Josh Reiner on the Educated Buyer | Masters of MEDDICC

00:00 Josh Reiner: If you are at a point in your career where you may have just successfully progressed because you've done well — but you haven't really invested the time into learning your craft, understanding how to build a repeatable go-to-market sales process and motion, and getting with people who can do that — come find a way to get into an organisation. Be willing to have your ego take what feels like a step down — because it's not a step down. You're investing in your career and your timeline. So if you're great but you may not have the right level of experience, or you may not have this: find a way. Based on a relationship you have. We live in a small world. Find a way to have someone sponsor you into the call. Find a way in, because you're going to need that way in to have a shot. People will follow other people because they get better. We're challenging people to be better versions of themselves. And when they have a challenge or obstacle, we coach them together, brainstorm together on how to go fix it. As long as you keep that culture of training and development and getting better — usually those people stick with each other for a long time. 00:57 Andy Whyte: Welcome to Masters of MEDDICC. Today I'm here with Josh Reiner. Welcome to the show, Josh. You're VP EMEA at what I know that word is used a lot in this industry, but I think it's genuinely true in this example — the rocket ship that is Wiz. Welcome to the show, Josh. 00:57 Josh Reiner: Absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks so much. For those who don't know me — I moved over here from the US, now about five years ago. My first job when I came over was to run the go-to-market for Zscaler, and I did that for four and a half years. Then about just under a year ago, I took over the go-to-market responsibilities for Wiz across EMEA. And prior to that I worked at BMC Software and AppDynamics in the US. That's the short version. 01:14 Andy Whyte: Love that. I was looking on LinkedIn and I noticed — and I'll admit, I'm not the strongest at maths — that you were at BMC starting in the year 2000. Which means 25 years. 01:14 Josh Reiner: Yes. Yeah. 02:03 Andy Whyte: How things have changed over those 25 years — if at all. What's new? What's stayed the same? 02:03 Josh Reiner: Well, a lot's changed. Especially now with the burst of AI and how it's being integrated into how people prepare for sales and become knowledgeable about the market. Over the years, the evolution of technology, tools, and processes — I think the biggest thing that has changed is the amount of data and information that is accessible to us in a very short period of time. And that is both positive and negative. Positive because there's a lot more information — you can bring a lot more knowledge to the customer about the problems they may be having and how your solution can service them. But it's also about sifting through the noise and information to come up with a coherent message — and that's definitely changed. The mediums through which people outreach have also changed. You know, dating myself — email was the sole digital channel when I started. Now there's branding and digital, LinkedIn, and the rest. There are multiple ways and multiple touchpoints that customers use to survey you as a company before ever engaging with you. A customer's ability to understand your product and service, the amount of research they can do without engaging you, is tremendously more than it used to be. We used to have to go in and educate a prospect about all the features, functionality, and problem statements. We were the sole guide. 03:50 Josh Reiner: And a lot of the time now, by the time they reach out to you, they've already done 60 to 70% of what they think is due diligence. That's a really good thing because they're much more educated buyers. But it's also a challenge — and I talk about this all the time with my team — because when people come to you with a problem or a request, they've already formulated an opinion of how you can solve it. And our job as sellers is to make sure they get the most out of the technology. I always use the example when I'm training my team: how much of the Microsoft Office suite do you actually use? Most people use email, maybe a bit of Word and Excel. But it's such a powerful platform that most people are using maybe a fifth of its value. So how you get a company to embrace as much of the value of your platform as possible is critical. People can get a lot more information about what you can do — but it's always in the context of probably one small piece of the problem they're having. So our jobs as sellers is to make sure we maybe broaden the scope: who else in the organisation can benefit, and how they can actually extract additional value beyond the initial pain point they've identified. 05:06 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I love what you said there — from our perspective, what you're talking about is the customer and their decision criteria. And there's this big divide in approach where, as you said, customers are so much more informed. But as much as that's a good thing — unless everything they've been reading is your own website and PR and product marketing — the perspective they're coming in with is going to have been influenced by someone or something else. Best case scenario that's Gartner, which I know you do well on. But it could also be a competitor, or just a bad opinion. How do you coach your teams to make sure they're not falling into the trap of following what the customer thinks is best and aligning with the preconceptions the customer has already formed about what their decision criteria should look like? 06:13 Josh Reiner: Well — I'll tell the Wiz journey to a certain degree, because one of the things that's special about the rocket ship we're on is they have the most amazing PR and marketing team I've ever seen. From how they've branded themselves — "security doesn't need to be scary, doesn't need to be swords and people in hoodies and falcons and evil stuff. It's unicorns and rainbows and fun. " It just created this brand of: this is enjoyable. People use the word love when they talk about the product, all the time. 06:50 Josh Reiner: So how that marketing impression lands is the first initial touch. Wiz spends a lot of time getting the branding right. We have a strong NPS, a real sense of what we can go do and how. But it's really about taking that down to the next level — once they engage. So how we work together: digital, PR, and marketing do the job of generating interest and highlighting the main problem statements. But then when they engage with us, you have to make sure you build the team to operationalise the value within that company. Yes, the technology is clear and the value is evident. But how do you take that technology and actually get value from it? What are the use cases that are going to take cost out, reduce risk profile, and provide real benefit? Both have to work together. You can't just have great marketing and digital branding without people to help execute and operationalise so that customers truly benefit. That handoff from PR, marketing, and digital to the field sales and engineering team is really critical to extract maximum value. 08:11 Andy Whyte: Oh, I absolutely love that. What we'd say is that what the PR and marketing team is doing is taking not just the technical parts of decision criteria but the relationship parts, and building them into their positioning. They're seeding in the market's mind the sorts of things people should look for and expect — not just from a technical perspective, which is obviously very important for a technical product, but from a relationship perspective too. Look at what our customers think. Look at the kind of culture we have. That makes so much sense. 