EPISODE 723: Bryon Kroger Created Rise8 So Fewer Bad Things Would Happen Because of Bad Software

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Today’s show featured an interview with Bryon Kroger, CEO of software development firm Rise8.

Find Bryon on LinkedIn.

BRYON’S TIP:  “Give away all your secrets. Every single one of them. If you want to have a value-based conversation with somebody, show that you’re willing to give them value in the first place. The worry here with everybody is if I sell the secrets, they won’t need me, but I promise, they’ll still need to buy the implementation.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We’re going to be talking to Bryon Korger. He’s with Rise8, and we’re going to be talking about some of the lessons he’s learned along the way as a successful sales leader. He’s also the CEO of the company, and he’s probably the sole sales leader, sales professional with the company. We’ll talk a little bit about how you got to that point and some of the things that you led previously, which have gotten you here as you talk about selling your software and software development to companies that were doing work with the government.

Bryon, give us a little bit about your background and tell us why you decided to start Rise8 and tell us exactly what Rise8 does.

Bryon Kroger: Thank you for having me. I spent 10 years active-duty Air Force. I was an intelligence officer, at least that’s what I came in as. I spent the first seven years doing targeting operations, a lot of counter-terrorism drone related work. I like to tell people that for the first seven years of my career, I used really terrible software. It’s not like what you see in the movies at all. Part of that is because people are selling bad stuff to the government, but part of it is self-induced as well. The government asks for the wrong things. The result’s the same, though. I was using terrible software in the field. As a result of bad software, I saw missions fail. I saw people die. Not just soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, but also innocent civilians.

I saw a particularly egregious incident where I thought software played a role and I decided I wanted to do something about it myself. I went over to the acquisition side of the Air Force where we procure software, got assigned to the program office where they built my terrible software and went to work trying to change it. That was a project called Kessel Run in the Air Force. After a few years of doing that, I decided to start Rise8 because I could keep going in the government and have vertical impact building a single program at a time, but I wanted to be able to have horizontal impact to be able to serve multiple customers, not just in the Air Force, but also across the services. Now we do work in the Department of Veterans Affairs as well. It gives me a lot more opportunity to have a broader impact.

Fred Diamond: Thank you for your service. I want to ask you about something you just said. We’ve done over 750 Sales Game Changers Podcasts and we’ve interviewed some of the leaders, a lot of times leaders of organizations like Salesforce, Oracle, and Microsoft, world-class companies that are targeting public sector and federal. You’ve used the term four times, terrible software. Why is that? Why would the government be using terrible software when all these great vendors are targeting the government and providing solutions as well? Give us a little bit of an insight into that.

Bryon Kroger: It’s easy to blame humans. In fact, in the incident that I mentioned, instead of blaming the software, we blame humans. That’s what we do. But really, it’s a broken system. I think there’s a lot going on in politics right now that a lot of frustration and pent-up anger even built up around the inefficiencies of government. But one of them is certainly the way they procure anything, not just software. It makes it really difficult for even huge organizations with giant sales forces like Salesforce to sell into the government.

It’s a completely different sales motion. It’s very inefficient and costly. It’s often cost-driven instead of value-driven. Something we’ll probably talk about because that’s how I think about sales a little bit differently in this space. But the government’s just not a great buyer is what it comes down to. As much as it’s easy to blame prime contractors and all these incumbents, it all traces back to the government. That’s why my first stop was to try to fix this from the inside. We were pretty successful at doing so and proved that, yes, in fact, if you get out of the way, some really incredible vendors can come in and do really incredible things.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great distinction there. I’ve met a lot of people who work for the government and all the agencies and departments, they’re committed to what they want to do. They’re committed to the mission, they’re committing to solving problems for citizens, be it through defense, infrastructure, or health and human services, or highways, whatever it might be, but the problem is always the procurement side. I appreciate your clarifying that.

Give a little bit of background on how your experience as an Air Force veteran, you mentioned Kessel Run, how has that impacted your sales strategy at Rise8? How has it defined what you’re going to market with?

Bryon Kroger: Outside of some of the true commercial product companies that certainly try to sell to government, there’s a whole cottage industry of people that just play the game. As much as I can blame the procurement process for creating those cottage industries, those people still exist and they choose to play that game. I saw that as just really gross, because for me, the cost of delay wasn’t like if you mess up some finance software, people’s paychecks get delayed. That’s a big deal, but that’s nothing compared to lives on the line and literally watching people die because people are behaving in largely unethical sales motions, where they’re not selling what the customer needs, they’re selling what they know they can sell more of, whether it helps the end user and the mission and when you’re selling to the government, like our society.

