Tech Sales is for Hustlers Podcast

Episode 78: Taylor Moore – Loyalty Will Get You Far

From a new skill to a new subject matter, you can learn almost anything on the job. Halfway through senior year of college, Taylor Moore decided to launch her career in tech sales at a company that invests heavily in training.

Now, Prisma Cloud Sales Specialist at Palo Alto Networks Taylor
recommends never allowing a lack of experience or knowledge to keep you from
taking on an untapped market. Connecting with people across your organization
can provide intel that allows for more effective prospecting in that market.

In this episode of Tech Sales is for Hustlers, Taylor talks
about the importance of interdepartmental collaboration, ways to differentiate
yourself, and the benefits of keeping a prospect talking.

Guest-At-A-Glance

Name: Taylor Moore

What she does: Taylor is a Prisma Cloud Sales Specialist at Palo Alto Networks.

Company: Palo Alto Networks

Noteworthy: Taylor used to work as a federal BDR, which was a highlight of her career.

Where to find Taylor: LinkedIn

Key Insights

⚡ If you want more meetings, embrace longer conversations. Taylor believes that SDRs and BDRs should go beyond scripts and recordings and try to have more meaningful conversations with their prospects. “Usually, you don’t talk to people — you get on and off. But we were talking for a while, […] and I think it provided better meetings in general. It led to happier clients. And when you have better meetings and happier clients, you get to stay on the account longer. So, longer conversations [are better].”

⚡ It’s important to have a diverse workforce. According to Taylor, having a diverse team can be highly beneficial for the company and its culture. “We have a diverse workforce — which everyone should have — because you need people from different areas to get different perspectives. If you have bodies that look and act exactly the same, then you’re not going to be successful with your company.”

⚡ Keep your options open. Taylor started her career before she even graduated, and this has helped her get more exciting opportunities and taught her how to keep her options open. “Keep your options open. I think I did a pretty good job of that. I have interviewed at many places over the course of my time. But, ultimately, I have not made a decision in five or six years on where I wanted to work. […] But, if you’re good at any job, you’re going to get compensated for it. If you work hard enough and show people that you can do things, good things happen.”

Episode Highlights

Moving to a New City Is Worth the Risk

“When you move to a new city, it’s worth the risk. Anytime you move through your first job, and you’re making a real salary for once, you have to accommodate buying less stuff. But I think anyone can do it. If you can do it in a place like this [Bay Area], you could do it anywhere in the US. So, it’s worth the risk of moving to a new place that’s a little more expensive if you think a long-term job is there for you.”

Being a BDR is Tough

“It was interesting to see a lot of other folks that get rejections because then we would know what we shouldn’t talk about in the next couple of calls, and to see other people working on similar accounts with similar industries that you could bounce ideas off. You learn how to be a BDR first, and then you learn the product set, which is an interesting way to learn how to do a job.

It is hard when you’re making calls, and I’m sure we did way more activity than the average BDR. Doing the hardest stuff here prepares you for doing mediocre stuff at other places. Could you imagine what BDRs at other companies could do if they were making a hundred calls? They just don’t. The fact is that it’s not very common.”

Being a Federal BDR vs. Commercial BDR

“Federal is an interesting position to be in. […] It is just such a different [role]. There’s different terminology. There’s different compliance. The sales cycle is way longer. So, the understanding of all those pieces is not like a normal sales cycle. You’re not selling to the same people. Sometimes they have to have things in place before you can even talk to them — regulations, etc.

I think that brought on an interesting perspective for somebody that only worked with other BDRs for commercial. So, I didn’t have a lot of people to lean on in the office. I had my sales rep and SE to lean on the most during that time to make sure that I was getting them the right meetings with the right people.”

The Renewal Job

“[The job entailed] renewing any existing customers. A big part of it was just renewal — you’re just talking to the customer three months before the renewal. But I think the field sales team would do most of the expanding while you’re talking about the renewal — they do all the upsell and such. But, as I worked in that role, I worked more on expansion, getting multi-year deals, and expanding customers. And during that time, I finally hit a year and a half in. I really liked renewals. I don’t have any problem with it, but I probably should think about the next step for myself and start planning because I don’t think they would’ve given me the role today or at that time.

With renewals, you’re doing so many deals in a quarter. So, you have a lot more exposure to problems and creative ways to quote customers. It’s very transactional. That’s a huge thing. I’ve seen many people who’ve had a lot of success selling to smaller customers and having ten deals closed in a month. You get so much more exposure than jumping to a role where you only sell two to three deals a month, and you don’t understand the product, the objections, and the problems that come up.”

We Sell to Large Companies

“We sell to San Francisco companies with anywhere from 5,000 employees to about 15,000 employees. We sell to the larger companies. They’re not startups; they’re not even beyond the startup phase. Most of them are public companies. So there are some big companies, big security teams, security folks, DevOps folks, SecOps, etc. We have a new sector this year — DevSecOps for anyone who touches security, cloud, and anything public- and cloud-related.”

When you Evolve in the Cloud, You Have to Evolve with Your Security

“With software sales and security sales, it is so competitive. There are so many people in the competition. We had a couple of competitors five years ago. Now we have 150 competitors. There are so many other people that sell a similar thing, not as robust as Palo Alto Networks’ products. But sometimes, the company just starting out needs a couple of checks. So, do they want to spend 100k on something, or are they willing to get breached by spending 10k or 15k at that time? When you evolve in the cloud, you have to evolve with your security, and people realize that. But I think it’s the nature of what I was selling, and it is not an easy transaction.”

Transcript: 

[00:00:51] Chris Corcoran: Taylor Moore In the house. Close to your old, where you used to 

[00:00:54] Taylor Moore: live. Yeah, I used to actually live two blocks away,

[00:00:57] so San Pedro’s definitely my spot stumping around at that period of time. 

[00:01:01] Marc Gonyea: Welcome back. It’s good, I’m glad you’re here too because we’re moving out of this office this weekend. 

[00:01:06] Taylor Moore: It will be sad, it’s sad to see everybody, everybody move, but hey, we have so many good years here. Yeah, for sure. To come back since, and it’s good, good stamping grounds that we can always remember. 

[00:01:18] Marc Gonyea: You were part of, like, a really good vintage, th, right?

[00:01:21] I mean, I want to say that about everybody, but, like, for Chris and I, when we opened the week of May, this is an open office in California, Michler decided he wanted to do it, it was a big deal, so it’s really special for us to come back and kind of catch up with you guys and see and track you from afar.

[00:01:36] And, we’ll, as we’ll talk about, you talk to some of the people who work at memoryBlue now, who you don’t even know, that they just reached out to you on LinkedIn, you take calls with them, which 

[00:01:43] Taylor Moore: is great. I think there’s, like, a special connection with people that did the same job as you and start at the same place right after college.

[00:01:50] Marc Gonyea: Great. All right. Definitely. Let’s get into it. Yeah. Before we get to that, though, let’s talk about you. Tell us, share with me, with Chris and people listening, who will listen, a little bit about yourself, like, where are you from, where’d you grow up. Talk about that a little bit. 

[00:02:03] Taylor Moore: So, I grew up in Southern California in Orange County,

[00:02:05] graduated high school, went up to Chico, went to college. 

[00:02:08] Marc Gonyea: Real quick. So, when you were growing up what were you kind of like? 

[00:02:12] Taylor Moore: Yeah, I did soccer my whole life, pretty much did every sport on the sun. What positions did you play? I did left, mid, but I was right-footed, but I had a pretty good left foot as well, so I’m doing right then, and after I quit soccer ’cause I had done it almost my entire life doing club,

[00:02:28] I did, like, basketball, I did softball ’cause I was trying to figure out all the other sports that I kind of missed out throughout. What was your favourite then? Well softball is a little bit near and dear to my heart ’cause I’ve been playing in an adult league with my company that I work for now, for three or four years now,

[00:02:43] so it’s kind of fun to do it when you’re a kid and then kind of transfer that over to an adult league where you have good relationships with people that work at your company. 

[00:02:51] Marc Gonyea: And, you got a little game too, which is nice. 

[00:02:55] Taylor Moore: But yeah, lots of sports growing up, lots of beach, swimming, everything under the sun when

[00:03:00] Southern California, the weather’s so nice there. 

[00:03:02] Marc Gonyea: So, everyone thinks about outcast, you live close to 

[00:03:05] Taylor Moore: the beach. Yeah. I only lived about a mile away, it wasn’t, like, the surf team, the middle school, so it’s a different lifestyle than it is here for 

[00:03:13] Marc Gonyea: sure. The team in the middle school. That is so cool. All right. Let’s learn new things now. Sibilings?

[00:03:20] Taylor Moore: Sister, a little older sister and yeah, she’s the complete opposite of me, so I’m the sports, athletic and she’s like the artistic, she’s went to culinary school so complete opposite of me, looks opposite of me too, she’s, like, five foot one and a curly dark hair, nothing like me, but hey, 

[00:03:41] Marc Gonyea: family. There you go.

[00:03:43] Did sales kind of protrude any point growing up? Yeah. 