08:11 Josh Reiner: Yeah. I've never worked at a company that customers love so much. They use the word love describing our technology. And I think one of the main reasons — especially in today's world of immediate gratification and high expectations around time to value — is that we can highlight gaps, risks, and challenges and help prioritise how they want to address them. When they start remediating those challenges and see their security posture improve, they feel like they're doing a great job. And I think that's one of the things when I relate to MEDDIC-type selling — everything still revolves around the champion who owns the initiative you're working on. How are you empowering and enabling your champion to be better, to be recognised for the benefit they're driving? The reward for taking cost out of the business, the reward for increasing a company's security posture. While we've got great technology that enables that, helping the champions in our accounts articulate back to the broader organisation — "here's the impact I'm having, here's the benefit it drives" — that promotes them in their company and in their career. And good things generally happen when people get promoted and start documenting the benefit they've realised. 10:03 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that. One of the things you were touching on — customers loving the product, the momentum from great product and growth, it's like a perfect crescendo. But something I've seen happen before — and felt the risk of myself at a company I was part of — is that sellers can almost find themselves hurrying through. They need to slow things down to speed them up. How do you help your team not get swept up in the momentum — where a customer says "I used you at my last company, I want you here" or "my friend is the CSO and he loves you" — how do you make sure they still slow down enough to plant that real value? 10:59 Josh Reiner: Well, these are good problems to have — champagne problems, I call them. When your product is so good that people bring it with them from one company to the next, that's really, really good. But you still can't shortcut the process. So yes, the CSO has a lot of value they get because you're securing the environment. But the application teams building applications to release new functionality — they also get tremendous value. The people triaging incidents happening in the wild — they're getting benefit too. So when someone comes to you and says "yeah, I want to bring you in" — great. But let's make sure it gets adopted across your organisation. Let's make sure you get recognised for all the great work we're going to do together. And that starts with getting us access to these other stakeholders who are also going to benefit. Let's build a plan to understand their challenges, document the before and after state — the financial impact and the security posture improvement — and pull that together as a comprehensive programme to roll out. Now you're providing more value to the organisation. And generally when you provide more value, you can command a higher price point — because they're getting more from the technology exponentially. So it's a win-win on both sides. 11:50 Andy Whyte: I always use this line — and most people who know me know it: I hate leads. And what you just described — someone going from one organisation to the next — is kind of a lead. But you still can't shortcut the process. You still need to go in and establish: "OK, we're going to do something here. Not because you like me — because I can solve a problem. Let's investigate all the problem areas in your organisation. Really identify the pain and the implications of the pain. " Keeping MEDDIC as a common language framework: what is the pain? What are the metrics we need to get down to in order to document the before and after state? 13:10 Josh Reiner: Once you start getting into that area, you're building use cases that document those criteria. And you can take the outputs and show them back to the organisation so they can represent them to the economic buyer: "Here's the problem we had. Here's how we proved it out. Here's the outcome. " I always take a very simple approach when I meet economic buyers. They really care about two things: will the product or service I'm buying solve the pain we've identified together? And will it be adopted in the organisation — deployed and implemented correctly? So when I meet with them, I always make sure I relate to the problem statement and present the deployment plan and structure. And then I go one step further: "60 days after we complete this deployment together, I'm going to come back to make sure we're on track. If we're not, we can pivot. But we will make sure these benefits are realised. Here's the adoption plan to ensure that happens. "14:22 Andy Whyte: I love that, absolutely love that. One of the things that stands out for me here is that what you're talking about is approaching opportunities with an open mindset. And one thing I talk about a lot is: imagine the company you work for right now. Even at Wiz — even though I imagine someone like yourself would have done a ton of work before joining, you would have had a tough time telling me the typical price for a customer before you were inside. You would probably have struggled with that. Right? Yeah. And that's someone who has done their research and was close to the space from Zscaler. So you should have a better sense of the cost than most customers would. Yeah. Right. 15:41 Andy Whyte: And what I find is salespeople often fall into the trap of answering "how much does this cost? " directly — which falls back to what we were saying a moment ago about decision criteria. Whereas what you're describing — going in with the mindset of "I'm very confident we have a great product, and I'm very confident it can bring you value, but let's pause on that one problem over there and take a broader view" — is so important. And the real point I love to make here is that it's not just about finding more value to make your proposition more compelling. It's about differentiation for customer trust and credibility. Not just differentiation for value's sake. If you can go in and say: "I know you have that problem — but let's look at the bigger picture. Let's look at some of the initiatives you have in play, what strategies they're supporting, what difference it would make if we can support, say, a new product launch. "16:50 Andy Whyte: And particularly in front of the economic buyer — all of a sudden you've not only differentiated yourself and created new value, but you've won a champion who's thinking: "I can't wait to take Josh to meet my boss, because he's going to make me look great. " A lot of good things come from that. 16:50 Josh Reiner: Yeah. A lot to unpack. One of the things I always try to train my teams on is: don't fall into the trap of a budget. Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to something else. So I use this line all the time when I'm asked how much a product costs: instead of answering with a number, I say: "I won't charge you a dollar more, a pound more, or a euro more than the value I can drive in a 12-month period. So let me run the process. First of all — am I the right solution for you? I can't assume that just because Wiz is great that it's great for you. "17:52 Josh Reiner: Going through the process with somebody to really understand their pain points — and back to your other really important point that I don't want to miss: educated sellers help make educated buyers. I love that. So when you go in and say — you're a fintech trying to compete against the HSBCs and Barclays of the world. How are you going to do that? By releasing functionality faster and having capabilities they don't have. Your advantage is speed to market. To think I can sell the same solution to both of those companies is naive on my part. So the first step as an educated seller is: go into the organisation and ask — what are the business strategies they've kicked off, and what are the underlying projects they need to implement to get them done? Any seller in my organisation, in their first meeting with a champion or a potential buyer, we go through what we call the value pyramid: corporate objectives, the business strategies they're trying to work on, the programmes and projects they have, and the risks to delivering those. 