As the threat landscape continues to evolve, you can build trust by adding value to security outcomes and emphasizing your expertise. How do you position yourself as a strategic consultant with a seat at the planning table? How do you demonstrate hard and soft skills to customer stakeholders?
Make Building Trust a Stated Objective
Best-in-class MSSPs are marked by their customers looking to them for guidance and advice. As an organization, you should strive to distinguish yourself from competitors who are more focused on short-term transactions. Leadership should ensure their teams are aware that building trust is one of the team’s objectives and key results (OKRs) and find ways to both influence and measure this objective. Examples of potential OKRs that can be measured include “Hold QBRs with every client” or “increase Net Promoter Score to X”.
What’s the value of your client’s trust? Some of the forefront benefits to organizations that influence enterprise outcomes and strategic business decisions include:
Establish Your Trusted Advisor Role
Whether the customer’s organization has decades of achievement or is more of a startup, your team can always further establish its role for driving positive results. Here are some ways to strengthen your position as a trusted advisor:
Trusted advisors don’t play off scripts. Scripts don’t allow for listening, according to Gartner in their research CIOs Must Become Trusted Advisors.
Trust Benefits Both Parties
In these unprecedented times of changing sales models and hyper-competition, it’s crucial to build trust with current and prospective customers for positive results and retention of hard-earned clients. As you enhance your impact and influence, you are able to add value beyond tactical purchase decisions prone to annual re-assessment and potential cost-cutting measures. MSSPs with a seat at the planning table gain insight into future enterprise goals and how technology serves as a business enabler.
And as a reward for MSSPs, you’ll see noticeable improvements in customer retention and satisfaction. Both of these are critical for growing your business as they’ll drive efficiency within your team and customer partnership.
We’ve expanded our MDR capabilities with enhanced incident response and security services to better protect against evolving cyber threats.