The Sales Game Changers Podcast was recognized by YesWare as the top sales podcast. Read the announcement here.
Subscribe to the Sales Game Changers Podcast now on Apple Podcasts!
Read more about the Institute for Excellence in Sales Premier Women in Sales Employer (PWISE) designation and program here.
Purchase Fred Diamond’s best-sellers Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know and Insights for Sales Game Changers now!
Today’s show focused on the concept of “Technology by Policy” and featured Federal Business Development and Marketing expert Rob Efrus and GitLab Federal CTO Joel Krooswyk.
Find Rob on LinkedIn. Find Joel on LinkedIn.
ROB’S TIP: “Try and walk in the shoes of your end user, federal customers, understand the pressures that they are facing, agency reorganizations, budget cuts, etc. doing more with less, and align your value proposition to those challenges and the policies that are driving those challenges.”
JOEL’S TIP: “Find some good sources of information and just subscribe so you’re up to date. Don’t let policy fly by as some of it’s going to be really important. Find a few news sources you like. I’m a big fan of subscribing directly to the White House and to CISA. If you just get a few of those things coming in your inbox, you can at least keep up with policy changes as they’re being published.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m really excited about what we’re going to be talking about today. I got Rob Efrus and Joel Krooswyk on the show. We’re going to be talking about a concept known as technology by policy. Rob, it’s great to see you. I’ve seen you present this a couple of times. I think it’s brilliant. Now, a lot of our listeners are sales professionals, typically B2B, business to business. Many of them are B2G, business to government. You and I are both partnered with Carahsoft. We do a lot of work for companies in the Carahsoft ecosystem. I’ve seen you make this presentation.
You also have your big yearly presentation coming up on December 13th, and it’s going to be in person at Carahsoft and virtual. We’ll provide the links for people to watch that. It is the in-depth, comprehensive presentation on the various federal agencies and what their technology direction is, and budgets and things that people know. Rob, I’m going to guess it’s going to be even more interesting right now because we’re doing today’s interview the week of Thanksgiving 2024, and we had something that I like to call an election about three weeks ago. We’re not going to spend a whole lot of time talking about that today, because your answer’s probably going to be, I don’t know, to relate it to a lot of the questions, but I know you’re going to be talking a lot about it on December 13th.
Rob, give us an introduction, then Joel will give us an introduction to GitLab and what you do, and then we’ll get into the concepts of technology by policy. Rob, you go first.
Rob Efrus: Fred, thank you so much for having me on. I’ve been a big fan of your sales excellence activities. My focus for over three decades has been to assist federal sales professionals in helping themselves and their companies to grow their federal footprint. I started my career out at NASA as a presidential fellow, worked in the aerospace and defense consulting industry for about eight years. Then since the early ‘90s, have been advising mostly enterprise sales software providers, including GitLab, and providing lobbying and business development services focused on revenue growth.
Fred Diamond: I’m excited to hear what we’re going to be talking about. I appreciate you inviting Joel Krooswyk to come on the show, federal CTO for GitLab. Joel, give us an introduction to you and tell us a little bit about what GitLab is, what they do, and what you do for them.
Joel Krooswyk: Like Rob, I appreciate the invite to be on your show. What GitLab does. Well, if you look on our website, we’re the AI-powered DevSecOps solution, and if that doesn’t mean anything to you, basically we are an end-to-end solution for building software. It is now charged with AI to help you do that faster. My role here has varied over the years. I’ve been here a long time, but I am currently the federal CTO. Basically, the way I describe that is I’m aware of the collision of policy and technology happens for the GitLab government side of the house.
Fred Diamond: Rob, let’s just get it started. Technology by policy, what does that mean? Why do you talk about it? Why is it such a critical topic for companies, the thousands, if not tens of thousands of companies that sell to the federal marketplace?