[00:03:48] Taylor Moore: So, my dad did sales for a majority of his life, he actually, talk about me working for my company for 4 years, he worked at his company for 32 years, same company positions and such, and he did a lot of sales, when I was growing up he did, like, outside sales

[00:04:03] so he was basically on the East Coast most of the week, but that’s what I saw all day long. I kind of always had that dream of, like, working at a big building, that’s like the childhood thing that, like, thinking back on it now, but so going into, like, even college and thinking about college, I knew I wanted to do something in business and I was kind of trying to figure it out based on my skillset

[00:04:24] and I really, probably, hadn’t learned that yet in high school. So, but business and, like, sales was kind of always ingrained in me ’cause I saw him do it and he’s so much like me, where my mom is a lot like. Interesting. What was he selling? It was pool equipment, so I don’t know if you guys have heard of Polaris.

[00:04:41] Yeah, of course. Yeah, so they made one of, like, the first sprinkle bag, honestly, it’s one of the biggest pool cleaners in the business. But he worked on the sales team for 15, 20 years and then he met, was managing engineering teams that were building product sets and stuff. But 

[00:04:56] yeah. 

[00:04:57] Chris Corcoran: And so surfing, soccer, softball,

[00:05:01] what I didn’t hear is how did you get into the, a girl from Southern California get into skiing? 

[00:05:05] Taylor Moore: We actually went up to Tahoe every year. I had an aunt, uncle that lived in San Ramon Area so I spent a lot of time in San Francisco, and that was kind of another thing why I ended up there. That was something in my childhood that I loved.

[00:05:17] I love San Francisco and that’s where I wanted to end up eventually, but obviously after college I ended up here, but I ended up in San Francisco after that, after I got experience in, broaden my horizons. Worked your way up the state, I guess. Yeah, exactly. But, uh, yeah, I skied in Tahoe every single year, it was way better than skiing in Big Bear,

[00:05:36] Big Bear has no snow, so. 

[00:05:38] It’s 

[00:05:39] definitely a lot nicer, so. 

[00:05:41] Marc Gonyea: So, you’re in, so you’re in high school, right? And, you’re kind of playing sports, your dad’s in sales, so what’d you think you wanted to do going into college? Like, you, businesses sounded like, right? And, where’d you end up going? What’d you major in and what was going on 

[00:05:55] Taylor Moore: in college?

[00:05:55] Yeah, there was a couple things, like my dad and mom just had bought a house right when I was about to leave for college and they introduced me to, like, a loan officer so they were thinking like, “Oh, maybe you go, like, the finance route.” And, I actually started in finance, I did, I don’t know, four or five classes and I was like, “I don’t know if this is exactly.”

[00:06:13] Yeah, in undergrad. And, I think just as time went on, I realized, “Hey,” I mean, most people that end up in sales do marketing, and at that time they were actually just starting up a sales program and I don’t think it was fully functioning by the time that I left, maybe it was, but they were building a sales program

[00:06:30] so there was like a couple sales classes, which was, like, very new, I would say, to, like, the college life. I know it’s a lot more common now to have, like, sales classes and sales curriculums, and certificates and such, but at that time it just wasn’t as popular, but everyone that wanted to eventually do sales, did marketing

[00:06:47] ’cause there was a lot of synergy there, so. 

[00:06:50] Chris Corcoran: So, you used to start, you started marketing? And, re, read part of the sales program or was it? 

[00:06:54] Taylor Moore: No, I think maybe the first graduating class was at my time, but I know it was existing, I did do, like, two or three sales classes that were part of my marketing degree,

[00:07:05] but it’s like a full functioning sales program now and I know that a lot of companies are getting people from Chico 

[00:07:12] Chris Corcoran: doing the sales. Their program is amazing. Yeah. So, you were kind of like, early? 

[00:07:16] Taylor Moore: It would be nice to see, like, kind of how it’s functioning today, what it looks like. Yeah, so. 

[00:07:21] Marc Gonyea: She has been good to us.

[00:07:22] Yeah, very, very good. We’ve got a lot of good people from 

[00:07:25] Taylor Moore: there. Yeah. And, they have a lot of, like, business programs and business fraternities, like, at our time, I think we had two different general business fraternities and we had one sales business frate, fraternity while it was leading. Yes, I was at one of them,

[00:07:39] Phi Delta. There you go. Met a lot of good friends there. I think everyone kind of just had the same interests in college and wanted to go the same path, and it’s just something else on your resume that you can put when you graduate college that you learned more than the average person in the business program, so. 

[00:07:54] Marc Gonyea: Absolutely, for sure. Give a little more into it. Yeah. So. 

[00:07:58] Chris Corcoran: Were there are a lot of people from your high school in Southern California that went to Chico? 

[00:08:01] Taylor Moore: I think there was three people from my high school, so I didn’t know anybody, started brand new, probably the first year, I didn’t really meet much of anybody, in sophomore year

[00:08:11] it was, like, the first time I met, like, my group of friends and the people that I ended up hanging out with, I think for the rest of the time period, and then all my business fraternity people, they were really close to me throughout the entire process. 

[00:08:22] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Okay. Very good. And then, so when you graduated were you entertained

[00:08:27] different opportunities, one and then two, where you were trying to figure out where you wanted to live, like, where you, was your goal San Francisco or was it certainly Northern California, or? Talk to us a little bit about kind of what you were considering when you graduated from Chico?

[00:08:40] Yeah. 

[00:08:41] Taylor Moore: When I was thinking about jobs, it was all, like, sales, I would say mostly, like, BDR-type roles. We had a career fair, we still, I’m assuming it’s still very up and running, and 5k data, and I can’t remember what the other fraternity, but they had that kind of first dibs, there was a resume book that we actually, like, gave to you guys

[00:09:00] and that’s how I got to hear about memoryBlue. But, the career fair happened a couple of times a year and so that was, like, our key to, like, find a job at that career fair ’cause that’s going to be your best bet at finding a job before you graduate, and I actually, I think ended up signing with you guys almost, like, a whole year before I graduated.

[00:09:20] I remember that. So, that was like the key, I would say, to getting people early, before they graduate and then I think the student kind of feels some relief that they have something coming out, it makes you feel good that you have something coming out. But, they do onsite interviews at the career fair,

[00:09:37] they do other interviews where they take you to their offices, so I did, I don’t know, four or five interviews with other people but ultimately you guys gave me an offer first, I was going to do an interview in Seattle and I ended up canceling it because I signed with you guys, so. 

[00:09:51] Chris Corcoran: That’s great.

[00:09:52] So, thankfully for us. Yeah. So, I mean, just, you make my belief and then I believe that the highest potential SDRs are on college campuses and the highest or the best ones are those, are the ones that already signed with an employer when in the fall semester of their senior year earlier.

[00:10:10] Marc Gonyea: Got it. That’s so cool. This time you’re just, started that company thing, right? Like, I think everybody believes that. Okay. Yeah. No, no. In a good way. Like, that’s so huge. Yeah. Tracking you down. What were 

[00:10:23] Taylor Moore: you going to say? No, I was just saying that usually the people that know exactly what they’re doing will be the ones that sign early, which means they’re ready to work and they know exactly what they want, where the others are, sometimes they’re strangling after they graduated because they still don’t know what they want to do.

[00:10:38] Chris Corcoran: Or they’re disorganized, irresponsible, all those things. Taylor knew what she wanted and she was organized right. 

[00:10:45] Marc Gonyea: Way to go. And, but I saw it, when you were in college, you worked, did you work, you worked through college, right? 

[00:10:51] Taylor Moore: I worked on campus through events, I worked for the first year experience office and actually did an internship freshman year and ended up working there

[00:10:58] the whole rest of the time I was there. I started on specific events, like, you would be put on one event that tracked one department and then, as I worked up there, my senior year, me and one other guy, co-chaired, basically, the overlooking of all the events and making sure that all the teams were working with each other

[00:11:17] so I think that gave me some level of understanding of organization and then dealing with different teams, just like any sales job today where you’re dealing with marketing, you’re dealing with sales ops, you’re dealing with deal status. 

[00:11:31] Marc Gonyea: I have a question for you. Yep. We talked about this before we got started.

[00:11:35] My wife’s in sales, there aren’t that many women in sales. Yeah. And, there are a lot more women in marketing than sales and I run into whatever reason, I mean, not on campus as much as some of our folks are women who want to go into marketing and go into the event side specifically, yeah. 

[00:11:52] Taylor Moore: It’s a common path for sure.

