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Customer experience analyst and best-selling author, Matt Dixon, sits down with TELUS International Studios to share insights from his new book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Dixon takes us through the bane of every salesperson’s existence: a long customer courtship that ends with an “I’ll think about it.”

Leveraging a first-of-its-kind study that analyzed 2.5 million documented sales conversations through machine learning, Dixon reveals that 56% of sales loss is actually caused by customer indecisiveness. Listen to the episode to gain more sales growth best practices to overcome indecision.

To learn more about TELUS International and our digital CX solutions, contact us today.

The JOLT Effect: How high performers overcome customer indecision is available for pre-order now.

Intro: TELUS International Studios, where customer experience meets digital transformation.

Patrick Haughey (PH): And you are very welcome back to TELUS international studios. I’m your host Patrick Haughey, and on this episode I am delighted to be joined by someone who I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with at a few TELUS International events over the last couple of years. Matt Dixon is a CX and sales expert, he has written many best-selling books — one of the best known is The Effortless Experience, but he’s joining us on this episode to talk about his newest book, currently available for pre-order. It’s called The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. To prepare for this book, 2.5 million documented sales conversations were studied using machine learning. So get ready to hear some very interesting insights from this first of its kind study. So I thought an interesting jumping off point with Matt might be a line that jumped out at me from the book’s description when I was reading it. And that line reads: “In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t ‘No,’  it is ‘I need to think about it.’ And I started by asking Matt why this is.

Matt Dixon (MD): Yeah, it’s a great question. That’s the beginning of the whole tale. And I love that line, too. Well, I don’t love it: I hate it — it’s terrible, it’s really bad news actually, for sales people. But it speaks to what the whole story is about. You know, I think if I’ve been out there engaged with sales people, I know, obviously, Patrick, you and I have spent a lot of time talking about customer experience, customer service, the effortless experience, etc. The other hat I’ve worn as a researcher is really focused on business to business sales and commercial effectiveness, and how is buying behavior evolving and so on and so forth. And one of the things I’ve been struck by over the years is that when you ask a roomful of salespeople to think about the deals they’ve lost over the past quarter or the past year perhaps, and you ask them to categorize that into two different buckets. On the one hand, deals you lost to a named competitor. So the customer ends up buying but they didn’t buy from you, they bought from somebody else. Versus customers where you lost, but you didn’t lose to a competitor, you lost to no decision — you lost to the customer doing nothing. What you find is, in organization after organization, by far more hands go up around the latter, that salespeople feel like they’re much more likely to lose to the customer doing nothing than buying from a competitor or, as you said, even just saying no.

MD: In fact, I think sometimes in sales we can feel like our sales people are heavily influenced by the last sales call they had, you know the product is too expensive, this competitor is eating our lunch, whatever it is. But in this case, our salespeople are actually onto something. We studied this with data and we’ll talk more about the research that went into the book, but I’ll pull forward one finding, which is that anywhere between 40 and 60% of all deals are actually lost to no decision, to the customer doing nothing. And we studied this across 2.5 million sales conversations. We used machine learning to study it. And what we found is exactly what you said. If you look at all of the I would say hundreds of thousands of things that are said in sales conversations, both on the salesperson side and the customer side, by far in our analysis, the worst thing that can be uttered by the customer is I need to think about it. And the reason it’s so bad is that, you know, the old adage in sales has long been that as a salesperson, you don’t want to you don’t want to chase garbage trucks, right? You don’t want to pursue opportunities that have no chance of closing. So in many respects, for a salesperson, it’s far preferable — it may be painful — but far preferable to be told no. The worst outcome is where you go through the entire sales process with the customer. For many companies that can be months or even years, and think about all the resources, the time investment from the salesperson side, the resources from their organization, not to mention all the resources from the customer side. These are customers who go through the demo, they go through multiple iterations of the proposal, they talk to your reference clients, they talk to your subject matter experts, you talk to all of the sales prevention departments inside the customer organization like legal, finance, procurement, etc., only for the customer to get cold feet late in the game and end up doing nothing. And so that is such a deadweight loss for the average salesperson, for sales managers and teams and for entire sales organizations. We do think that how to overcome that ‘no decision’ phenomenon, how to break through and pull more deals across the finish line is the thing that separates great sales organizations and great salespeople from the rest.

PH: We’re going to come to those traits of a great salesperson who can manage to overcome the hurdle in a few minutes’ time, because it’s a fascinating area. We’re looking at something very psychological here called omission bias. Is that right? Which you cover a little bit in the book. Just briefly explain what omission bias is and what kind of mistakes customers are looking to avoid.