Rob Efrus: Technology by policy is another way of looking at the federal marketplace, beyond the features and benefits of your company’s offering, whether that be software services or some combination thereof. We’ve seen such evolution of public sector policy impacting cybersecurity, cloud computing, now artificial intelligence, customer service. There is a whole inventory of policies that have evolved as the technology has evolved governing how the government buys and consumes IT and cyber-related solutions. This concept, and one which I’ve collaborated on with Carahsoft, evolved as the policies have evolved to be another filter for sales professionals to consider how their offerings map onto federal agency requirements and how those requirements are being driven by specific statutes, policies coming out of the Office of Management and Budget, and agency policies as well. The message is for sales professionals to embrace those policies and incorporate them into the value proposition being provided to prospective customers. Moreover, to put the sales professionals in the shoes of their end user customers, because many of these policies govern how those civil servants and their contractors are evaluated in terms of performance and results.
Fred Diamond: Joel, before I ask you about what this means to GitLab, Rob, could you give us an example of what maybe a policy might be that they need to be, even generically, if you could, to give it that type of an understanding?
Rob Efrus: One that goes back over a decade with me involves efforts to ensure that the software being purchased by federal agencies is free of vulnerabilities. Moreover, those vulnerabilities can be patched and those patches conveyed to the end user customer. This policy started with a minor provision in a defense bill back in 2011, and it has evolved to requirements coming out of CISA, the White House requirements relating to software attestations where vendors attest that their software was developed in accord with NIST and its secure software development framework. It’s one where large and small vendors all now have to meet attestation requirements to even sell their software to federal agencies. For the sales reps pitching that software, they need to be aware, as Joel, on behalf of GitLab, has become aware of the requirements and make the requirements into discriminators, where you can tell your customers, your software’s been developed securely, your corporate management is on board, and it’s one less box for the end user customer to check off and worry about.
Fred Diamond: One of the great things is that it’s very clear. They communicate budgets, they communicate the policies that need to be followed. It’s not just about you trying to pitch your features and benefits. It’s about how really does it apply. Joel, let’s get real-world here. What does this mean to GitLab, technology by policy? Then talk about how it’s been embraced by your sales organization.
Joel Krooswyk: It’s interesting, if I look back a few years, what we tended to do is take the corporate marketing messages, and just slap a label on them that reflected what we think it means to the government customer base. While that was effective, it wasn’t necessarily purposeful in helping our customers. When the cyber security executive order came out in 2021, I began watching and inadvertently created my role. I’ll say it was somewhat of a fortunate accident. It’s something that we were paying some attention to, but not a lot. As a result, what’s happened is when we started supporting the sales systems with this kind of information, we started to see three distinct outcomes, one being just compliance. If we know where the policy is headed, we can ensure that we are in a position to sell it. Case in point, recently, the Army said, “We need software bill of materials, otherwise we’re not buying your stuff.” If we didn’t know that and we went to sell it, we could get caught by quite the surprise at RFP time. There’s those kinds of things.
The second one is just relevance. I can now talk to government entities with their language. It’s one thing to say, “Well, NIST and CISA have put forth all these requirements.” It’s another thing to say, “This particular department over here put out AI guidance that I now have to pay attention to. Can I speak their language?” Otherwise, thought leadership really isn’t credible, and I can’t put out information that matters. Nobody’s going to listen to me if I’m talking in my own marketing speak.
I think the last thing is a variant on that, and it’s just customer success, because not only can I talk about what my customers want me to say, that’s going to help them, but it’s also the implementation. As we’re implementing things, it’s tailored to their exact needs. A good example of this is, one customer came to me and said, “All right. I’ve got this document in front of me. It’s 325 pages of security stuff. How do I break this down? What do I really need?” Now, we had already processed that, taken a look at it, and said, “Here’s the most important parts and how it’s relevant as a customer of GitLab.” We were able to help them rather quickly and take that 325-page burden out of their backpack and allow them to actually do some implementation of the solutions.
Fred Diamond: Not everybody here listening understands the federal marketplace. As we’re talking here, it sounds complicated. We talk about a 100-page document, 500-page document. We’ve talked about this on many shows before, federal acquisition regulations, all these kinds of things. The reason why we’re having this conversation is because the government is spending our tax dollars. There’s a lot of scrutiny and there’s a lot of looking into this, understanding what they’re communicating. How easy is it to work with the government customer to truly understand what exactly they’re looking for? Or is it pretty much, “Hey, here’s a document. You go try to figure it out?”
Joel Krooswyk: I’ll say there’s too much for anyone to know it all. I have gone through tens of thousands of pages of policy. My wife has taken pictures of me some days with my head on my desk in frustration trying to comprehend it. We look for the things that are most relevant where we can help. There’s a number of documents that we’ve processed and said, “You know what? This isn’t for us. It’s okay. We can let this one go. We really don’t have anything that we can give.” I think that helps focus it.
The other thing is, and I think this is where it’s interesting. I’m not a government guy in my background. I come from enterprise sales. I come from the commercial sales space. I’ve worked a lot with Fortune 10 companies in my past. That is not the government customer. Understanding the documentation is simply understanding the highlights of the documentation, so you’re relevant on the key pieces that matter most. I think from that perspective, it should give everyone hope that I didn’t live in this world. I was able to adapt to it though fairly quickly because the needs of a customer are the needs of a customer. Though the government lingo is different, I still could not tell you all the three and four-letter acronyms of all these agencies. It’s still something that we want the best experience for our customers, and that doesn’t change regardless of who the customer is.
Rob Efrus: Fred, I wanted to add that Joel really has not only performed far above the norm in terms of digesting all these policy documents, but he has also been the guy that has had the lead in responding to the requests for information associated with those documents, which is a key part of this integrating what the government wants with what the solution provider is offering. But what really impressed me the most was when Joel’s corporate marketing colleagues started to embrace the messaging associated with the knowledge and expertise gained by the policy research and engagement that Joel had done. They, in turn, started to be a channel for distributing messaging related to GitLab’s not only compliance with these policy documents, but exceeding those requirements in support of customer-related outcomes. Lastly, it also had a spillover effect back onto the federal sales team at GitLab, which got a whole lot sharper in what the policies and compliance documents were and what the GitLab story was in meeting and exceeding those goals.
Fred Diamond: Give our audience more of a broader perspective on why it’s so critical for federal sales professionals to understand technology policies, bills, laws. One of the things that we keep talking about, it’s a very lucrative marketplace. Of course, it’s fortune one. A lot of people say there’s so much money being spent because there’s so many needs. Defense, health and human services, infrastructure, service to the citizens, customer service to the citizens. There’s so many things that get affected by technology, of course, but it’s not just a walk in and shake a hand type of a thing. We’re not even going to talk about procurement, but there’s so much involved, and you’re going to be doing this great talk on December 13th about the process and what things look like 1, 2, 3, 4 years out. This is a marketplace where it’s clearly spelled out. Why is it so critical for government sales professionals to know this? What is your advice for them on how they should prepare to be good at this?
Rob Efrus: Well, it’s become a best practice and one that’s been embraced by the very largest enterprise IT vendors for years. It’s not so much the rank-and-file sales professionals that are adopting this messaging, but their leaders. Their CEOs, their leaders of the federal sales teams, et cetera. In my experience, having represented dozens and dozens of public sector sales teams, it is the sales professionals that get how the policies and the budget drive purchasing behavior so that when they are pitching their offerings, they are not doing in a single dimension that being features and benefits and value. There’s a lot more to it. There’s a lot more requirements on agencies to meet the requirements contained in those policies. They’re evaluated on them, not only by their agency leaders, the agency deputy secretaries, the CIOs and the CFOs, but you’ve also got a crew at the Office of Management and Budget that is looking at IT and cyber-related spending based on those priorities established in the policies.
The sales rep that doesn’t have a more strategic perspective on these requirements, in my opinion, is going into sales discussions with one arm tied behind their back. They’re not using the full turbo thrust of a large enterprise IT vendor who goes into these discussions with agency officials, having a better sense as to what those policies are than even the govvies that they’re speaking to. In my mind, that’s true value added.
