Undeniable Justification: Sponsored by Ingram Micro

We are just a little over a week away from my webinar with Ingram Micro on providing Undeniable Justification through the Security Assessment Process – a shortened version of my House & the Cloud sales process. The more I work with companies on their proposals and assessment deliverables, the more I see the need to overhaul the process. I was working with several people last week during individual sales coaching meetings to refine their documents. Here are a few points to consider…

Re-engineering the Assessment Deliverable

These documents should be written to the decision maker, not IT. If your SE is writing the deliverables, chances are that your documents are written to technical people, not economic buyers on the business side. Most of these will not lead to larger remediation projects.

If your document is mostly lengthy paragraphs – and you have pages of paragraphs, it doesn’t really matter who you are writing to. No one will have time to read it. Stick to charts, graphs, diagrams, bullets, and a few paragraphs. If your assessment was done at no charge – you don’t need a long written report. You need something short, to the point (I recommend using a Power Point document), and supplemental to a great presentation on what you’ve found.

If your “Findings” section contains technical misconfiguration information, or possible vulnerabilities to some technical sounding Trojan, you might consider changing it. Ask yourself, “So what?” So, what will happen as a result. I call this – the “So What?” test. Keep asking yourself until you get to an urgent sounding issue with business impact. For instance, on two documents I read last week, both reps were recommending managed services services on the basis that, one person can’t manage a group of 50 or 100 end-users. I kept asking, “How do you know?” The document made is sound obvious, but no justification was given. You can’t do this. Imagine you are the CFO, trying to save as much money as possible. Someone with a sales business card comes into your office and tries to convince you to sign a contract for several thousand dollars per month. You won’t do it unless you’re sure you need it. There must be some pretty strong evidence. I’m not saying you can’t find it – I’m simply stating that you need that evidence before proposing the solution.

I will be covering this and more, next week on a webinar sponsored by Ingram Micro – Wednesday, September 26th, at 1:00 PM ET. You can sign up right here:
SIGN UP FOR DAVE STELZL/WITH INGRAM MICRO

Looking forward to seeing you there!