I just saw so many people playing into that system that I wanted to build something different that was focused on actually producing outcomes for war fighters. The true end user, not just the customer I sell to to get to them, but actually them, and then veterans and the clinicians that serve veterans. That was first and foremost. I knew that had to be the starting point. We’ve got to work backwards from that. Then when I went over to start Kessel Run and I was on the procurement side, I saw a huge gap in the industry as well in terms of there were a lot of great point solutions, but not like a compound services organization that could come in and solve across the entire value stream.

Sometimes you get a little pocket of excellence and they’d get stuck, truly great vendor, truly great capabilities, whether it was services or product, but they’re stuck inside of five other vendors that are not doing their part. You get capability that gets stalled out that way too. I wanted to be able to serve the actual end customer and to be able to do it end to end. That really informed how I stood up my company and the sales strategy that we put in place.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second or two. We have listeners all over the globe who listen to the Sales Game Changers Podcast. As listeners, they know that I’ve had a lot of people who focus on the United States public sectors, federal government. I’m based in Northern Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. A lot of our customers at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, a lot of our members focus on public sector. Go a little bit deeper into what you just described. You said there’s pockets of excellence within other places, but then there’s a lot of things around it that make it difficult for the business to operate. Give us some insights into why that is. Is that just because of history, years and years and decades of legacy systems? I hate to use the word malaise, but maybe things like that. Give us your insights and why that is, because that’ll help us understand why you wanted to make these changes.

Bryon Kroger: It’s a little bit different for product versus services companies. I’ll briefly touch on product. We’re a services company, so I’ll focus on what I know better. But an area product companies get stuck a lot and actually reach out to us for help as a third party is they’ve got really great software, they can’t get it deployed to military production environments where the end users could actually use it. There’s a whole authorization to operate process, or folks a lot of times go through the FedRAMP process to get their ATO, and those processes are often fundamentally broken. Even when they’re not, it’s very difficult to navigate without insider knowledge. Folks will get stuck in that. Then also, even when they know how to navigate that process, if you’re a cloud-based software application, you need a cloud to land in.

A lot of times the customer thinks they have that, but they don’t actually. They haven’t executed their cloud strategy well. Maybe they’ve got FedRAMP, they’ve got an ATO, there’s still nowhere for them to land, which is a fundamentally different problem. Like I said, I wanted to be able to go end to end. We do all custom software developments, we’re on the services side, but when we build custom apps, we can run into the same problem. I wanted to be able to solve that problem end to end. How do I make sure I can stand up cloud environments or help them refactor the ones they’ve tried to stand up, make sure there’s a path to production to get my app into prod, and then of course, build, or in their case ship really great applications to those end users? It’s really a three-part process. It’s not just the app, the app’s just the end. You’ve got to make sure the underlying network and cloud infrastructure is in place and that all of the compliance is done.

Fred Diamond: For people who are listening here, it’s not just buy the software, then deploy it like you might be able to do in a corporate environment or a department within a corporate. With government, there’s rules. We’ll talk about those in a second. The government is using taxpayers’ dollars to buy these things. There’s a lot of checks and balances, if you will. There’s a lot of rules. We’re going to talk about one in a second here. Let’s just get right into it. Your business, it requires an in-depth understanding of both the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, their risk management platform. We’ve talked about the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the FAR, many times on the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

For people who are listening, you just can’t walk in, have a round of golf with the CEO and get them to buy your stuff. There’s rules you need to understand. Matter of fact, a lot of the companies that are successful in selling to the government, they have experts on these federal acquisition regulations, rules on how you can sell, and then how the government will procure your software. How do these requirements and your knowledge and understanding of them enable rather than be an obstacle to innovation?

Bryon Kroger: There is a conflation that happens where the way we implement those frameworks and regulations today is assumed to be the exhaustive list of ways that they can be implemented. The risk management framework and the FAR, Federal Acquisition Regulation, they specify the guardrails. But then a lot of times we’ve got established paths to buy things and to ship them into production to get the ATO. But those aren’t the only paths. Sometimes I refer to this as hacking the bureaucracy, but that makes it sound like we’re skirting the rules. Really, it’s using the rules. You can’t hack a system that you don’t understand. Nobody can hack a computer system they don’t understand. You can’t hack risk management framework or Federal Acquisition Regulation unless you really understand it. We made that core to our sales motion, is making sure we had the adequate knowledge to be able to multi-path our way through.

If you run into a barrier, an objection, or an obstacle, you have another way around it that’s legal and ethical, very important on that piece, legal and ethical, but allows you to still continue forward. I would say on the risk management framework side, we have gone through painstaking effort to figure out how to automate and reduce a lot of risk. Rather than telling people, “You just need to take more risk and go faster,” we can say, “We can go just as fast as the leading cloud-native companies and still answer all of your compliance framework.” Being able to do that obviously has unlocked a lot of doors.

You have to understand the mind of the buyer. The buyer, they’ve seen your technology, they think it’s really great, and you think the reason that they’re not funding you is because they don’t have funding. I promise you, the funding exists out there in the federal ecosystem. The real thought that’s going through that buyer’s mind is, “I’m going to pay for this today, and it’s not getting into users’ hands until 18 months from now.” If you can go to them and realistically say, “When you buy my product, I can get it into your hands tomorrow,” maybe you already have it deployed in a production environment and it’s just granting access, or, “Hey, I can get it live in 60 days or less, which is our guarantee in most instances,” fundamentally changes the sales conversation and all of a sudden that money magically appears.

Fred Diamond: One thing we really didn’t talk in detail about is what you bring to the market, Rise8. You mentioned software development, et cetera. Can you give us, even if it’s generic, just an example of a customer engagement so that people understand a little more detail about physically what you’re selling and how your customer is utilizing what you’re bringing to the market?

Bryon Kroger: If I could just do one thing in the world, it would be build and deliver applications and data for end users, like I talked about, the war fighter, the veteran, the clinician. But in order to do that in the federal space, we’ve also had to become really good at the cloud infrastructure. In this case, sometimes those are hybrid cloud. We have some on-prem work that we do, going all the way down to networking. Sometimes it’s software-defined networking, but sometimes it’s no kidding switches and physical infrastructure. Then the other piece is connecting the two. How do you get an app into that production environment, that cloud? We call that path to production. A lot of that is what I just talked about, being able to navigate the risk management framework from both a policy perspective and an automation perspective. But then there’s also a lot of modern cloud DevOps type automation that’s involved in there as well.

Those are our three core practices, cloud, path to production, apps and data. Then within those as we go deeper with the customer, and this is something we could talk about on the sales side, is there’s a lot of digital transformation involved, to use a buzzword. We don’t lead with digital transformation and consulting, but we know that in order to scale the number of apps and the value of those apps, we have to move the customer through a digital transformation journey. As we go deeper with customers, we do bring in consulting services to help them understand how to transform their organization to better support software delivery.

Fred Diamond: Your team told us about Continuous Authority to Operate, cATO. How does it enable your team to deliver value for the government customers? How effective has it been in the sales process as a key differentiator for you?

Bryon Kroger: Most people say ATO, Authority to Operate. That’s the output of the NIS risk management framework process that we use. That’s the formal decision so that you can actually deploy your software into production. Continuous ATO is taking that framework, which again, there’s a standard way we’ve always done business. When you’re doing waterfall legacy style software development, it’s a very serial manual process to get your ATO. But RMF doesn’t say you have to do it that way. We’ve been able to navigate RMF, produce all of the same documentation artifacts, and I would say even reduce risk while going fast and using DevOps principles and frameworks. We call that Continuous ATO. Really, it’s continuously applying the risk management framework.

As we’re going through the course of software development, we’re satisfying all of the compliance requirements such that when it’s time to deploy our app, we already have authorization to do it. As you can imagine, going back to that other conversation, being able to quickly deploy the software changes a sales conversation for sure, because now the time to value is greatly reduced. A lot of times people get lost. Federal government very much talks project management terms, so cost, schedule, performance. That’s just one side of a value equation. We like to say value equals performance divided by cost, divided by schedule or performance per unit of time per dollar.

One way to increase value is to increase performance, obviously, but we forget how much impact you can have by reducing the denominator, by reducing cost, and in particular, schedule. This schedule conversation becomes key because the cost of delay, as we talked about earlier, is sometimes measured in lives. Being able to have an established cATO where we can just onboard new applications and tell the government, “Hey, when they’re ready to push to production, you don’t have to wait,” or, “They’re already ready to push to production. As soon as you sign the contract, we can do it,” game changer.

Fred Diamond: We’ve had a lot of people on the show, Bryon, where we’ve talked about coming from the military into sales. We had a good show recently with a couple guys from Amazon Web Services who were former military, made the transition. Again, I’m in DC, so there’s a lot of people that I interface with who are veterans who’ve been in the various defense agencies and the military. Give us some of your sales tips. You got to sell things at the end of the day. I love all the stuff we’re talking about and how to understand and how to figure out more effective ways to have the customer procure your technology. But what might be some of your two or three sales principles that you focus on on a daily basis?

Bryon Kroger: Number one is value. For me, value is for the end user, not necessarily the buyer or the buying group. With that, I would say in the software world specifically, we talk a lot about output features. In fact, most of the product sales motion is a features-driven versus a solution-driven conversation. I would say the more you can switch to solution-oriented sales approaches, the better. Specifically, when I’m talking about software, whether it’s custom or prebuilt, shifting the conversation not just to outcomes, which outcomes here I would define as what users do with the outputs. We give them features, they do something with them, but being able to translate that in enterprise sales, you see this all the time, they translate it to bottom line. That’s harder to do in the federal government because there’s no P&L. You really have to start understanding your customer’s mission.

If they do space command and control, you need to know space command and control, and you work backwards from what impact can I have on space C2? I can reduce the amount of time it takes you to plan your satellite master collection plan by 20%. I do that by giving these features, users do this with these features, and that’s what produces that impact. You get that believability chain there. That’s number one. I’ll always start there and work backwards.

Number two is eliminating friction and time. The time one I’ve already covered. I think the biggest game changer on time to value in software is the ATO process. It’s the biggest bottleneck. Figure out how to crack that. But on the friction piece, one thing that you can do is figure out how to make it easier to buy your services in a federal space. The traditional sales motion, which leads to a very cost-driven competition, is to bid on open competitions. People might take what I’m about to say wrong, because we’re like, “Competition produces the best outcomes at the lowest prices.” I promise you, it might in a free market, but government procurement is not actually a free market. What you’re actually competing on is who can write the best proposals at the lowest prices, and that doesn’t get Americans the capabilities they need and deserve.

For me, even though I could win a lot of work that way, I could probably be a bigger company than I am today if I went that direction, it’s very much focused on I want to do the right thing. In order to do that, I’ve got to figure out how to reduce friction of getting to me, because the right thing sometimes costs more. It sometimes involves different requirements than they might’ve thought they were putting on contract. The only way to really do that right, is to have a direct pathway for the government to get to you.

There’s a lot of ways you can do that if you’re a small company. I would tell your listeners, the SBIR process has been taking a lot of heat lately, Small Business Innovation Research. I still think it’s a good viable pathway, especially in the Air Force, to get started and get some traction and get a contract vehicle. You can turn that into a sole source vehicle down the road that people can then take. I could give you a million little hacks of how to allow the government to go directly to you, even if you’re not a minority or have some special set aside category. There’s other ways to get sole source contracts.

Fred Diamond: I love both parts of your answer. The first one I particularly like because we talk about it all the time, not just in public sector, in federal, but also in commercial. If you as a sales professional are not providing real value to your customer right now, because you talked before a couple times, a lot of times product sales are about a feature, et cetera, a customer can get all that on the internet now. They can even go type into ChatGPT whatever they need to know and within 10 seconds everything’s going to get spit out. But the great sales professionals out there are the ones who are going back, and I love the way you described it, who are going back to their customer, because they understand the mission.

Everything in the government, and commercial for that matter too, there’s a mission behind why they exist. If you can go to your customer three steps ahead of the game, because you’re putting the time and energy to understand where the customer’s trying to get to. In the federal government in a lot of ways, they already published this stuff. They say where they want to get going.

Bryon, this has been great. I really appreciate your insights. Once again, thanks for your service and best of luck to your continued success with Rise8. You’ve given us so many great things to think about, I particularly love the last two answers, but give us something specific, something people should do right now, after listening to the Sales Game Changers Podcast or reading the transcript, that will help them improve their sales success.

Bryon Kroger: Give away all your secrets. Every single one of them. If you want to have a value-based conversation with somebody, show that you’re willing to give them value in the first place. The worry here with everybody is if I sell the secrets, they won’t need me, but I promise, they’ll still need to buy the implementation. In the federal ecosystem, I would say there’s a second order concern there that, well, like you just said, Bryon, you’re competing on paper. Now I’ve just given them all the words they need to compete against me on paper. But the truth is, the federal sales process is just like any other one. There’s relationships, there’s preconceived ideas, there’s all of that. The best relationship you can create, even if you never meet the person, is if you’ve put out a bunch of content online about how to solve their problem, they’re going to want to work with you and they’re going to still need your services to actually implement those ideas. Give away all of your ideas, sell the implementation. It stands the test of time, and it’s no different in federal.

Fred Diamond: It’s all about execution, especially now when almost everything is available with the click of a button. Once again, I want to thank Bryon Kroger from Rise8. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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