MD: Yeah, perfect. So I think the conventional wisdom in sales has always been that if the salesperson starts to get cold feet, if they start to backpedal, wring their hands a bit, waver, waffle, straddle the fence, whatever term you want to use, that it must be that we’ve not we haven’t put to rest the status quo, because we all know, even as human beings, we are predisposed to stay the course. We’ll pass up on better options just for no other reason than we’re lazy and we don’t like to change. And for salespeople, that’s a really powerful obstacle. But I think salespeople have always been taught that that is your only enemy in sales. And what we found was that in our analysis of 2.5 million sales conversations, when this customer starts to show signs of hesitancy, when they start to show those signs of cold feet, by far, three-quarters of salespeople we found go back and they kind of hammer the status quo. They either try to re-convince the customer that ‘you must not really understand the value that our solution is going to deliver.’ ‘You must not really understand how wonderful it is, the ROI projections and how amazing things are going to be on the other side.’ Or, when the customer doesn’t respond to that, what do we do? We put away the carrot and we break out the stick. And what we try to do is show the customer the cost of inaction. And we do that by dialing up what’s called FUD in sales: fear, uncertainty and doubt.

And what we’re really trying to do is make the customer squirm a bit, make them feel the pain of what they’re going to miss out on if they don’t if they don’t buy the solution. We actually found in the analysis, surprisingly, is that that approach, while it’s commonly practiced, actually makes it 84% less likely you’re going to get the customer out of no decision. So you actually increase the odds of the customer doing nothing by using some of those tactics designed to beat the status quo. And to your question, what we actually found, we realized that we wrestled with this quite a bit because it’s been the conventional wisdom in sales for a very long time. In fact, we wrote about this in the Challenger Sale that the best salespeople are gifted at showing the customer that the “pain of same,” the pain of the status quo is actually worse than the pain of change. And that is one of the things they do really well. And so it came as a big surprise to us that that strategy, that approach backfires so often. And so we took a step back and what we realized was we were asking the wrong question. The question that we were asking was, what’s the best way to beat the status quo? Maybe it’s just not being done well. Maybe high performers have figured out a different technique that’s really effective today. But the question we should have been asking is a bit different, which is not how do we beat the status quo, but rather why do customers make no decision? And it turns out the reason they make no decision is exactly what you talked about, Patrick, actually if you look at the psychology research and this is actually backed up in our own analysis, that there are really two reasons the customer will choose to do nothing. The first reason is that they’re committed to their status quo, they just prefer the status quo. It could be that they don’t believe your solution is superior to what they do today or they may just believe it’s superior, but they believe their current approach is good enough. Right? ‘It’s just not worth it for us to change.’ But there’s a second reason that the customer will choose to do nothing. It’s not commitment to the status quo, it’s indecisiveness about changing the status quo. And I think when people hear that, what they immediately ask is, how are those two things different? You’re telling me that customers choose to do nothing either because they prefer what they do today or because they don’t want to change what they do today. And what we explain in the research is that those two things are massively different. And it’s something that high performers get an average performance don’t.

MD: So if we go to the psychology research, what we find is that there are really two types of loss that people in our customers are worried about. On the one hand, there are what are called errors of omission, which are mistakes and losses that we incur because we choose to do nothing. One of the old stories to illustrate is you’re in a tennis tournament and your competitor has a peanut allergy and you sit down to enjoy a lunch before your match and you know there’s something on the menu that has peanuts in it. The omission bias is when your competitor orders the dish that has peanuts in it and you don’t say anything about it. And so they get sick and they have to drop out and you win. The opposite is an error of commission. Now, an order of commission is when you incur a loss because of something you did, not because you failed to do something right, but because you actually did something wrong. So the same metaphor uses you’re sitting across the table from your tennis competitor and you proactively suggest they order the thing that has peanuts in it because you want them to get sick. Now, with those two scenarios, the outcome is exactly the same, your competitor has gotten sick and had to be rushed to hospital, etc. But by and large, everyone was more comfortable with the first one because I didn’t have anything to do with it. The second one is ‘a thing I did.’ ‘I did something wrong.’ And what we find with customers is that when they’re facing two different options, whenever something could go wrong by me not choosing to buy your solution, we could not capitalize on an opportunity, or I could buy your solution, and then something bad could happen as a result, they will choose to do nothing far more often than they’ll choose to do something and run the risk of getting something wrong. Now, the three types of things they’re worried about getting wrong are:

MD: One, I picked the wrong option. We think about all the options we put in front of our customers. So often they start to wring their hands about, ‘I’m not sure if I’m picking the right contract length’ or the right scope of the agreement or ‘I’m buying the premium version — should I really just buy the basic version?’