[00:11:53] Yeah. It wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but it gave me a good exposure. But I see, like, generally women are more organized, I would say, so I would say events, like, you have a million things that you have to be doing at all times, especially on the event days, you’re working 12-hour days

[00:12:10] and you have to make sure everything’s going according to plan, I would assume that’s probably why more women kind of take that path, and then marketing too, like, women generally are more creative so they’re probably, that fits their lifestyle and skillset a little bit better, 

[00:12:25] Marc Gonyea: but. You need to be organized and creative in sales, maybe not as organized, but so, you sign up for a sales job, probably,

[00:12:33] maybe they express your dad being in sales a year, you know, almost a year, like you said, how could we have gotten some more of those women that, like, do what you did? Is there a 

[00:12:44] Taylor Moore: way, or? Yeah, I would say it’s, like, personality-based. You’re not going to get the women that are in Phi Delta data that don’t want to do the sales route,

[00:12:53] but I think what they did do a good job of at that time is they came in and talked to us at our meetings, and I know at the end of when I was leaving, it started getting repetitive of what they were talking about but there was nobody that was talking about a BDR role. It was like, the foster farms companies trying to get you to do, like, outside sales,

[00:13:12] so I would say that was, there was some interesting conversations where people would come in and talk to us about, like, what you would do on a daily basis, where you can get to so that people can see the types of roles that you could put yourself in. But, otherwise I would say most guys know they want to do sales because they just assume that they want to do that,

[00:13:33] but the women don’t think that same way. 

[00:13:36] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[00:13:36] Marc Gonyea: So, you signed up early. Yep. When did you start? 

[00:13:40] Taylor Moore: I started in July, I think, I ended up doing a month-long Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia trip with one of my friends. Actually, I was going to start, like, a week or two earlier with you guys, but I wouldn’t have enough time to, like, get back and get settled.

[00:13:54] We had to, like, move into our new apartment, we had no time, maybe a week and a half to get up here, move in, get settled and start working. So, talk 

[00:14:03] Chris Corcoran: a little bit about, we run into this a lot to this day, you grew up in Southern California, right? Went to college to Chico, and decided to move to a new city and not a inexpensive city?

[00:14:15] I mean, it may be inexpensive compared to San Francisco, but it’s probably one of the most expensive areas of the country. And, how did you decide to do that and what did you do to make sure that you would be able to kind of make rent and? 

[00:14:30] Taylor Moore: I mean, we looked at a few different apartments, we had it, we had a range of what we could afford

[00:14:34] and I think at that time we both had a little bit of money saved up morphing in college, um, or maybe our parents gave it, gave us some money, but I think when you move to a new city, it’s worth the risk of thinking that. Obviously, the first couple months were definitely dry, anytime you move through your first job and you’re making, like, a real salary for once, it’s definitely dry and you just kind of have to accommodate buying a little bit less stuff,

[00:15:03] and I think anyone can do it though. If you can do it in a place like this, there’s plenty of people that have come in this office, same position that I was, if you could do it here and you can do it anywhere in the US, so I would say any, any place you move to, it’s worth the risk of moving to a new place

[00:15:19] that’s a little bit more expensive if you think that long-term job is there for you, it’s down the road, which is what I’ve seen. 

[00:15:28] Chris Corcoran: So, we, you said we, so it wasn’t, you, you didn’t come into town and say, “I’m going to live by myself. I’m going to live in the nicest building in town.” You did it smartly,

[00:15:37] so talk a little bit about what you did and who you roomed 

[00:15:40] Taylor Moore: with. So, um, Brent was in the same business fraternity as I was. 

[00:15:45] Chris Corcoran: Brent Adams? Brent Adams. So, you met him, you met Brent at Chico, in your part of your business fraternity? I 

[00:15:51] Taylor Moore: did. We were good friends and I think he had told everyone, at the end of the year when you were about to graduate, you either say that who you were going to work for, the interviews you’ve had,

[00:16:01] and I think that kind of stires some sort of excitement that all these seniors are going off to do great things, and he had said that he did an interview with my memoryBlue and I talked to him after, I was like, “Did you end up getting the job?” He was like, “Oh, I haven’t heard back yet.” And, I said, “If you do get the job,

[00:16:16] and that’s where you want to go, do you want to be roommates?” He actually lived right across the street from me, my senior year as well, literally right across the street, so it was, I would say an easy transition. We didn’t know each other, like, we were friends, but we didn’t know each other that well, at that period of time, it was kind of, like, a leap of faith that, “Hey, you’re the only person I know that’s going to San Jose.

[00:16:37] I don’t know anyone else.” If I did it by myself it would be a lot harder. You’d have to find a random roommate which plenty of people did that worked at memoryBlue at that period of time, but it was kind of a fate thing for sure ’cause otherwise I don’t think we would’ve had as easy as the time. Kind of moving in and we got to walk to work,

[00:16:57] so that was just such a blessing because we didn’t have to deal with, like, parking, everyone else had to go park over by where we were living, so. 

[00:17:03] Marc Gonyea: And do, do you guys still work together? 

[00:17:07] Taylor Moore: Yeah, he still works at Palo Alto Networks. I actually got him the job at Palo Alto Networks and then I told him about the renewals job

[00:17:13] and so he’s there now. 

[00:17:15] Marc Gonyea: Spreading the love. Where does Brent live? 

[00:17:17] Taylor Moore: I don’t know if this is common knowledge, but he actually just moved to 

[00:17:19] Chris Corcoran: Louisville. That’s Sacramento, right? That’s his hometown where he grew up. That’s where he’s been wanting to go for quite 

[00:17:25] Taylor Moore: a while. But I think, back to that notion of you guys were saying like, are go, people gonna stay here in, like, an office environment,

[00:17:34] I mean, a lot of people are working remote now, our company in general, most people are going to be working remote forever, so this is the time where you can move to other places. 

[00:17:44] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. Great. 

[00:17:46] Marc Gonyea: So, what was it like when you started then? So, you start, so you knocked at all these things and you’re reinforcing the belief that these folks who take jobs early, right,

[00:17:54] or organized, know what they want to do, knocking out where she’s going to live, two blocks from the office, that’s stuff doesn’t happen by accident, right? It’s all well-planned and orchestrated with intent. What was it like when you got going because you had, you were gainfully employed and busy and undergrad, but you hadn’t done an SDR role, the sales,

[00:18:12] so 

[00:18:12] Taylor Moore: what was that like? Yeah. I mean, it, you guys made it certainly really easy, I think with the training and everyone that was here management-wise, when I started, I think it was an easy transition. Everything can be learned on the job, which is, like, proof after the hundreds of people that you guys have put through memoryBlue at this point and have done successful afterwards, you just have to lay a good foundation and teach people what to do

[00:18:37] right and then you’ll see the good ones kind of flourish on there. But, I mean, we had an interesting group in the office at the time, but it was a fun group and I think the majority of us are all still friends today which just proves a good culture. 

[00:18:53] Marc Gonyea: Definitely. Give us some names, drop some names off.

[00:18:56] Taylor Moore: Well, we just met each other in the hallway, Justin Henry. Justin Henry, that’s right. Did you guys graduate with each other at Chico? We did not, we were a couple of years different from each other, I think he was, he graduated a year or two before, but it was pretty funny connection. There was a couple other Chico-people too. Any people from the office, I mean, of course, Jeanne Ball, part of the management team, Mike Mishler, which I enjoyed working with for many years to come afterwards.

[00:19:22] Max Haar, he is one of our best friends today and he’s doing really well at his job. 

[00:19:30] But there’s, I mean, there was a million people in the office, Jonathan Adams.

[00:19:36] Marc Gonyea: Jonathan Adams. He’ll give us some credit, hopefully he’s healing up well, right? 

[00:19:41] Taylor Moore: Hopefully. Yeah. Now, in the next couple of weeks, he should be good, but yeah. And, of course, Joe Reeves is still here today. He’s probably one of my closest friends too, was a big mentor to me because he had started a little bit before I did, was a manager when I had left,

[00:19:57] so I still think of him as a, a great, like, peer, I would say, at the period of time that I worked here, but a great mentor and manager to many people for years to come. And, I’ve heard great things about all the people that have left here since that I, weren’t at the company when I was, but yeah. 

[00:20:13] Marc Gonyea: Well, you left your mark too,

[00:20:14] let’s talk about that. So, when you were an SDR, what was it like learning with all these people? Was it, what was learning the job like, learning to go the outbound route and those 

[00:20:23] Taylor Moore: things? Yeah, I think it was interesting to see a lot of other folks that get rejections because then we would know what we shouldn’t talk about,

[00:20:33] in the, in the next couple of calls, but to see other people working on similar accounts with similar industries that you could kind of bounce ideas off of, that’s a very unique thing than if someone just worked on one account forever. You learn how to be a BDR first, and then you learn the product set, which is an interesting way to learn how to do a job.

[00:20:56] Why is that? Go into that for us. I would say there’s just a lot of people that have started at the company I work at now that all they know is selling the type of security that we have, but I got to learn about so many different other companies and what they’re doing, and maybe other ways to sell to companies, I think, the different people that headed the different clients gave them tips

[00:21:18] and then it got brought back to us. I think it’s, uh, a way of learning collaboratively while you’re trying to get meetings that maybe an average person wouldn’t get if they just started at one job and were selling one product, they would be able to work probably with different teams like marketing and such, but they wouldn’t learn to be a BDR better,

[00:21:36] they would only be understanding the products that will work, so I think it’s an interesting way to start up and that’s why we kind of have a connection, when you talk to someone else that’s worked at memoryBlue because they had that same 

[00:21:48] Marc Gonyea: experience. Yeah. Yes. I mean, you’ve got such a positive take on it, but was it hard for you?

