Threat intel could be your secret weapon in cybersecurity sales

Technology solutions selling has traditionally focused on the product portfolio, with resellers opening their lengthy product catalogues to display countless options for customers to choose from.

That might well have been the best approach in the past, with customers picking and choosing solutions based on the features they need. But today, with the sheer number of options available and threats to face, this has turned into a guessing game.

Threat actors are becoming ever-more sophisticated, targeting companies sector by sector and needing to find the weakest points, and their evolving tactics are fuelling fast-changing customer needs. This fast pace frequently leaves customers picking solutions based on whatever the latest attack was, a reactive approach without a long-term view.

But what if they could change this? By working closely with security vendors, resellers can sell solutions based on a deeper understanding of threat intelligence.

With access to this data, they can map their recommendations directly to customer needs, creating insight-packed threat maps to inform their recommendations. Not only does this deliver better results for customers, but it can also develop stronger client relationships, starting new upsell opportunities and embedding resellers as a partner with real strategic value.

Pick and mix

Threat actors are innovating faster than businesses can keep up, and the threat landscape has become far too complex to be boiled down into a selection of products for customers to pick and mix between. Today, security stacks need to be custom-built.

The same goes for resellers. As the market has grown exponentially, the competition out there is fiercer than ever. To stand out, you don’t just need the best product selection; you need the expertise to match.

That’s what makes customers stick with you - the trust you build up over time. And you don’t just build that with your catalog. You need the confidence to step in, for example, when your customers are panicking about the latest headline attack, to reassure them with insights and knowledge on how this could impact them. That’s how you embed yourself in their processes and stand out from your peers.

Not just ‘buy’, but ‘why’

Evolving towards a threat-map-focused selling approach doesn’t happen overnight. To truly align your sales strategy with the threat landscape, you need to build a deeper understanding of trends.

Think of the recent shifts in social engineering with the emergence of ClickFix campaigns, big game encryption ransomware, data exfiltration instances, or the rise of info-stealers and legitimate remote access abuse. Rather than just switching your product selection over, imagine being able to explain why these shifts are happening and how each move should be reflected throughout the security stack.

It’s not a case of getting out your crystal ball; it's about positioning resellers as strategic partners that have their finger on the pulse of the most recent threat.

These threats don’t just come out of nowhere; they start out slowly and bubble up into big picture trends. Take the rise in data extortion as an example. In the retail sector alone, data extortion attacks have tripled over the last three years. Trends like this that are beginning to dominate today are often traceable back over multiple quarters, if not years. By working closely with intelligence units and keeping track of threat intelligence data, you can identify these trends before they take over and help customers get ahead of the game, protecting them before an attack, not after.

With this enhanced knowledge of the threat landscape, you can provide bespoke recommendations, mapping specific threats to the security vulnerabilities of each customer. This is the kind of experience that differentiates you as a reseller.

Security vendors need to step up and arm their channel partners with the threat intelligence and data needed for this. The benefits for vendors are plenty; better-informed channel partners using this threat map sales approach are more readily able to justify higher-value services, driving additional revenue downstream.

While both parties might benefit materially from the sales, it also helps to drive better outcomes for customers. They’ll benefit from security stacks that are truly personalized and informed by real data.

Two heads are better than one

It’s clear that to remain competitive and deliver the best results for customers, security vendors and resellers need to work together. Threat actors have stepped up their game, and we need to do the same.

Combining the customer knowledge of resellers with the threat intelligence data of security vendors is very powerful. By doing so, the result is not just an excellent sales process, but a strategic advisory experience that delivers real impact for customers. So why not give it a go?