The Problem with Traditional Sales Training for Cyber Security & Insurance

When it comes to problem-centric sales training for cyber security and insurance, traditional sales training methods and companies fall flat. They borrow a few terms like pain, problem, discovery, impact or solution and simply repackage them into a product-centric model.  Problem-centric selling is more than dressing up words to appear problem-centric, it’s about understanding what a current state problem looks like and how to uncover all the current state problem elements a customer is dealing with at the moment and how those problems are manifesting themselves in the business. Problem-centric selling is a100-percent focus on the buyer and the buyer’s problems, and not your product or service.

Problem-Centric Sales Training for Cyber Security

Understanding this, when it comes to sales training for cyber security, insurance, and other “preventive” or risk-based product and service offerings, traditional problem-centric selling becomes tricky. Why?  Because in most cases the problem hasn’t appeared. Your product is designed to either prevent the problem OR allow people to recover if the problem does occur.  Ex; In most cases, if you sell cyber security, you know that most of your prospects have not had a recent breach or undetected phishing, malware, or ransomware attack.  They tell you everything is great and they don’t need your service.

From a problem-centric perspective, there is no active or existing problem to sell to.  To an untrained salesperson, there is no problem. Fortunately, this isn’t accurate. It’s just salespeople are looking at it wrong. The problem is that they could be attacked and they aren’t ready and it could cost them dearly.  In these cases, it’s the salesperson’s job to highlight the risk of doing nothing and the probability of the event happening because of their inaction.

Cyber Security Sales Strategy

When you’re looking to develop a new sales strategy for your cyber security organization, the first thing you need to understand is that you’re practicing what is called risk based selling. Learning how to sell cyber security requires you to identify, quantify, and mitigate potential financial, operational, or security risks. Your role is prove the value of mitigating those risks.

The key in this situation is to embrace sales training program specifically for cyber security and or a sales method for industries like cyber security and insurance that understands that risk-based selling is different than traditional problem-centric selling and requires a different approach.

And before you ask no, there is no one size fits all cyber security sales pitch. Anyone trying to sell you something along those lines is selling snake oil.

This video outlines how sales training for cybersecurity, insurance, and other risk based products and services should look and how to break it down.

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