Yesterday we kicked off our three-day online workshop, Making Money w/ Security Day One.  This class continues to grow, and this quarter we have about 30 participants!

Sales Training Is Crucial to Success!

Sales training is crucial if you want to grow sales, and specialized training, not product training, is the key to moving from Vendor to Adviser.  Yesterday’s class is an example of security-focused sales training.  Google Information Security Sales Training, and you’ll see that this type of training is rare.  Google something like Solution Selling and you’ll find that, even though Bosworth wrote the book in 1995, everyone from vacuum sales people to high-involvement technology sellers are taking the same classes from millions of so-called solution selling trainers.

Not that basic sales training isn’t important – it is.  But taking the next level and specializing is what creates differentiation.  Yesterday we covered a number of areas including where the trends are, where the business is, and what is expected to happen around the world with security in 2013.  Security continues to be a hot topic among business leaders worldwide.

We also covered sound bites.  Part of our home work was to discover more recent hard hitting sound bites and evaluate their usefulness as a sales tool. Most security presentations I’ve seen in a sales call contain sound bites – but most of the sales and marketing people I know are using them incorrectly.  They are actually defeating themselves before the competition ever arrives.

Today we’ll cover how to use them.  Using them incorrectly leads to a judgmental, left-brain mindset – one that won’t make a buying decision even when there’s an urgent issue at hand.  Here are come examples of sound bite evaluation…

1.  “China is stealing trade secrets as part of plans to bolster its industry.” Wall Street Journal on April 22,2013.  This is a good sound bite – it’s global in nature, speaks of an ongoing trend, and affects any company that store mission critical information such as intellectual capital and trade secrets.  It also comes from a source that speaks to executives – the Wall Street Journal.  No one is going to question its validity.

2. LivingSocial.com, a site that offers daily coupons on restaurants, spas, and other services, has suffered a security breach that has exposed names, e-mail addresses and password data for up to 50 million of its users.  4/27/13 – Ars Technica Magazine – This one isn’t bad…it’s an identity theft sound bite which in my opinion may be too common – it doesn’t wake up as much as the first one.  The other problem is the reference.  No one reads Ars Technica – at least not the C-Suite as far as I know.

3. “What most organizations do is overreact: they throw all of their efforts into that one incident and are not looking at what they should be looking at,” says David Amsler, president and CIO of Foreground Security. “And worse, they don’t have a playbook [for response]. It’s so haphazard, and that’s where they fall down.”  – This one is good…it speaks to the security strategy and can leveraged to up-sell the bigger picture.  It’s what Cisco would call the architectural sale – an opportunity to look beyond the immediate disaster, and over the entire enterprise to sure up things.  One downside on this one – it’s too long.  If you can’t quickly quote it, you’ll lose your audience.

4. “More than 90 percent of user-generated passwords, even those considered strong by IT departments, are currently susceptible to hacking, according to Deloitte’s analysis.” – I love this one.  It’s quick, quotable, concrete (meaning visual), and from a trusted source…and it affects every organization, federal, commercial, big and small.

If you’ve never attended one of these classes, make sure to stay tuned for our next class which will like fall in August or September 2013.

© 2013, David Stelzl