Marina Ayton on Imposter Syndrome | Masters of MEDDICC

00:00 Marina Ayton: In order to be successful — particularly in this environment — you have to have the tenacity, the grit, the determination. Everything you have to do in these organisations is focus on your team: how to create high-performance environments, how to coach people to play better on the pitch, how to find development areas where you're seeing things that people haven't seen themselves. How can you change their diet — all of these things that professional athletes do all the time. And if you focus on the team and their performance on the pitch, then the fans sort themselves out. 00:37 Andy Whyte: Welcome to Masters of MEDDICC. I'm here today with Marina Ayton, Vice President of Strategic Accounts for the UK at Zscaler. How are you doing, Marina? It's good to see you. 00:37 Marina Ayton: Yeah, so nice to be here — in such a professional setup, isn't it? I feel like I'm being interviewed on the BBC. 00:37 Andy Whyte: Yeah, but better. 00:37 Marina Ayton: But better. Exactly. 00:55 Andy Whyte: How are you doing? 00:55 Marina Ayton: Really good, yeah. Busy but good — lots of things going on. But that's the game, isn't it? 00:55 Andy Whyte: It is. For our audience who don't know you — why don't you let them know a little bit about yourself and how you got into this wonderful world of sales? 01:13 Marina Ayton: OK, sure. So I'm Marina, and I run our strategic business at Zscaler, where I've been for the last four and a half years — how time flies. Like many people, I don't have the most conventional route into sales. Let me take you back a little to my family, because I think that will give you some insight into where my drive and ambition came from. I came from an amazing family. I've got four brothers and sisters. My dad also has four brothers and sisters. My mum was an only child. The two of them had literally started from absolutely nothing. My mum was a fishmonger — when her mum died, she took over her small fishmonger business. And my dad's dad had gone bankrupt when he was very young. My dad trained as a lawyer, then some dodgy builders knocked down the wrong wall in his house and the whole thing collapsed. He found himself having to work abroad just to pay his mortgage. While we were growing up, my parents decided they didn't want to work for anyone else — they wanted to work for themselves. They tried loads of different businesses, put their absolute all into growing and building something together. And I lived through all of that. As a kid, when you see two people with a work ethic like that, it instils in you firstly a level of belief, and secondly a level of inspiration around what it truly takes to be successful. 02:43 Marina Ayton: I was very fortunate to be the oldest of four children — old enough to see the sacrifices they'd made in order to send us all to amazing schools, to support us, to give us this incredible life. And when I went through my early career, all of that sat with me — and still does. It's why I literally bounce out of bed and want to go and get the next thing. That all comes from them. So that's a slightly long-winded way of starting the answer, but when I was at university, I'd been really inspired by this build-and-learn mentality that we always had at home. Every Sunday lunch was like an episode of Dragon's Den — who's got an idea, what are we going to do, how are we going to execute it? It was so fun. I think the common denominator I see among salespeople is that their story — whether it's their parents, an environment they were in, or whatever it was — hasn't always been easy. And that's the thing. We went through the 80s and 90s of booming economies, things felt comparatively manageable. Now we're in an environment where nothing is on our side. We've got a massively down market, the tech boom is largely over, people are focused on shareholder return, we're seeing layoffs across the board in tech companies. It's hard — it's really hard. So in order to be successful, particularly in this environment, you have to have the tenacity, the grit, the determination to see through all of the noise and the rubbish situations and the things that are going to hit you — and to believe that you're going to be OK. [QA: check word count — approx 284 words]04:57 Andy Whyte: And belief in line with aspiration — because people who are driven are driven because, in my opinion, they can see their potential. They know where they can get to. They know what they're capable of. And so all of those great attributes and traits are pushing the person towards their potential. This is where it ties in really interestingly with imposter syndrome. I have a very firm belief — or definition — of imposter syndrome, which is: you don't get imposter syndrome unless you have two ingredients. First, you are self-aware. Second, you are growing. If it were a chart, you'd have self-awareness on one axis and growth on the other, and imposter syndrome happens in the top right — high self-awareness and high growth. Because if you're growing but not self-aware, you don't have imposter syndrome. You're not questioning yourself, not saying "I shouldn't be in