Accelerating Sales in B2B Environment

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Dean Beaver, who is the VP of worldwide sales at Gigamon. Hi, Dean. Welcome to the show.

Dean Beaver: Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Jessica Ly: Yeah. So thank you for coming in. I would love to hear more about Gigamon. Because I know you are in a quite unique situation here. And you've got fantastic sales, and it's growing really well. So tell us what is driving such demand for your solutions.

Dean Beaver: I see two major directions. One is the challenges within the traffic itself. There’s security, encrypted traffic, that many times it's increased from 25%. Now it's close to 75 to 80% of the traffic, a lot of solutions out there are able to see it, so we have to decrypt it for them. So they can see that. Also, certain packets are being split up, especially in the service provider world. You have control and a user plane that goes in different directions. So we need to correlate that bring it back so that it can be used beyond just the visibility aspect of being able to look at so much traffic and getting that into solutions that are not able to achieve the speeds that are out there. That's another area that we're actually solving for today's environment.

Jessica Ly: Wow. Okay, so do you actually sell directly to the companies that need it? Or do you sell that via the security partners?

Dean Beaver: Good question. Actually, we sell mostly directly to the companies that need it. But we also have an alliances program too. An alliances program is actually where our product tied with their solution gives them a better product so they can compete against our competent competitors in the market. So we do both.

Jessica Ly: Alright, so let's talk about sales. Because, you know, I want to get some best practice some tips or lessons learned that you want to offer as far as how do you accelerate sales, you know, in a B2B technology play.

Dean Beaver: Right. So, you know, I think it's, you know, historically, companies usually have come out with a pricing model. And this is how we go to market. This is how we sell our product. In our case, we've actually had that baseline, but we also now are able to kind of modify it based on what the customer's needs are. So we've had customers that come to us who said, I want to be buying based on capacity, I want to buy based on subscription, or I want a site license. And so we've been able to design many different targeted pricing models that the customer actually wants to consume our model product a certain way, which allows us to design something that ultimately gives us the upper hand, but the fact that we're not public today allows us to do things that a lot of public companies are able to do.

Jessica Ly: Okay, so that old traditional model of pricing didn't work as well. Yeah, and the new pricing model since they are appealing.

Dean Beaver: It is, especially for our largest customers who actually have wanted to buy have to buy a certain way, we used to sell our hardware-software as a bundled solution. Now we are actually able to do a separation of software, firmware hardware. We’re able to tie in a maintenance into our site license models, for example, which lowers optics costs for companies that don't want to have an optics bill. So there's a lot of ways we've designed to allow our customers to consume our product easily.

Jessica Ly: And that was based on the customer asking for this, right? You’re responding to the demand.

Dean Beaver: Correct. And I think what we've done a Gigamon is that the customers all have suddenly slightly different from each other than how they want to consume our product. And so we've been able to listen to what they say and then actually customize a pricing model that works for them.

Jessica Ly: Okay, so on the sales front, any strategy changes or any strategy tips as far as your sales team, the people and the go-to-market?

Dean Beaver: Yeah, I mean, I think as far as the kind of the go-to-market, we actually have a verticalized a lot of our sales teams. So we have specialties. We actually have an enterprise sales team. We have a government, federal government sales team. And then we have a search motor sales team. So in the way you sell you to the customers are very different from each other, which is why having the verticalization allows us to do much better in each of those targets.

Jessica Ly: And then within each vertical, do you separate like enterprise and commercial? Do you do that tearing?

Dean Beaver: So yeah, with an enterprise? We definitely have we have some named accounts within there. But usually, if you're an enterprise rep, you're selling to enterprise customers. You’re not selling to the service provider or accounts. Internationally, we do have some hybrid roles, which kind of do a little bit of both because it's a smaller market. But in general, that's how we have it to generalize, you know, kind of verticalized to that point.

Jessica Ly: And how do you like to set up the career path or the motivation for sales to achieve quotas?

Dean Beaver: Very good. Yeah, we actually drive a weekly cadence that we're tracking each of the reps. They roll up to a number to their manager who rolls it up to their RVP rolls up the VP and each along the way, we have categories that we track that the opportunity and making sure that it's moving a pathway that we need to, we have a lot of motivational areas that we're taking, you know, our obviously our team is pretty common sales, you have a club trip, you have bonus programs, you have all kinds of different things that motivate them to do that. And then obviously, you know, their goal is to get to accelerators so that they can kind of really overachieve at that point.

Jessica Ly: Well, you know, how I hear sometimes you have to know what really motivates people and money is not always the case.

Dean Beaver: No, that's true. That's right. I think, you know, and salespeople, you know, obviously, money is is a driver for some of them, but I think a lot of it is they want the recognition, they want to go against their peers, they want to do better than their peers are doing.

Jessica Ly: Competition.

Dean Beaver: They like that competition, right? And they'd like to go to club and they, you know, able to bring their spouse along or significant other with them. So that, you know, this year we're gonna go to Ireland as an example. And so you know, these are places which a lot of places that people don't normally go to, for vacation. So that's why a club trip like that is always nice.

Jessica Ly: And where's the growth coming from? As far as like you mentioned, you manage the global team, but, you know, like, I know, data is growing security's growing encryption is growing, is that everywhere or certain regions?

Dean Beaver: That's a good question. You know, I in the service rider market specifically, it's growing very, very rapidly with 5g coming, probably in 2020 and 2021. All the big providers are actually, you know, investing a lot into 5g. And that's going to be a huge growth because 5g is not just your cellular phones anymore, it's going to be access to your home, internet and there's going to be you know, cable companies are going to have some challenges because now you're going to be competing with the likes of the big surf telcos out there because 5g is very fast to your home so if that's a transformational era that's happening, which is causing a lot of large investment by the telcos. The federal government is doing wonders for us as well. Enterprise spaces are a very solid business for us. But if you look at I guess if I look at where we're growing, it's in a lot of industries spider and federal government.

Jessica Ly: And that's global.

Dean Beaver: Right.

Jessica Ly: Yes. Okay. So what's the big challenge for you? Everything seems to be really nice, really, you know, great, but is there a major challenge that you want to overcome?

Dean Beaver: You know, I think if there's always you know, I mentioned 5g with 5g means that we have to always stay in front of what is coming in the new technology 5g has many different ways that you can design an architect their environment, and so we have to be able to solve 5g for all the different telcos and they may be different from each other. So there's really hasn't been a defined 5g that everyone's going to be doing it this way.

Jessica Ly: That’s the standard.

Dean Beaver: The standard, there's a lot of standards, and so and all of them are not following the same one. So I think that would definitely be the technology challenges that we have. We have. We’re definitely overcoming that. But that is always trying to see in front of how technology is shifting and changing.

Jessica Ly: All right. Well, I'm so glad to hear Gigamon is doing well. Thank you so much, Dean, for being on the show to share with us.

Dean Beaver: My pleasure.