Working from Home
Working in cybersecurity is already a challenging, yet rewarding, field. When times are normal, you are dealing with selling a product to people, who have the job of ensuring they are as skeptical of threats as possible. When you pair that with a pandemic, causing all professionals across the states to work from home, it makes for a really difficult battle to overcome.
Working from home for myself is a transition that has not been too difficult, given my role in the field of sales. Instead of commuting to the office, I commute to my desk and work. The biggest personal challenge is simply finding a way to stay productive, with all of the distractions that the comforts of my home offers, that work does not. In order to combat any potential malaise that may onset, I’ve continued to follow through the schedule I’ve pre-created while in the office.
That means dedicating certain chunks of each workday, to certain subjects/tasks, I need to do in order to be successful. The questions itself is twofold, however, and the biggest work from a home challenge I face pairs directly with the biggest cybersecurity professionals are facing on a day-to-day basis. Working from home now removes many protective layers that these professionals have installed for employees within the office, and remote work has, in some ways, opened Pandora’s box for hackers.
Now my job of selling to people within this space becomes much more difficult because the nature of my call itself and allowing my company to do work on their system without having any checks in place, on their end, is a scary proposition for. Therein lies the problem; it is an inherently scary proposition in the best of times, and the overall pandemic has simply created an even scarier worldview for them.
The solution to all of my fellow cybersecurity sales professionals has been this; continue to plug away and now more than ever is a time to showcase a sense of comradery with your peers in the space. Make them know that you understand their pain and relate to them on a human-to-human level. While our jobs may not have changed too much, all of our lives have greatly changed.
The best sales relationships are built on trust and mutual respect for one another. As we continue to move through this together, we all must understand this concept, and be less focused on immediate results, but rather long-term partnerships.
By Robert Moore
nside sales | Synack | Cyber security | Security testing
San Francisco Bay Area,US