MD: The second thing is they start to worry that they haven’t done enough research and think about all the content out there about every vertical, every technology out there. And they start to fret over the fact that it’s the next white paper that they would consume that will have all the answers that they need to be a smart consumer.

MD: The third source of indecision is what we call outcome uncertainty. This is where the customer, before they sign on the dotted line, starts to worry that they don’t have any assurance that they’re going to get the benefits they’re paying for. And despite your rosy ROI projections, despite the great demos and proof of concept trials you did, despite the wonderful reference calls and the great analyst reports they read about your company, the customer is worried that they might be the one company for whom this whole thing goes sideways and if that happens, somebody’s head is going to roll. And the person who is going to roll first is the person whose name is on the contract.

MD: So those three things: I’m picking the wrong option, I didn’t do enough homework, or I’m going to be left holding the bag (if you will) and not getting what I’m paying for, are the sources of indecision, which interestingly have nothing to do with the customer’s preference for the status quo. And so it helps explain why we see this phenomenon that salespeople who are taught that every indecisive customer, every waffling and wavering customer with cold feet, must be struggling with a preference for the status quo. So you go back and, you know, your ‘beat the status quo playbook’ is like a hammer, every indecisive customer looks like a nail. But in fact, if they’re worried about something else, then going back and trying to convince them of the loss that might result from inaction only gives them more to be worried about when they’re actually worried about something quite different. So we found in the research that high performers have figured out a different playbook, a companion playbook not just for beating the status quo, but for laying to rest or overcoming these sources of customer indecision.

PH: And does this take us to the JOLT effect?

MD: Absolutely, yeah. So what we found is, there’s again, there’s two playbooks. We’ve all got ‘the beat the status quo’ playbook. We wrote a book about challenger selling; we happen to think being a challenger is one of the best ways to beat the status quo. But as I said before, it’s only part of the story. If beating the status quo is all about showing the customer the cost of inaction, overcoming indecision is getting them more comfortable with the action you’re asking them to take, making them feel like you’re making a good choice, don’t worry about the other options, you’re picking the right thing. You’ve done enough research, you’re in good hands. I’m your subject matter expert, your trusted advisor, and don’t worry, you’re not jumping out of a plane without a parachute. There are some assurances we can give you that this is going to actually work out well for your organization, etc. So if the beat the status quo playbook is about dialing up the fear of not purchasing with the customer, then the playbook for overcoming indecision is about dialing down the fear of purchasing, right? It’s making the customer more confident and comfortable in the decision you’re asking them to make, which they are quite anxious about, right. I didn’t do enough homework. I’m picking the wrong thing. I don’t have any assurance this is going to work out for me. And so JOLT is a set of four behaviors, and I’ll just explain what they are really quickly, that together form this playbook for overcoming indecision:

MD: The J is judging the level of indecision. And what we found is that high performers are quite good not just at assessing opportunities and customers on their ability to buy their solution, but also on their ability to make a decision. So not just the ability to buy, but the ability to decide. And they do that through active listening, probing questions, and powerful requests they make that elicit responses from the customer that tell them, ‘Is this person somebody who can actually make a decision and do so in a reasonable amount of time?’

MD: The O: offer your recommendation. So salespeople have been taught for a very, very long time that it’s all about diagnosing the customer’s needs, understanding what they want. And the hope is that by asking good questions, the customer will figure out on their own what they really want or what they need. But what high performers know is there’s a time for asking and letting 1000 flowers bloom, and then there’s a time for telling and making a recommendation, because with too many options on the table, the customer again will get wrapped around the axle about what they should choose and they’ll fear I’m going to choose the wrong thing, and that will become an irreversible decision.

MD: The L is limiting the exploration. So in a world where customers want to continue to consume content, they always feel like they’re not enough of an expert on the technology or on the platform or on the competitive landscape or on the decision they’re being asked to make. They will consume information endlessly, and there’s no way that they could possibly develop the level of expertise that we as salespeople have. And so we’ve got to put a limit to their exploration, and the way we do that is we’ve got to earn the trust, the trust and credibility, if you will, the customers trust, and we’ve got to establish our credibility as trusted subject matter experts who have the customer’s best interests in mind, and that we can guide them through this learning journey and that they don’t need to consume all the content because we’ve already done that. And we are their trusted advisor.

