It’s a not-so-secret, secret, that cybersecurity $vendors are not paying their sales staff for renewals. This results in high-turnover of sales staff, ghosting, poor support, and aggressive sales.
The result within orgs takes the form of shadow IT, bad tech rationalization, half-assed deployments, overworked FTEs, and constant re-tooling.
What are some techniques you’ve found to be useful?
My number one go-to, is termination of convenience clause within contracts. You won’t find much luck with Microsoft and AWS, but you will with even largest cybersecurity organizations, even as a mid-enterprise. What this means, is despite an immaculate proof-of-value / RFC, they have a financial incentive (sales don’t get paid until the period has passed) to ensure a perfect post-sales deployment; you’ll get their A-team, training credits, and possibly PS hours.
There’s probably a heap of other things we do without thinking about it, like not allowing sales to divide your teams and always document every proof-of-value, to build resistance to organizational regime changes.
Depending on your role, much of this may be out of our control, such as software purchasing on P-cards, silo’d orgs, weak-willed peers with buying power, but I’m interested on how others handle this race-to-the-bottom, short-sighted sales world we have to operate in.