this room. " It's the self-awareness that makes you realise you've got it. But if you have high self-awareness and you're not growing, there's nothing new to feel uncertain about. Going back to what you said earlier about believing in yourself that you can do better — from a leadership standpoint, great leaders are the people who see potential in people that they can't see themselves. That's when you meet a leader who changes your life and your career. They push you to do things you didn't think you were capable of. And personally, I think imposter syndrome gets talked about a lot — particularly in relation to women. But going back to my chart, my perhaps unpopular opinion is that women are more self-aware. Maybe everyone's growing the same amount, but if you have more self-awareness, you're going to be more aware that you're growing — and therefore you'll feel that feeling more acutely. [QA: check word count — approx 302 words]06:34 Marina Ayton: Yeah, 100%. 09:32 Marina Ayton: And I also think the self-awareness from a women's standpoint comes from — and this might be contentious — a more innate curiosity. I'm constantly interested in how I can get better, requesting feedback, wanting that perspective from other people. And asking for it consistently — not just in a quarterly review, but making it a habit — allows me to become more self-aware, know where my gaps are, figure out what I need to learn, figure out where I need development. 10:10 Andy Whyte: And not just asking for it in a quarterly review — making it consistent so it's not treated as a special occasion. And like anyone listening to this right now — by the nature of listening to this podcast, you have a passion that's performance-driven. Whoever they reflect on, whether it's a colleague, a peer, a mentor, a sports person they look up to — every person listening will be able to think of someone they look up to who embodies what you'd describe as coachability. Always looking for that next game, that next challenge. 10:49 Marina Ayton: But what you talked about — passion — is really interesting. Working hard without a purpose is just stress. Working hard for something you don't really care about is just stress. So when I talk about who I want to hire and what I need on my team, working hard for something that I truly care about — that's passion. And if you don't have a genuine passion for the customer, for the outcome, for the development you're getting in that organisation, or for the open mindset of learning new things and becoming a different kind of person — then yeah, it's incredibly hard work. Imagine just traipsing through sales processes, trying to learn MEDDIC for no real reason. And I always say: so much of what we give as leaders — good sales advice, good sales coaching — only works if you genuinely believe. It doesn't have to be that your product is the best product in the world and ticks every box. But you have to believe that your solution is the best solution for the customer you're selling to. If it doesn't do everything at a ten out of ten, you might think a third of those things the customer doesn't need — so that's just unnecessary complexity or cost. The best solution isn't always the most complete one. It's the one that best fits that customer's needs. 11:45 Andy Whyte: And that's a really, really smart way to think about decision criteria. 11:45 Marina Ayton: Yeah. Because decision criteria in an RFP isn't all about the technical specification of what the product solves in a specific environment. It's: is the fix for the problem that the customer has the right one, based on our ability to execute, based on the team we've got, based on the operational resilience we've built? We are a mission-critical service that is going to underpin this company. Are we best placed to serve that customer? So all of those things — going back to MEDDIC — are around educating the customer on why other areas of the criteria need to be taken into consideration to make the best decision for their business. And this is where the sales process and MEDDIC are sometimes misinterpreted. Because actually, all the sales process and all MEDDIC is — as a qualification tool — is creating a science behind enabling us to get the right outcome for the customer. And it's a very different thing when you're selling a point product that solves one problem — maybe a £20K deal. People can make decisions like that relatively quickly and move on. That's not complex. It's not transformational. It's not you selling something that's truly going to impact the champions you've been working with over an extended period. 13:35 Andy Whyte: Right. Yes. Interesting. And the thing around RFPs — we get asked about this a lot. A deal will come up and people will say: "We're in this RFP but it's not suited to our strengths. What should we do? " And it's like: then you're not in the right RFP. There's no point following somebody else's decision criteria if you genuinely believe it's either not best for you to win or not best for the customer. 15:05 Marina Ayton: I think we're going through an interesting phase in how people approach picking technology. An RFP — we see them a lot. But my view is: if you're shocked by an RFP, you haven't done your job in the first place. None of us should be unaware of an RFP, particularly in my role where I should know every single one of my customers — what they're doing, who they are, what their priorities are — constantly. In my current role, I look after around the top 60 largest customers across UK and Ireland, as well as some global accounts — you know, HSBC, Barclays, and so on. We know everything going on in their organisations because each of my team members has between two and four accounts, and with that comes the requirement to know people's businesses almost better than they know them themselves. But the RFP thing is interesting. I'll tell you a story — I can't name the customer — but we'd been working on a classic pipeline generation motion for a long time. The team had spoken to a lot of people in the organisation and done a fantastic job. We always knew they were going to have to go out to market for an RFP, because they're a regulated industry and they need to make sure all the books are clean. What the team did amazingly well was: not enforcing our playbook, not enforcing MEDDIC explicitly, but acting as a consultant for that company. They said: "When we work with large financial services customers like X and Y, typically they find the RFP process most effective when they do these three things. " So that allowed us to — having already done a huge amount of discovery, already having set the decision criteria in a way that differentiated us not just on product but also from a company and experience standpoint — to then be fully in control of that RFP process. [QA: check word count — approx 326 words]17:04 Marina Ayton: It worked on multiple levels. First, we were able to answer everything in the RFP. Second, all of our differentiated capabilities were mandated as business critical to that organisation. We knew who the competition would be — because the best salespeople know their competition better than the competition knows themselves. And we were able to continue driving momentum, because one of the things that often happens in an RFP situation is that you get locked out of the account. And we all know that deals don't happen without champions, and champions don't get built without activity. What we were able to do is continue driving momentum, because we had already pre-told them how many meetings they were going to need per week, how many workshops they were going to need, and that they were going to need a Business Value Assessment — because at some point someone was going to ask: "Why are you going to spend $10 million on this product? Do you have a defensible business case? " Of course they are. So positioning the sales process and all of its elements early — before the RFP was even announced — allows you to control that narrative in a really smart way. 18:33 Andy Whyte: Absolutely. And here's the thing — I say this a lot, and I think people get a bit uncomfortable when I say it, but I think it's more because it's true than because they disagree. No customer, no champion, no one in a customer's organisation ever gets out of bed in the morning and thinks: "What have I got today? Oh, I'm meeting Vendor X. Can't wait. Just can't wait to buy more technology. " What they're looking for is the most efficient engagement. They want it to be as efficient as possible. They don't want to need ten meetings when five would do. But they also have to be diligent — they have to make sure they're not buying the wrong solution. Particularly the more complex and transformational the decision, the more a wrong choice can literally take businesses offline. So it's massively important. What you describe — yes, there's a fair argument that you're setting yourself up as a vendor for success. But the reason you're doing that is because you're setting the customer up for success — to get the best engagement they possibly can from you. That's the art of the sales process. That's MEDDIC. The worst version of this, you know, when everyone talks about how difficult it is to get to the economic buyer — of course it's difficult. I don't want it to be easy, because then everyone would be doing it. But like, if you say to someone: "Before we start the POV, I'm going to need to meet your boss, because in our sales process, we can't proceed unless we've met the economic buyer first" — awful. Just awful. That's not how you position it. [QA: check word count — approx 283 words]20:20 Marina Ayton: Here's the other version. You say: "Andy, we've been working together now for a couple of months, and I'm really excited — I feel like we've got a really clear understanding of the problems you want to solve and how we're going to go and solve them. Obviously, the next step is to make sure it works in your environment and we can test it adequately. Is there anyone else who needs to be involved to make this decision? Because where I've done this with large customers before, we've occasionally been caught out at the end because we missed something that was really important to the CIO. Do you think it would be valuable to just meet him for 15 minutes next week and make sure we've captured everything that he'd be interested in? " Yeah. And that's a very different conversation, right? 