MD: And then finally the T: this is about taking risk off the table. So when our customer’s hand is hovering over the contract and they’re worried: ‘boy, this is a really big investment, it’s a really big decision for our organization and what if this goes sideways on us?’ We’ve got to provide some assurance that we’ve got their back, that things are going to go fine. And sometimes it comes down to additional professional services support, not that we give it away for free, but proactively suggesting that starting smaller, getting the customer to not bite off more than you can chew, or creative contract structuring that gets us in a place where the customer feels like they’ve got a safety net if things start to slide, if they start to go sideways. So that is the JOLT Effect. And we like it because it’s memorable, but it also speaks to what’s happening here, right? It’s about jolting our customers out of their indecisive state toward action.

PH: It’s really, really interesting. And actually everything you’re talking about there, there’s a couple of words that are shining through to me, which are customer success, it’s not just ‘make the sale and that’s it.’ It’s not a new area, but it’s certainly been more in focus in the last few years that we come out the other side of the funnel with a whole new funnel, which is making sure that the product is used properly, that we keep we keep them educated, that we’re there for them. Is there an element of this in all of that?

MD: 100%. We talk about actually in that T chapter, taking risk off the table, that one of the best things that that salespeople can do is pull forward some of those customer success engagements, laying out the roadmap for how we’re going to work together, the project plan, here are the key milestones, here are the metrics. Let’s get the quarterly business review meeting set up now, let’s get all of this lined up because we know from working with companies who get a ton of value out of our solution, this is the roadmap for success. So it sends the customer the impression that you’ve done this before. You know where the pitfalls are, you know where the landmines are, you’re going to start thinking one step ahead and you’re going to make sure that we’re going to end up in a good spot — this is a huge confidence giver for the customer.

PH:  And on that note, and again, in relation to customer success, is that the area where a lot of this is about the sale and the salesperson, but when it comes to CX professionals, customer experience professionals, what are the lessons here as well?

MD: Yeah, for others who support the sales organization, whether that’s marketing, it’s customer success, I think understanding that when our customers start to waver, it is more often than not, in fact, I didn’t mention this before, but what we found is if you divvy up losses to no decision by losses to the status quo versus losses to indecision, you find that indecision actually encompasses more of those losses. 56% of the losses are because the customer is indecisive, it’s not because they’re in love with the way they do things today. And for all of us in the organization to understand the sources of that indecision so that we can work together to get our customers over the hump and get them across the finish line, again, whether that’s customer success, articulating the plan to work together, even proactively introducing you to your customer success team members, and maybe sharing roadmaps and project plans that have been successful with other clients and talking openly about the risks and the pitfalls and the landmines you want to avoid. Or it’s marketing perhaps, figuring out what are, what are the configurations that we should pre-package into, kind of, if you will, “Happy Meals,” because we know when customers buy this configuration, they’re really, really happy. So let’s package those up, let’s market around those and let’s train our sales people to actually advocate for those solutions because we know when people buy it that way or buy that configuration, they’re much more happy with the results. Or lastly, it might be finance, it might be thinking about some of those ways to do creative contract structuring, terms and conditions that provide that assurance to the customer, instead of making salespeople go and ask for permission every single time they want to grant an exception or flex a term or condition in a contract.

PH:  It feels like everything we watched and learned from Glengarry Glen Ross ‘always be closing’ is actually wrong. It’s turned on its head, Matt.

MD: Although I will say I will say Alec Baldwin did have a point. You do want to get the customer to sign on the line, which is dotted.

PH:  Just a couple of final questions, Matt. Are these same techniques that we’ve just talked about, do they apply to securing contract renewals with existing customers?

MD: Yeah, it’s a great question, Patrick. Actually, I was reminded of this recently. My co-author, Ted McKenna, who did a lot of the data analysis, reminded me that we actually did have a fair number of account managers in the sample. And so some of these behaviors about gauging indecision, offering recommendations, limiting exploration, taking risk off the table, matter as much to existing customers as they do to new customers. Now, some of those things I think might matter to different degrees. So offering recommendations, think about when the account manager is often in the position to have to not just renew the contract, but to introduce cross-sell and upsell opportunities, or ideas, new integrations, expansion. It is in many companies today ‘land and expand’ is the motion of sales. And so the account manager is the one leading the expansion charge, which is very much a sales motion. So guiding the customer, making a recommendation and also building credibility and trust by telling them what they shouldn’t buy. I know you want to go over here, but I actually don’t know that that’s the best fit for our solution. Where, you know what, in an extreme world, I know you’re looking for us to help you here. We’re honored that you turned to us, but this is actually not what we’re good at, it’s actually a competitor of ours, I know people over there, and I’d be happy to put you in touch. So these kinds of conversations can be huge credibility builders, because, again, our customer is not just going to going to feel indecision when they’re weighing the purchase, they’re going to feel indecision when they’re weighing a bigger contract next time around or renewing for a number of years, right, which is very much the job of the account manager, that indecision will creep up in any, in either scenario, I should say.

PH:  Finally, what’s made this book possible and what has allowed you to maybe turn some of the perceived wisdom around sales kind of on its head in a lot of ways is rich data, which, ironically, COVID-19, allowed you to collect.

MD: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. I think right around the time that everyone was watching Tiger King and learning to make sourdough bread, I think what Ted and I realized was there was this golden and maybe once in a lifetime opportunity as sales researchers, which was to study sales in a truly ethnographic way, which is to go where the rubber hits the road, the actual sales conversation. And what made that possible is when the entire world of sales went virtual overnight in March or April of 2020. And so we worked with several dozen companies to, if you will, harvest 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, then use a machine learning platform to do the analysis. And so it was, again, I don’t know that we’ll ever be afforded the same opportunity, I think some sales will start to go back to live in the future, so this may be a one-time thing, but I think virtual is still going to be a big chunk of the way we sell moving forward. Customers like it, it brings some efficiencies to the sales organization, the sales person. It’s better work-life balance for our sales people and they don’t have to fly around on planes all the time, not to mention better for the environment. So it was a really exciting initiative and maybe a once in a lifetime thing, but it was this fantastic, I think, once in a lifetime opportunity for us as sales researchers to study sales in this completely new way. We were very much inspired by Neil Rackham’s work when he wrote Spin Selling, and he and his team spent 10 years physically sitting in on 35,000 sales calls and it never occurred to us that anything like that could ever be accomplished again until COVID-19 happened, and suddenly, now there we go.

PH:  Well, it’s fantastic. So where can people find more information and pre-order and buy the book?

MD: Yeah, sure. The book is coming out from Penguin Random House on September 20. The Jolt Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. So you can find it listed on the Penguin Random House site as well as everywhere where fine books are sold. And you can go to www.jolteffect.com and get more information there. We’ll be releasing bonus content, we have a pre-order offer out there for people who buy early, send us their receipt at preorders@jolteffect.com and we’ll sign you up for a virtual event in September that we’ll be running. And we’d love to host all of your listeners at that event.

PH:  Matt Dixon, a pleasure as always. Thanks so much for joining us on TELUS International Studios.

PH:  And a very big thanks to Matt Dixon for such a fascinating conversation. But it’s only a taste of what’s in Matt’s book, so please do check out the links we leave in the show notes here and purchase a copy for yourself. Thanks again for listening to another episode of TELUS International Studios and I hope you can join us for the next one coming soon.

Customer experience analyst and best-selling author, Matt Dixon, sits down with TELUS International Studios to share insights from his new book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision. Listen for his latest findings.

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Matt Dixon on overcoming customer indecision

On this episode of TELUS International Studios, we’re joined by Christopher Bray, chief revenue officer at Aura, a digital security start-up that recently achieved unicorn status and caught the attention of high profile investors like Jeffery Katzenberg and Sujay Jaswa.

Aura has been making waves recently for its pledge to back customers who suffer losses related to identity theft and fraud with up to one million dollars in coverage. Christopher shares his thoughts on how this offer, as well as Aura’s approach to empathetic customer care, has impacted the company’s success. He deep dives into how these components help strengthen the level of trust between Aura and its customers, all while serving as a key differentiator in the industry. Check it out.

Intro: TELUS International Studios where customer experience meets digital transformation.

