Selling Security: 3 Ways the Channel Needs to Evolve

Become a strategic business adviser: Since security is now seen as a business issue, partners have the opportunity to evolve from the role of salesperson to business adviser. This means partners should transition from simply selling products to helping their customers understand how to manage risk. To do this, partners must understand their customers’ businesses inside and out. That’s particularly true if the customer operates in a vertical like health care and financial services. Partners need to offer customized counsel on how each customer can secure their network — end-to-end.

Practice solution-based sales: Instead of leading customer conversations with point products and speeds-and-feeds, partners should orient discussions around solutions to their customers’ business problems — whether it’s end-to-end network security to replace ineffective perimeter-based defenses or creating a holistic security architecture to tie disparate endpoint solutions together.

Stay fluent on threats and technologies: To truly serve as a business adviser and understand customer problems, partners need to double down on staying fluent on emerging trends and technologies. Since the field is evolving so quickly, some customers may not have the bandwidth to stay up to date, and partners can add value by continuing to establish themselves as security experts. Partners should also ask for and take advantage of training courses provided by their channel partners to hone their security expertise.