How Do You Establish Credibility?

Earlier this month, we met with our Executive Advisory Board. These are seasoned Chief Information Security Officers commanding enterprise security teams in various industries. In short, they are incredibly smart leaders who know exactly who they are and how they feel. They hold nothing back and this meeting was no different. We owe them a debt of gratitude for sharing their perspectives with us.

Credibility is Critical

At this meeting, credibility was a hot topic of conversation. How does a company establish and maintain credibility with its customers and prospects? How credible are we? Can we be believed and trusted?

Now, we’re not talking about street credibility. We are talking about business credibility. According to Wikipedia, credibility has two key components: trustworthiness and expertise. With respect to these components, how do we fare? Sometimes in life, you have to take a hard look at yourself to see where to improve. We went there.

Credibility of Product

The group agreed that credibility of product begins with the Proof of Concept (POC). If a company has a difficult time implementing our product during a POC, our credibility takes a hit. That generated a conversation about how to ensure a POC goes well.

An Advisory Board Member declared that use cases need to be crystalized. They need to be measured with pre-determined metrics. POCs that are too wide in scope can’t deliver results. His recommendation: go specific on use cases and knock them out of the park. Anything else that comes out of the POC is gravy on top.

A lesson we learned early on: data is critical. For a successful POC, we need to have the data up front and it needs to be good data. We have to truly define the POC and hold to that scope. This is how we are able to show results quickly in a POC. And, this is why we are winning POCs.

Credibility of Relationship

Everyone agreed that relationships deliver the best results. Are there things we don’t realize we’re doing? Are we building relationships with our customers of credibility and trust right from the beginning? If we go in and are wishy washy, that’s not credible.

One of the things we did at the RSA Conference a couple of years back was to provide “white glove” treatment to our customers. We didn’t see other companies giving clients the white glove treatment during the sales process to get value. That’s when we came up with Gurucul Labs.

Gurucul Labs is a Managed Security Analytics Service that provides customers a turn-key service to detect unknown unknowns using the Gurucul Risk Analytics (GRA) platform. The service is designed to leverage GRA advanced analytics capabilities in the most effective and efficient manner, and to align with customer-specific priorities. It’s a unique mix of people, process and technology. And, it has completely changed the customer experience. That’s how we are giving our customers the white glove treatment today.

Credibility is Earned

The meeting ended with a story about how we earned credibility with a new customer. This customer recently purchased our product. They bought the product. We installed it. We left. A few weeks later, our services team called the client to check in on how everything was going. This is a standard practice at Gurucul: following up with clients after the sale to ensure their deployments are running smoothly and to answer any questions they may have. Our customers’ success is our most important asset.

That was when the SOC program manager told us, “You’re the only vendor to come talk to us after the sale.” We were stunned. This company buys a lot of security products from numerous vendors. He told us we were the only security company that came back in after we installed to ask how our product was doing in his environment. We earned credibility with that customer in that moment.

We’d like to earn credibility with you, too. Contact us for a POC today!

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*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog – Gurucul authored by Jane Grafton. Read the original post at: https://gurucul.com/blog/how-do-you-establish-credibility