How many startups and scale-ups really understand their responsibility for data compliance, and why does it matter? In this episode with Mitchell Omer from Trust Keith, we learn some important lessons that founders should take away on the importance and benefit of managing data properly as well as what it takes to build and market a data protection platform.
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Episode Transcript
Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers in the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the successes, the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.
Okay now, welcome back to Inside the ScaleUp today. Really pleased to be joined by Mitchell Omer from Trust Keith. Good afternoon, as we talked today, good to have you here.
Mitchell Omer
Good afternoon, Matt. Thank you very much for having me. How are you?
Matthew Todd
I’m good. Thank you. Yeah, doing doing well. It feels like September’s arrived now as we record this episode, but it’s all good.
Mitchell Omer
Thank God. Yeah, I’m done with this hot weather.
Matthew Todd
No, that’s cool. So yeah, as always, I like kind of guests to introduce themselves tell us a bit about themselves and their business and what it is. So yeah, over to you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself to kick us off.
Mitchell Omer
I’m Mitchell Omer, I am head of revenue at Trust Keith, which means I look after everything to do with before a company becomes a customer. So anything to do with marketing, sales and partnerships. And that’s a short summary of my role. Awesome. And what is trust, Keith? And what does trust keepers do? What does it provide for people? Okay, yeah.
What’s the best way to? I think the best way to explain this is to start off with but the problem we solve? Yeah, so perhaps I can give you a bit of context first. So as we know, there are tons of tech startups and scale ups out there today. And naturally, these companies are processing an increasing amount of personal data and generally sensitive data. Because of that, these companies are subject to pressure from all different angles to make sure that that data is like protected and secure.
So an example might be free examples would be regulatory pressure. So think GDPR compliance. Another example might be customer pressure. So let’s say you’re in a b2b SaaS business, in order to work with those big enterprise customers, there are prerequisites that you’ve got your data security and shape team, they need you to complete due diligence questionnaires, all that stuff. That’s another that’s customer pressure. And there’s also increasing the investor pressure as well. So in order to secure your series A or series be round, you need to prove that you’ve got a good data compliant business.
The problem for startups and scale ups in particular is that a lot of the time, they don’t have like an in house Data Protection Manager to look after all this stuff, it just it doesn’t quite make sense to have the hire that early.
And so usually, what ends up happening is either the founder, a chief operating officer, or a chief technical officer, will take on responsibility for data protection themselves. Now, why is this a problem? Well, first of all, typically, they’re not data protection experts. Like it’s a quite, they’re quite nuanced topics, and you get people that spend their entire careers doing this stuff. So not experts. Also, these individuals have a ton of stuff to be doing. And they’ve got dwindling capacity and phone data protection on top. Sometimes it’s just too much. Yeah.
And the other thing is they tend to find it a bit boring. Like, traditionally, it’s not the sexiest topic, and you’d rather focus on like, go to market then versus like implement in GDPR. Legislation.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah.
Mitchell Omer
So usually what ends up happening, pressure to comply, there’s is no one in the business to do it. So it ends up being one of those three, the problem. And usually, then what ends up happening is it either doesn’t get done, they don’t stay on top of data protection, or they spend a ton of time getting the business data compliant, which means it’s a distraction. So this is the problem we’re solving.
In terms of how we solve it, it’s very simple. We provide one dedicated data protection expert who like takes on the technical stuff and the heavy lifting for you to get you compliant. And we combined that with a platform where you get access to basically everything you need to become in stay compliant, like policies, procedures, training, all that kind of stuff.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. No, that’s awesome. That’s really good. And I think something definitely relevant to a lot of businesses that I work with a lot of businesses in this audience as well. You know, whether you’re at the startup or scale up stage. Yeah, it’s a problem. I see myself time and time again, is that yeah, as I say, as the CEO is the founder, the COO that or sometimes CTO that feels obliged to pick that up. And as you say, it’s not what they’re trying to do. It’s just something that someone has to do, and they haven’t got anybody else. And they’re kind of hoping that, oh, if I just stick it on Amazon Web Services or whatever, then surely that’s sufficient. But sadly, it’s not. There’s a lot more to it than that, isn’t it?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, exactly. And use the common option is like, usually, you know, spend some money with lawyers and things like that. But that’s something to note about the business as well as like, stereotypically data protection isn’t like the sexiest topic we know. And if you look at the competitive landscape, you tend to find that there are like law firms or law firm-esque consultants out there who help. And a lot of the time the options can.
They can provide like quite overcomplicated solutions, lots of legalese and jargon. And it’s difficult for data for startups to implement the stuff that sometimes is out there. So we really want to disrupt that. We think that data protection can be simple, it can be easy. It can even be engaging, so that we can make sure employees are actually thinking about it. And yeah, we’ve tried to disrupt that in even like the way we deliver our brands, the way we deliver the product, the way we sell all of that. So it’s quite an important thing that we focus on as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And I think it’s good that you kind of call out the different pressures and different angles that you can kind of come from, as you say, whether it’s regulatory, customer or investor, I think, sometimes with topics like this, where it’s something that they have to do, or in some cases, they treat it like, Oh, I know, I should be doing but you know, I’m not doing it. I think it’s all well and good kind of ignoring that until it becomes a real problem, right?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, absolutely. And ultimately, the most common trigger point is due diligence from prospective customers, because they’re, most of the pressure goes to the big corporates, like the BPS and the shells and the British Airways. But if you’re a startup and you want to work with one of those businesses, as as a result, you need to make sure you’ve got your ducks in a row as well. So it’s usually left until the point that you’ve got this like 100 Question Due Diligence Questionnaire sitting on your desk, haven’t got a clue how to respond to any of the questions. And then yeah, it’s like, okay, we need to do something about this now.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, when companies have had issues with the way they’re managing data, obviously, it might be that they don’t get the customers that they’re trying to get, but, you know, worst case scenario, you know, it causes some real data breach of some form as well, then, you know, these days as a, you know, a lot in the press a lot in social media work quickly gets out. And it’s not a good thing to have to email your entire customer base saying, by the way, we’re sorry, we got a problem.
Mitchell Omer
No, definitely not as a good point, because I think like the reality is for startups scaleups, you risk of things like fines fairly low. Like for the GDPR, there’s only been a handful of fines. And they tend to go into like the BA’s of the world. So yeah, it’s not fines, it is either, or it’s reputational risk of a breach. And if not that, then it’s just making sure that you can work with big companies and partners and get investment. There is also the other aspect of it is like there’s an ethical stance to take some companies, some founders really care about it and want to get it right from the outset. Some don’t care about it as much. And so they’ll leave it and it will be a risk that sitting in the business, but that’s a choice you have to make as a founder, I guess.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And like you say, none of the typical founders of a business will have that background and experience. So I think, yeah, it’s good that you are looking to disrupt that and provide that middle ground to help, you know, educate as well as implement.
Mitchell Omer
A lot of companies that we speak to tend to look at data protection as like a legal or technical issue, and we try to look at it as a cultural issue as well. So it’s one thing having like your policy documents in place, but ultimately, it’s about getting your staff to think and act in a certain way, which is particularly important as you start to scale your business up.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the other thing is that I think that a lot of companies that we speak to tend to look at data protection as like a legal or technical issue, and we try to look at it as a cultural issue as well. So it’s one thing having like your policy documents in place, but ultimately, it’s about getting your staff to think and act in a certain way, which is particularly important as you start to scale your business up and hire lots of employees. So making sure that yeah, exactly. You’re, you’re embedding security and privacy into the culture of your business is ultimately what will set you up for success versus like a one off purchases and policies of a consultant.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely. And I don’t think you should underestimate how much work is involved in undoing what you’ve ignored for the past six months, you know, that could be a significant kind of, you know, architectural things, you know, within your kind of software stack and the way that you’ve approached that, that you, you have to kind of revert and roll back and processes and procedures in the way that like, you know, back office staff are used to working with customers, there’s potentially a lot to undo. Yeah, it might not cost you any more to do, how do you just approached it properly? You know, early on in that journey?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, definitely. So we we work with all types, all types of startups and scale ups. And so there are some companies, we start working with that around 200 employees, and some that we start working with, with five employees. And the challenge of embedding data protection into into the culture of the business is so much bigger when you’re starting at, you know, 100 200 employees, versus if you think about it and get it right. In the early days. It has a disproportionate positive impact, thinking about it and getting it right at the start. It will also probably be a lot cheaper if you get it right at the start as well.
Matthew Todd
Absolutely. So yeah, no, I think it’s, it’s definitely a real problem that startups scaleups founders should be considering. So yeah, I guess getting to kind of Trust Keith, as a business yourself, then how and when did you get involved in trust? Keith, what were what stages is that when you kind of first came across them and started to work with them?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, so the business is just just over two and a half years old. I joined a year and a half ago, when a business was about a year old. At that point, there were I think, there were four employees. The point at which I joined was when Rory, the founder was leading on sales and marketing efforts and done an incredible job and still does do an incredible job of founder led sales.
