SIX ''MUST HAVES'' IN EVERY SALE Robert Bluestein
Robert Bluestein
Account Executive, Cloud, Datacenter, and Cyber-Security Sales with both Direct and Channel Management
Every member of an organization is an ambassador for their place of employment. Nowhere is this more true than in sales. We all are involved in the sales process whether we know it or not.?That’s why?it helps to understand sales from a process standpoint even if your job normally doesn’t involve selling.?
Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, recently spoke at Amazon's Sales Kickoff, outlining their approach to business. ''Your customers have to know that you are there to help them complete the journey.'' The successful company has a track record with happy customers. They learn that the first impression is the most important and second chances don't come so easily. Develop a knowledge of the culture of the organization, ensure having a solid customer service team and the main focus is on providing the best-ever customer experience. This is vital as it gives business owners and marketers a way in which they can boost their satisfaction, advocacy and loyalty. So, you just have to take into account your business model and then find out the best way in which you can serve your customers.
Relationships are built over time. I have been fortunate to have live in this geography of Texas and have gotten to know people up and down the I-35 corridor. Some of these customers have bought from me whether I was at Dell, VMWare, Cisco or Oracle. Now that's loyalty!
I look back at a few of my favorite accounts and I think of the 'Process' of the sale itself. And I realize there are thousands of articles about how to improve sales, how to add-on sales, how to follow-up sales and how to know when to walk away from a sale. We read these articles because no two sales are alike. But the patterns of a successful sale are - and I have spelled them out below. Perhaps it is just another way to hear the obvious, but my hope is that I can deliver the message in a way which proves helpful to you down the road.
For the sake of this article, I am using a solution that is in great demand at the moment - Cloud Security. Aside from my own passion about it, the need for it is growing more evident each day. With Hackers, internal threats, malware, encryption issues and managing big data, a lot of emphasis is on finding the right Cloud Security Solution.
Here are the ''Five Must Haves in Every Cloud Security Sale.''
1) STAKEHOLDERS
It sounds easy and a bit redundant to successful salespersons. But there is nothing quite like the new and not-so-obvious members of an IT Staff. Moreover, different silos within organizations may have different needs altogether. Each stakeholder will want assurance cloud security won’t get in the way of their work. Single and dual sign-on as well as provisioning integration will help make it easier for organizations with multiple cloud applications.
How often have you sat across from a customer who is rattling off a series of issues that are outside your scope of capabilities? This is where 'Partner Making' happens and where you can become the point-man for all deliverables. Having played baseball my entire adult life, I know what it means to play on a team. Teams set goals for themselves. They boost one another, drive one another and most of all, should bring out the best in one another.
Their input is typically quite valuable and increases the opportunity in size. But make sure as much communication is driven through you as possible. The resulting confusion of having too many cooks in the kitchen invariably slows down a deal, and we all know ''TIME KILLS ALL DEALS!''
2) KEEN OBSERVATION SKILLS
Understand what the customer is currently using and how it is viewed by members of the team. Look for security gaps, flaws and downloaded applications, including applications downloaded that deal in Private Cloud Security solutions. (Shadow-IT) If you are on-site, look for excess equipment or dated technology.
To get buy-in, the entire landscape of Cloud Security should be completely understood. This can be a delicate conversation because part of the TCO story is to comprehend the cost of doing Business-As-Usual. The customer was shown why spending on security is needed. Without stepping on too many toes, inquire about employees and how often they are doing their part. This would include an assessment on training, password protection, dual authentication and proper download protocols. By finding the answers to these, someone will invariably open up about an event that has occurred in their recent past. Take a LOT of notes.
Quantify the benefits including the cost of a breach and compliance costs versus operational efficiencies. For example, the success of the sale was built around the things that are often overlooked and how they can impact the company. Part of building a good TCO story is to bring up the little things that are often overlooked. For instance, there may be cost savings because the service provider patches apps, looking after encryption.
This will likely be an engineer-to-engineer solution as this is where the impact of cloud security gateways, tokenization and encryption on performance has to be measured, as well as identity and access management. Other considerations include whether solutions meet regulatory requirements, data loss prevention and intrusion detection, user behavior monitoring, monitoring the integrity of cloud workload (configuration) files.
