Start-Up Secure

CHAPTER ELEVENCommunicating Your Cybersecurity Posture and Maturity to Customers

Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.

– Malcolm Gladwell

CUSTOMERS WILL CONTINUE TO BECOME more risk-averse when it comes to the vendors they do business with and trust with their data. Just like in high school, showing your work is still important. Customers want evidence that you are meeting minimum requirements. This can be helpful to sales – but can also bring them to a grinding halt.

Your sales team should be generally familiar with your cybersecurity program and practices. If you have certifications like SOC2 or PCI DSS, they should be capable of talking about these at a high level with customers. When the customers dig in, the sales lead should know who to bring into the conversation to make the customer feel comfortable. While sales operations is a huge topic unto itself and there are many books on this, it is important we cover cybersecurity in the sales process.

Discussing it up front in the first pitch with a customer is important; a single slide just mentioning cybersecurity at your company and how it is baked into the culture and product go a long way. Be up front and transparent. These details obviously will shift and change as you grow. Selling to your first lighthouse customers¹ may not require as much high touch transparency on cybersecurity, but certainly, for future customers it will. Make sure how you talk about how cybersecurity ...