18:59 Josh Reiner: When you start talking in their terms — "these are the mission, these are the projects, these are the concerns you have — let's see how we can relate to those, what requirements we need to meet those initiatives, and then let's run a proof of value to see if it makes sense for you. " Because if you come in during this process and say "your product is very expensive" — I say: "Expense is relative to the value we're providing. Let's see if I can provide you enough value to justify the cost. " And the only way you can do that is if you understand the initiatives they're trying to accomplish and whether you can help them get the outcomes they need. That is how a truly educated buyer and seller should be engaging. 18:59 Andy Whyte: Absolutely love that. Yeah, it's funny — we use the value pyramid internally too. We call it our codex. We have at the top level what you'd call corporate objectives — we call those our goals. The top two levels are things like "have a winning team" and "help our customers unlock their full potential. " Then underneath we have our strategies. And then anything that falls under those strategies is an initiative — a new show, a new feature, a new product we're developing. And what I mention that for is: if somebody were to sell to us using the value pyramid, even if they didn't know we use it ourselves, it would be a wonderful experience. Because you're almost doing half the champion's job — you're giving them the framework to connect your proposition to the very top-level corporate objectives. And it's funny to me that this tool — the value pyramid — isn't being used every single time. How does that work at Wiz? With what's renowned as really high-quality sales execution? 22:08 Josh Reiner: I wish we lived in a world where no one took shortcuts. Unfortunately, we don't. And one of the champagne problems we have — when you've got such great technology, such market demand, and such a clear need for what Wiz does — is that sometimes you can take shortcuts and get away with it. But only for so long. Before people like Dolly and Mike and Dave and I came in, the company had already built a rocket ship through technology and market timing. But the longest part of the sales cycle was the gap between when they showed the technology and when they got a purchase order — because buyers didn't know how to buy it. They'd been shown this unbelievable technology that could surface all these risks and vulnerabilities, and they were like someone seeing fire for the first time — wide-eyed, thinking: "This is the greatest thing in the world. How do I buy it? "23:00 Josh Reiner: So part of working in an organisation is enabling your company to buy a product to solve a problem — because they're not used to buying it, and you have to help facilitate that process. And so the sales process — MEDDIC as a foundational framework — has evolved into a communication framework. You almost have to win a first sale with the person: I want to help you buy this so that it gets adopted, deployed, and the value is recognised. That means starting by understanding: here are the initiatives you're running. Now that we have those — why do we do anything? Why now? And why do we think Wiz is the right fit? But that's how people buy. What's my problem statement? Why am I going to do something now? And why is this the right solution? 23:55 Josh Reiner: So the artefacts we use to walk a buyer through that journey are all built on the buyer's mentality — to make sure they fully understand, can document, and can deploy and adopt across the organisation. Going back to the economic buyer: a lot of EBs have bought things over their careers that never got deployed. So the better you can communicate a clear plan to get it adopted and the value recognised, the better. Again, going back to Wiz's original challenge: showing great technology without being able to quantify the problem also meant buyers didn't know how to deploy it to get the recognised value out of it. Having and following that process enables your champion to recognise and socialise that value internally. 24:40 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that. And it's interesting — I forget how many records Wiz broke in its first few years. But then there was the moment when Dolly came in and said: "Let's make this truly great. " From the outside, we were watching and thinking: how long before that person joins? And it's one of the things about our industry — people follow greatness. You never see it the other way around. But one of the things I think isn't talked about enough is how we define winning and losing incorrectly. We define winning as closed-won and losing as closed-lost. But what you were just describing aligns with how I think. You should never really lose a deal — you should qualify out of one. It should never come as a surprise. If something is truly mis-qualified, yes. But if you've done everything right, you should see it coming. 25:56 Andy Whyte: So what becomes winning and losing is: did you win the best possible deal you could have won, versus the worst possible deal? And then people think about size of deal — which of course matters, it's revenue. But actually we look at it from a sales velocity perspective. Not just size of deal, but how long did it take to close? That's the often-forgotten metric — as impactful as number of opportunities, as impactful as conversion rate, as impactful as deal size. Because if it takes you twice as long to close something, it might as well be half the value when closed in the same period of time. Focusing on not just deal size and conversion rate but time to close — that really makes the difference. 26:41 Josh Reiner: Yeah. So I like using shock statements. One of mine is: I've never lost a deal. And I'm like: what are you talking about? Well — I'll qualify out of a deal if we're not set up correctly, or if the customer won't engage in a way I know they need to in order to get the value out, to make sure it's going to be adopted. Part of the challenge we talked about early on is that with all this data and information, customers are genuinely afraid to engage with companies because they fear a bad sales process, a bad experience. "I'll do my own research and you just tell me what to do. " So the biggest sale any person needs to make is convincing a prospect: "I want to engage with you the right way, and quickly find out if we're the right fit. You've done your due diligence. I've done mine. Let's see if we want to go forward together. "27:50 Josh Reiner: And in that discovery phase — analysing the problem statement, looking at the challenges, articulating the criteria — if you go through it early and find you're not a good match, back away. Or if you get a customer who won't engage with you that way and you can't convince them to — walk away. Because they're not going to get the value from it. Even if they do buy, you'll probably get a low price point, it won't get adopted the way it should, and they'll probably end up saying: "I bought Wiz. It was really expensive and it's not even really being used. " So have the courage to sell the process — to make sure that when a customer engages with you at enterprise size and scale, we have their best interests at heart. 28:33 Josh Reiner: Spend time in the discovery and qualification phase. Because if you do that well, if you understand, document, and get the metrics lined up, and you both think it's the right fit — then you can execute and do a deeper dive. Now, the reason discovery is so important — and the slow-down-to-speed-up analogy holds — is that you're not really slowing down if you invest more time upfront to understand the criteria you need. What takes a long time is POVs. What takes a long time is when you start investing significant resources on both sides without sufficient foundation. If you don't do a good enough job in discovery, how do you know if you're going to be successful? How do you know if there's going to be enough benefit? So slow down up front. Spend more time in that discovery and qualification phase. 