Resignations and terminations are not usually happy events, barring retirements. And for cybersecurity teams, these events can cause a lot of anxiety, especially if their company doesn’t have a plan for securing data prior to an exit.
But cybersecurity marketers can help security teams make their workplaces safer by giving them educational materials and exit security protocols.
You’re probably already selling security programs for onboarding, password management, and deperimeterization. These are all valuable protocols to follow, and they help keep individuals and the company safe from attack. But how do security pros ensure the company’s data stays with the company, especially during a hostile termination? Exit security protocols.
While some security experts and practitioners may come to this conclusion on their own, you can become a trusted partner in security if you help them make a plan from the beginning.
Protocol outlines
Start with the protocol. Pull together a checklist of all the possible ways that an employee may be able to access a company’s data. You may have to go to your internal thought leaders for the details on this one.
Of course this could be specialized to job descriptions and industries, but those complications are actually opportunities for you to better-target your marketing for exit security. Imagine a whole set of exit security drip campaigns for every vertical you sell to. It’s a marketer’s dream come true.
Once you’ve made your checklist, check to make sure you’ve added specific instructions for locking down that data.
- What pitfalls or issues might the company have?
- Is there a way to combine account rollovers or change passwords in bulk?
- Don’t forget password sharing accounts: make sure all necessary passwords are shared with others before the employee leaves, and that those passwords are changed after.
Use your company’s specific features as examples
You want to educate cybersecurity pros, but you also need to sell your product. How do you do both without sounding pushy, overbearing, or salesy? Show how to solve the problem, and use your product as part of the solution. The secret to content like this is to provide your product as one of the ways — and sometimes even acknowledging the other vendors or providers who can also do it — to solve the problem.
Focus on using screenshots from your tool and step by step instructions using your product as an example of how to engage the protocol. This combination will show the security pros
- How easy it is to implement the protocol
- How easy it is to implement in your product
- The UI of your product
When you solve a problem and provide expert advice on best practices, you can also give pros a peek at your product and how well it works.
Create, repurpose, resell
Each asset we marketers create can take hours, and if you add in approvals, it could take weeks. Repurposing each asset increases the ROI of that asset. Save the earth and recycle your content.
If you start your exit strategy asset as a white paper, consider how you’re going to promote it. Will you make multiple copies for different industries? Use this same content in presentation slides that you can use for a webinar or a slideshare (or both). Consider making a PDF checklist as a companion piece.
Depending on where the assets from this campaign fit into your funnel, consider gating the content for lead generation or using the assets in a content syndication campaign.
Don’t stop with marketing assets. If you’ve got your eye out for new revenue streams, exit security consulting is perfect for teams that already have consulting under their belts and need to expand to new products. These assets can gauge market interest in that program and ultimately drive leads to it.