Selling Credibility
You pitch the product, no sales. You build a network of contacts, no sales. You lower your prices, no sales. What is going on here?
Selling complex products or services is tough. I sold cybersecurity products and services for years. I lost a lot of deals. Eventually, I realized that selling cybersecurity was different. I was focused on selling the wrong thing.
Average salespeople sell capability. Great ones sell credibility.
NOTE: While this article focuses on selling information security (cybersecurity) products and services, these concepts apply to selling anything that has a complex sales process.
Overload
Today’s decision-makers face an avalanche of information and choices. This makes it extremely difficult to sell them anything, especially complex security products and services. Not only are they awash with options, most of the products sound alike. Wander the expo hall at RSA next week. After a few minutes, all those threat intelligence, XDR, malware, AI-enabled, cloud platforms become a blur of buzzwords and bloviating. To make matters worse, many of the companies focus on what they do (capability), rather than why they can do it (credibility).
In today’s market, decision-makers are inherently skeptical and suspicious of anybody selling anything. If you launch into a sales pitch before they are open to receiving it, they will dismiss you. Consequently, it is easier for decision-makers to dismiss new technologies or new ideas rather than make an effort to learn them.
I learned this lesson many times. It did not matter how good my product was (or how good I thought it was), if I was unable to build credibility with the buyer, the deal was never going to close. To repeat Simon Sinek, “people do not buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
All cybersecurity sales are credibility sales. You must sell your credibility to provide pain relief. The products and services you offer are secondary to the decision-making process.
This is how savvy startups can outmaneuver larger companies in cybersecurity sales. When the founders (or key technical people) are involved in sales calls, those people can draw upon their experiences to tell compelling war stories and build credibility. This translates into reassurance for the decision-maker that you can solve their problems.
In contrast, large companies will deploy teams of salespeople and “customer success managers” with zero hands-on security experience. Unable to tell compelling war stories, they do not sound credible to buyers. Worse, many of these salespeople will fall back on stories about sales, which alienates them even more from decision-makers. Nobody (except other salespeople) cares about the giant deal you closed ten years ago.
Therefore, if you want to close more deals in cybersecurity, you must adopt a credibility sale process.
Here are some ways to do that:
1. Experts Up Front
Put a cybersecurity expert in the first meetings with prospective customers. This person must lead the conversation. This shows the prospect you value their time and are committing experienced, articulate, problem-solvers to their pain.
2. Sales in the Back Seat
Conversely, the sales team must fallback to a supportive role. If a salesperson is leading the discussion, anybody with a technical background will zone out and ignore them. Salespeople should focus on gathering intelligence about the customer, particularly who has buying authority. As I have written before, (see Selling to Technically Savvy Buyers) technical people may hold the real power in the meeting, not the person with the lofty title.
3. War Stories
The most important part of credibility sales is telling compelling, relevant stories. These stories must be not only about your product, but security in general. War stories are how prospects evaluate your credibility. The more textured the story, the better.
War stories do not need to be lengthy. When I sold compliance products, I routinely talked about the frustrations of managing firewall rules in the context of compliance. Specifically, I would tell a story about customers placing overly permissive rules into a firewall, forgetting about it, then discovering it later during an audit. Anybody who has worked in security struggled with this kind of issue. This story had added weight, as I could tell a related story about a different customer who got hacked from the exact same situation.
It is important to contour your stories to the prospect’s situation. For example, when the prospect describes the pain they experienced with PCI, FedRAMP, or HIPAA compliance, you need a war story about enduring the pedantic, nit-pickery of compliance requirements.
4. Do Not Pitch
The moment you begin pitching your product, you sound like an idiot. Nobody wants to hear it (except you.) If you must pitch, make it extremely brief then pivot to a demo. You want the buyer asking questions about your product. This puts them in control. More importantly, it provides insight into what they value. If they ask about authentication methods, for example, then clearly this is an important detail for them.
If your prospect does not ask questions, then they are not interested in you.
5. Do Not Push Back.
Speaking of which, do not waste time hard selling a disinterested prospect. It only makes you sound desperate. Prospects only buy security when they believe you are a credible resource. If you and the prospect are not clicking, it is better to walk away and let the prospect re-engage at a later date.
6. Focus the Solution on Relieving Pain
Remember, your prospect does not really care about your product or services. They care about their own pain. They want your products to alleviate that pain(see Getting Customers to Discuss Pain).
Focus your solution on how you resolve the customer’s problems (pain) and not on how awesome your product is.
7. Demo Fast
Demos are important to building credibility. Boring demos do the opposite. Race through a demo quickly. Show the basics, then ask if the prospect has any questions. Let the customer drive the demo. This makes them more engaged and keeps the conversation lively. It also makes you sound more confident and credible.
8. Nobody Cares About Your Pipeline
Your prospects do not care at all about your internal sales processes. Blathering on about your need to meet quota kills credibility faster than any fumbling demo could.
9. Time Kills Deals
Get a proposal (price quote) to the prospect in under 24 hours. If your company is not capable of producing proposals that quickly, then make it capable. Every second you delay sending a proposal is a moment your competitor can use to jump in front of you and steal the momentum and goodwill you built.
Time kills deals. It is also unfriendly to credibility.
10. Build a Culture of Problem-Solving
Once you close a deal, the credibility building effort is not finished. You must be able to follow through on all the promises you made during the sales process. This is where a lot of fast-growing startups go off the rails. Post-sales success is fundamentally a product of your internal culture and processes.
Rapid change makes people uncomfortable. This discomfort will manifest in protective behaviors such as finger-pointing and badmouthing. It is much easier to blame a co-worker for a problem, than resolve it.
Blame and badmouthing are the genesis of a toxic internal culture. Eventually, that culture will seep into your customers, and wipe out every bit of credibility you fought to earn. The customer will feel cheated. Customers who feel cheated become vindictive and get themselves lawyers.
Make problem-solving and customer-satisfaction everybody’s mission. Moreover, actively and aggressively squash finger-pointing and badmouthing. Otherwise all your credibility, and sales, will dry up.
Conclusion
Cybersecurity buyers are overloaded with data. Do not be another mindless moron mumbling marketing messaging. Refocus your sales efforts on demonstrating that you can solve problems and alleviate your customer’s pain. You will close more deals.
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