29:08 Andy Whyte: Love that. I feel like you're describing what we'd call professional discovery. The problem is most of our industry thinks discovery is a PDF they downloaded from a LinkedIn guru — a list of supposedly silver-bullet questions that we know don't exist. What people miss — and if I could really implore people of one thing — is that discovery isn't a set of questions you have written down to ask. It's not a script. Discovery is curiosity. And one of the things I'm a little afraid of for our industry is that AI is being preached as a shortcut for the research that underlies great discovery. Sure, you can use AI to pull out topics from annual reports. But the best discovery calls or meetings I've ever been part of have come from doing the research — and it's not necessarily the research itself that gets me into the right frame of mind. It's where my mind goes from that research. I read something and it connects to a situation with Vodafone, and now I'm preparing for a meeting with HSBC and suddenly there's something there — not finance to telecoms, but a link that sparks a strong, credible point of view. 31:33 Andy Whyte: And when you come into that discovery meeting with that — the customer goes: "OK — not only is this interesting, but to have gotten to this point of view, you must have put real work in. Which tells me you either feel very strongly about this or you have a compelling reason why we should be talking. " And so it's that air of confidence — the research you do gives you that — that comes across and makes the customer think: "This is a serious person. " And I always liken it to top-tier consultants. They have a very similar job to an AE in that they go into a scenario where an organisation is trying to get to a better outcome. The difference is we get to that outcome by charging for technology. The consultants charge for the thinking. But the selling motion isn't that dissimilar. We almost give the value-framing away for free — in the hope they'll buy into our technology. It's not that different. 32:42 Josh Reiner: There are a few points from all that. The first: data is your superpower. The more you know, the better you can serve your customer. Back to the early days — dating myself again with those 25 years — I had to read the 10-K. I had to read the annual reports, do a lot of research into what the organisation cared about. You can build that quite quickly now. So there are shortcuts you can take with technology to be more efficient and have more meetings faster. But it doesn't shortcut the fact that you need to get the data and have a point of view. And when we look at the sales process, we obviously start with the value pyramid. We come in and articulate as we discussed. The next phase is getting into the three whys we talked about — so when you sit down with them and you're going through "why do anything? What are the impact statements? How are we going to quantify these benefits? " — I always look for names when someone hands me a three whys document in a deal review. "Who's that? " I want to know: "Did Andy care about this? What does the champion care about? Why are we doing anything? " And why now — what is the impending event that is finally going to drive them to action, to break the inertia? 34:22 Josh Reiner: So again — I want educated sellers. And educated sellers make sure they're aligning to the outcomes the customer wants, ensuring it gets deployed and goes into production so the value is realised. That solves so many other challenges. But it's all underpinned by a common language and framework. And what I love about MEDDIC — having started as a qualification tool and now moving to a common language — is that when you talk to anyone in my organisation, regardless of which team they're in, we're talking to each other in the same language. Where are we in the process? Have we validated the decision criteria? That's a black-and-white question. No? OK. Let's go back and validate it. Do we understand the decision process they're going to go through? Do we have enough differentiating criteria in our favour that's unique to our platform or service? Those are the questions we ask each other as a leadership team and with sellers — to make sure it's the right fit. Going back to "I've never lost a deal": if you go through and you've got differentiating criteria that only your product or service can deliver, and you can prove it in the proof of value — then the output in the EB meeting is that they're going to go forward. Because they want that problem solved and they want that benefit realised. 35:06 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that. The common language piece is an interesting one, particularly because you're channel-first, right? So you're having those conversations you so aptly described with customers — how does that expand to your channel partners? Are you taking that same language to those conversations? 36:06 Josh Reiner: Yes. A couple of pieces with the channel. Making a channel-first commitment is a big commitment. It shows that we're not going to use partners just for fulfilment or convenience — we're using them as true partners to drive outcomes together. And the reason that matters is there are thousands of customers out there. I can't hire thousands of people to go service them all. But if we partner correctly — with regional-based partners, global systems integrators, cloud providers — they have the coverage. There is no customer that doesn't have a partner or a cloud provider. So they're already in there. So when I use MEDDIC, and one of my other shock statements — and actually Dolly did laugh when I said this in front of the entire global sales team at our kickoff in San Antonio — I said: "Never call a prospect cold. "36:51 Josh Reiner: And he's like: "What are you doing? You're a sales leader. You just told the entire sales team never to call a prospect cold. " And the reason I said it is: if you're channel-first and you're going to run your product sales through the channel, why wouldn't you want the person who already knows that customer intimately in your first new business meeting? Why wouldn't you make the effort to understand what they already know? Because they understand the strategies, the projects, the people and the nuances of that organisation. Use MEDDIC to help qualify: "Here's why we should go in together. " Here's what you're doing, channel partner. Here's what the cloud provider is doing. Here's the niches they're working in. The three of you go to a new business meeting together. 37:52 Josh Reiner: What champion or economic buyer wouldn't want their cloud provider, their channel partner they trust, and the product or service being represented — all jointly brainstorming an outcome they can all achieve together? "We're here because you want to release these new functionalities. Here are the outcomes we want to see if we can help you drive. Do you want to engage with all of us to see if we have enough metrics and benefit to justify the cost? " They love it. It's the best way to go to market. 38:06 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that so much. Because so often in channel we talk about co-selling motions. And MEDDIC is brilliant for that — it's the common language that aligns us, even with partners who haven't implemented MEDDIC themselves. Because it's so common sense: if I start talking to you about the champion, you know what that means. If I start talking about the decision criteria and decision process, you know what it means. It works as a beautiful, succinct way of communicating everything we know matters. But what I loved about what you were saying there is it shifted from co-selling — "here's the customer we're going after together" — to actually selling to the partner. What's in it for them? Because most of your partners have other ISVs they could be working with. And your partners — even the most customer-first ones — are still a business with their own interests. If you approach them with the perspective of: "What pain do you have as a partnership business? Do you know that our customers love us? Do you know we're truly committed to the channel? " — these are relationship decision criteria elements that competitors may overlook because they're only thinking about technical or economic criteria. 39:51 Andy Whyte: And at Wiz we're thinking about the bigger picture: we've got the best product, a fast development roadmap, and there's going to be opportunity for you to expand with these organisations. Not to mention the product works, which means you're not going to have unhappy customers or a big support burden. So keeping in mind MEDDIC not just as a language for co-selling to customers, but as a language to sell to partners — that helps all channel teams make sure they're considering the interests of the partners as well. 40:24 Andy Whyte: I learned this the hard way without going into the full story — I was working on a big transformation opportunity at Oracle. Long story short, we had both Accenture and Deloitte backing our bid on what was a really complex programme — something like 80 different people who would have been paid if I'd closed my deal. The alternative was a best-of-breed approach with companies that Salesforce has since acquired. Accenture and Deloitte were on our side, bidding the Oracle solution. And then one of the vendors — I won't say which — switched sides. It obviously disrupted things significantly. The VP EMEA for Oracle went for dinner with the partner to understand what had happened and try to win it back. And the answer was nothing had gone wrong — it was just that this consultancy had a big project wrapping up and they had a bench full of Salesforce consultants who needed a new project. So they needed a new home. And the point there is: perhaps there's more I could have done if I'd made it very, very clear — earlier — what the differentiation was that Oracle had, and made it almost impossible for that consultancy to switch sides without going back on the criteria we'd established together for what the customer needed. And worst case, I would have seen it coming and been able to double down with the remaining partner. A very hard lesson. "That's not fair — I'd done everything right. " Yeah. You learn from the hardship. 42:32 Josh Reiner: The biggest challenge many independent software vendors face is noise. Whether it's value-added resellers, cloud-native partners, or global systems integrators — I had the opportunity to speak to the entire AWS go-to-market leadership team last week in Amsterdam. We were sitting with the lead for the DACH business and Alison for the UK business. And she said: "We have 1,500 ISVs trying to get our time. Why are we giving you time? " And think about a customer or prospect — how many CISOs are sitting waiting for someone to call them? They get inundated. So you have to use the right tools to distinguish and separate yourself. Part of Wiz's strategy is that channel-first commitment. Understanding how the channel goes to market, how they make money, how we together create great outcomes for their customers that are mutually beneficial. Because if you don't understand how the channel makes money — how the value-added reseller is going to profit from this, how it's going to grow additional areas for them — you're not going to be able to align to them correctly. You haven't applied a MEDDIC-style qualification to that understanding. Just like you do research to get ready to talk to a customer, you have to do that same amount of research to talk to a partner. 43:52 Josh Reiner: And one of the other things I always encourage people is to think bigger. With Wiz, based on cloud workloads — our target audience is obviously companies consuming a lot of cloud. The cloud providers themselves love Wiz because once Wiz comes in and provides a security blanket over their cloud environments, those customers can deploy new capabilities like AI and expand and release applications faster. And the cloud providers have noticed that Wiz customers increase their workload consumption 20% faster. So all of a sudden the cloud providers are saying: "I want Wiz in every one of my accounts. " So when you use MEDDIC to sit down with the geo leaders of a cloud provider — stop talking about technology and start talking about outcomes. Understanding their pain, the champion, the metrics, and tying those to the outcomes of what they want to achieve and their business strategies — if you can align around that, you unlock their entire resource base. Once you have those outcomes documented, you can start measuring progress in the right direction. And whatever business you're in — what is the outcome for the people you're going to market with together? How do you jointly benefit? How do you drive the right outcomes to the customer? Use MEDDIC as that common language and framework. 45:35 Andy Whyte: What's fascinating is that from the very first things you said — the roles you described in your career — you were always talking about go-to-market. "I took the go-to-market for this company, that company. " And then as you spoke about your impact and some of your Wiz anecdotes, you're talking not just about go-to-market but the entire customer lifecycle. It comes across in everything you do. And it's interesting — we were talking about this internally at our company recently. At our first MEDDICC event we were talking about how MEDDIC should be a common language for the whole team. And we came up against this conundrum: is it the whole revenue team? Because everyone says revenue team — but it's not really the revenue team. It's the go-to-market team. And I think that term has gone from not being particularly mainstream to almost bordering on a buzzword in the last few years. But go-to-market to me means: who does the company bring together to provide benefit to their customers, and how? Sales is always the tip of the spear — we have the quota attached to it. But engineering, customer success, professional services, marketing — so many people get brought together to drive benefit and value and ensure the product gets delivered to do what the customer needs it to do. 47:03 Josh Reiner: And having those tight relationships across the go-to-market team spans out to the broader organisation. How are we tying into product? How are we capturing customer requirements? Communication and transparency are key. People generally get afraid when they don't know. So the more you can communicate your strategy, the more transparent you can be about what you're trying to accomplish, the more you can align to a common North Star. And every time you interact with any part of the organisation, you interact in that language, in that North Star direction. "The reason I'm reaching out to you in product is because we're going to market and we're hitting a common customer requirement — with this level of impact, this potential revenue. " But you're going back to them using MEDDIC as a framework. What is the pain we're solving? What are the metrics that qualify it? What is the business case you're taking internally to prioritise this on their list? What I love about MEDDIC is it's a communication vehicle that enables collaboration and transparency. They know when I come to them, I'm going to talk in a MEDDIC framework. And they're going to respond back in kind — because that's how people rate and assess things. 