Fred Diamond: Actually, one thing we spend a lot of time talking about at the Institute for Excellence in Sales and on the sales Game Changes Podcast, is the fact that sales professionals have always had to bring value. But now you got to be two, three steps ahead of your customer. That’s what we tell people, is you got to be two, three steps ahead. One of the opportunities in the federal marketplace is, like we talked before, a lot of that stuff is published and there’s experts like you who can offer consulting and expertise on where, kind of looking through the cracks type of a thing, and even on the printed word about where the customer’s going, it’s really what you need to do to be valuable.
Joel, federal CTO for GitLab. You spend your day discussing software modernization, cyber governance, compliance. We touched on AI. It’s surprising that we’re 15 minutes in, and we’re now talking about AI, ongoing digital transformation, automation, et cetera. Give us some of your insights into where we are with AI and Agile in government, and also DevSecOps. Describe once again what DevSecOps is for people.
Joel Krooswyk: It’s interesting. There were a lot of buzzwords in there and clearly, I need to fix up some of my LinkedIn profile terminology, because I’ve used them all. If you look back in time, it started about 20 years ago where we said software development needs to change, and we started talking transformational language. The Agile buzzword took off and we started doing Agile transformations. I worked in that space for a while. I really enjoyed that. That’s where we just started developing more iterative ways of working. Well, iterative ways of working were great, but we needed to automate a lot more things. DevOps became this term where we’re going to automate our builds and automate our processes so that we can speed through the parts that are slowing us down.
Well, that became something industry standard. We started to see a lot of it. Then security got woven in. Now we’re at DevSecOps. You’re Agile and DevSecOps, and it’s becoming a platform, GitLab. As we move towards the next leg of that journey, we’re layering AI on top of it. I think this is actually a really important point right now. A lot of people are talking about AI as a game changer, and it is, but in the immediate term, it’s an accelerator, not a transformer. Unto itself, it is accelerating all those processes you’ve been putting in place for Agile and for DevSecOps and everything else that you have in your environment because it’s reactive. At those points in time where you want to engage it, you hit the button, you say, write some code for me, fix this bug for me, develop some tests for me. In the software development world, that’s exactly what it’s capable of, but I have to push the button.
I think that’s really important to look at, is where we are today. But to the point of getting ahead of where the customers are is looking where we’re going tomorrow, where it is transformational. AI’s running on its own in the background. It’s this autonomous agent that says, I know you haven’t seen it yet, but I found this bug and we’re going to fix this thing. We’re going to get ahead of it now. Or, “I was looking through your security scans here and it’s been a while. I’m going to go ahead and run one on your behalf, because we’re seeing some new things in the database. Let me just double check your code. You know what? That code’s been sitting for two years, but there’s new code that’s been injected into some of the open source. We have to remediate that for you.” It’s becoming this agentic autonomous solution, and that’s near term. We have to help people see where they are versus where they’re going to go and how these things overlay with each other, eventually ending up at some sort of predictive solution that’s going to blow all our minds. But I’m not going to go there today.
Fred Diamond: Rob, do you want to give us some insights on AI and what you’re seeing? It’s huge and I’m really curious, in the relatively short amount of time we have left, if you want to give any of your insights on what’s coming out of the government agencies as it relates to AI.
Rob Efrus: There was talk not too long ago about zero trust being the shiny new object. But AI has eclipsed that with this massive, massive bright light that has really become prevalent throughout agency operations. What’s impressed me the most, I read agency spending and policy bills routinely and have just completed a review of all 12 fiscal 25 spending bills that fund the entire government. What was amazing to me was, sprinkled in virtually all of those spending bills, was language, funding, and direction for artificial intelligence related requirements and spending. It was just amazing to see, especially within the DOD, especially within Homeland Security, within the Department of Transportation, within HUD, within Veterans Affairs, all getting on the AI bandwagon in terms of spinning up agency capabilities to harness AI in support of their stakeholder groups.
