This is the second installment in my New Year’s resolution to share my 25+ years of experience working with MSPs.  Selling cybersecurity can be challenging for many reasons:

1. Your customer thinks you are already providing everything they need 
2. They have bought some tools from you already and they are happy with the bare minimum
3. You sold them MDR from an EDR vendor and they think they are covered
4. They think you will magically save them if they have a breach

That is just your existing customers.  Differentiating your company and services with new prospects is even harder!!

Every vendor right now is trying to get you to sell their “stack” or “bundle.”  As you are trying to sell new customers this is the biggest thing slowing down your pipeline!!  Every prospects biggest objection is they already have a combination of those tools.  Worse yet they have been purchased at different times so the expiration dates are all over the board.  For SME customers this can also cause the worst case scenario - no decision at all.

EDR vendors have been selling MDR as the complete solution for an SME.  It is not - they only monitor their platform (this is also letting the fox watch the hen house).  You need to collect logs from the entire digital footprint.  That means firewalls, SSO, MFA, O365, Google Workspace, email security, cloud security, and more depending on their environment.  You can get SOC services from some of the EDR vendors, but you have to buy their EDR to get it.  The trick is to find a stand alone SOC service provider with connectors into all of those things.

So how can we break this cycle and not only grow our business faster this year but for the next several years?  It is simple.  Start by selling stand alone Blue Team (SOC) services.  Here is how it works:

1. Start the relationship with Blue Team - it will give you an opportunity to ingest logs from their current tools and help you get to know their environment.
2. Most SME customers have not purchased Blue Team in the past because they do not understand Ingestion/Events Per Second/Daily Storage.  It is silly to even have the conversation.  Look for a program that is flat rate per user/device.
3. Build trust once you are in.  Have quarterly check-ins with each new customer.  This is your opportunity to share the gaps they have in their security.  Then you can upsell them on new technologies and begin replacing the old ones when they come off of contract.

If you are able to do these simple steps I guarantee you will have your biggest year onboarding new customers ever.  You can also use this strategy with your existing customers to help you gain more services from them too!

Good Luck! 

Brian Stoner
SVP, Growth

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