48:38 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I love that — we tie that into decision criteria as well. When you're ideating a product, you should be thinking from a decision criteria perspective. Because by the time you pass that to product marketing, you want to start surfacing it as: what are the requirements the customer is going to need to be able to get that value? And the beauty, as you touched on, is that once it's out in the selling motion — having gone from positioning the value to the selling motion — you can start seeing where you're winning. "Why did we win that deal? " "Because we had this. " "Well, that's decision criteria. " And conversely, "Why did we lose that deal? " "Because we didn't have that thing. " And you take that back to product: "Here's the pain it would solve, here's the value from solving it. " And that starts to build the loop. The way we see it: marketing teams can start to see which use cases are resonating. How many clicks does a use case get on the website? How often do those clicks convert to leads? How often do those leads become opportunities? How often, when we're in front of a customer selling that use case, does it turn into something they want to pursue — through POCs and POVs to close? And when we actually deliver that use case, what value are we delivering? It becomes this full cycle — the go-to-market team all together as one. And it removes what I think has always been a blocker: each go-to-market function speaking about the same thing in different languages. [QA: check word count — approx 264 words]50:52 Josh Reiner: And Wiz was no different when I came here. Everyone wants to be great and works tirelessly. The one challenge I don't have is will — if anything, people could afford to take a break every now and then. But what they were lacking — and would cause attrition if we didn't get it right — was that sense of satisfaction and completion. Just like the original challenge between showing the product and getting a purchase order was the longest gap — because no one knew how to buy something they hadn't bought before — if the marketing organisation doesn't know how you want them to serve you, they could be your biggest asset if you give them direction and help them point in the right direction. Take all that energy they're going to spend regardless, and leverage MEDDIC as a communication vehicle. "Here's where I want you to engage. Here's the why and the why now. " All of a sudden that energy is being well-utilised — versus having all these people going off in their individual streams. Now you're all rowing together in the same boat, going much faster — enabled by a common language. 52:09 Andy Whyte: I love that. The same boat, rowing in the same direction — really important. But also: everybody wants to be great. Something we don't talk about enough is how A-players are driven primarily by greatness — by this insatiable need. It's not even an appetite. It's a must-have. It's oxygen. To achieve the version of themselves they aspire to be. And that means you never get there — it's always this far away from you — but you're constantly striving towards it. Which is all about coachability, constantly improving, having that drive for greatness. And our industry gets this wrong because we think people are motivated by money. I feel like money is the way we keep score. It's a way of sense-checking: "Am I in on this mission? Am I getting what I need? Am I growing? Am I getting the reward? " It checks out. But that inner drive — the need to achieve — is something I don't think we talk about enough. And everything I've heard about your team, and from everything you've said, suggests that your catchphrase is all about coachability, all about your team, all about the rising tide lifting all boats. Is that right? 53:12 Josh Reiner: A-players don't worry about money because they consistently do the things that need to get done. I only care about making people better. And people who want to get better are generally A-players because they push themselves into hard situations, into discomfort. I remember — and it also requires a great leader. In my career, I've had the luxury of a great leader in Dolly. And one of the things he always did whenever I started getting a little too comfortable: "I need to push you harder. You're getting comfortable. You need more. Go from the US, go run UK and Ireland, go figure that out. " Learning to drive on the other side of the road, new challenges. A-players want that. 54:53 Josh Reiner: They're going to constantly do the things no one asked them to do — the extra little thing that makes it better. And they're always trying to be great. Now if you combine that with a great leader who helps inspire them, works with them every week — I always say: nobody ever left a leader who makes them better 52 times a year. Because they're sitting you down every week making you better. That's what you need. Great drive, great leadership, and then giving the vehicle, the plan, the ability to execute, the common language we've been talking about. Those are the main ingredients. Recruiting great, coachable people who want to challenge themselves and get better. Leading them and retaining them by training them every day, every week. And then the output is revenue — because A-players consistently make their numbers, because they consistently do the things not asked of them. They just do them because it's the right thing to do. 55:55 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I have this saying I came up with recently: A-players are uncomfortable being comfortable. Yes! I love that. And it's so simple, but so true. I'm sure I've had this experience in my career — and maybe you have too — if you took a data printout of my performance as an individual contributor and found where I was highest-performing, it also correlates with where I was most uncomfortable. Not because of my performance — that was great — but because of the environment. I wasn't growing. I felt almost frustrated that those around me weren't rowing in the same direction. I love being part of a team where I feel uncomfortable because I'm looking around going: "Oh, that's a good idea — why didn't I think of that? I need to do that. " Striving to be a better version of myself. And if you can't see that around you — it's a little like the idea of not being the smartest person in the room. I didn't feel like I had the opportunity to look around and level up from it. So I think it was my first quarter, I did my number — and then I left before finishing Q3. Wasn't the right environment. And I always think: if everyone could have that same experience — of doing their number but still knowing something's missing — they'd see things much more clearly. 57:29 Andy Whyte: And this is sort of an evolution of thinking I've arrived at around imposter syndrome. There are two things you need to have it. One is growth — you don't feel imposter syndrome if you're not growing. And the second is self-awareness — you could be growing, but if you're not self-aware, you'll just feel like you belong everywhere. And there's something beautiful about imposter syndrome — it's you in a grey area between where you are now and your potential. I've gone from massive imposter syndrome as a first-time CRO to actually feeling right about it. And then realising: that feeling of rightness is not a good thing. Being in a professional role without imposter syndrome means you're stagnating, you're not getting better. So I thrive for it. I don't enjoy it — I don't think anyone does. But I need it. We should talk about this more. People are almost embarrassed to say they have it, because they think it reflects a lack of confidence in themselves. But it's self-awareness. It means you're growing. 58:56 Josh Reiner: I would like to change imposter syndrome from a negative to a positive. Because you're pushing yourself, you want to feel uncomfortable. And you want leaders around you who push you in the right spots — giving you enough but not too much, because too much and you can fail. So doing that with people you trust is just as important. I'm going to push you to the next level. I recruited somebody who was an excellent individual contributor for a long time. I said: "It's time. You're brilliant. You need to make the jump. " And he said: "I'm nervous. I'm scared. Why would anyone respect anything I do? " And I said: "The good news is I'm not just going to throw you off the end of the dock and hope you swim. We have a framework you're going to be plugged into. You already know our process. You know how to do big deals. Now I'm going to teach you how to become a great leader and lead other people to do that. " And six months in he came back to me and said: "This is the best decision I've ever made in my life. "60:09 Josh Reiner: It's about pushing people far enough to where they feel that imposter syndrome, but giving them the framework, the trust, and the week-over-week development to make sure they can do it. It's never one big journey — it's how you do it week over week to make sure that mountain isn't so insurmountable. 