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Client Introduction

Our client is a market disruptor in the cyber-security industry that has developed a low cost, easy to deploy suite of solutions that persistently assess a client's network and defend that network from unauthorized access. The founder of the company is a retired military intelligence analyst that has extensive experience conducting red team activities for the national power and he has surrounded himself with other senior military intelligence professionals and Veterans.

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The Situation

When we engaged with our client, they were a new entry in to the growing cyber-security industry, having made an exit from the break-fix side of IT. Their four product suite was in varying states of alpha and beta testing with multiple companies.  But at this point they had still not closed any deals that resulted in ongoing revenue. To maintain their development operations and expand their staff, new revenue needed to be entering the business. 

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The Issue

Because our client was composed or Veterans and engineers, they had very limited sales experience.  While there was a detailed product roadmap in place, they was no such plan for their sales program.  Our client need to develop a plan that not only achieved their mission of protecting small businesses but enabled them to scale from a start up to having a presence in multiple markets around the US.

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The Solution

Before any sales plan could be designed or implemented our client needed to have a clear understanding of who their target markets were along with a sustainable pricing structure. We worked with DevOps to calculate the actual cost of the product, both the production cost and the cost to provide the ongoing service and then designed a tiered subscription based pricing plan that had a profit margin large enough to support commission payments and reinvestment back into the product.  Once we had a valid pricing strategy we refined their target markets to only organizations of a certain number of employees and revenue within three specific industries.  Now that we knew who we were going to sell to we were able to map out a sales process along with the specific content that is needed to help the prospect make a buying decision. This allowed the founders to get out in the field and start validating our assumptions.

While the founders were out selling we worked with them to design a multi-tiered indirect sales channel that would allow them to leverage the existing relationships of IT professionals active in the market, refined the sales process to account for partner sales, developed a new sales compensation plan, a referral incentive program, and configured and deployed a CRM system. 

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The Outcome

The roadmap we designed established a foundation for our client's growth.  Our client was able to identify six new partners in 3 states and sign their initial clients, including a key influencer in one of their target markets that has helped open doors into additional clients. Additionally, because of the initial success of the sales process, our client was able to take the initial plan for the indirect channel and outline three lines of effort to help expand their sales program and provide greater support to their indirect channel.