[00:21:54] Taylor Moore: Um, I mean, yeah, it was definitely hard, I think, when you’re making dials, and I’m sure we did way more activity than, than I think the average BDR at any of the companies I’ve ever worked at, every company you leave at after, though, you’re a gold star, but here, I mean, it’s a work ethic and I think doing the hardest stuff here, just prepares you for doing mediocre stuff at

[00:22:20] other places. If you can continue that momentum, I mean, could you imagine what BDRs at other companies could do if they were making a hundred dials? They just don’t, the fact is they just don’t, it’s not very common. And, when I worked at Evident after memoryBlue, I mean, we definitely made a lot of dials,

[00:22:38] I think Mike infused some memoryBlue tactics on us, but we didn’t have to make a hundred dials because we had one release and we had different, unique projects that the company was working on and other ways to get meetings other than just dials and emails. But, of course, at that time too, I think our systems were a little bit lower, not lower quality, but it was, like, the start of the calling world in what things that we had access to.

[00:23:05] Now, I feel like it’s a lot more automated, I’m sure it’s a lot different being a BDR than it was. 

[00:23:10] Marc Gonyea: All those call-avoidance tools that exist now? The Call Web? A-call-avoidance tools. Yeah, 

[00:23:15] Taylor Moore: a-call avoidance tools, and also, like, for a couple of weeks we’re doing a trial, I remember, at Palo Alto Networks, you were doing a trial of this automated tool where it would just keep dialing people,

[00:23:25] is it, those things didn’t exist when we first started, that’s for sure. It was a lot more manual of how we called, but we got it done and I’m sure the new techniques today, you just have to innovate with whatever you’re given at that time period and whenever you have that. 

[00:23:40] Chris Corcoran: So, when you first started, do you remember what, who, who was your manager and what client or clients were you supporting?

[00:23:46] Taylor Moore: Jenny was my manager when I first started, and who was my first client, oh, that’s a good question. I know my second client, Yroo, and then I worked on Evident.io and, Apcera, and I worked on it with Theron. Did you know him from high school? I did not. So, we actually are both from Orange County, and so we kind of had that in common,

[00:24:12] he lives, like, 25 minutes away at home, and so we knew a lot of the same things, a lot of, like, the same restaurants and places so instantly we had a good connection. We were, like, work wife and husband, kind of talked about that. But, yeah, no, it was a very, like, tiny team at the time. I think maybe James was on our team too,

[00:24:32] and then we ended up scrapping the smaller team and going into bigger teams after that, but yeah. It was a interesting start of the litter because I think there was, like, we were going through changes of people leaving, a lot of people were getting hired out, so. 

[00:24:47] Marc Gonyea: What was your signature move as an SDR?

[00:24:52] Taylor Moore: Oh man. Throwing this on me.

[00:24:55] Towards the end, I had a lot of good long conversations with people. In the beginning, it was not like that, I think over time, but when I worked on Evident and I was, I remember when I was trying to get the job with Mike, he was like, “Send me some recordings.” And, all of them were very long, like, usually you don’t talk to people, you get on, you get off the, like, we were talking for a while about, like,

[00:25:15] I feel like I just had a better understanding of Evident that I did any other products then so I could talk longer to customers, and I think it just provided better meetings in general. I know it’s good, but there’s a time to get on and off, but towards the end there was like 5, 10-minute-longer conversations to get a meeting

[00:25:31] and I think at that time it was rare, usually you get the meeting, get it scheduled and get off the call. 

[00:25:37] Marc Gonyea: Great point. Why do you think that’s important to be able to have those sorts of conversations? 

[00:25:42] Taylor Moore: Because I think it just leads to happier clients. When you have better meetings, happier clients, and you get to stay on the account longer

[00:25:50] they upsell or add more people, more heads. You don’t want to be on a client that you can’t get any meetings for it, or the meetings are crappy every time you’re doing them, so I think better longer conversations. 

[00:26:02] Marc Gonyea: What about from a skill-development standpoint though? At least in the beginning, I wasn’t doing that.

[00:26:06] So, what skill did you develop that you were able to extend those conversations? 

[00:26:10] Taylor Moore: Comfortability being on the phone? I think over the course you’re not going to be comfortable month one, unless you have some crazy personality, and I don’t think everyone’s kind of born with that, but {yeah} there’s skills over time that you learn, “Hey, you can say this and this to keep somebody on the phone a little bit longer, some phrases, some ideas,” like, there’s some “gotchas” too that you can say like, “Wait, what about this?”

[00:27:31] Marc Gonyea: No, it’s a good skill to be able to extend the conversation like, right, Chris? Was it qualification, discovery is, like, probably the most important skill to develop? 

[00:27:39] Taylor Moore: They’ll stay on the phone with you if they think that you’re going to provide value to them, so even if you listened to them you have to provide something back,

[00:27:47] so I think it’s a good give and take. And, like, they have so many things to do, what I’ve learned when I was a BDR at memoryBlue I certainly didn’t realize this, but people are so busy, especially security people, they don’t have time to sit on the phone with you so you have to be providing value or they’re not going to stay on the phone with you because why would 

[00:28:04] Chris Corcoran: they? So, how do you provide value?

[00:28:06] Taylor Moore: I think knowing the product set, listening but also knowing the product set beyond what is on a piece of paper that we learned at the very beginning. 

[00:28:16] Chris Corcoran: How’d you learn that? I 

[00:28:16] Taylor Moore: think, with Evident, for example, we had a lot more channel and we don’t always have this with every client, but we have a lot more channel to, like, the marketing team,

[00:28:24] like, the marketing lead came in and talked to four or five of us on the account when we first started and told us, like, everything that they’re trying to accomplish and why they’re a good fit in the market, and sometimes you don’t have that level of experience with somebody on that team, but I think it’s so valuable.

[00:28:42] You can read all day long about the things on the website, but if you get in a little bit farther to the organization, except that one person that’s heading the team for the client, it does help the SDRs in understanding why they’re calling and what will make them different. 

[00:28:59] Marc Gonyea: The Michaline Todd?

[00:29:01] Yeah. Yeah. She’s amazing. Yes. 

[00:29:04] Taylor Moore: Yeah. I worked for her, with her for a long time and we’ve kept in good context. 

[00:29:08] Marc Gonyea: Yeah. She keeps coming back to memoryBlue, thankfully. That’s good. Yeah, because of the work that you guys did initially, or actually because of Mark logic, but does it matter? Like, when you move on to someplace else, like, if she doesn’t continue to get to work with great people like you and the rest of that crew, she’s not going to keep coming back or stay in touch,

[00:29:24] Taylor Moore: right? It’s true, and people move jobs constantly, like, five years down the road I’m sure they came back years later, I mean, people don’t stay at the same job forever, the circumstances don’t stay fixed, the same forever and I think it’s good to have good friendlies everywhere. 

[00:29:42] Marc Gonyea: Absolutely. Definitely. That’s the whole model.

[00:29:46] That’s where we got to go find more tellemores, at Chico. 

[00:29:50] Chris Corcoran: Through your time here and kind of, you ultimately ended up getting hired out and how did that all happen? 

[00:29:56] Taylor Moore: Yeah, I wo, worked on a couple of different accounts, I really enjoyed them, one of them was, like, based in Canada, very different than any, any other account that anyone else worked on so

[00:30:08] it was a very interesting relationship, but I think we did well with them, with what we had and they ended up adding another head, so that was good success that didn’t happen very often back then that we added more heads to new accounts, so it was a good growth, I think. It did not. 

[00:30:25] Marc Gonyea: It did not. I just don’t know that

[00:30:27] ’cause you guys weren’t doing a 

[00:30:28] Taylor Moore: good job. It was, we were starting out. I think we hadn’t built, like, our skills and management, like, I was one of the first people here, there wasn’t enough momentum, I think, it takes time to build, like, a company even, for example, so I think it was by the time I left, I’m sure it was a lot more thriving

[00:30:45] than when I started because we had more success and we were learning from each other, but. 

[00:30:49] Marc Gonyea: I agree. I also think maybe sales development wasn’t as accepted as it is now, 

[00:30:54] even then. 

[00:30:55] Taylor Moore: It was five years ago. It’s a more common job, more common thing to be taught in schools, more common job to go out of college, so it’s act, natural career path

[00:31:05] Marc Gonyea: now. It’s a career 

[00:31:05] paths now, right? It’s a function in, like, you’re kind of crazy if you can get more people, like, the memoryBlue people on the phone, why would you not want more of them, like, if it’s going the right way. So, you run a campaign, you added back 

[00:31:17] Chris Corcoran: to the ad time? 

[00:31:18] Taylor Moore: Yep. And then I think they dropped off and then we started Evident, and at that point I don’t, I don’t even know if there was any time-lapse between those things, but there was quite a few heads of us on the Evident account,

[00:31:28] I think ultimately they had the discussion with us, like, “If you do well, we’ll hire you,” and then during that time period, Mike moved from here to there and then it was really, like, having to prove yourself, like, it was all numbers, Mike is a numbers guy, “How many meetings have you had? How many discussions have you had?

[00:31:46] How many things has that led to?” So, it was all based on that for me, he asked me about, as I was saying, recordings, he knew me more than any of the other people on the account. I think me and Kayla were probably there at the same time he was. Kayla, that’s right. But yeah, I think at that period of time, they had just started hiring a few new people and yeah, it all happened really fast,

[00:32:13] and I basically told Mike, “I’m the right person for this. You shouldn’t hire some of the newer people. They haven’t had as much time at memoryBlue.” Yeah, and I had a very unique position, I was put on government, actually, for Evident. They gave me some government leads and they said “Go after government and fed,” which nobody in the office knew anything about.

[00:32:35] So, it was a lot of, like, me talking to the rep about, like, the terminology and all that kind of stuff, and so that actually, I think, gave me probably one of the uniquest opportunities to move over to Evident because I was doing something no one else was, and they really needed a federal BDR at that time because they had a federal sales rep and a federal SC and they really needed a BDR.

[00:32:54] They had no pipeline, so I think that was kind of an interesting position that I, it was, I didn’t plan it that way, but it ended up being a really good position to be in because yeah. 

[00:33:06] Marc Gonyea: So, you’re doing your thing, have been, uh, doing well in the role, growing your skillset, where did you kind of think, or did you start to think about what you wanted to do before these things kind of happened?

[00:33:17] Like, did you think, “I like this, I want to go with this call closing,” or did you think about, unfortunately at the time we didn’t have the opportunities internally that we have now, where we would have done everything we could to try and keep your stay here longer, but, like, where did you kind of see it going as you were developing?

[00:33:29] ‘Cause you were, like, an SDR for about a year. 

[00:33:31] Taylor Moore: Yeah, I think we, at that time, all you knew was BDR to AE. Yeah. Don’t think there was any career paths that we had any visibility into, but I think at the time that we ended up moving or I ended up moving from memoryBlue to Evident, there was basically AEs in the office and there was BDRs in the office,

[00:33:50] so you saw kind of, like, if you did well, you would end up there. There wasn’t a clear path at that time, they just had gotten a new office, there was a lot of new folks on the team, so for the company itself, it was really starting out the sales leg. There was really not very many sales reps before I started,

[00:34:08] but I think that was just, like, our next path, even if we didn’t really know how we were going to get there, and I think over the course of that year, you learn more about or at least I learned more about, like, what you would need to do to get there and what kind of skills you would need to have,

[00:34:24] and what kind of meetings do you need to put up so that they can pay attention to you. And then over that course of the time we were at Evident, we started out on pretty much anything, I think it was just, like, outbound, inbound, whatever was there and then they just took the people that knew a little bit more.

[00:34:39] I’d been at the BDR role a little bit longer to complete the outbound, and then they took the people that were newer and completely inbound because we were building out our sales leg and trying to fine tune how we were going to get more meetings as a company and as a team. 

[00:34:53] Marc Gonyea: So, you went to Evident.

[00:34:54] Yep. And, where did you want to go from there, from that role? 

[00:34:58] Taylor Moore: I think, I mean, that was, like, a first understanding of a company that didn’t, everyone didn’t do the same thing because at that time everyone did the same thing that we work on, so we had no experience with, like, marketing. We had, like, yeah, we sat down with Michaline one time but

[00:35:14] we realized what other people did in an organization, it sounds so silly, like, you don’t know what marketing does and you don’t know what these other roles do, but you really didn’t know until you were in the office, like, talking to the CEO because he would hang out in the office quite a bit, but I think that gave you, like, experience the first time you realized there was other teams that you should be working with in an organization to learn more about the product and why we’re selling it.

[00:35:39] Marc Gonyea: That’s what she did. Yeah. Yeah. And then you moved into another role. Talk about that. 

[00:35:44] Taylor Moore: Yeah, we went to outbound and that was honestly pretty similar in time period to when we got acquired, we moved to an outbound role for, I think, a few months, and then it was completely out of the blue. Our CEO told us we would never sell

[00:35:59] but apparently there was kind of bare problems that they needed to build the product in a different way and they needed the money to do so, so we weren’t going to, to stay in off of the company that we were and what the products had, that we had, so we kind of needed to get acquired or something needed to happen.

[00:36:15] So, we ended up getting acquired, everyone was shocked, we actually needed, like, a day or two before someone was a little sneaky and found out, but otherwise it was all a shock. We didn’t know what was going to happen, even though I knew what was going to happen, I didn’t know what was going to happen to all the employees,

[00:36:30] it was a very interesting experience that day, the fire alarm went off, we ended up all outside and, yeah, it, people got let go during that fiasco. So, it was a very interesting day and they basically were like, ” You guys work for Palo Alto Networks now,” but we didn’t have any details other than that

[00:36:47] and the other people got let go, so. 

[00:36:51] Chris Corcoran: Wow. I just want to be sure I understand that, the journey. So, when you were at memoryBlue for Evident.io, they put you on 

[00:36:56] Taylor Moore: federal? Yep. And, I was on federal for

[00:36:59] almost the whole entire time, I would say 78 months, and then, ’cause I worked there a year, and then the last few months, I think it was, I took over DC and Virginia as well because it made sense in that 

[00:37:11] Chris Corcoran: patch. I see. So, you had federal and commercial in kind of the DC Area? And, what’d you like more, commercial or federal?

[00:37:17] Taylor Moore: I think federal is an interesting position to be in. A lot of people have kind of asked me that as well, but I actually interviewed at other places in the future, I was interviewing for, like, an ISR role and they actually asked me a bunch of things on how I was successful in a BDR role in federal because federal is just such a different, like, there’s different,

[00:37:35] like I said, different terminology, there’s different compliance, the sales cycle is way longer, so the understanding of all those pieces, it’s not like a normal sales cycle, you’re not selling to the same people, sometimes they have to have, like, things in place before you can even talk to them, regulation,

[00:37:52] so I think that brought on an interesting perspective for somebody that only worked with other BDRs for commercial. So, I didn’t have a lot of people to lean on in the office, I actually had my sales rep and SE probably to lean on the most during that period of time to make sure that I was getting them the right meetings with the right people.

[00:38:14] Chris Corcoran: And so you, what’s 

[00:38:15] Taylor Moore: your preference? I would say here it makes more sense to be commercial. 

[00:38:18] Chris Corcoran: Meaning if you live in the Bay Area? 

[00:38:22] Taylor Moore: Bay Area, there’s just not federal state-level very much, of course there is, but it’s smaller than it is in, like, Virginia and DC and so I think that’s kind of great that you guys are capitalizing on that, in that office.

[00:38:36] But, if someone actually gave me the advice, I went on a trip to the AWS GovCloud conference in DC and one of the sales reps that only worked on, I think he had one of the federal departments, he said, “If you,” ’cause I was kind of toying with him, like, “Do I want to kind of take a role with that more federal?”

[00:38:57] Because they had, at Palo Alto Networks they’ve learned that I did that at Evident, so then they got wind of that and they were like, “Oh, you know so much about it.” But he said, “If you want to stay in this forever, this is what you should do, but if you don’t want to stay in it forever and you want to capitalize on Bay Area, like tech, then you might not want to do it because you might actually have to move here

[00:39:15] long-term, if you want to be a field rep.” So, that was a good word of advice, something I didn’t really think about, 

[00:39:21] Chris Corcoran: but. These companies that they, if they know that federal, they find it irresistible. They do. They, how did you kind of unwind from federal? It was, you were doing federal and then partially commercial in the DC Metro Area,

[00:39:34] and then the company got acquired? 

[00:39:35] Taylor Moore: Yeah. And, I think pretty much everything changed after that. I don’t even know if we kept our team’s same territories, I can’t even remember off the top of my head, but everything changed, it was a Wild, Wild West. We were put next to a bunch of other BDRs that were selling firewalls and they thought their virtual firewall was cloud, a cloud product, which is the complete opposite of what reality is,

[00:39:59] but it’s just the starting of a company that was trying to convert to cloud and everyone else was selling legacy products and they were kind of trying to pigeon hole us in a group that sold the way that they sold, I think the traditional way of selling firewalls is very different from cloud-based software solutions. And, way in, uh, our team came in, Mike came in, we really made a bang,

[00:40:23] it was a very interesting process, they were kind of shocked by our activity. ‘Cause you guys were working? Yeah, I mean, their team look a little bit. 

[00:40:30] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. We don’t want to talk about this acquisition, right? This was scary times, like, you got, no one knew what happened, lots of people got let go. You were told, “Now you work at Palo Alto,” and then kind of walk us through what happened,

[00:40:42] and I want to hear about kind of when you all show up there and you start working and shining the light on them. 