Patrick Haughey (PH): Welcome to TELUS International Studios. I’m your host, Patrick Haughey, and on this episode, I meet the chief revenue officer of a digital security start-up called Aura that recently achieved unicorn status. And we talk all about online security, customer and user experience and, of course, growth. There are so many threats out there when it comes to your digital presence. And traditionally, we have had to have an individual application or piece of software for each one of these threats, requiring quite a bit of time and money and also a level of technical knowledge and expertise. But then Aura came along and bought all of these individual applications together into one suite, giving users better options, better value and a more seamless user experience. And here at TELUS International, we understand the importance of client security on behalf of our partners. So this is a topic that we take very seriously indeed. Well, Aura has attracted the attention of some very high profile investors, including Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Silicon Valley investor Sujay Jaswa. And the company recently achieved unicorn status or a one billion dollar plus valuation. At the heart of that phenomenal growth is Aura’s chief revenue officer, Christopher Bray, who is my guest on this episode of TELUS International Studios. We caught up earlier and Christopher began by explaining exactly what Aura does.

Christopher Bray (CB): Yeah, well, we are, we’re protecting individuals and we’re doing it in a very different way to, I think, the way that the industry has done it over the last 20 years. What makes us different is, we’re a collection of experts coming from various companies and putting together a solution and a value proposition almost with a white sheet of paper. Our strength is that we have a lot of these core technologies that have existed as point solutions. But we’ve pulled that in together into a very seamless customer experience that protects people’s identity, privacy, as well as device security, unlike anything out there in the market. I think one of the things that the industry has been guilty of over the years is they’ve expected customers to be technical experts. But any bit of consumer research, you’ll find that your average consumer doesn’t know what the difference is between a firewall and an antivirus solution and why should they? You know, that should really be our job to say, hey, listen, we’ve got your back and we’ve got a solution that takes care of it all for you. So we’ve built this product the Aura suite that we launched just recently, that does a really good job of demystifying a lot of this, educating, empowering and giving you the ability to really understand your security profile and fix it.

PH: So does that suggest that up to now, traditionally there are many different types of threats when it comes to your digital presence and your online security. But up to now, you really have had to have a number of different types of software or a number of different types of applications to address all of those threats. Whereas what you guys are doing is bringing all together in one suite.

CB: And that’s very much the case. And if you look at all of the solutions that you need on a point product basis in order to protect yourself, that starts to become rather expensive. But it also requires a certain level of technical sophistication that most people don’t have. People are aware of the threat out there. I mean, every seven seconds, someone is the victim of identity theft or fraud, and they’re losing about three point three billion in fraud in 2020. That was an 80 percent increase from 2019. So the problem is there, it’s just how do I fix it? And it leaves a lot of consumers a bit paralyzed thinking, OK, I know I’m at risk, I might be protected, but I’m not sure to what extent I am.

PH: What does Aura, the Aura suite look like? How does it work? What’s the experience?

CB: That’s a great question. So the big, I think, difference and differentiator is the customer experience. So we try to do as seamless and onboarding as possible and as frictionless as possible and then driving to a very clean and understandable UI that summarizes your security, your privacy and your identity status. And then it provides you with tools a) to understand what’s going on and then b) to remediate, which is all covered by a million dollar insurance policy, as well as telephone based support, in the event something has happened where your identity has been stolen and you need our help to get it all back.

PH: In terms of actually knowing that we need tools and platforms and suites like Aura, do you think unless you are hit by a threat, unless your identity is robbed or suddenly your bank account is empty, do you think we are actually aware of how much we need these things as a preventative measure? Could there be a bit more education around that? Could we be a bit more aware of why we need things before the threat actually becomes a reality?

CB: Yeah, and that is being done for us, sadly, with the ever increasing amount of breaches that are that are happening and the press coverage that they’re getting, the challenges is, is even if you are diligent about protecting yourself and making sure you’ve got your private data all locked down. That does nothing if you have a massive breach where a company that has your data has lost it all to hackers. And that has led to quite a bit of awareness across consumers that, “hey, maybe I do need to be more proactive here because this is not within my realm of complete control.

PH: Yeah. And those consumers that you’re dealing with, are they, you know, people like you and I or big enterprise companies or are they both.

CB: They’re overwhelmingly - I wouldn’t say people like you and I, because we have industry experience. I think my perfect litmus test for a consumer is my mother in law who is just not technical in the least bit. She does not understand how complex and pervasive the threats are, but she does know that they’re out there and she does appreciate a solution that basically takes care of it for her. And if she wants to learn more about it, it is there. But at the end of the day, it keeps her protected. And that’s the, that’s really the bulk of the consumers out there. As I said earlier, we don’t expect them to be technical or security experts. All we need them to do is to install and use the product and have that peace of mind that they’re protected proactively as well as reactively.

PH: Ok, well, when it comes to a situation where your mother in law might feel she wants to talk to a customer care agent, customer experience agent of yours, what kind of communication can she expect? And is how she is communicated to very important or can you just have an out of the box let’s just sort this for you  factual approach or is tone important?

CB: Oh, tone is critical. We take great pride in our customer service. It’s US based and it’s got some of the highest NPS scores in the industry. If we’re talking about just the identity component of our solutions, there are plenty of pure identity play companies out there. What differentiates you in that space is the effectiveness of your customer care. So when something really goes sideways and you need help, you need to be able to access someone quickly who can then guide you through the process, hold your hand and handle that remediation process as effectively and empathetically as possible. And that’s reflected in our NPS numbers. It’s also reflected in our reviews and it’s something we take great pride in.

PH: Another telling fact of how successful you’ve been. You’ve attracted the backing, the attention firstly, and then the financial backing of some very high profile people like Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood mogul, and the Silicon Valley investor, Sujay Jaswa. Do you want to tell us a little bit about these investors and maybe how that came about?

CB: Yeah, this was the brainchild of our CEO, Hari Ravichandran, and he’s done a fabulous job of taking businesses and growing them and taking them public and making them very successful. And he saw a real opportunity here to take a couple of assets. You know, I like to say we’re a start-up, but we’re not a start-up because we’re a collection of acquisitions. And in that process, he got to know Jeffrey and Sujay. But we’ve also complemented that board with some pretty other impressive names like Jim Cash and Zulfikar Ramzan. So it’s a star studded board that has done a fabulous job in supporting us in our business and being advocates as well. So getting our name out there, because we’ve got these point solutions that we acquired and combined into a suite who all are industry leading solutions in their own right, but pulling them together into one seamless customer experience and a new brand requires a fair amount of work. And you need, you need top talent at the leadership level as well as top talent at the board level to make that a success.

PH: And so when you bring on investors like this, do they tend to be more than just the finance? Do they tend to bring a little bit of expertise to the table, like you say, or bring a little bit of their profile to the table in terms of getting the name of Aura out there, et cetera?

CB: Oh, absolutely. And as you can imagine, folks like Jeffrey Katzenberg, I can’t think of anyone who’s better networked than that man. So they are - this is a - I’ve worked with many boards. What I really, really enjoy about this board is they’re hands on and they’re very and they’re strong advocates of the business. And of course, they all bring a wealth of experience and their own network. So if there are companies out there that we want to talk to, invariably there’s somebody on our board that knows somebody senior or somebody on their board. And it just makes that whole process so much easier than cold calling a new organization, for argument’s sake, and trying to make yourself heard and establish that credibility. We - when people find out that we’ve got the backing that we do that opens doors and that really helps.

PH: I guess you’re a long time in this industry and you probably have seen this over and over again. The importance of putting together a strong board, it’s probably very hard to overestimate.

CB: Yes, I fully agree, and what’s nice about this board is it’s very diverse in the experience and the skill sets that they bring. So invariably whenever we have a roadblock or a challenge, there’s probably someone on the board who’s been there before and someone we can turn to for advice.

PH: And your role, Christopher, as chief revenue officer. What does that involve exactly? I’m sure that’s a very long answer. So maybe the elevator pitch.

CB: My role is really focused on helping scale this organization and scale or go to market. We did some pretty remarkable things in previous lives at previous companies, and we’re running a lot of similar plays here. There’s a huge opportunity in not only obviously the direct to consumer business, but also on the - in the side of the business we call B2B2C where we partner with large PC manufacturers as an OEM solution or large telcos as part of their value added services and - or even financial institutions and others. Those channels are some of the highest volume, new subscriber acquisition channels that you can get out there. So we’re scaling that side of the business. And, you know, to my earlier point about a virtuous cycle that helps feed the direct consumer and vice versa, the direct consumer helps drive the brand awareness to help the sales work, land new partnerships.

PH: And so, you know, is as a large part of your role, kind of coming up with those ideas for how to scale, for looking at different types of partnerships, whether it’s new telco or device manufacturer, for forming those relationships and really just trying to get a partnership going.

CB: Absolutely. That’s the majority of what we’re doing right now. And what’s nice is it’s - there’s some proven verticals out there that are quite successful. And so we don’t need to reinvent the wheel in most regards. But what I’m finding, the advantage that we have with a lot of these large partners is our customer experience. They themselves have grown weary of some of the legacy players and the solutions that they’ve been exposed to over the years. And look at the Aura solution as a fresh new alternative.

