Why is selling Cybersecurity so hard? Let’s ignore for the moment that there are already too many cybersecurity vendors competing for dollars and look at how cybersecurity is often sold today. There’s a post in LinkedIn where the author writes that it can’t be sold as an ROI purchase, which I agree. Because it’s really an insurance sale, like auto or home or health insurance. However, selling cybersecurity as an insurance sale to reduce your risk typically leads with a few pitch slides from marketing about all the breaches and subsequent damages that happened recently that would be mitigated if the CISO had only used “our” cybersecurity solution. I would argue that this is ultimately a FUD (Fear Uncertainly Doubt) sale and quickly turns off the CISOs and their teams.
Instead, consider that companies already have too many cybersecurity tools and many are in the second or third generation. Anti-virus to EDR to XDR. SIEM to SOAR. Firewalls to next-gen firewalls. And overlapping solutions that say they fix the same breach, albeit in different ways. The last thing a CISO needs is another tool! So the savvy cybersecurity sales rep sells their solution as a Replacement sale. CISOs have fixed budgets and sometimes declining ones. They have tools on their shelf that have not been implemented or just partially implemented. If you bring a cybersecurity solution to them that adds incremental value to their solution set while also allowing them to remove an existing solution, then you have a winning sale, based on replacement. CISO can turn off their existing product and use that budget to purchase yours and without asking the CFO for extra budget. And with software sold as a subscription, it’s even easier to turn off an existing product in a short time frame versus waiting for the perpetual license software to amortize to nothing. And an even bigger win is when you can turn off two or more of their existing solutions with your solution.
Let’s arm our cybersecurity sellers with the knowledge of what solutions their product can be used to turn off (replacement sale) versus discussing all the breaches that have happened (FUD sale).
For more, follow here https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mskreppein_yesterday-i-brought-up-several-reasons-why-activity-7275159949083648001-Jh88
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