Dangerous & Desperate Sales Tactics

In recent news it has been confirmed that many cybersecurity vendors are lying and even blackmailing large companies in order to “fix major security threats”. The vendors’ salesmen use questionable tactics to reach executives on the phone and prey on certain areas of fear in their industry in order to create the false narrative that the large company is in danger.

These are usually smaller cybersecurity companies looking to make a splash in the news to get more business or to drive up large contracts with companies by backing them into a corner. They use large company names or even recent news stories to hype up the urgency of what usually turns out to be smaller problems of no real importance.

In recent cases these salesmen have even lied or left out important details about the scope of the actual issue the company is facing. For example in one company there was a “breach” of data that was found on public servers including customer names. The way the vendor would misrepresent the scale of the problem would be by making it sound like their customers data was compromised when all that really happened is their names were found on a public listing of people who attended the company’s event.

By the end of the sales call the vendor had already gotten the executive to grant them access to go ahead and start working on fixing this breach and the vendor started racking up charges that the company was willing to pay in order to do what it had to do to save its customers data and privacy.

This is a great example of pushy sales tactics that are definitely looked down upon in the sales world. You should always tell the full truth and never leave out important details. These vendors clearly took advantage of these companies and should probably be taken to court. You should never have to terrorize your prospect to get them to buy your services. Be honest, be clear, and keep your sales tactics above boards.