I would never consider myself a salesperson given I am more in the technical delivery and development world, but at some point, we all need to be sellers. Part of our roles a Security and IAM leaders is we need to sell our roadmaps to leadership to get budgets, resources, etc. I’ve sat in front of multiple leaders over the years to get projects and budgets approved and pretty much always follow the same approach which I have had success with. So, next time you are going to get your budget and/or project approved, follow this process and maybe it will help you also.
I read a book early in my career because I realized just asking for a budget wasn’t cutting it. The book was on the Microsoft Solution Selling process (can see the book here https://www.amazon.com/Solution-Selling-Creating-Difficult-Markets/dp/0786303158). I don’t remember much from the book, but the big thing I took away from it is you need to have a vision, current state, and steps to get to the vision. I’ve adapted it over the years to align with how I typically do assessments and recommendations and follow the below approach.
- Issues / Requirements: Over time, through compliance, enhancements, failures, etc. you are always going to have issues and requirements that get added to your backlog. Looking at these myopically is going to get you nowhere and really just lead to small point solutions. I usually try to group them together into common threads / solutions which get put into:
- Problem Statements: This is where you define the problem you are trying to solve given the issues and requirements. You can group multiple issues / requirements together into a problem to help give background and weight to the problem.
- End State / Goal: This is where you get to have fun. Take all your problems, issues, risks, etc. and define the perfect end state. Make sure this is big picture, outcome and use driven. This should be a dream and paint a picture of how the environment is going to be based on proposed solution. You can group a single or all your problems into that vision to help put more weight behind it.
- Gap Analysis / Steps: Once you have the vision, work backwards and define the steps to realize the vision from where you are today, problems, issues, etc. THIS IS THE BUDGET STATEMENT. Since you know where you are, what you need, and where you are going, now you can assign the plan and resources to get you there.
- Execute: Once you have the steps / plan, execute on communicating this to your leadership.
When doing the vision / end state, THINK BIG and be relevant to the task as hand. I love these meetings and ideanation sessions because it lets you dream a bit of how the environment COULD and SHOULD function. A typical vision I use as an example is employee / governance driven. Essentially, I paint the picture of a new hire that has all their access day 1 and has capability to request additional access to enable them quicker in their roles. I like to use examples I have seen over the years that a typical new employee is not productive in their roles for 14-21 days post employment (best case) given all the onboarding and access they need to request. The end vision of this is to have them active and enabled on day 1.
I’ve seen a lot of derivatives to the above, some more complex, some less, but most tend to use fear and FUD to help drive this home. Me personally, I have had more success setting the dream and defining the steps to get there. This comes across more quantitative then punitive and seems to be more received.
Whether you’re just starting, or have been doing this for years, we all need to be sellers at some point. Keep it simple and focus on the outcomes with the approach above and hopefully this helps you get that next big budget / project.