21:03 Andy Whyte: I love that. And that's a soundbite, by the way. But also what you did there — which I think is a very underused tactic, or strategy if you like — is you're not confronting your champion and saying "I need to do this for me. " And you're not saying "if this doesn't happen, these bad things will happen" — even though you are saying that, sort of. But the way you're framing it is: "I've seen this happen before, and this is where things have gone wrong. " You're removing the confrontation. You're saying typically this might happen, we've seen it before, you don't want that to happen, I don't want that to happen — so let's avoid it together. You're not putting yourself in conflict with someone who's put so much work into this. 21:03 Marina Ayton: And this is genuinely what I focus on when I'm hiring now. The team has to be obsessed with the customer. It has to be about the customer. And you have to genuinely care about the champions you're building — personally care about them. If that's insincere, it's incredibly clear. And even more so now — when I was starting out, Covid hadn't happened, everyone was in the office, it was completely normal to be on site with your customers all the time. You'd have watercooler chats, go to the pub after meetings. Even that walk from reception to the meeting room and back — briefing and debriefing — those are the richest minutes of the whole meeting. 22:31 Andy Whyte: 100%. And you know, when you're in the lift with someone, you're talking about their family, where they're going on holiday. I always think you should pull up their contact page on your phone — there's a notes section now — and you put in what their kid scored at the weekend, where they're going on holiday. Then three weeks later when you meet them: "How was Sophie? How were the Canary Islands? What did you guys do? " It makes such a difference. It's a really interesting topic — optimising for the new world we sell in. Remote selling. And I know from conversations you and I have had before that you, as a leader at the very sharpest end of sales execution, are thinking hard about how to present yourself best on a Zoom or Teams meeting. 23:31 Marina Ayton: Massively, yes. I think people underestimate this. How do you show up to things? On a Zoom, your tone, your presence — I'm not a good texter, and I'm not a great emailer. I'm very direct, and my directness can be really misinterpreted in writing. I'm self-aware about it — I'm working on it — but that's just me. If you're on a Zoom meeting: be present. Have your camera on and show up. Don't have your phone out, don't have Slack open, don't have anything else going on. Show up and be in the room with that person. Another basic thing — have one screen in front of you. Don't be side-looking or flicking between two screens. It looks disrespectful. And when you talk to people on Zoom, match their energy. In person, if someone speaks quietly, you don't shout back. It's the same on a video call — you match their tone. Build rapport at the beginning: how are you, what's going on? And look into the camera. 25:43 Andy Whyte: I have a real bee in my bonnet about this because in the days when we used to meet in person, people would rightfully spend good money on what they wore to work — suits, smart outfits. Just well-presented. And then we got into work-from-home and people started showing up to calls with their hats on backwards and their unmade bed visible in the background. And to your point about the second-screen thing — the one that always gets me: if you wear glasses, people on Zoom can see exactly what you're looking at in the reflection in your lenses. If you open Slack, if you open your emails, they can see it in the reflection. And even if you don't wear glasses, most platforms use a dark UI — if you switch to a light one, your face lights up and you can literally see when someone's opened a website. Your customer is going to consciously or subconsciously know you're not paying attention to them. It's just a really bad place to be. 26:37 Marina Ayton: Yeah. Zoom etiquette. And I'd go further and say: if you're going to be demoing or sharing a screen, practice your flow. There is nothing more clichéd and frustrating than "can you see my screen? Is that working? " Get past that. You should have been practising this. We should be beyond that. So yeah. 26:37 Andy Whyte: Well — speaking of doing things for years, you've been at Zscaler for four and a half years. And you have more zeros in your team's target, I think, than some companies going for IPO have in their annual revenue. 27:19 Marina Ayton: We have an annual number and quarterly numbers, and we have a responsibility to the business to deliver those. But the most important thing is that we run a long-term business. We're driving true transformational change for companies, and that takes time. You go on a journey with people. So my priority now is focusing on what the North Star is for every single customer we engage with. And as part of that North Star, naturally there'll be a phased approach to getting there. But you need buy-in for the vision first. And I think where some people or companies get it wrong is that the vision is very go-to-market focused — like: "I want to do a $1 million deal with Customer X. " Whereas what I'm saying is: we need to take Customer X to this nirvana state. How do we pull it back from there and build towards it? And yes, that nirvana state is perhaps $10 million in ARR — but let's focus on the business outcomes for the customer, because that's what drives the right behaviour from the team. And in order to drive true change like that, it takes a whole army. The requirements for what it takes to be on a team like that have changed. I need people who are experienced, patient, and outcome-focused — who have different skills across the sales process. And combined with MEDDIC, I need people who have great executive presence, because when you think about the economic buyer, they are changing. We're in rooms with CEOs and CFOs now. And the team around that — whether it's the technical account manager, customer success, professional services, deployment teams, architects — the ability to run service reviews, all of these things: it's genuinely like running a business within a business. I mandated across my team — and I'd strongly advise anyone who doesn't do this to do it — that every single account has a Slack channel. On that Slack channel, every single person who touches that account is included. And every Friday, everyone with regular touchpoints with that customer provides an update: what value have we driven, are there any challenges the customer is facing, where do they need help? [QA: check word count — approx 371 words]30:16 Marina Ayton: Because when you're in second-line leadership, it's all about removing barriers and enabling the team. It's about: what's the plan for next week, and how do we get everyone on the same page around the mission that is the customer? 30:16 Andy Whyte: How many people are typically in one of those Slack channels? 30:16 Marina Ayton: Around 30. So these people — and we talk about inflated titles in tech sales — at the end of the day, in a company like Zscaler, my Account Directors would probably be classed as Regional Vice Presidents elsewhere, because the businesses they run are multi-million-dollar accounts. They are the quarterback of that customer relationship. They're responsible for their direct account team of four or five people. And beneath that, they've got all of these additional resourcing capabilities they have to manage, co-ordinate, and keep rowing in the same direction. And that's why for me it's so exciting. It's really new. It's bigger deals than I ever thought I'd be working on, and it truly changes people's businesses. 31:29 Andy Whyte: There are two things I want to dig into. One is your career journey — the different directions you could have gone. And the other is how you communicate common language across those groups. Let's start with the career direction piece. I always describe it as: in your career, you have ladders, and different ladders have different rungs of seniority. As you said yourself — you could be a CRO, no question asked, across loads of different ladders. Anything from a company that just started out to Series A, B, C, all the way up, depending on stage. And so the titles run parallel with the ladders at different rungs. What's really interesting about the insight you were sharing — all the excitement and new learning you're getting from staying on the Zscaler ladder — is really compelling. Because there are absolutely people I know who reach out saying "Marina would be great for this role over here. " And I know it's happening because if it's coming to me, it's definitely happening at your doorstep. And for people listening who are similarly driven in their careers — it's great to have this insight and positivity about staying on that ladder and growing with the company and the opportunity. 33:44 Marina Ayton: Well, I really believe this: change is inevitable in any company that's growing fast. That's just the nature of the beast. If there isn't constant change, you should be worried. And change by its very nature is uncomfortable. But I would advise anyone to sit in that discomfort — because being uncomfortable means you're growing. If you're not uncomfortable every day, not doing things you're terrified of, not showing up and doing things that feel new — you're not developing yourself. And if people are truly interested in developing themselves as better human beings, better professionals, better salespeople — they need to be in companies that give opportunity. And you see a lot of people in the industry who hop from startup to startup, building things from £50 million to £100 million and then repeating that journey. They are brilliant at it — excellent at that phase. But if your purpose is to genuinely change people's lives forever — because in this sector you truly can, in two years, as an RSM or an AE, you can genuinely change people's lives both through the financial opportunity and through the development and confidence you can give them — if your purpose is really caring about people and changing their lives, then leadership is the path for you. 35:56 Marina Ayton: Because as a leader, it's so different from being an IC where it's: "Look what I did, how amazing. " As a leader, nothing that goes well is on you — it's on everyone else in your team. And everything that goes badly is entirely on you. And those two things are pretty hardcore. Most people — and I'd say 90% or more — when they move into sales leadership, go into first-line management first. And that isn't the hardest role — it is the hardest. And what people may not realise as they step into it is: it's hardest for all the obvious reasons, but also because you're the most lonely in that position. You're new to management, and you've got this new line you have to adhere to — the company line — and sometimes the company line isn't going to be popular with your team. So you're caught between a rock and a hard place, maintaining the integrity of leadership while being the voice of bad news or discipline. On the other side of that — the only reason you were put in a leadership position in the first place was because you were really, really good at the job you did before. And then you transition to still being really good at that job, but your responsibility is no longer about doing it — it's about making the people beneath you really good at it. And it's very easy to become a micromanager because you know exactly how to do that job. You've done it many times with your eyes closed. But you need to take the leadership line — teaching, allowing people to make mistakes. That bit is so uncomfortable, because you know you could have done it better. [QA: check word count — approx 293 words]37:53 Marina Ayton: And for me — I'm a complete perfectionist. I've had to learn through multiple leadership roles to relinquish control, because the only way people are able to learn is to fail. You're not going to let them fail catastrophically — that's awful and doesn't serve anyone. But if they don't feel like they can take risks and fail in your presence, you can't build loyalty. And I'm relatively young to have the role I have now. I've hired a lot of people who are significantly older than me. And the only way I've been able to create an environment of trust and respect — all of the things that are really important in high-performing teams — is that I don't focus on any of those things directly. All I care about is the people. If the people are happy, everything else follows. The customer outcomes follow. The ingredients are being developed. All of it. 39:00 Andy Whyte: I think so too. And that balance — having trust without micromanaging, not wrapping your arms so tightly around a person that you fill all the gaps for them — is so difficult. Especially if, as you describe yourself, you're a perfectionist — I'd describe it as having high standards. And the balance you have to strike, as a frontline manager with that self-awareness and those high standards, is: you can't own every deal. You can't sub in every time you think you could do a better job. You've got to keep people free to express themselves and do things their way, without standards dropping. And that is the art. That's the difference between high-performance teams and others. Because the bar never moves down — it moves up. 40:02 Marina Ayton: So what I focus on now is raising the bar every single day, and elevating the people in the team who are raising it — putting them on a pedestal in front of everyone else, so others think: "Wow, I could do that. That looks hard, but I'm going to try. " Performance is super important because without holding everyone accountable for a certain level and quality of work, you can't recruit the best people in the industry. It's impossible. And even if by some fluke you get A-players in, they'll be gone so fast. I can put myself in this scenario — I've been in an organisation with a good product where I felt surrounded by people I won't comment on their ability, but their appetite to raise the bar, to adhere to a standard — it wasn't there. And the other thing: have you got the right first-line leaders in place? Because that's actually the crux of the whole problem. One poor first-line leader can dismantle an entire team. I've seen it — it's awful. So my advice: do not rush the process of getting first-line leaders in. They are the most important thing to your business. They define what culture looks like. They define excellence. And culture isn't something you talk about — it's something you do. 41:38 Andy Whyte: Where do you sit on hiring first-line leaders from within versus externally? 41:38 Marina Ayton: I'm a huge fan of promoting from within. It's the most important thing. They're a trusted resource, they know how to do the job, they've worked with you, they understand the mission. That's always the preference. And no one gets promoted unless they've performed well — you earn the right to that role. You don't just get handed it. And going back to imposter syndrome — when you've earned your way into a role, you actually have less reason to doubt yourself. You earned it. But the thing I'd say about stepping up from rep into first-line: cut your teeth as a first-line leader in an environment that has some deal velocity. That's my advice. When I moved into first-line leadership, I ran an enterprise team where the average deal size was around £40K. By the end of it, we'd risen that to around £240K in average deal size. I was managing 14 people across Europe. The introduction into leadership in that environment was unbelievable for me — I was managing around 40 deals a quarter. With that, you build muscle memory. You build the ability to think: "I've seen this before, I know what to do. " Your common language — obviously MEDDIC — you're able to train your brain to ask the right questions to get to the right outcome, while simultaneously teaching your reps, so they can then answer questions about their deals in a better, smarter, easier way. That was the best thing I ever did. 44:13 Andy Whyte: So going back to the big deals — we've got 30 people in a Slack channel, working on this transformational opportunity. The moment that Slack channel kicks into gear and there's a sniff of an opportunity, what does the decision process look like? 44:13 Marina Ayton: These deals — mega deals, let's call them — don't happen overnight. They're a combination of becoming a genuine extension of that customer. You are spending every day thinking like an employee of that bank or that organisation. You intrinsically understand what they want to achieve at board level, at IT level, at security level. 44:13 Andy Whyte: What does the sales play look like before you even get to a formal decision process? 44:13 Marina Ayton: It's complicated. When you're selling a platform with 26 different components, each has to have its own three whys, its own differentiated success criteria. That takes time, organisation, and a huge amount of co-ordination. Once you've built what the value proposition looks like, built the business value assessment, and understood the ROI and the implications of doing nothing — because a lot of what we're doing now in this down economy is fighting against inertia and the do-nothing option — — once you've done all of that, the Decision Process is the bit where all of MEDDIC has to be under constant scrutiny and constant review. Information from here, information from there can change the criteria or change the decision process. You might have a deal that spans five different org charts in a large global bank. How on earth are you going to tick a box at the end of the day and say "we've got the decision process understood"? It's an evolution, and it constantly needs revisiting. The skill set required is different from more tactical or smaller deals where you can say: "It got signed off by my champion, it goes to the CIO, then the CFO signs it, and the paper process looks like this. " We don't have that luxury. It's constantly asking questions — engaging with potentially hundreds of stakeholders, looking for bad news, saying: "I've been told this, but I can't quite figure out where I'm going wrong. " It's a constant process. 47:13 Andy Whyte: Yes. And what people get wrong about qualification is that they're trying to qualify "is there a deal here for me? " rather than "can I bring this customer real value? " If your orientation is always: "In every evaluation I enter into, can I first and foremost establish whether we can bring this customer value? " — and if we can, is that value going to be significant enough to be high enough on their priorities list for them to involve the right people? This is such a rich topic. 47:13 Marina Ayton: One of the challenges I used to have when running an enterprise team was conversion rates after New Business Meetings — the ability to win the stage, get back on site, drive activity levels, and convert effectively into visible pipeline. And it comes down to smart things you can do at the close of a New Business Meeting. There's a bad way and a good way. The bad way: "Thanks, Mr. Customer — did you get out of this what you wanted? It would be great to come back and do a deeper dive and maybe a demo. " And they're like: "That sounds like a lot of work. We'll discuss internally and let you know. " But imagine if instead you said at the end of the meeting: "Thank you so much for spending the last hour with us. I feel like we've learned a lot about your business, but there are definitely some areas where we lack enough understanding to be confident we can solve the problems you're looking to solve. What I propose, if it's OK with you" — and then let them speak — "is that in two weeks' time, I come back and we spend half an hour together. During that time, I'll work with some of your team to understand a little more about your business, so that when I meet you, I can play back an executive summary, and we can both decide together whether spending more time together is going to be valuable. " That builds trust. You're respecting the CIO's time by only asking for half an hour. But you're also intelligently giving yourself the opportunity to continue building the team relationship, understand whether there really is a problem worth solving, and on the rep side — qualifying your time rather than chasing an opportunity that may never amount to anything. [QA: check word count — approx 307 words]50:13 Andy Whyte: So in the decision process for these transformational opportunities, there's so much momentum to build. But we've talked a lot about business value and the work that goes into it. So much of it can't just be about proposing: "If you buy our solution, you'll deliver this value. " You're building true partnerships. 50:13 Marina Ayton: And yes — 100% — because in these long-term partnerships, customers stay with you. We are a core component of how our customers do business. We sit in a very unique spot, right in the middle of a mission-critical platform. So we need to be able to go back to our customers and say: "Look at the value we're delivering for your business. " One of the things we've really started doing is Business Value Realisation plays — you could deliver these through an executive Quarterly Business Review, where you get all the key decision makers in the account in a room. And the only way you're ever going to get all of those people in a room on a regular basis is to deliver genuine business value. They are not going to sit there and listen to you say "I blocked a thousand threats this month and Sandbox picked up X. " But if you can sit in a meeting like that and say: "Zscaler had a direct impact on your ESG score by X, by moving you out of your data centres into cloud environments and speeding up that transition — we've saved X in CO2 emissions. " That's something executives are actually compensated on in their bonuses. Or: "During the deployment, in the first six months, we've consolidated eight tools down to three. The total cost of ownership of those five tools we've removed is X. Over the next six months, you can expect that to become Y as we consolidate down to one. " That's an efficiency story. The story goes on. But what's really important is: before you run those business value reviews with your customers — before you've managed to create a meeting environment those people actually want to attend — you need to have agreed, when you first landed the deal, on what success looks like. [QA: check word count — approx 309 words]52:48 Marina Ayton: "Mr. CIO — thank you for your investment. It means a huge amount and we're really excited about the partnership. How are you going to measure success? And can you help us agree as a team on a set of criteria we can measure ourselves against, to ensure we're delivering the value we've promised you? "52:48 Andy Whyte: You've got this incredibly exciting opportunity. And I'm sitting here feeling a little bit like — could I get back on the tools? Because it is genuinely exciting. 52:48 Marina Ayton: It really is. 52:48 Andy Whyte: For me, I always liken things to sport. And the way you're talking about what you're doing right now — it's like being at the very top level of a sport, in the biggest arena, playing for the best team with the best people. 54:09 Marina Ayton: But going on that sporting analogy — when people talk about growing shareholder value for Zscaler or whatever the company is, it's like saying: "I just want to grow the top line and hit X revenue. " For me, that's working for the fans. If you run a sports team, the shareholders are the fans in the stadium. And your mission is to work for them. But if you genuinely care about your fans, what happens? Your team has to be brilliant. The team performance creates the results. So everything you have to do in these organisations is focus on your team: how to create high-performance environments, how to coach people to play better on the pitch, how to find development areas where you're seeing things people haven't seen in themselves. How can you change their diet — all of the things that professional athletes do all the time. And if you focus on the team and their performance on the pitch, then the fans sort themselves out. They get excited, the results come, and everything follows. 55:14 Andy Whyte: I was lining you up there to introduce the fact that you're looking for great people to join the team. And I feel like I was doing a reasonable job — and you just made it even more compelling. So what should people do if they've heard this and thought: that's exactly what I want? Well — maybe I shouldn't say how they should get your attention, because perhaps you want to see what approach they take organically. 55:14 Marina Ayton: Look — I'm super open. I have LinkedIn, which is the tool we all use. Contact me there, or get in touch with our careers team. And yes — open to any conversations. And anyone who disagrees with anything I've said as well. Yeah, I'm fully open for the debate — coachability and self-awareness all the way. 56:07 Andy Whyte: Yeah. Well — wow. Thank you so, so much. I feel like every time I do one of these conversations, I always learn a ton. And I thought: that's a soundbite, that's a soundbite, that's a soundbite. So for anyone who maybe heard a soundbite and tuned in for the full episode — I think you'll be very glad you did, because I think we just took in an enormous wealth of wisdom. So thank you so much, Marina. 56:07 Marina Ayton: Thank you so much for having me and for the opportunity. 56:07 Andy Whyte: Cool. Thank you very much.