[00:40:48] Taylor Moore: Yeah. I had already moved to San Francisco, so they were like, “Even though it’s called Palo Alto Networks, it’s essentially in Santa Clara, you’re going to have to drive down there.” And, of course, there’s people that live in Berkeley,

[00:40:57] there’s people who live in San Francisco, there’s people that live all over the place, Pleasanton, which are going to have to make more than our long needs, so I think there was a lot of turmoil in the beginning, I think where you see the mass exodus of people, there’s sure a mass exodus of people, but there was quite a few of us, I think like 80 of us came over,

[00:41:17] so, of course, on different teams, but the majority of, I think our entire team stayed for more than a year after. I’ve always really liked Mike, I’ve respected him, he’s a man of few words, but everything he says is insightful and will help you with whatever you need help with, and that’s the kind of manager that I like.

[00:41:35] I don’t like people standing over my shoulder, looking at my every move, and I think everyone else kind of felt that same way too, even though we had to drive ridiculously far during that period of time, I think we had a good transition, but I would relay that to the manager that we had because I think he shielded us from a lot of the other things that were going on around us

[00:41:55] that could have been huge distractions. He was like, “Focus on your job, focus on what you’re doing, and we can’t say that we’re completely safe, but if you do a good job they’ll keep you.” So, I think that’s kind of what was installed from the beginning, and I think over time they respected us a little bit more because it’s hard with acquisitions,

[00:42:14] like, there’s people that think you’re going to get fired and there was people that told us that we were going to get let go because the last acquisition that happened and let everybody go, so it was negative energy, but it was, I think in the end we ended up kind of coming up on top and being fine. But that happens with any company,

[00:42:31] I think, when there’s duplicates of specific roles, they have to let people go if they don’t see that value in people, so. 

[00:42:39] Chris Corcoran: And 

[00:42:39] so you guys, when you, 

[00:42:40] talk a little bit about or tell the story of when you came into the office and kind of. Yeah. You sat with people, be with kind of, like, the existing Palo Alto SDRs versus the,

[00:42:50] Taylor Moore: like mr. Nimmit. Yeah. We had a very interesting diverse team of half women, half men, which when we walked into the office there was one other girl on our floor so it was quite a shocker for us. I think at Evident we had a really good mix of women and men, it was very, like, formal, I think it was like that here too

[00:43:11] so there was, for me, I didn’t think anything of it, I think at that time, but when we got in there and it was a little bit of a shock, there was a lot of nails and I think the whole floor really was, um, sales, so at that time there really wasn’t very women in sales and that was pretty clear. I think over time we definitely saw a shift,

[00:43:32] I think we kind of made a little bit of a bang with how many women we had, people of different backgrounds, but now, today, the company is completely different four years later. We have a great diverse workforce, which is everything that everyone should have because you need people from different areas to get different perspectives,

[00:43:51] if you have all the same bodies that look exactly the same and act exactly the same, then you’re not going to be successful with your company. And, they were in hyper-growth mode and still are in hyper-growth mode, so it was important that they kind of got with the times, which they definitely did over time.

[00:44:06] Marc Gonyea: So, you went to this renewal job? Tell us about that. 

[00:44:08] Taylor Moore: Yes. Yeah. So, I was on my BDR team and then they were, finally decided that it was a good idea to take us from, like, the general group of BDRs and actually make a cloud team, so the company was trying to make the shift to cloud and was figuring out that selling cloud was a little bit different,

[00:44:26] so we moved to this cloud team and then we realized, “Okay, so if we’re going to be a full-functioning, almost startup within a large company, then we needed everything full-functioning.” We needed a BDR team and we needed, like, renewals and the inside sales, we needed all these things that we hadn’t had.

[00:44:42] We basically had field sales and BDRs, so with that, I think, Mike was tasked with figuring out a renewals team, there was a couple inside sales folks and AEs that were working on smaller accounts, that they could have used. I think over that period of time, I had a friend, actually, from high school that worked at Palo Alto Networks more on the core side,

[00:45:07] so he sold all Palo Alto Networks products, but he worked on the renewals team and I thought it would be interesting to introduce Mike to him and kind of have them talk about what he needed to accomplish. Mike was going to kind of have a combo team of, like, a BDR renewals team, but we didn’t really know how it was gonna pan out,

[00:45:22] I didn’t know how many people he was going to hire, I assumed that all the people from the inside sales team, AE team were going to kind of the old into that renewals team, and we had a good conversation and within, like, the next week, I think, he kind of had everything figured out and then he offered me the job,

[00:45:37] so I think it was a easy, interesting transition. I didn’t think it was going to pan out like that. Mike has a big poker face, so you never know what’s going to happen next, but, I mean, I was hopeful that like, “Hey, I’m giving you this information, we’re working on this together. I want to be on another team.”

[00:45:53] He knew that I wanted to be on another team other than BDR. I was looking inside the organization but on different teams, trying to find another role that I could fit into, and so he knew that I was doing that and I talked to him about it quite a lot so I think it just made sense as the next position.

[00:46:10] So, we had pre-sales, now we have to figure out post-sales. 

[00:46:14] Marc Gonyea: What did that job 

[00:46:14] Taylor Moore: entail? Basically renewing any customers that were existing, I think a big part of it that started, it was just renewal, you’re just talking to the customer three months before the renewal. But I think as the course of the time that I worked on the accounts, usually the field sales team would do most of the expanding while you’re talking about the renewal,

[00:46:33] they do all the upsell and such. But I think as the time I worked in that role, I worked more and more on expansion and getting multi-year deals and expanding customers, and I think during that time period I finally hit, like, a year, year and a half in and so that was, like, the time period where I was like, “Okay, I can say this renewals roll forever.

[00:46:56] I really like renewals, I don’t have any problem with it, but I probably should think about, like, the next step for myself and start planning,” because I don’t think they would’ve given me the role today or at that time but I wanted to, like, think six months, a year out, because you should kind of be socializing that with other people.

[00:47:15] I talked to the VP of sales at the time about, like, what would be a good transition to, like, kind of get to field eventually, and he had said, “Hey, maybe, maybe you should take on one of these inside sales roles” ’cause we had a couple of people from another acquisition after us that was kind of feeded into our team that could have been a good transition for me,

[00:47:36] “Now I know post-sales, let’s go back to pre-sales but learn farther up the process,” and I think, like, six, eight months later, after I had been working on more expansions, they actually got rid of a bunch of my sales reps that I was attached to or they left, and so there was no sales reps that were attached to any of my renewals

[00:47:55] so I was basically doing the renewals by myself and expanding the customers by myself, and I think after 3, 4, 5 of those that were coming in a couple hundred grand, um, they were like, “Well, no one’s helping Taylor. She’s already doing it. This might be a good transition for her.” 

[00:48:09] Marc Gonyea: That’s nice that you took advantage of the opportunity, a little chaos, right?

[00:48:13] And capitalize 

[00:48:14] Chris Corcoran: on the chaos. On these larger, larger firms. Do the job before you have the job. Yes. Right? So, you were, you were talking about how you, you were doing renewals from, your territory was in the Central 

[00:48:23] Taylor Moore: region? Yes. So, the first year I did Central, there was me and one other girl and then we hired someone as well,

[00:48:29] so we took three parts of the US, and I was in Central for a little over a year, I love the Central team, but during that period of time, when I was thinking about field sales, I was like, “Okay, well, eventually I’m going to have to get back to the Bay Area if I want to be field sales because I need to have some experience with Bay Area and I want to go onsite to customers.

[00:48:49] So, like, at the end of my removals mole, I moved to Bay Area and then we actually went on site to a couple of customers, like, I went with the sales rep and with one of our customer success managers, so that was, like, another kind of goal. I was like, “What are all the things that field salespeople do? They go onsite with customers and they have the patch that they live in and they do expansions.

[00:49:12] The only thing I’m not doing is selling that new.” Like, if you start doing all the things that already entail on the role, then you can kind of get to the role and show that you can actually do it because I think oftentimes when you’re a BDR, it’s hard to, like, how do you sell a deal and show someone that you can sell a deal? Go to inside sales.

[00:49:30] There’s definitely ways to do it in tricky ways, but I think at that period of time, I was trying to be creative with like, “Let me show these people my skillset. If they don’t, like, want to put me in field sales right now, I’ll just show them my skillset and then hopefully down the line they’ll agree that it’s the right decision 

[00:49:46] Chris Corcoran: for me to go into.”

[00:49:47] So, you were in renewals in the Bay Area, started showcasing your abilities, and then how, how did it ultimately turn into a field sales role? 

[00:49:54] Taylor Moore: Yeah. I worked with all the Bay Area customers and at the end of every year for us, which is July, they re-evaluate, they have new positions available and usually they have a position or two available,

[00:50:08] and so we were coming up to that period of time, I think it was, like, June, July-ish, and I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but, like, on the last day of the quarter my current manager actually called me and told me that I got the field position. 

[00:50:21] Chris Corcoran: Nice. So, you’re not interviewing? No. You’re auditioning.

[00:50:25] Taylor Moore: Yeah, essentially. I think ultimately I stepped into the role knowing every single one of the existing customers and boy, did it help because if they were like, “Okay, well she needs help with selling net new, that’s something that she hasn’t done before, but she has all these current customers and most of our, at that time, most of our money

[00:50:45] and most of our deals actually came from expansion.” Right. So, if I had already been working with those customers and I have faced with them, I could do half of the job already. Right. Off the bat. And, that’s what happened. I mean, there really wasn’t a period of time where I needed to learn much except the first pitch.

[00:51:03] Yeah. Because most of it, I knew all the licensing, I knew the systems, I knew how to quote already, I’m quoting really at a higher capacity than these sales reps ’cause they, they sell big deals but don’t sell that many of them, but renewals, you’re doing so many deals in a quarter so you have a lot more exposure to problems and creative ways to quote out customers. It’s the transactional nature.

[00:51:26] It’s very transactional. It helps you, right? That’s a huge thing. That’s a huge thing for any people that I’ve seen, that I’ve done a lot of success, like, selling to smaller customers and having 10 deals closed in a month, you get so much more exposure than jumping to a role that you only sell 2 to 3 deals a month and you just don’t understand the product and the objections and the problems that come up, like you do

[00:51:50] if you are in a transactional role like renewals, and that’s why I’ve always suggested it to people. Like, I loved the transition of that and that’s why I suggested it, but it was such an easy transition for me. I really loved that team, the manager was amazing, after Mike had left they hired a new person,

[00:52:07] she was amazing and she really knew her stuff and that whole team was super helpful cross the board, so it was a good team to be a part of, if something. I didn’t know if I was gonna leave or not, but I think it was good because I still work with them today, just in a different capacity. So, talk 

[00:52:23] Chris Corcoran: a little bit about why you’ve stayed.

[00:52:25] Like, there’s been so many reasons or opportunities for you to leave from, you got acquired and everything’s changing and now you’re doing, you started in federal, then you did DC Metro, now you’re doing Central, now you do Bay Area, all these changes. And, 

[00:52:38] Marc Gonyea: yeah, I am sorry. And, you’re living here, you got colleagues, used to work with them at memoryBlue, college work at the Evident, in Palo Alto, who were leaving and kind of hop stooping around.

[00:52:48] Companies are good raising money, giving you a call and you’re linked in with, you know, tantalizing promises of riches and equity. 

[00:52:55] Taylor Moore: Yeah. Definitely. I think it’s all about the opportunity that you have. Not everyone at the company had opportunity and that’s why a lot of people left, they were at different parts in their, points in their life,

[00:53:07] they’ve had different jobs, um, but I had a great team, I had a great manager, I thought I was getting compensated pretty well and that’s why I say, I mean, if there’s nothing glaringly wrong, you shouldn’t leave, but I think a lot of people, like, get into a position where they’re hitting 20% of their number and they have to leave or they hate their manager and their manager

[00:53:30] doesn’t give them the kind of flexibility that they need, so I think I’ve just been lucky with a good culture and good people around me to make me want to stay because that’s all we really want is people that you, like, you work for that you like. That doesn’t always happen, I know that it pops up, I think people could be given terrible situations time and time again

[00:53:54] and that’s why people hop or they try to get more money. Some people leave companies because they’re not getting compensated the right way and they leave and maybe come back later with a higher role, I mean, a lot of people do that as well. It’s just for me personally, I just, it was the smartest thing for me to stay because I saw the upward trajectory

[00:54:14] and I think even in this role, I mean, this is a role that everyone on my team is a lot older than I am, so they’re going to be in this role for maybe 10, 20, 30 years, I mean, that’s literally the team that I work with in the Bay Area, there’s a lot of them that have been with the company for 8, 10, 12 years. 

[00:54:32] Marc Gonyea: So, tell us about that,

[00:54:32] break it down for people who are listening, so what types of companies, what size companies are you selling to now? Who’s the persona that you sell to? 

[00:54:40] Taylor Moore: It’s a named accounts in the Bay Area, so mostly San Francisco, but definitely has some in San Jose and other areas, but anywhere from 5,000 employees, I would say, generally, to about 15,000 employees, but there are some wild cards out there that are in my patch that are huge,

[00:54:59] but I would say the larger companies. I mean, they’re not startups, they’re not even beyond the startup phase, they’re in, most of them are public companies, so there’s some big companies, big t, big security teams, personas that we go after, security folks, DevOps folks, SecOps. We have, like, a new sector that’s pretty recent this year, like DevSecOps,

[00:55:23] so anyone that touches security and cloud, anything public-cloud related. I mean, there are so many people that work with our products that now because we’ve expanded our product set so much. When Evident was going on, we sold to, like, one or two personas, we had one value set or one thing that we would help customers with,

[00:55:45] but it’s just not like that today. We have a platform and there’s many more platforms that Palo Alto Networks sells, but it is, it’s huge, I mean, there’s just so many people to go after, and there’s also so many people to sell to that can help all the teams come together to solve the same issues, so it’s an interesting time to be at security, for sure.

[00:56:08] Marc Gonyea: memoryBlue SDRs, you know what they don’t like? Guess, guess what they don’t like? 

[00:56:13] Chris Corcoran: Think. 

[00:56:13] Taylor Moore: Security? Yeah. Really? Yeah. Security’s, like, one of the fastest-growing industries with the most jobs right now. 

[00:56:19] Marc Gonyea: I guess why they don’t like it. Right. What about it going outbound? 

[00:56:23] Taylor Moore: Is it hard to get a hold of people? It’s hard to

[00:56:25] Chris Corcoran: get a hold of people. I can see that. 

[00:56:27] Marc Gonyea: You know, people work hard here.

[00:56:29] We work hard here, but they, like, cyber, cyber campaign that’ll pick up, the hard to get ahold of, they’re really quick with their time. It’s so interesting. Right? Well, you know what we tell them? It’s better for them to hear it from you, which is why, 

[00:56:44] Chris Corcoran: why. What would you say to that person? What would you say to that person, that the Taylor Moore, SDR? 

[00:56:50] Taylor Moore: Do you want to challenge?

[00:56:50] I mean, security, like, when I started at Evident it was, like, we had to educate people on why it was important, now with our product set, like, there’s people that are putting budget away for it, it’s a legitimate area of a need for customers. Gardner, literally, after we made this product, now they’re, telling us what it’s called,

[00:57:13] so it was kind of a little backwards, we built the product and now they’re telling us what the value set is called, so I would say, like, security now is nowhere near what it will be in 10 years. We, since I’ve been working on this product, there’s more and more companies moving to the cloud. It is so crucial that companies get with the times and move to the cloud because they’re going to be left behind if not.

[00:57:37] And, at the time when I first started, it was like companies, big companies that were cloud first, we’re just starting to get to the cloud, but there are still companies that are, like, construction companies that are just moving to the cloud, so the opportunity that I saw five years ago is still as just starting with other companies.

[00:57:52] So, your expertise in security is so valuable, there’s going to be 5 times as many jobs 10 years from now than there is today, especially with cloud security. It’s an industry. You don’t, you don’t want to be on the account because it’s easy. I think that opportunity I didn’t even know I had at that time is so much greater than what I expected. It is going to be an insane industry.

[00:58:17] Think about the breaches that happened six, six years ago, nowhere near what it’s like today. It’s, like, everything in the news is security breaches, security breaches, and that’s with the products. 

[00:58:28] Marc Gonyea: Yep. Yeah. We need to get you in the office here in DC, if you’re ever in DC again, in tower here because people, you know, it’s hard when you’re an SDR and you’re starting off and you’re frightened,

[00:58:38] get people 

[00:58:38] on the phone to get blown off and someone may be selling something it might be a little easier to get someone on 

[00:58:42] Taylor Moore: the phone with. And, maybe you just need some new techniques, maybe calling isn’t the way. I mean, you need to think different, differently. It doesn’t, just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s not accomplishable.

[00:58:55] Right. 

[00:58:56] Marc Gonyea: I also think too, like, you’ve given me some perspective, but I grew up in legacy technology where renewals was just kind of, send that stuff 

[00:59:02] over, getting people to sign 

[00:59:04] stuff, and the technology, it’s not like that, and technology is changing so 

[00:59:08] quickly, right? That 

[00:59:10] if you’re renewing, renewing things, trying to sell more, like, you have more things to talk about with them.

[00:59:15] I mean, you know what’s going on because of the competition is fierce, right? So, 

[00:59:19] there’s other people coming for that Palo Alto edited budget, but you’ve learned so much being in that role, let’s take advantage of the opportunity, but renewals used to be this like, “Give this to somebody.” 

[00:59:28] Taylor Moore: Yeah. Legacy and legacy products are like that.

[00:59:31] It’s like that on the core side for firewalls, they’re working with partners, they’re not really working with customers that much, and so when we were building the team out, it was like, we had heard, “Oh, you’re just going to be talking to partners,” but there’s no partners in cloud, like, there are some now, but it was not a thing back then.

[00:59:48] We didn’t have people helping with the sales cycle on the partner side and it’s definitely advanced since then, but the role that I was in it was you’re getting on the call with the customer, you’re understanding what the problems are, oftentimes they hadn’t been communicated with for awhile, you’re making sure you talked to them months in advance

[01:00:06] so if there’s an issues you solve them before the renewal, you’re the one quoting it, you’re the one talking to them about, once you quote it out then you talk to them again and then you negotiate with them. It is a lot more than traditional renewals and there’s still renewals rules today that are like that,

[01:00:24] but with software sales, it is so competitive and security sales is so competitive. Peop, there’s so many people in competition, I mean, we had, like, a couple of competitors five years ago, now we have, like, 150 competitors, so there’s so many other people that sell this similar thing, not as robust as Palo Alto Networks, product set will say that, but sometimes company just starting out just needs a couple of checks

[01:00:50] so do they want to spend a hundred grand on something or are they willing to get breached by spending 10, 15K at that time? And, I think when you evolve in the cloud, you have to evolve with your security and people realize that, but it’s, I think it’s the nature of what I was selling and it’s not an easy transaction. People don’t say, “Okay, I want to renew with this many credits,” and you give them the quote and they’re fine with it,

[01:01:17] and they send it to procurement and they do the transaction. It just never happens like that. 

[01:01:22] Chris Corcoran: Interesting. Very interesting. So, looking back to the night before you started as an SDR, what advice would you give yourself now? 

[01:01:32] Taylor Moore: I would say keep your options open. I think I did a pretty good job of that. I had interviewed at many, many, many places over the course of my time, during jobs, in between jobs, internally at the companies I was at,

[01:01:47] but ultimately I have not made a decision in five or six years on where I wanted to work, which is a very rare thing. I think a lot of people have to make decisions to leave very often, but I would say, like, keep your options open because I think there was a lot of times where I was like, “I’m stuck here.

[01:02:05] Where do I go? Should I stick it out?” but I think constantly intervening places, even if you don’t think that you’re going to leave, is really valuable. But, something to tell myself, I mean, if you do good at any job, you’re going to get compensated for it, and if you work hard enough and you show people that you can do things, 

[01:02:27] Chris Corcoran: it’s a natural. Good things happen.

[01:02:29] Good things happen. One other thing. So, how do we get more women in tech sales in particular? You kind of 

[01:02:36] Marc Gonyea: hit on it, but like. 

[01:02:37] Taylor Moore: So, one thing is interesting about Chico’s, there’s actually more women than men at Chico in general, so I would assume that cool is very high, and I think in a lot of state colleges that are actually proven that there’s more women than men and you see there’s more men than women,

[01:02:54] but I would say if you get it at the college level, you get colleges that are mostly women because they’re going to feel comfortable with going into positions that have good programs. I think, in general, there isn’t that many women that are raising their hand to do this job. So, what Mike used to do in interviews is he would send me, there wasn’t always a lot of women on our team, but if someone interviewing is seeing women, then they think that that’s the majority. It’s not, like, it was a facade or anything. I knew, I knew, I mean, I did hundreds of interviews for him over the course of being a BDR in renewals that if you send in a woman they’re going to expect that there’s women that are working at the job. Seeing is believing. 

[01:03:47] Marc Gonyea: Seeing is believing.

[01:03:48] Like, you can see yourself in the role, you see others like you, who look like you or maybe feel like you, can relate to you, you’re more likely to do it. That, Mike was always good at having diverse teams, always. In Virginia. Always. Right. And, he was an SDR, is a DM or he’s an MD. 

[01:04:06] Taylor Moore: And they’re always successful, all of our teams are successful.

[01:04:09] None of ’em went down and crashed and burned. So, I mean, it’s the proof that you have different people doing the same job, it helps everyone in the group. 

[01:04:19] Marc Gonyea: Absolutely. Especially when it’s a hard thing to do, but you’ve done an amazing job carving out for yourself, like, a role in developing your perspective on things and staying patient, but deliberate

[01:04:31] and that’s like the theme I’ve seen with these folks with these podcasts these days, right? The intention, intentionality is being so intent with what you’re going to do, and I think it’s great that you kind of came from the chaos and the smaller organizations because you get into these big ones, you’re kind of used to it in a way, you take advantage of it.

[01:04:48] Chris Corcoran: Yeah. 

[01:04:48] Taylor Moore: But it’s so different working for a large company versus working for a startup. It is very interesting though because I’m basically in a startup within a large company because we are the Prisma cloud team, so we’re a subset, we have our own everything, we have our own sales desks, we have our own legal, we have our everything, but we do have, like, the leverage of the large company, which, so you’re kind of having a little bit of that

[01:05:12] both worlds. 

[01:05:14] Marc Gonyea: Both. Yeah. There’s some predictability to what goes on, like, in the years coming up, people are going to come in and people are going, changes are being made and you can kind of anticipate that and you’re comfortable navigating those waters. There’s, some people who might be 

[01:05:25] Taylor Moore: paralyzed by that. It’s a lot.

[01:05:27] We’ve had a lot of acquisitions since I started, Evident, RedBlock, Twistlock, Aporado, Crew, we’ve had six, seven different product sets that have been acquired into our team, so a lot of shuffling, a lot of new people. I mean, I have to explain the same thing over and over and over again, it’s something you just have to deal with if you want to stay at a company like that because you’re explaining to the new customer success managers how to do their job because they just started

[01:05:54] and you’ve been there for almost four years. So, it takes some patients, but I think when you see, like, the excitement about where the product could be, I mean, I’ve obviously seen the evolution of the product over the last five years, but it’s an interesting space to be in, and every time I talk to people about like, what do I do,

[01:06:12] I don’t want to like say, “Oh, you’re so passionate,” and someone that, like, doesn’t directly work with me, like, “Oh, you’re so passionate, you know so much about it.” But, I mean, I’ve spent a good portion of my life talking about this product, right? I don’t think a lot of people stick with the same, even industry for that long.

[01:06:27] Okay. 

[01:06:28] Chris Corcoran: And, that makes you an expert. Shows, yeah, especially so early. Yeah. 

[01:06:34] Taylor Moore: I graduated in ’16, so four or five. 

[01:06:38] Chris Corcoran: That’s great. Yeah. So, talk a little bit about giving back, one way you’re giving back is obviously sharing your wisdom here with our listeners, but then also talk about, you know, a conversation you had with an existing

[01:06:49] memoryBlue SDR from our DC office, Erin 

[01:06:51] Taylor Moore: Miller. And, this time, the first person that I’ve talked to over the course of the years, but it’s kind of close to my heart because she’s actually working on a campaign with the company that I worked for. I thought it was interesting when you reached out,

[01:07:02] I had no idea where she could have worked because we actually have a memoryBlue competitor in there right now, being our BDR, so it’s pretty funny. I had no idea what to expect, but she reached out to me, we had a really good candid conversation about her experience, honestly, was very similar to my experience at memoryBlue

[01:07:21] and she liked clients she was working for, she liked the people, she had a little bit of a niche, like, she was federal too, we need a federal renewals rep that knows what they’re talking about, and someone just left that was covering that territory, so kind of right place, right time. But also,

[01:07:40] I mean, I heard that she did phenomenal from the other people I talked to, the other people that I interviewed or interviewed with her, and she actually is looking at the team that I started with Mike years ago, so it’s just funny where it comes full circle. I can give her tips on the team members that still work there,

[01:07:59] I mean, they’re still on the team, they still have the same processes that we put in place many years ago, so it’s a good team and it’s a good transition, and I think she’ll have the exact same if she ends up choosing to go there, she’ll have the exact same experience that I had because now there’s even more growth options for people that then there really wasn’t a career path.

[01:08:19] I kind of fed my own path, but they’re putting people from renewals in, like, SMB roles and then they’ll move them up to, like, enterprise, which is my sector, so there’s actually more opportunity now for people to move forward in renewals to, like, some sort of a field role afterwards which is something that I first expressed to her,

[01:08:38] like, I see that and that’s probably something that she doesn’t see being on that side, but I see the growth in people moving from renewals and then get into the field afterwards. 

[01:08:47] Marc Gonyea: Great. Well, thank you for joining us. Very good. Sharing all this with us. It’s Insightful. 

[01:08:53] Chris Corcoran: Inspiring too. Definitely. We appreciate it.

[01:08:55] Taylor Moore: Yeah, thanks again for having 

[01:08:56] me. 

[01:08:56] Chris Corcoran: Thanks. We’ll be tracking you, too. 

[01:09:00] Marc Gonyea: Longest we’ve ever talked. Yeah.

[01:09:04] We’re grown business. We’re in the West Coast, you are in the East Coast. 

[01:09:08] Taylor Moore: Busy much, now especially. 

[01:09:11] Marc Gonyea: We’re trying to make sure we live up to what you guys are doing, we’ve got to match what people like you are doing out in the industry. So, you’re proud of the fact that you worked here and you’re willing to take calls from people who work here now.

[01:09:24] Right? I’m glad you’ve met all these great people in your life, that you met here too, that’s important to us, but we gotta keep it going. Yeah, no, I agree. 

[01:09:32] Chris Corcoran: Very good. Well, thanks a bunch, Taylor. We appreciate the time. 

[01:09:36] Taylor Moore: Yeah, thank you, guys.