And I think that the point that I joined was when we got, I think it was about 10, or 12, or 15 customers, we’ve got proof that we’ve got a solution that works, we’re starting to get some inbound referrals, and it was about putting in place a scalable and predictable revenue system. So making sure that we’ve got a good marketing foundation, a good coherent sales process, a partnership, strategy, all of that kind of stuff. So that’s been my focus, working very closely with the rest of the team to get get a good revenue system in place.
Matthew Todd
Cool, no, interesting. So I guess from from my side, that can be quite a an interesting point of time, as you say, where you’re starting to develop these systems, you know, once you’ve got, you know, an element of product market fit. So now it’s that kind of go to market fit that you’re looking for. So yeah, yeah, lovely. If you could kind of explain a little bit more about some of the things as you can about that you’ve managed to put in place.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, sure. So probably the best way to cut it up is to look at the different channels or routes that we take to market. So I’ve separate the, our channels into three different areas. One is inbound, one is outbound, and then one is event and community partnerships.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Mitchell Omer
So on the inbound side, I think that, this is ultimately at the core of our inbound mark, or inbound strategy is a good content strategy. And if you think about like, the data protection landscape for tech startups, the problem is fundamentally like a lack of know how on what to do and when to do it for founders, because it’s not their area of expertise, which means our proposition bodes well to a good education or an informative content strategy. Can we create good, simple, informative and engaging content that gives founders and and scaleups the information they need to figure out what they have to do?
Can we fundamentally educate the market on that through good content? And the result of that is then when it’s the right time, and people have engaged with our content, they can come to us when they’re ready and say, Hey, I’d like to learn more about trust. Keith, I’ve been using your content.
At the core of the inbound marketing strategy, in terms of content is live events. So we run live events, once every two weeks. Combination of our DPO’s being on those events, literally just answering questions for founders, CEOs, CTOs will join, they’ll say like, how do I do this? And the DPO will just answer the question. There’s no sales pitches, nothing like that. It’s purely about helping people. Yeah. And it works very well. Like it gives the the end users the knowledge, the information that they need. And it gives us brand equity, because they’ve heard of us now that we’ve proven some credibility. And when the time is right, they can come back to us.
Naturally, by doing lots of live events, we can repurpose that content. We can read it we’re starting to repurpose on to YouTube. We’re breaking it down into short videos, putting them on to Linkedin, Linkedin posts, and all of that good stuff. And so that’s one of the core components of the way we’re going to market at the moment. And it works very well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s an excellent strategy is certainly one that that we advise, you know, kind of our clients take on board as well. And I think for the way that b2b purchases are made. Now, you know, I think, you know, the days of kind of transactional marketing, you know, basically being an expensive way to buy somebody else’s email address that you can get for free with a little bit of work. Yeah, those are kind of gone, you need to build trust with the audience, you need to add genuine value, not the kind of the fake value that you know, yet another PDF that you’re not going to read is going to be in your inbox kind of thing.
Mitchell Omer
Tell me about it, I completely agree. And if you look at like the way people buy and want to buy nowadays, a lot of the time, they’ll be doing some form of research online. And you know, there’ll be scrolling through LinkedIn feeds, learning about things that way, there’ll be chatting with people in community channels. And if you can create a good content strategy that accesses all of those channels, then that’s going to I think that’s going to be very effective, assuming that your your target users are using all of those platforms. And I mean, most people aren’t today.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. And I like what you said about those DPOs on those calls, genuinely not trying to sell anything genuinely just trying to answer their questions, so that you really do help somebody with something and like you say, you’re building that brand equity, you’re building that trust with your audience, aren’t you?
Mitchell Omer
Absolutely. And I mean, you know, probably 80 90% of the people who come on there, and we answer questions for will go away And you know, they might never work with us might never come back. But that’s absolutely fine. We’re okay with that. That’s the purpose of it.
And like, ultimately, that pays indirect dividends over the long term, because it creates this viral effect of oh, hey, you should join this webinar, you should chat to Trust Keith. So yeah, it does it pays returns in a slightly different way, instead of looking for a direct return every time.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, exactly. I know, it’s harder to measure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not effective. And as you say, some of the people that attend will end up becoming customers, because that way when the time was right, because that trust has been built, but they might just be sharing that content or telling other people about you as well, that otherwise wouldn’t have heard of you, right?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, exactly. And I, so I was chatting about this, we work with like a freelance marketing director called Charlotte, highly recommend. We were talking about like, okay, how do we measure the success of this? And her response, which I completely agree with was well inbound leads, that’s all well and good looking at, like the number of likes and the number of pageviews, and like, how many followers you have and things, but ultimately, the whole, the data you should be looking at is are we getting leads? Are they decent? Are they in our ICP? And if you do, then you’ve got proof that it’s working.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, what constitutes a lever that lead quality as well must play a part in that as well. Imagine with this, you’re certainly seeing a better lead quality than you would with some other tactics.
