I doubt it’s all that controversial to say that most security engineers don’t care overmuch about sales. Realistically, why would they? As long as salespeople aren’t putting the organization at risk, their activities aren’t really within the security team’s bailiwick.
Service providers occupy a bit of a weird space in that regard. Engineers at these organizations are still responsible for managing risk and compliance, sure. But they also need to make sure that the claims sales and marketing are making about the company’s offerings are accurate.
In my experience, this is one of the biggest sources of friction at such organizations.
Security professionals may feel frustrated that they’re being pulled away from their role. Salespeople and marketers can feel condescended to by jargon they lack the expertise to understand. As a result, both sides tend to find themselves at one another’s throats.
Left unaddressed, this misalignment has the potential to bring an organization’s growth almost to a halt. Worse still, there’s a good chance that the interpersonal conflict could further drive burnout across the three teams. Given that sales, marketing, and security are among the most burnout-prone professions in the B2B world, I probably don’t need to explain why that’s a problem.
As for what you can do about it? That starts with understanding the processes underpinning customer acquisition and customer success. To that end, we’re going to focus on lead management — and how security fits into the process.
What Is Lead Management, Exactly?
I’ll be blunt. Lead management is basically just a fancy umbrella term for the tools and processes an organization’s got in place to identify, attract, and build relationships with prospective customers — in this case known as leads. It generally consists of the following:
- Lead generation. Bringing in leads and collecting information. Generally owned by the marketing team.
- Lead qualification/scoring. Determining which leads are likeliest to convert based on a combination of predictive algorithms and historical data. Typically shared between sales and marketing.
- Lead nurturing. Building relationships with leads who aren’t yet ready to convert. In B2B, may be shared between marketing, sales, and customer success teams.
These three pillars are closely interconnected and heavily reliant on one another.
Without lead qualification, for instance, your sales team becomes overwhelmed as growth scales, forced to sift through mountains of leads with no idea which ones are valuable. Without nurturing, leads begin to fall away over long sales cycles. And without generation, of course, there’s nothing to qualify or nurture.
If it helps visualize how everything slots together — and why each of the above is critical — you might think of a lead management system as similar to an endpoint monitoring solution.
In this analogy, lead generation comprises the algorithms that identify potential threats and trigger security alerts. Lead qualification and scoring is triage. Finally, lead nurturing consists of any proactive and ongoing measures a team takes to protect their people, systems, and data.
Bringing Together Security and Sales
You probably already have an inkling of the role a security team plays in the sales process.
As mentioned earlier, their job is twofold. First, they need to safeguard the organization against risks and threats. Second, they need to ensure the sales team has the necessary knowledge and expertise to effectively sell the organization’s products.
A better understanding of how sales and marketing operates provides an excellent starting point for the second objective. Just as I used an analogy here to explain lead management, security engineers and sales teams should find shared language to communicate and collaborate. I’ll go into greater depth on what that entails with my next piece.
