Part 2: Tips to Sell Security Successfully
What you can learn from your salesperson
In Part 1 of Tips to Sell Security Successfully, we looked at the first four tips to helping the salesperson. In this post, we’ll look at the final set of points to help sell security.
You can learn from the sales people that call on you every day and from the ones in your own organization. The successful ones do this every day. And this is how they do it.
Know Your Customers
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The first step is to understand what your customer does and why they do it.
- What outputs and results are they expected to deliver and how do they do that?
- What are their business objectives?
- How much does it cost them to perform their function?
- How do they get the information they need to be effective?
- What are the challenges they deal with every day?
- What has occurred over the past few years that has significantly changed the way they do business?
- And, what was the impact of any recent security incidents on their team and their ability to perform?
One way to do this is to have a series of “Lunch n’ Learns” to which you invite business managers and leaders and have a discussion focused on them. Oh…and you buy!
Something for Everyone
You can only gain internal support for a project or initiative if there is a little “something for everyone”. Detail the benefits to each constituency within your organization and if possible, for those outside such as clients, vendors, and other stakeholders. Take the time to point out the risk management aspects as well as any business enhancement opportunities that will result.
Create Your Value Proposition
Spend time documenting your value to the organization — no one else will do it for you. When your team responds to and resolves a security incident, ask for input from the various stakeholders who were affected. Ask how it impacted their work output and the work of others dependent on them. Have them tell you how much it cost them and what it would have cost if the incident had continued and/or escalated. Ask them to quantify lost revenue opportunity, increased labor costs, missed SLAs and other contract terms. Now, create your value proposition and share it.
There are the final three tips that will help you win friends and influence people to successfully sell security. For the first four tips, please see Part 1.
Using these tips will help build a strong risk management and business enhancement partnership with your company’s managers and leaders moving forward.
