Richard Stocks

When Cymulate withdrew from Australia and made the team redundant at the end of Q3 2024, Richard took advantage of an open headcount to return to the team at Rapid7 in a technical pre-sales role.

Taking ownership of the technical sales process, Richard is able to understand the "pain" at all levels of a business, from the C-suite to the hands-on technical team, synthesising their requirements into actionable outcomes. This combination of acumen, empathy and technological excellence has contributed to successful opportunities across government, healthcare and higher education.

At Cymulate, Richard was tasked with being the first technical resource in the region, supporting the sales teams in Australia and Singapore, as well as partners across the region, to deliver technical enablement and first class proof-of-vision activities. As a member of a small team, the scope of responsibilties is broad: a typical day could start with a product demo for a prospect, followed by a technical enablement session for a partner, before pivoting into a PoV for the afternoon.

Key achievements include net-new sales into a major media company in Singapore, insurance sector in Hong Kong, and banking institutions in Australia, Thailand and Indonesia.

Unfortunately, despite success in the region, the local team was made redundant when the company decided to refocus on the US and EMEA markets.

Richard joined Rapid7 to build and run their theat intelligence business for Australia and New Zealand, following the acquisition of IntSights. Responsibilities included defining the go-to-market strategy, and then working with the greater team (account executives, business development representatives and customer success) and channel partners to grow new business and retain customers.

Key successes included international mining companies, retailers and local, state and federal government agencies.

As a senior sales engineer, Richard was responsible for translating end user requirements into technical outcomes, and then providing product demonstrations and proof-of-value to match those requirements.

As a way to get prospects some guided hands-on experience with the Recorded Future platform, Richard deployed a capture-the-flag solution based on an open-source framework, with the flags based on intelligence that could be discovered using the appropriate queries. This was designed to allow prospects to discover the capabilities in a fun and lightly competitive environment. This proved to be popular and successful, and is still utilised by Recorded Future today.

Key successes included tech wins and subsquent deals with two of the “big four” banks in Australia.

Originally employed by Blue Coat Systems (prior to the acquisition by Symantec), Richard’s role was to educate focus partners and distributors in Australia and New Zealand on the Blue Coat portfolio. This covered everything from initial discovery and mapping business requirements to technology through to how to install, configure and run.

After Blue Coat was acquired by Symantec, Richard continued in this role, albeit with an expanded portfolio. In addition, he recognised that there was an internal capability gap with sellers being able to correctly size and quote solutions, often placing an additional burden on the SE team. He developed a proof-of-concept iPhone application that presented a simple step-by-step configuration tool. This app was adopted by the business, and Richard then acted as the product manager, with a development team who turned his concept into a production application with direct interfaces into Salesforce.

Richard then extended this work, becoming a ‘founding member’ of a global business transformation team. His work with that team focused on distributor and reseller interfaces to Symantec, streamlining processes such as onboarding and deal registration.