This period of testing and proof-of-concept can often come after hours. If you are in Security Software Sales then you know about these possibilities. Over the testing period questions sometimes came at odd-hours of the day. Engineers working on problems were often trying to solve challenges late at night. The salesman told them that they could reach him if necessary, twenty-four hours a day.
He proved to be true to his word, often acting as a conduit for technical support and the engineering team of his customer. Reaction to emails and phone calls also made a positive impact with each stakeholder and whenever a question was asked that he didn't know the answer to, he was quick to find out. These are traits that separate the good salespeople form the great ones.
3) HELP CUSTOMER PRIORITIZE THEIR NEEDS WITH CONSULTATION
The best sales people help a customer organize and orient their infrastructure relative to the immediate need, help the customer modify or set new corporate and compliance guidelines that address the greatest needs. Additional opportunities are often uncovered during this time and can add to the sale.
Part of structuring a solution is helping the customer realize the differences between the things they would LIKE to have and the things they NEED to have. They must NEED what you are selling. Either they have it, or its up to you to create that need!
Like every good sales person, I was competing against a vendor who offered a suite of applications that were neatly built into the solution. They sounded great at the time, but in reality they were luxuries and did not address the customers end-goals. By asking an abundance of questions and gaining the perspective of everyone from the CTO to the end-user in a cube, the successful salesman made sure he had as close to 100% buy-in from everyone.
3. DESIGN SEVERAL WINNING OUTCOMES
So now you have a pretty strong grasp on what is driving your client to reach out to you. Because good sales people observe and listen, there is an ease with providing quotes for products and add-on services. You have skillfully eliminated competition by working with the customer to create a needs list that only you can provide.
It is practical to become aware of the different types of compliances that are being required in todays market. HIPPA and Sarbannes-Oxley are becoming more and more important - especially as Artificial Intelligence brings us into the evolution of applications. Being compliant is a great driver for companies that want to protect themselves and is a benefit for future investors to know that a base-line has been established
Everyone in the organization will have to understand and agree to the changes in compliance. Preventing cyber hacking and malware intrusion requires that everyone follow guidelines when logging on, visiting certain sites, and downloading applications or images from the internet.
On a more technical level you will have address Disaster Recovery. Any type of Cloud Security solution includes data recovery and high availability. This means knowing where traffic goes and the ability to tag information. In many ways, this will help define what needs to be encrypted, who gets access to what attributes in the cloud and on premise and how to classify unstructured data.
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4. ORCHESTRATE THE SALE, SHARE EXPECTATIONS
This is the stage where you take your knowledge of the existing landscape and you draw out the combination of the addition and the integration with their environment. How well will your solution work with the applications they are depending on to run their business smoothly? The good news is that more and more applications are built in with AI. This makes them adaptive to different environment and takes a load of pressure off the customer's IT staff. (That's a nice financial benefit and a demonstrative ROI as well!)
The order you get is rarely the end of the journey but the beginning. Begin to look ahead to the next challenge on the horizon. By opening that type of dialogue, inviting them to webex's, announcements and even to fun events, the relationship grows beyond a few points of contact. With corporate movement happening each day, these extended relationships provide continuity with the account.
Don't be afraid to discuss the future. In helping the customer predict and analyze technology trends you will be part of future discussions on solutions as well. There is nothing greater than ''Trusted Advisor'' status for any good salesperson.
In an article I wrote in 2013, I made five predictions for 'future' technology around Cloud Security. They are STILL viable for the next five years.
Be able to speak to what is ahead in your field. This is sure to engage everyone as technology is interesting. The internet will essentially become the corporate network perimeter. One of areas that a customer addressed was the new team of Security specialists that were hired in the past twelve-eighteen months. Cyber and Cloud Security is of such importance that IT Staffs have grown exponentially in size. Companies like Cylance, Protegrity and Tanium have taken both Cloud and On-Premise solutions and are offering an extensive suite of products around them.
Here are some of the other trends and technologies that I believe are still ahead of us:
Another customer mentioned that she wanted to reduce the amount of on-premise security applications which was a natural evolution of technology. It was less to manage, and it was less complicated. The salesman brought forth a variety of solutions that gave the customer the ability to prioritize their needs in a meaningful and systematic manner.
Secondly, CISO’s are concerned about users connecting from their personal mobile devices and downloading Shadow-IT applications which are actually harmful. (These are designed to look like end-user security applications and they 'shadow' the corporate IT solution.) In many cases, it is these applications which are disruptive, As an example it is suggested that the Russians hacked into the DNC using a variety of Security Apparatuses such as these.
For this reason, corporate leadership is also concerned with users accessing sensitive data stored in public cloud. The potential attack surface has expanded from being the corporate network perimeter, which in itself was challenging enough to protect. But when one adds the all-encompassing and unbounded environment of personal devices, public network infrastructure, cloud applications and other devices, it becomes overwhelming task. Orchestrating the right solution with all of these variables can be daunting. Consider all of the money companies have to spend that was originally invested in perimeter security and now offer little to no value in this scenario.
One customer mentioned that as always, their IT team is over-loaded with point products provided by a plethora of vendors. These products tend to be difficult, if not impossible, to integrate together. This ends up resulting in severe visibility limitations across the organization’s security posture. The conclusion is that the customer is currently with limited visibility to the network and there are often a shortage of specialists to identify and eliminate the problem.
One of the areas that has even exceeded all expectations is in the shift from 'Re-Active to Pro-Active' management. The emergence of smart, integrated, cloud-based security services will enable a transformation from an alert-centric to an intelligence-centric approach to security – vastly enhancing the visibility and ultimately delivering substantial improvement in the robustness of the security posture.
This particular company has 1,500 employees worldwide. For some Enterprise level customers, so many devices engaging in thousands of interactions a day implies that there will literally be countless daily events to correlate, analyze and secure. This will require a new breed of security technologies, and likely new security vendors, that offer everything customized to Dual-Point Authentication to Bio-Security for all sizes of customers. Small-to-Medium-Businesses (SMB) all the way to huge financial institutions and Enterprise sized customers will be able to customize and structure their security infrastructure.
But perhaps the biggest impact has been in the 'Pay-as-you-Go' subscription model. Organizations now can size their needs by the way their company is growing. They learn to use predictive analytics to trend future growth and needs, greatly reducing both complexity and cost.
5. ACT BEFORE REACT
The CSO of one of my older accounts has given me permission to write a compelling case-study built around a terrible cyber-breach that did a great deal of damage. The legal issues for them are wrapping up but there are lessons to be learned. Some vendors have stayed the course, perhaps losing sales elsewhere while helping the customer through this tough time. For the ones who stayed, certain traits emerged in the members of the team. As I got to know the other vendors that helped address this problem, the best salespeople were left standing. What did they have in common?
The answer is the simple things. Each was gifted listening, observing, learning and then offering a real-world solution that the customer could be happy with.
There is nothing more important to the customer than the security of their network. The decisions as to which company to choose and what they should buy aren't easy ones. A salesman that is a trusted-advisor is a tremendous asset and an extension of the IT team. To be the best, let that customer perceive you as an Ambassador for them. It's probably the best advice anyone ever gave me. And it works.
Customers are won and they are lost. They choose the things that are going to make their organizations run smoothly and drive revenue. But it is a great feeling when they call you unexpectedly and say, ''Hey I have a problem in my datacenter and I figured if you couldn't fix it, you would know someone who can!''
That phone call was why real sales people love what they do.
6) CELEBRATE THE SALE AND GEEK OUT WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS SUCCESS!
A good sales person is multi-faceted and can drive the end result by being able to get excited about the same things your customer does. Sure, statistical analysis on the variable speeds fo garden slugs aren't your thing, but MAKE it your thing. Learn all you can about Garden Slugs and what drives some to acheive slothful speeds while others kind of barely move. I like to say that I can be the best of BOTH Geeks and Nerds when it comes to mindless statistics and factoids, and these have served me well in the past.
Most importantly, be yourself, care for your customer's success, and the customers will keep coming back!
Robert Bluestein, 2018, revosed 2024