Mitchell Omer
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. So that’s inbound, we’ve got two others, we’ve got outbound and then community as the third one. On the outbound side. So I we’ve broken outbound down into two kind of sub channels, you’ve got your traditional kind of cold outreach, building out a list, reaching out to them via email, phone, LinkedIn, all of that kind of stuff. And then a slightly warmer type of outbound whereby you’re reaching out to people within your network, and asking them to introduce to people, something called founder of Oreos is very good at as well. We found much more success with the warm type of outbound reaching out to people within their network within our network. Not just asking for intros, but thinking about, okay, how can we provide value to you, you know, I can introduce you to this person who might be able to help you or I can refer this customer to you. And in return, would you be able to introduce me to this cmo who I see you’re really close with.
And it’s actually works quite well, at first, especially in the tech community, I feel like everyone wants to help each other. And so that that strategy is worked quite well. And this quarter in particular, we’ve really focused on trying to put a bit of a system in place around it of making sure that we’ve got like inputs that we can aim to do each week each month to make sure we’re doing that consistently. So that’s worthwhile.
Yeah, and then on the traditional outbound stuff, we do that as well. I think at the moment we if I can, so we’re about to hire, look, hire an SDR who can help with some of the outbound and the referral based stuff. I think that ultimately, I want to make sure that we’re using a multi channel strategy and that we’re working across all of these channels. And the positive of cold outbound is that you can be incredibly targeted with who you want to reach out to. And you can test the messaging that you’re using. So that’s been incredible, incredibly valuable from that perspective as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, that’s, that’s interesting. And I like what you were saying about the, the kind of warmer approach and the way that you utilize that network, but still look to add genuine value to that network as well. And I think that, you know, I’ve, I’ve worked with a lot of people that are, you know, supposedly experts in LinkedIn, I’ve seen the results of other people that were some of these people as well, right. And it, you know, it can vary from Nice to meet you. Here’s my pitch, to, you know, some kind of automated approach, and you know, making it a bit of a numbers game. And yeah, you can pick up people that way. But you ended up with quite a bloated, low quality network, whereas here it is, sounds like you’re describing something that’s more genuine, but probably requires you to kind of understand that network a little bit more, but it is a lot more value led, certainly by the sound of it.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, it definitely is. It definitely takes a bit of time as well. So I have an example of one that worked recently was one of my old colleagues reached out to me and asked for some advice on their CRM evaluation. Should we use HubSpot sales, all of this kind of stuff. And we, as a business, I spoke to all of the leadership team pulled feedback together on HubSpot and Salesforce, because we’ve used both documented that into a notion page, put it into a nice structure and format and presented it back to him. We know that the business is a good target as well. So we were hit to set a good impression. And there’s genuine feedback, like it’s real feedback from us. And in return, would you be able to introduce us to your cmo and we could have a chat about if or how we could help you with data protection? I mean, we probably put collectively about five or six hours into generate in that, but actually, it’s worth it. Because value for both sides. And we managed to get a meeting out of it, which is good. haven’t had it yet. So not sure how it will go. But yeah.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, that’s Yeah, really good. Illustration, and like what you said about making a good impression?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah.
Matthew Todd
And I think not enough people think about that they can get caught up in oh, sending a response or need to send this many messages or whatever it may be, or I’ll send this over to them or send them this link or send them that link. But just ask yourself that question. Is it going to make a good impression? Could I make a better impression? Is it more personal?
Mitchell Omer
And that, yeah, I completely agree. We want to set a good impression. And it’s something that we carry throughout our entire customer journey, as well. So wherever you are on a first stage discovery meeting, or a risk committee meeting with one of our DPO, or an account check in you’ll, after each after each meeting, you’ll get a follow up with a short summary of what happened in the meeting, what the next steps are just like little things like this to demonstrate diligence and demonstrate that we care go a long way in like, setting a good impression, I think.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes a long way in trust and relationship building. Which obviously for a business to trust in the name is is you know, massively important, but it should be right.
Mitchell Omer
I didn’t think about that. Yeah, it definitely does. Yeah, so that’s the outbound, that’s two of the three. And then the third one is community. So our community strategy is about partnering up with local online communities that are communities of people within our ideal customer profile, I guess you could say. So we partner up with some venture capital firms who have come they kind of run slack groups, and some kind of founder led communities. Operations nation is a good example, who I’d highly recommend both joining the community and partnering with them. It’s absolutely epic.
And so how does this work? So I’ll give you the operations nation example. Because this is a good use case of one that works really well. So it’s a community of operations professionals, mostly in tech startups and scale ups, but it’s a global community. And it’s not just limited to that. Now, they cover all aspects of operations. And there’s a Slack group, there’s a content channel, all of that type of stuff, in terms of like the value we try to provide to the community, so we will run those events we’ve dedicated for the community. We will answer their questions on like, what they need to be knowing and thinking about data protection. If anyone ever has a question, we’ll just be there to answer it. Again, that’s great for the community, it means people are getting questions from experts, they’re getting answers that they need. And for us, again, we’re getting brand equity, which is perfect.
And so yeah, partnering up with communities, helping the users of them, and providing value to the community has been really successful for us in terms of building up the brand name of trust, Keith, as well. It’s not just operations nation, there are some, as mentioned, there are a couple of venture capital firms that we’re doing it with as well.
So that’s the third channel. And I think it’s a really important one. Because again, if you look at like how people buy today, and you’ve got even if I look at how I buy, I will always check in with one of the slack groups that I’m in, I’ll say, Hey, has anyone used HubSpot? Do you have any feedback on before I speak to a salesperson? And so making sure that you’ve got some degree of your strategy focused on communities, I think is a very important component of a modern day go to market strategy.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And that’s kind of mainly trust building. Yeah, in those communities?
Mitchell Omer
Definitely.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And I guess that must, you know, kind of feed back into, you know, the product that you provide as well, right. You know, people ask questions, it’s great to better add value and answer those questions. But you also get good insight into what type of questions are people asking you at the moment as well? And how are they asking those questions?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s something we pay very close attention to as well. And I mean, we’ve run we’ve got a product manager who runs our customer interview process. It’s something we do continually. But yeah, joining events and hearing what people are asking is incredibly informative, in terms of like shaping our marketing, messaging, or website messaging, our product strategy, like that has an impact on everything.
Yeah, so it’s a very good point, that’s something that we pay close attention to, as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Do you pair those kind of online communities and events with, you know, physical ones as well, obviously, you know, past couple of years, that’s been a little trickier. But starting back, but do you kind of use those physical ones as well?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, we do. So we’ve, we’ve sponsored a couple of on online events, and the in person ones are starting to come back. I’ll try and attend on in person events when I can, whether it’s like with a founder community, or a marketing or sales event, whatever it may be. Yeah. But definitely, I mean, I’m a big advocate of in person working cowork and flexible working, but I’m a big advocate of, of working with people in person and meeting with, you know, people in your network and potential customers in person as well. I think there’s, there’s just there’s certain degree of value that comes from meeting someone in person that they do meet.
Matthew Todd
I think we, we kind of like to kind of convince ourselves, I feel sometimes that, oh, you can have any meeting on Zoom or teams or whatever it might be. But it’s it isn’t the same as in person, I think certain types of relationships and certain types of work as well, like creative. What just happened better when it’s face to face?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, I agree. We got to be careful here, because the working from home police might come and bash us for not being modern enough. But like, Yeah, I think a blend of the two is ultimately my preferred option. But I am an advocate of making sure that there’s some in person contact, whether it’s the way we work as a business or the way we work with customers.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think a balance I think people you know, like to kind of go to one extreme or the other, but like many things, right, a balance of both is typically what gives the best results.
Absolutely. I definitely agree with that. Yeah. And thank you, firstly, for kind of sharing and breaking down as three different kind of types of channels. I think that’s a) massively interesting for me to hear. But I think massively interesting for our audience as well to get a bit of insight into are you doing any kind of paid media at the moment, or is that something you’ve experimented with?
Mitchell Omer
So we have a Kate we experimented with it, particularly my family, our founder experimented with it before I was joining, we were working with this paid agency wasn’t, wasn’t quite yielding results. So we stopped it. And we evaluated whether it was like a channel that we were going to double down on, and at the time, we just didn’t have any data to prove that it was going to work. And we had data to prove that like, you know, the organic marketing was working. And so we decided to focus on that.
So it’s not really it’s not at the core of what we’re doing. I think that I from I’m no paid expert just to fully outset. But from what I see, I think sometimes people look at paid as this one channel in isolation. But I get the impression that paid is successful when blended with a wider organic content marketing strategy, you shouldn’t just be putting a paid advert on LinkedIn and trying to book a meeting, it should form part of your wider like education, educational content. So it is very likely to be something we’ll start to sprinkle on to the organic content marketing, but it’s not something we focus on. Right now.
Matthew Todd
I see that’s interesting. And that kind of matches my findings and the approach that we take as well. And, you know, again, have you worked with all sorts of different kinds of paid agencies in the past, as well. And that if you try and treat it like a shortcut, like that kind of transactional marketing kind of way to or less get in front of this content, or lead magnet or whatever it is in front of as many people as possible to get as many email addresses as possible, like I’m counting leads, and I think the platform’s they kind of encourage you to do that in the way that they measure success and conversion as well. But I think, for me, I always see pay just like an amplifier of what you’re doing on organic, so that if you’ve got something that works, then use that as a way to amplify what’s working rather than be its own thing in isolation.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, that’s a good point. Like, the beauty of paid is that it enables you to be uber specific on who you’re targeting.
Matthew Todd
Yeah.
Mitchell Omer
And so the it feels, from listening to us, or listening to a podcast called refined labs, that state of demand gem from refined labs at the moment, and the way they look at it is use paid to deliver a message not collect an email address, which I really agree with. And again, you do this stuff day in day out, so I’d love to hear your view on it. But that really resonated with me, it’s not just about trying to get an email address or book a meeting. Yeah.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 100% agree. And I think, yeah, what paid is good, if you do it, right, is the ability to specify an audience and get in front of that audience. And if you think about that, as you know, one of the main things that a tool of paid media can provide, then why would you have something working on organic? And then not say, well, okay, let’s use that tool of paid to get that in front of some very specific people or types of people. Yeah, why would you say, Well, okay, let’s use paid, but give them something completely different, and try and route them through a different path? I don’t think that makes sense. But yeah, if you’ve got something that, you know, good content that, you know, would add value within an organization, then use paid to target that organization and see what happens.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, that makes sense. The other the other like issue or challenge I have with paid as it because I don’t know much about it just felt like this real murky and complicated world. And I feel like if you’re going to do it, well, you need to have someone who really knows what they’re doing. And someone who’s gonna dedicate time and resource to it, don’t get the impression. And also have been advised by like marketing mentors who are in contact with that you can’t look as paid as as something that you’re just going to, you know, touch up every one or two weeks. And on the back burner, like you need to focus on it and get it right. And it’s like it’s continual experiment that you’re working on. We just we don’t have the expertise in our team to do that at the moment. And so just chose not to.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I certainly agree with that advice as well, I think, don’t rush into trying to do pay too early. I see a lot of people trying to jump into that before they’re really ready in the same way that they’re trying to overcomplicate that kind of go to market fit before they’ve really got the product market fit. To start with him, I think, Oh, look, I’ve got a little bit of interest from a few small handful of customers that you see in startups. Now that’s trying to scale that was a no you don’t need to scale that you actually need to focus on the experience. And if you’re not getting a lot of referrals from those early customers, then that’s probably the place to start before you worry about any kind of ad campaign or overly complex you know, going on even more channels with social and organic.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, I agreed. That’s a good point as well I speak to a lot of startups scaleups who are looking at like how they go to market and they think they’ve got this this sales problem or marketing problem and actually, if you look at it and they’ve got a product problem like so a good indicator is are you get are your customers referring new leads to you because that tends to be a good indication that you’ve got the product right and if you haven’t then moved going on to things like your marketing and shalt sales strategy. Yeah.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think yeah, that’s definitely something to focus on. If you’re not getting that then thing kind of ask why and I think It all comes down to kind of the same thing really that we’ll be talking about, which is network and, you know, genuine network and networking, you know, versus number of connections you’ve got.
Mitchell Omer
Yep. Agreed.
Matthew Todd
You can add value to a network and community then then you’re doing the right thing.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah.
Matthew Todd
No, cool. I think that’s, yeah, interesting. Talk about kind of your perspectives on on paid as well. And kind of jumping track a little bit. I know, we were kind of talking, you know, before this call about the topics we wanted to cover, I think we’ve, you know, done a really good job, hopefully, of kind of outlining some of the problems that startup scalars face with data and why it’s probably not something they want to put off. And, you know, really great to hear about, you know, that kind of marketing strategy stuff as well. But for you kind of from a personal perspective, you know, you mentioned that you’d come from a corporate background into a startup environment. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about, you know, some of the motivations for that and how you found it.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, of course. So perhaps a set of a very quick bit of context. So from leaving school, didn’t go to uni, I joined like a recruitment startup. That was like a four man band, then went to a private equity backed SME, which had about 100 people, and then went out and I went to a very large corporate, which had something like 20,000 people in it. So a bit of exposure to all three environments very intentionally. Yeah.
I spent the majority of that time in the corporate space with a company called Thomson Reuters. And why did I join that business? So I joined to get exposure to the corporate environment to see what it was like and also get exposure to how to run a good enterprise sales process. And, yeah, I had a great time there and learned a ton. I spent a bit of time as like an SDR and manage the SDR team then spent time as an AE, and managed an AE team as well.
I think how does that differ at all to where I am today, which is like startup scale up environment. The biggest differences I’ve noticed, which sound fairly obvious, but they are differences to talk about is number one, access to resources. Obviously, there’s much less resource in a smaller business. And so you tend to wear more hats. The other one is the difference in brand recognition. So if you you’re in a sales team in Thomson Reuters, and you call someone they’re probably going to have heard of you. Versus if you’re in an earlier stage business, you might have like a micro brand in your community, but generally people haven’t heard of you. And that’s a huge difference as well. And so that’s x brand. And the third one, I think is, but they’re just two different beasts. And I found that it’s a different sales skill set to work in a large corporate, I found a lot of my time was spent managing internal teams and stakeholders versus speaking with customers, which is a skill in itself. By the way, it’s very difficult thing to get, right. But it’s very different to working in a startup where I’ve got a handful of stakeholders, and most of my time is spent just going to market and trying to find customers. Yeah, there’s some of the probably some of the key differences that I’ve noticed.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, I imagine it is an incredibly different, I’ve come from similar journey myself, I’ve worked with a lot of deliberately worked through a lot of startups scaleups, and then saw more of those bigger corporate and consultancies, just to see, you know, what were they doing that the smaller ones weren’t? And vice versa? And yeah, it’s different skills to kind of navigate that environment. But still, lots of lessons I think you can still apply to, to startups and scaleups as well.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, there definitely are. I think, work in it. So my assumption was going into the corporate world is that I’m going to be able to pick up a very specific playbook on like, how to go to market, then take that and reapply that in a smaller environment. Which kind of worked out to a degree. I mean, you know, a lot of corporates, you will you will so what I found also in the startup community is that there’s this assumption that every large business has a perfect playbook in place. And you go in and you pick the playbook up, and it’s easy, you’ve got a brand, when actually in reality, a lot of them haven’t got good playbooks. And a lot of the startups that I speak to and even a start up in now might have a better flavor than what the other corporate did.
They tend to be a bit more disorganized than then you might think. So yeah, that’s that that was definitely a difference as well.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah.
Mitchell Omer
And then like like I said, the other thing is just dealing with the difference in brand. And part of my job now in in a smaller businesses, making sure that we’re building up our brand continually, as we, you know, we haven’t got the huge name to rely on at this point.
Matthew Todd
But obviously a lot closer to that kind of brand definition and ownership of that and closer to how it’s perceived as well, right? You know, the feedback cycles are shorter, but as you say, you, you wear many hats, and that comes with a lot more responsibility, but also a lot, it’s a lot easier to kind of take ownership of those results as well.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, definitely. Another difference, as well as that, I mean, in the larger in the large corporate environment, I was working on much larger deal sizes and more complicated enterprise sales. Which in itself comes with its own set of challenges. And you tend to find in that environment that most of your competitors are big corporates anyway. So an advantage now is that going into the startup scale up? Well, the sales process is a little bit more simplified. There’s less time spent, like worrying about InfoSec and negotiating contracts versus working in a big corporate and on enterprise sales. So that’s, that’s definitely a difference too.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah. No interesting, and good to kind of compare and contrast those, as you say, I think people make assumptions about, you know, the good and the bad of what they do, and don’t have sorted out those big environments as, as well. But I think it’s, it is just different. It’s not necessarily, you know, any better or worse, is it?
Mitchell Omer
No, it’s not, I think it’s what it’s worth getting a bit of exposure in both environments, or certainly that’s my philosophy to that. To get a real taste for what both of them are like. And there’s definitely value that could be taken from from both environments as well. But I think only for myself, as I see myself staying in the startup scale up environment for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I think it probably just bodes what better to what I enjoy. And I have my personality.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s good to get to hear. And yeah, thank you for, for sharing that as well, I think, yeah, we, we’ve talked to a lot of, you know, kind of diverse range of people and startups and scaleups. And part of the reason for the podcast is to kind of highlight a lot of that. Can I diversity as well, because, you know, in the tech media, you know, there’s a very kind of US investor led kind of centric, yeah, model that, you know, tends to gain a lot of courage because it sounds really kind of sexy to say, oh, well, let me just close this many million dollars of funding or whatever it may be. But, you know, there’s a lot of different ways to, to build a startup, a scale a lot of different ways to do it and run it. That said, there are some best practices that, you know, we’ve certainly talked about today as well. But I think, you know, there’s a lot of different kind of founder backgrounds, as well, and a lot of different assumptions they may or may not make about, you’re working it in and tries or selling to the enterprise as well.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah. And of course, there is, it’s worth noting that a very good way to learn how to sell to an enterprise is to work in one as well, to really get you actually understand like, how complicated and how it works. I don’t think I quite appreciated the complexity of a large business until I was in Rome. And it definitely helped my mindset then going to sell to other large businesses as well, because you can appreciate the the the number of like systems and processes that are in place, and the the amount of focus there is on making sure that you’ve got all of the right stakeholders engaged. So definitely valid. Yeah, it’s definitely worthwhile working in one if you want to learn how to sell to one.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. And I think that’s really interesting. And, yeah, I can imagine with Trust Keith, as well, kind of, you know, bringing things back full circle, you mentioned, you know, one of the pressures, you know, could well come from those bigger companies that have those data requirements. I guess you’ve got to see that firsthand.
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, definitely. And so when I was working in enterprise sales at Thomson Reuters, most of my so if you’d imagine you’ve got an average sales cycle of nine months, four or five months of that sales cycle would be spent, that you would, it would be spent on things like data security, InfoSec, contract negotiation, actually getting the gusto that getting the customer to a point of agreement, they want to go ahead with you was kind of the easy part. But the difficult part was dealing with all of these complexities after and so yeah, I’ve got first hand experience of how painful and annoying these data security questionnaires can be. Because like, they absolutely block up deals. They they take time. And they’re difficult to respond to even for a large corporate. So you can imagine working in a startup, how much of a pain they can be.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, absolutely. I’ve worked with some clients kind of selling into some, some very big kind of national multinational companies. Not that I can probably name them. But yeah, there were a lot of layers of people. And data and security came up time and time again, from different angles. You’d have these spreadsheets and checklists and lots of questions and nightmare frameworks, some of which made no sense as questions to ask as well, right now, do you have to try and navigate?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, and the thing is what you find is, so I was selling, we were selling enterprise software to a big financial institution. And there were like six departments that we had to get through in terms of InfoSec. And every department had their own questionnaire, or all the questionnaires had roughly the same questions on them worded in slightly different ways. And none of the departments talk to each other. So you’re starting from scratch every time.
And I mean, in Thomson Reuters, we have an InfoSec in house InfoSec team to do this, that for us, so and it was still difficult. So doing it as like a, you know, in a scale up with one legal counsel, or even though one is, yeah, is a real pain. Obviously, the other consideration is, you know, how risky is the solution that you’re selling to these companies? Like, how much of their data are you purchasing? Is it just the name and email?
In any case, you’re still gonna have to respond to the questionnaire? Or are you processing their finance data? Are their employees diversity data? In which case, you know, you’re gonna have a tough time?
Matthew Todd
Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. It scales according to the type of, of data that you’ve got.
Mitchell Omer
Yep. Absolutely.
Matthew Todd
Yeah. Yeah, no, really interesting. So cool. And I think we’ve covered quite a lot on on our chat today. And I want to be respectful of your time. As well, I think there’s a lot that people can take away, you know, certainly from this conversation, I’m sure we’ll have a follow up conversation. And I’d love to get into some more different topics and you know, see how how things are developed as well. But what’s kind of your next for for Trust Keith, over the coming kind of months and year or so?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah, whats next for Trust Keith is scaling that go to market plan, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got a solution that works. And that has very good feedback from our customers. And it’s building, building that out and building out the the number of companies that we can help with with data protection. So that’s very much the focus over the course of the next year. And, yeah, hopefully we can we can perhaps do another podcast in a year’s time. And we’ll be well, some, some good developments to show. So yeah, let’s see how that goes. And watch this space.
Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, love to catch up and see, see what are the lessons learned and experiences you’ve, you’ve gained, and the Trust Keith has gained as well before just to wrap things up there for any startup or scale-up, founder, COO CTO, that’s, you know, in that position of someone’s got to do something about data protection. But then maybe they’re not quite sure where to start? Or what’s sufficient or not. You kind of mentioned either the value lead approach that you certainly take. So are there any kind of resources or things that you’d recommend they at least take a look at?
Mitchell Omer
Yeah. So jump on to any of our live events? Ask a DPO question. There’s no sales pitch, and there’s no expectation that you’re gonna join a sales call at the end. We’re literally there to help. So that’s probably the best way. If you have questions on anything you can send me or any of our DPO a question on LinkedIn. And yeah, that’s probably the best way. Drop or join any of our events, or drop us a note on LinkedIn, or, you know, there’s resources on our website as well.
Matthew Todd
Cool. Fantastic. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to talk to so thank you very much for taking the time.
Mitchell Omer
No worries. Thanks, Matt. much appreciate it.
Matthew Todd
Cheers.
Mitchell Omer
Cheers.
Matthew Todd
Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp Remember, for the show notes and in depth resources from today’s guest. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening.