Cyber Security Sales Manager

JW
by Jonathan Wagner6 views·Updated May 4, 2021
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  1. Hello. My name is Jonathan Wagner and I decided to
  2. do cybersecurity sales manager for my research project.
  3. So a little bit about me.
  4. Before I begin, I am also a sales manager.
  5. I started um just as a door to door sales
  6. rap, I worked my way up the ranks as most
  7. entry level sales reps do um and I ended up
  8. being a sales manager pretty early.
  9. I'm pretty young to be a sales manager.
  10. I'm actually the youngest in my region and the youngest
  11. in my division and I'm the second youngest in the
  12. company. So um I feel very blessed and thankful for
  13. that opportunity but it's also taught me a lot as
  14. well and that's why I wanted to do some research
  15. on other sales manager positions in the area.
  16. So I'm going to share with you what I found
  17. but that was a little bit about my background, um
  18. a little bit about me and my experience and what
  19. I can kind of bring to the table to this
  20. research project.
  21. Yes. So as I was looking at a lot of
  22. sales opportunities um throughout the area, what I found is
  23. that there was a lot of lateral or even negative
  24. movement. Um for any sales positions.
  25. Sales manager positions that's in my same market but also
  26. that requires the same level of education that I do.
  27. I don't have a bachelor's degree.
  28. Obviously that's what I'm working towards.
  29. Only have a couple associates degrees.
  30. So I quickly realized and I'll give two examples of
  31. the different places that I looked at.
  32. So E.
  33. G. Innovations for example um is a sales manager opportunity.
  34. That was one of the better ones that I saw
  35. that on average they made around 75 to 100 k.
  36. Per year.
  37. That's fantastic.
  38. That's great.
  39. Um Another one was mint aesthetics and the average sales
  40. manager makes anywhere from 32 K.
  41. 200 k per year.
  42. So that's both of those are gonna be probably negative
  43. movements for me, just because my company has treated me
  44. very, very well.
  45. Um and you know, my company treats me well, why
  46. why would I move?
  47. So at that, at that point in time I thought
  48. to myself, you know what, maybe I should start looking
  49. at places that are going to be in a different
  50. market completely.
  51. So that's when I decided to do some research and
  52. I came across cybersecurity sales management.
  53. Um I was really interested in it and I knew
  54. some people at my church that were in cybersecurity sales.
  55. So I reached out to them and asked to have
  56. an interview with their manager.
  57. I had they pulled some strings for me and I
  58. had to do some things, but I was able to
  59. to get a hold of um the national sales director
  60. of IBM Douglas Bruce.
  61. So um after reaching out to him, very, very busy
  62. guy, decided to do a meeting over Microsoft teams instead,
  63. it wouldn't be more than 45 minutes.
  64. Um and he said it was okay, so in the
  65. interview I wanted to ask three major questions, what were
  66. the current cybersecurity, sales trends in that market communication in
  67. the workplace and also industry concerns.
  68. So I'm gonna go over those real quick with you,
  69. just kind of share what I've learned.
  70. So the first question I asked him was Covid caused
  71. many markets to get shifted in unexpected directions and how
  72. has it impacted his business, And his answer was pretty
  73. simple. Um Covid hasn't really um a lot of what
  74. they do is a virtual anyway.
  75. Um the only thing that they had to do is
  76. instead of doing in person meetings for potential clients, they
  77. had to move over to virtual slide deck presentations, which
  78. they were already in the process of doing anyway.
  79. Um another one was over the last 10 years, it's
  80. been a high spike in cyber security positions.
  81. Is that going to continue to grow is they're going
  82. to become something that's declining and it becomes something that's
  83. more lucrative.
  84. And he said the answer is all of the above.
  85. Um There is increasingly more need for knowledge for a
  86. person to know in order to be successful here because
  87. you have to keep up with the times.
  88. But i There's also an equal increase in the amount
  89. of need for sales reps.
  90. So it's a booming business but they're kind of in
  91. a catch 22 with both a need to increase the
  92. knowledge but of of the reps that they have, but
  93. also to recruit reps with a high level of knowledge
  94. which is really difficult.
  95. So it's it's a it's a fast growing business is
  96. very exciting.
  97. Um Then I asked him how the typical career ladder
  98. would work in companies such as IBM.
  99. Yeah. Is is there room for internal movement?
  100. How does that go?
  101. And he says honestly there's not a lot.
  102. Um So at this level you kind of really differentiate
  103. yourself as a sales rep or a sales manager or
  104. they call it sales experts over there.
  105. So the skill sets are very different.
  106. Managing a sales team is very different than actually selling.
  107. Um In fact sales managers and sales staff make equal
  108. amounts and a lot of times because sales staff wars
  109. on commission they can actually make more than a sales
  110. manager. Yeah so that's kind of interesting.
  111. I didn't know about that, it's very different in the
  112. market that I'm in.
  113. So um next one was communication in the workplace.
  114. So going back to um I'm actually gonna just use
  115. one of the examples in the questions I ask because
  116. I feel like it was the most relevant and I'm
  117. running short on time here.
  118. Um One of the toughest jobs in the company is
  119. is management because they have to relay company objectives to
  120. a staff and their job isn't to get the staff
  121. to understand why it's just to do it.
  122. So how do you communicate company objectives um to the
  123. staff that are lower in the totem pole.
  124. And he said it's very simple communication is going to
  125. be the same no matter where you're at.
  126. Um We have objectives that we have to hit as
  127. a company and the staff um lower gets paid on
  128. hitting their own metrics and it is tricky sometimes to
  129. align your needs and the company's needs with the staff's
  130. needs really.
  131. That comes from internal structuring.
  132. If you do, you're good if you do a good
  133. job on that.
  134. So um you know, because if if if your reps
  135. are making money then you're making money and the company
  136. is making money.
  137. The last question I wanted to ask real briefly was
  138. a lot of times there's issues and unethical selling.
  139. What is this where your thoughts on this?
  140. So he said that there is unethical selling in the
  141. workplace in a hi company.
  142. That being said they're not successful.
  143. What will happen is a lot of these companies based
  144. there um uh commission on long term um maintenance of
  145. a customer.
  146. And if you don't retain your customer, you don't get
  147. paid. So anyway, that's my presentation.
  148. Thank you very much for listening.
  149. I learned a lot and hopefully you learned a little
  150. bit as well.