By now we all know the story of Ryan Lochte and his “over exaggeration”. Never one to miss an opportunity to relate current events to cybersecurity I thought I would write about the cybersecurity sales lessons that we can learn from this unfortunate event.
Stop “Over Exaggerating” to Scare Your Customers
In most organizations cybersecurity sales’ rule #1 is to scare potential customers. Salespeople “over exaggerate” by telling customers the barbarian hordes are at their gates and if the customer does not buy the solution today then they will lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Then salespeople back up their claims with impressive statistics like 110% of people were compromised by the exact problem that our solution resolves. As Homer Simpson once said “you can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that”.
The truth is that your customer knows the statistics and they understand the risks. Don’t sell to customers by fear mongering but rather by inspiring. Just last week a customer referred to TELEGRID’s Privileged Access Management tool as “elegant”. That is what you want to hear.
Show your customer how easy your solution is to install, how it will make their day-to-day job easier and most importantly how it will promote network best practices. Considering how many attacks are from an employee doing something they shouldn’t, network best practices are extremely important.
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Your Bathroom is as Important as Your Point of Sale System
When selling a cybersecurity tool salespeople should consider the impact of integrating it into a network. For instance enabling two-factor authentication requires the install of an agent on every application or host device. This forces customers to make difficult decisions about what should and should not be secured.
The first applications to be secured are always those that handle Personally Identifiable Information (PII). These applications are important but so are the “non-critical” applications. How would your organization fair if it was the victim of a ransomware attack on its inventory database or client relationship management system. Salespeople should consider these gaps and help customers to resolve them.
Taking it back to Ryan Lochte’s alleged incident, I bet that gas station owner in Brazil sent all of his credit card data securely and that his cash register had a lock on it. He even paid to have security guards protect the premises 24/7. What he could not afford to protect was his bathroom and we all know how that ended. Ok that might be a stretch but you get my point.
In my last post I discussed how we need to rethink cybersecurity tools from a security AND network performance standpoint. I think we also need to rethink how we sell cybersecurity tools.
Eric Sharret is Vice President of Business Development at TELEGRID.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here do not represent those of TELEGRID Technologies, Inc. TELEGRID Technologies, Inc. will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis.