Get inspired by Safetica success story in Poland

What works and what does not with partners and customers? What do you need to create a functional vendor - partner - customer relationship? We asked Mikołaj Sikorski, Product Manager at Dagma (Poland), a couple of questions on the topic. Reading the answers will give you an inspiring recipe on how to become one of Safetica best-performing partners.

What made you decide to include Safetica into your portfolio? 

Before Safetica, we didn’t have any DLP vendors in our portfolio. Some software had single features that are typical for DLP solutions, like for example removable media white listing, but we had more and more feedback from the market that customers were ready to upgrade their security by adding a Data Leak Protection solution to their protection. We decided to start cooperation with Safetica and it has opened doors to customers that were closed to us before this move.

What was a tricky part when you started to sell Safetica?

Safetica DLP is a complex product so it takes time to fully understand the product and be able to present it very well with all its functions. Many potential customers have no idea what DLP is so you’ll have to learn how to educate them about it and how DLP will help to protect their business. To gain confidence in your newly learned knowledge and presenting Safetica to potential customers.

What were your initial expectations and how have they changed?

We have targeted ourselves internally to start 100 projects in the first year and close at least 10 of them. Looking now, after year and a half, we already have 600 open projects in our channel and over 50 customers.

What are your targets for 2018 and your current successes?

To build a position on the market, you need partners who will be your “people in a field” and who will support the process from lead generation, through POC (Proof of Concept) to positive project closing. What I personally consider as my success is creating in 1,5 year a network of over 20 such partners.

What do you think has helped your success with Safetica?

Do your homework first! Before you start approaching your potential new customers make sure you know the product as best as you can. To fully understand the product can take a few months so don’t rush it and play with it.  If you have the opportunity to visit Brno so you can see and learn directly from Safetica, go for it! With good knowledge of the product comes the confidence that you’ll need for presenting Safetica with precision and detail. Because often you’ll be presenting the product to customers with no technical knowledge or experience so you need to be able to communicate the product from their perspective.

Could you pick one of your customers´ success stories?

What I find as a very nice success story is from a customer who already received great value from Safetica during POC. Our customer is in the food industry and his biggest asset is know-how about how they prepare their products and from what ingredients. During POC, the customer installed Safetica on 50 endpoints, to check what information Safetica is able to collect about them. After a week, we had a remote session with this customer where together with customer administrators we went through the information that was collected. After only a few minutes, our engineers alerted the customer that one of the employees had copied over 12.000 files to removable media. Files which contained information about food production. The remote session stopped almost instantly, because the customer wanted to block this user as fast as possible. The outcome of this Safetica Audit was 400 sold licenses for us within the next 2 weeks.

What do you appreciate the most in cooperation with Safetica?

What I appreciate the most is that cooperation with Safetica is a 2-way partnership, where I know that Safetica not only delivers me a great solution but also supports me when I report any issue.

What kind of advice would you give to a new Safetica partner?

Get organized and well trained before you start approaching your new customers. Cooperate only with a small number of partners at the beginning so you can make sure that they’re as well trained and knowledgeable as you are. Focus on smaller customers and practice your newly learned skills and knowledge on them.  In case the deal doesn’t work out, you won’t be as disappointed as if you lose some big customers and a lot more money. Don’t expect an increase in sales immediately! This is a long distance run and you’ll see some results after one year or even longer. Do regular e-conferences every two weeks to educate companies about DLP and cybersecurity.  This is a great way to get new leads. Use the ESET brand to help you approach new customers.

What would you personally outline as Safetica’s most important advantage for the customer?

What our customers consider as the most important Safetica advantage is much quicker implementation time compared to other vendors. What they like even more is that you don’t have to wait for full implementation to get protection of your data, because Safetica protects your data from the very first moments you start installation through tools like Channel Control and later you can add additional protection layers.