60:09 Andy Whyte: Yeah. We first met at an evening organised around the talent opportunity at Wiz. And I talked there a little about how I see our industry as like football leagues — or European football, where you have the Champions League: the best two, three, or four teams from every league in Europe. In your career, you want to find a Champions League club and hitch your cart to it. And Wiz is absolutely an example of a Champions League club — you only have to look at the numbers and the growth you're putting out. For someone listening who knows there are levels to this game of sales and wants to attach themselves to the highest level so they can grow fastest and fulfil their full potential — whether they're in school, in their first or second role, or been an AE for a while but feel they haven't found that Champions League club — what's your advice for how they can get your attention? And how should they think about what they're doing in their current role to elevate their skill, experience, and position?61:11 Josh Reiner: Great question. A couple of different answers. One: make sure you have a good self-assessment of who you are, what your strengths are, what training you've had to date. Just two days ago I spoke with someone who was a second-line leader at a major company. After an hour on the phone, he decided to come in as an individual contributor — because he knows he hasn't truly learned the process. When we talked about his goals and what he wanted to accomplish, he said: "I need to learn it from the ground. I need to run a full sales campaign from start to finish, following your process. Then I can teach it to somebody else. " He was mature enough to say: I've gotten to this point because I worked hard. To get to the next point, I need to follow a proper process. I need to learn it, then I need to be good at teaching it. 62:57 Josh Reiner: So if you're at a point in your career where you may have progressed because you've done well, but you haven't invested in truly learning your craft and understanding how to build a repeatable go-to-market sales process and motion — come find a way to get into an organisation. Be willing to have your ego take what feels like a step down. Because it's not a step down. You're investing in your career and your timeline. And for the second group — people trying to get into an organisation like this because they want to be part of a Champions League club — the best ones find a way. It's no different from finding a way into a CEO or CTO. It's relationships. It's understanding a pain statement. We live in a small world. Find a way to have someone sponsor you into the call. Find a way in — because you're going to need that way in to have a shot. Great ones always find a way. 64:46 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And I was laughing because I couldn't agree more — but also because I recently upset a hornet's nest on LinkedIn by advertising for account executive roles and pointing out that the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn would be ignored. We had over 750 applications. And I very clearly state that a big part of sales is standing out. We love people who capture our attention. We don't like shortcuts. So if you hit Easy Apply, you'll be ignored. Now, some people don't like that. Fair enough — if you read the job description and choose to use Easy Apply anyway, you do you. But if you're upset because you didn't read the job description and hit Easy Apply out of habit and felt overlooked — what does that say about your approach? And the best candidates we've found — every one of them made themselves stand out. It's made the mark. And we do have that in our job descriptions, which apparently upset some people on LinkedIn — questioning our culture, things like that. But the best people we found? They always make themselves stand out, even outside of sales. We work in an attention economy. We want to capture people's attention. 65:54 Josh Reiner: It goes back to the shock statement: never call a prospect cold. The chance of success is very minimal — it's something like 0. 01%. That's the easy button. If you want to get my attention, talk to Alice Carlisle, who runs UK for me. If she says: "Josh, you need to go meet Andy White" — I'm going to meet Andy White, because I trust Alice's opinion. So find a way to get to Alice. Find a way to get to somebody. Just like you would in any other sale. Great people find a way because great people do the research. They find out who the trusted advisors are. They find out what's really important to me. And they find a way into my diary. 67:05 Andy Whyte: And to make that concrete — you only have to look on LinkedIn at the key leadership team here in EMEA. Is it fair to say roughly half your leadership team you've worked with before?67:05 Josh Reiner: About half and half. But the majority of the new ones — I'm going to work with them forever as well. 67:05 Andy Whyte: I bet the ones you're working with for the first time will end up working with you again when the next rocket ship comes along years from now. 67:05 Josh Reiner: Of course — people tend to follow people. 67:05 Andy Whyte: What is it that makes people like Alice, people like Marina, those who've worked with you before — what makes them move from extremely successful roles to follow you to a new rocket ship?68:12 Josh Reiner: I'll use a real-life story. Alice is a direct report, and we were going in with some non-negotiables: we're going to build a pipeline generation culture, and we're going to do it as a team. She started implementing the process and the non-negotiables. Then she goes into value pyramids — every first meeting needs one. Now, remember: people who haven't learned the process or seen it work have to make a big jump to spend that time when the technology just works on its own. She insisted on it, and I thought she made a slight mistake initially — she had Pete Stedman, who creates what I'd call Picasso-level value pyramids — genuine works of art — show her entire team one of these masterpieces. Then she said: "OK, who wants to go next?" And everyone just went: "I'm not following that. "69:15 Josh Reiner: So when we sat down, she was frustrated: "Why can't they see the value? We know how important it is to understand your customer's objectives, to win their mindshare, to enter the sales process properly. " And I said: "You have to make it their idea. How do you make someone on your team think this is the best way to do it? Show them. Take them on a first meeting and let them see the client's eyes light up when you talk about their business, what impact you can have, and the areas you want to explore further. " Once they see it work — and it becomes their idea — because people do 100% of what is their idea. They may do 20 to 30% of what you tell them to do. 69:57 Josh Reiner: So people will follow other people because they get better. You obviously have to enjoy one another to a certain degree — which I do with everyone we've talked about. But I also enjoy it because we're challenging each other. Using that Dolly analogy — he pushed me to take the next step when I was getting a little too comfortable. And that's what we do here. We're challenging people to be better versions of themselves. And when they have a challenge or obstacle, we coach them together, brainstorm together on how to fix it. As long as you keep that culture of training and development and getting better — usually those people stick with each other for a long time. 70:35 Andy Whyte: Yeah, I totally agree. I love it. And you've got quite a diverse leadership team — you take great pride in that. Is that something that's come naturally or is it something you've had to work at?70:35 Josh Reiner: Well, a couple of points. I'm the father of three daughters. So not practising what I preach would be a little bit hypocritical. But having a diverse team — just like any part of your career — takes a plan. We have a plan in place to hire an equal number of candidates from diverse backgrounds. By default, you end up with a very diverse team. And once you have one, it's easier to continue having one — it perpetuates itself. But I can't tell you the excitement that comes from having a wide variety of opinions, challenges you can overcome together, and different perspectives. How do you want to be the best team on the planet if you don't have more ideas, more different thoughts coming at you? If you want to be the best, you have to hire diversely. And a diverse team teaches you: you have to make sure your customers are diverse, and they want to have that experience of working with a team that takes into consideration work-life balance and the things people bring to the table. Just like all companies want to have an ESG strategy — we want to run a business that is respected, diverse, and providing good to people in the organisation. Others feel that when you bring it to the table too. It's powerful. And it broadens the scope of what's possible and makes life much more enjoyable. 73:19 Andy Whyte: Yeah. And it's self-fulfilling too. You mentioned Marina and this book she's writing with Penny and Lucy on female sales leadership — I think a major incentive for it was that: yes, there's great positive momentum around getting more women into sales. But what we felt was missing was more women in sales leadership. When you look at the data, there weren't as many women moving into sales leadership as men, even in relative terms. Women would often move into customer success or other adjacent leadership roles. And I think what's missing is role models. You want to be able to see yourself in the job you want to do. And to your point about it being self-fulfilling — I know of at least a couple of extremely talented high-performers on your team who you might not have attracted without such a diverse leadership team. If you just hire males, you get access to 50% of the talent. If you hire a diverse team, you have everyone to go after. 74:36 Josh Reiner: And you highlighted the exact point — how much great talent do we have in our team because of our diverse, embracing culture?74:36 Andy Whyte: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. 74:36 Josh Reiner: It definitely sets us apart from the competition. 74:36 Andy Whyte: So one last thing I want to get into — you're quite well-known for having a very specific view on how to write a CV that captures someone's attention. And to our earlier point: if someone is listening to this podcast and doesn't take the advice you're about to give, they haven't done enough research. So — what are the key things you look for?76:01 Josh Reiner: Yeah — and again, back to a teaching culture: we teach people how to read a CV. The reason is that when we interview somebody, we're testing intelligence, character, and coachability — and we're doing that based on the CV itself. The question funnel we build to test these things has to be derived from the CV. And there are a few things I always do. I read it from bottom to top. I start with education. Even something as simple as: did they put their GPA or grades? If they didn't, that's a question I'd ask in the interview: "I notice you went to this university — why didn't you include your attainment on here?" Because a CV has to have data and statistics. Those are the meaningful metrics we're gauging off of. So if it's not there, that in itself is a data point. 76:55 Josh Reiner: Then I look at whether the CV logically makes sense. Did you go to university as an engineer and then your first job was in sales? OK — what happened there? If you come in front of me with deviations like that, you should have a really good explanation for why you changed course. Does the logic flow make sense in the progression? The success aspect — I like to see decent stints in roles. If someone was an SDR for three months, an AE for nine months, then a Director for — you know — they're not learning anything. I want to see people master the craft. Show me consistency. When you've come in, have you mastered your role? Because if you're at a role for a very short period of time and then become a second-line leader without having truly struggled as a first-line leader — you haven't had someone resign on you, you haven't had a surprise — you don't know how to handle those challenges. 77:45 Josh Reiner: So I look for: have you stayed in companies long enough in a position to master it? Yes — and then once you've mastered it, did you move on? If you stayed in the same company for seven years as a salesperson, maybe that's a little too long. Are you challenging yourself, or are you comfortable and coasting? Because I want people who are uncomfortable being comfortable. So those are the things I look for. Education — does that logically translate into your career? Does the career have a logical progression? Do you start as an SDR and stay 6 to 12 months? Do you become an AE for a year or two? Then a senior AE? If you make a switch to another company — why? And did you follow somebody there? Were you jointly recruited with somebody? Those are questions I'll ask: when you progressed through your career, what relationships did you build? What people did you bring with you?79:50 Josh Reiner: Good people master a craft before moving to the next one. Good people get promoted into the next role, then go to the next company — not because a recruiter called them out of the blue. And this is going to spoil a lot of my interviews — but I always ask: "How did you get to be in front of me?" And if they say: "Ben called me up and said I had a great profile," I say: "So one of the most important decisions you can make in your entire life — the company you work for and the people you work with — you completely left to chance? If Ben hadn't been a great recruiter, you wouldn't be here. So what is your plan for your life? Where do you want to go?" And everyone who hears that goes: "Oh shoot. I just walked into that one. "80:39 Josh Reiner: The reason I ask that is because I do want people to have a plan for their life. I want people to get better every week. I want people to have a sense of where they're going. People who meander through life and get lucky — either I can convince them to come into the process, like we talked about with the second-line leader who stepped down to learn the craft. Or I want to find people who have a plan, who are working with others to make that plan a reality. People I can have a massive impact with. Versus people who say "a recruiter called me. " I want people who sought me out. Who did the research. Who got in front of me and made this part of their plan — not the other way around. 81:22 Andy Whyte: Wow. What an incredible conversation. Thank you so, so much. And we've said many a time on this rocket ship — you're always going to be looking for talent whilst gaining altitude. For those wanting to get involved — I'm not going to give them the shortcut. 81:22 Josh Reiner: No — don't hit the easy button. 81:22 Andy Whyte: But where should people look for you and what roles do you have open?81:22 Josh Reiner: So the major markets: we already have UK, the Nordics and Benelux, we have DACH and Central. We'll be opening up an office in the Alpine region as well. We have France, Spain, Italy. And we're going to be opening up entities in the Middle East. Growth and coverage models — a lot of the roles are posted already. I look forward to it. Please apply if you're interested in joining the rocket ship. 82:21 Andy Whyte: Just don't hit Easy Apply. 82:21 Josh Reiner: Just don't hit Easy Apply. 82:21 Andy Whyte: But thank you so, so much, Josh. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. And yeah — I can't wait for people to see this. It's going to be epic. 82:21 Josh Reiner: It's been great. I like what you're doing. Thank you very much for that.