What was so impressive was the amount of money that’s out there. It’s billions and billions of dollars. I don’t believe that that’s going to stop because it has the impetus related to the competitiveness with China as well as the national security agenda associated with protecting the homeland from our adversaries. This is a major, major trend. Fiscal 25, I believe, will blow the covers off in terms of the amount of funds, which has only been in the $1 to $2 billion range. It’s, in my mind, clearly going to the $5 to $10 billion range, ballpark. It’s no end in sight.
Fred Diamond: Obviously you’ll be talking about that on December 13th when you give your presentation at Carahsoft Conference and Collaboration Center and virtually. Is that going to be the highlight or is there anything else you want to give us a little bit of a peak into that we should expect to hear you say?
Rob Efrus: I wish it was the highlight, because it’s relatively good news and the news isn’t so great on the budget front. We’re looking at the very strong likelihood of an extension of the current continuing resolution into at least the March timeframe, with the potential for that to be extended another two or three months before the fiscal 25 process is done. The federal IT and cyber sales market, I believe, as part of the overall policy priorities of the President-elect Trump is going to be disrupted. The Civil Service is going to be disrupted with forced return-to-work requirements, the specter of entire federal agencies in the crosshairs Department of Education and EPA, to name a couple. A true effort to disrupt the performance of civil servants to potentially go after contractors to achieve what Elon Musk has targeted at $2 trillion worth of savings, presumably over multiple years. As a result of all that, the run that we’ve been on in terms of increasing IT and cyber budgets year after year after year, I believe is going to be done for some time. Once we get into ‘25, the Trump administration releases its budget and we move forward.
Fred Diamond: Joel, do you want to comment on that? Do you have any insights?
Joel Krooswyk: There’s not a whole lot I can say. However, I will say that we see that AI has to continue to accelerate. That has to be an area where funding is going to be protected, and we believe it’s actually going to be accelerated. A great reason why is simple. We talk about national security and the time to exploit a vulnerability. Five years ago, I had two months to patch my system. The latest reports from Google that came out in the last couple weeks are showing that we are down under five days, and there are some exploits happening within hours. There’s no way for us to stay secure without AI. I think that funding is going to become the critical question, while at the same time weaving itself into that cybersecurity funding that’s been mostly protected each year.
Fred Diamond: I want to thank Rob Efrus and Joel Krooswyk for the great insights here. We like to wrap up the show with an action step. You’ve given us a lot of great things to think about. Give us a specific action step that sales professionals should take right now to take their sales career to the next level. Obviously, one of them is going to be pay attention on December 13th to Rob’s presentation. You could go to the Carahsoft site to register. I go every year. It’s probably one of the more fascinating uses of time if you’re selling anything, not just federal, but any of the public sector markets. Joel, why don’t you go first? Give us a final action step that you would recommend sales professionals take to take their sales career to the next level.
Joel Krooswyk: I think the easy button is simply to subscribe, find some good sources of information and just subscribe so you’re up to date. Don’t let policy fly by as some of it’s going to be really important. Find a few news sources you like. I’m a big fan of MeriTalk, a big fan of just subscribing directly to the White House and to CISA. If you just get a few of those things coming in your inbox, you can at least keep up with policy changes as they’re being published.
Fred Diamond: There’s no excuse for not being on the leading edge of information. Rob, how about you? Why don’t you bring us home?
Rob Efrus: With all of the change that’s starting to occur with this current presidential transition, my hope for sales professionals is that they consider upping their game to consider the more strategic elements of the marketplace that are influencing purchasing behavior, in particular to try and walk in the shoes of your end user, federal customers, understand the pressures that they are facing, agency reorganizations, budget cuts, et cetera, doing more with less, and align your value proposition to those challenges and the policies that are driving those challenges.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great idea. Once again, I want to thank Rob Efrus and Joel Krooswyk. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo