Converting Prospects Into Customers With Cyber Threat Assessment

It’s time you change the way you talk to your SMB customers about cyber attacks. More than half of small businesses fell victim, last year, according to Ponemon Institute Research.

You can do one of two things with that information:

1. Hope these hypothetical statistics mean something to your customers.

2. Show customers their cyber attack real risk.

“A small business wants to see the proof in the pudding. ‘Show me that I need to do something about this, because everybody’s asking me to spend money on their stuff,’” says Stephan Tallent, Senior Director, MSSP and Service Enablement at Fortinet.

Gravity Networks President Mike Coffey has put this notion into practice at his company, which focuses on small to midsize clients in legal, medical and banking. “When we meet with a client originally, we will do a discovery with them to figure out what their needs assessment really is,” says Coffey, “We have found a problem with every CTAP we’ve ran for our customers.”

CTAP—Fortinet’s Cyber Threat Assessment program—starts with a device that goes inside your customers’ network. And, it doesn’t require any changes to that network. “It listens to and sees all the different traffic that’s going through the network, and it sends that data to a webpage where the customer and the partner can look at it and go, ‘Oh, wow! Here’s all this malware, and here’s all these data leak issues that are facing the customer,’” says Tallent.

And Coffey’s team says customers are always shocked to see they’re not fully protected. “It’s given us some really good feedback, shows the customer some particular holes in their network, in their security, and then we’ve been able to spin that off into some revenue,” says Kevin Sparks, Vp of Operations at Gravity Networks.

Gravity Networks also makes money off the CTAP itself, going as far as to say charging for the technical assessment—versus giving it out for free—makes them look better to customers. “When people pay for the assessment, when we bring the report back, and we show them the vulnerabilities and the holes in their network, they’re more likely to continue on and invest money in the solutions that we can provide them. When the customer doesn’t pay for it, they’re just kind of like, ‘Okay, we’ll look at it at a later time,’” says Sparks.

The question left is how you position the Cyber Threat Assessment to your SMB customers. Fortinet recommends using it to convert prospects, as a competitive displacement tool, or at renewal time. Even if your customers are confident in their network, Fortinet recommends asking them to let you install the device, so there’s proof.

Learn More: Threat Management

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