kevin Moore: It really starts with narrowing focus and planning. Again, what problem are you solving and who's going to benefit most from your solution is your target audience, the large enterprise. Or is it more of a mid market and SMB play? Is there a particular industry that can benefit more from the solution that you're going to be, you know, launching to market that's going to solve that problem or has more of those concerns?
Then you build a list of companies, top 100, top 200, right? And then you take a look at LinkedIn or whomever, right? And the target personas, the target titles that you want to go after. Cybersecurity, it tends to, tends being the. Chief information security officer. But the reality is that there could be a VP below the chief information security that focuses on that, that particular problem, but the bottom line is it starts with this focus list of companies, and then it's a focus list of contacts and the beauty of selling today is that you do have these social websites like LinkedIn or even Facebook for that matter, to try to get an understanding of who knows who within your network.
And then again, do what you can to, to get a warm introduction to any of those folks, but then when you have the conversation. Don't try to sell them so much on the product. Be genuine about getting their feedback and ask them for their help.
But the reality is spare time is very hard to come by, particularly for these senior personas. So if they're willing to help you, they have an interest. And if you can get them to have interest by helping you form the value proposition, helping you round out the offering to something that ultimately the broader market's going to buy or that particular industry, then because this interest, they will end up buying the product and they'll start referring friends.
People genuinely want to help, particularly if it's something that they have selfish and corporate reasons to do so.