PH: Yeah, interesting. I’m actually on that note and your pricing structure, you know, when you come out with it, with a new offering like this, how to price it, I guess, is one of those huge conversations at the very start. And it’s a huge decision. So how did you land on your current pricing structure and how does that make you different to what else is out there also?

CB: Yeah, well, you know, back to bringing together a world class leadership team. I’ve got a lot of people in my org who are some of the best and the brightest in the industry. And the opportunity we have here is to start with a clean sheet of paper and not repeat some of the mistakes that we saw in previous companies. And one thing that this industry is notorious for, and people pretty fed up with, is the sort of bait and switch pricing. Right. Become a subscriber. It’s only nineteen dollars to activate your first year of the product. And invariably they’ll get automatically renew the next year for sometimes in excess of one hundred dollars. And we wanted to be really clear to differentiate ourselves from that type of approach because it’s about trust. We’re handling not only people’s ultrasensitive information, but we’re also telling them, hey, we’re here to protect you and we’re here to treat you fairly and treat you with respect. And doing that type of pricing strategy just flies in the face of that. So our pricing is very transparent. If you land on our website, you see our good, better, best option and the monthly in the annual price for each one of those. And that doesn’t change. That doesn’t you don’t get a nasty surprise 12 months later where all of a sudden it’s 50 percent more.

PH: So you obviously have form, a lot of form in this industry. You’ve worked in it for some time. I think we believe you would have been with McAfee, which would have one of the big operators in the cybersecurity space. So what attracted you into the industry in the first place?

CB: I got into the industry, oh jeez, back in 2001. That was really when the big mass mailer viruses were coming out. Like Melissa and the like. And that was really being perpetuated by kids who were looking for the digital bragging rights, it was sort of the digital equivalent of breaking streetlights and the like. Of course, that’s evolved into organised crime and nation state mischief out there on the Internet. But  the idea of protecting people and getting into that space I found very attractive. Previously, I’d been working in the consumer hardware world. So I was approached by McAfee back in 2001 and with responsibility for southern Africa. And that was just an absolute blast and came to the US in 04 to join the relatively nascent consumer group. It and in some regards it reminds me a little bit of what we have in terms of potential at Aura. When I joined the McAfee consumer group, we were pretty much a rounding error on the corporate PNL and through this scaling strategy of working through large partnerships, I mean, we pioneered the telco business model of AOL back in 2002. We were able to take that business from a near standing start to a billion dollars in seven years. So, fast forward to today. What attracts me about Aura is I see a lot of similar things here and an ability to be disruptive and to scale this business quickly and very successfully. I think we can easily get to a multiple hundred millions of annual incremental revenue to what we’re doing today through this approach. I think we have an opportunity to really change the industry. And we’re seeing some of the legacy competitors getting very nervous about what we’re doing. So I don’t think us becoming a billion dollar revenue organisation is out of the question. I think it’s more of a question of when as opposed to if. And our aspiration is to take this organisation public. And I’m very optimistic that we’ll be able to do that in the medium term.

PH: And finally, I guess you’re doing it in a market that unfortunately, in a way is certainly becoming rife for companies like your own. You know, the threat of online hacking, privacy, all of the things that you mentioned is growing. I guess it is not going to stop anytime soon. And particularly with the world moving on to digital as it has since COVID, that’s only going to be a fuel for that.

CB: Oh, indeed. I mean, we’re looking at it. You know, it’s about one hundred billion dollars TAM as it stands currently. And I remember in the early days of working for McAfee, I think there were something about less than 20 or 30 new pieces of malware released a month. And these days it’s in excess of five, six hundred thousand unique pieces of malware released today. So just the volume of online mischief has increased exponentially. We’ll continue to do so.

PH: And with that increase in online mischief will, no doubt, come more demand for Aura the services or provides in the years to come so the story of Aura’s growth, it seems, is really just beginning. Thanks to Christopher Bray Aura’s CRO for joining me on this episode of TELUS International Studios. Remember to check out TELUS International dot com for more information about the company that brings you this podcast series. And if you are enjoying the series, please do follow on Spotify or subscribe for free on Apple. We will be back soon with another brand new episode of TELUS International Studios. And thanks for listening.

On this episode, we’re joined by Christopher Bray, chief revenue officer at Aura, a digital security unicorn. Christopher shares insights on empathetic customer care and combating fraud. Listen now.

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