Every industry comes with its own unique set of sales challenges that sellers must identify and resolve to keep their operations moving. Government sales has strict no contact policies that sellers must adhere to when chasing opportunities. Financial advisors can’t say certain things in mass marketing campaigns when building out their prospect portfolios — and then we have the cyber security sales vertical.
Due to their business’s very nature, cyber security decision-makers tend to be overly cautious, hard to reach, and prone to giving all of their information a high-level classification to keep it off hackers’ digital radars. As a result, cyber security sales leaders can find themselves struggling to gain momentum or even gather meaningful data sets on their list of prospects. Recognizing five common cyber security sales challenges that industry vendors and solution providers face can help you develop a strategic selling approach designed to optimize results with your own efforts. These issues often include:
Cyber Security Sales Challenge #1: No Opens, No Clicks
Cyber security decision makers are trained on a “zero trust” model which means exactly what it sounds like — these professionals do not open or click on anything when they don’t know who is sending them the information. Even known senders aren’t blindly trusted; cyber security personnel are trained to double check URL links before determining if it’s safe to click.
Cyber Security Sales Challenge #2: So Many Solutions
Typically, most cyber security issues have multiple options that attack and solve the program. As a result, cyber security vendors are not only competing against direct competitors, but they may also compete against a myriad of solutions that mitigate the same threats in a different way.
Cyber Security Sales Challenge #3: Ad Costs
Search engine marketing and ads in the cyber security industry are ranked among the highest costs compared to other verticals. Depending on the size of your organization, you simply may not have the budget needed to target your cyber security prospect list effectively using traditional and digital marketing tactics.
Cyber Security Sales Challenge #4: CISO Strategic initiatives
As we’ve already mentioned, CISOs are notorious for being difficult to reach. Additionally, they’ve mastered the art of making their company information highly confidential, which means that sellers can waste countless hours trying to find out about strategic initiatives they could help support and pain points they could help resolve.
Cyber Security Sales Challenge #5: Cloud Perception
Cloud-based innovation means that cyber security education has to be completed before people will engage. For users in the small- to mid-sized business space, many IT and cyber security decision-makers assume that other vendors are already protecting it from an attack or breach because the data is in the cloud.
Create a Strategic Cyber Security Sales Strategy with FounderScale
Cyber security vendors are getting more creative about how they work channels, build relationships, and engage cyber security decision-makers. FounderScale can help you develop a strategic selling approach that effectively targets your demographic within this challenging vertical. Contact our sales enablement specialists today to learn more.
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Engaging people on a human-to-human level to provide experiences and education is one of the few long-term sustainable lead generation methods that you can employ. Many other methods like contact and pitch may provide a certain level of results but the efficiency and cost are less than ideal. To maximize sales engagement platforms, you have a number of different options ranging from webinars to group lunch and learns which provide 667% higher engagement than cold outreach to set a meeting.
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