Name: Joshua Hammer – Title: Sales Operations Manager
Valentin Vesa: Good morning everyone and welcome back to the Sucuri Short Webinar Series. This is your host Val, and it is my pleasure again to welcome you to today’s topic. During this webinar you will meet our sales enablement team and view the marketing information packages we have created for web agencies. We’ll have the full team presenting today, Joshua Hammer our Sales Operations Manager whom you know from previous webinars, Victor Santoyo our Account Executive, you also know him from previous webinars and for the first time here, Mr. Steve Renteria also an Account Executive with Sucuri.
Valentin Vesa: Before I hand it over to them, let’s talk about the key takeaways and introduce themselves, just a few housekeeping rules, first, we’d love to hear from you during today’s presentation. If you have a question for our presenters, please feel free to send it through the Q and A tab in your Zoom window, or you can also Tweet us at Sucuri Security using the #askSucuri. Our team of panelists will be answering questions at the end of the session, if we don’t get to your question during today’s webinar, we will be sure to follow up with all of you via E-mail.
Valentin Vesa: All questions and answers from today will be made available on our website within a few days and today’s webinar is also going to made available as a video recording with slides being sent to all registrants. We’d like to encourage you to share today’s webinar with your friends and your follows on your social profiles and with that, gentlemen, stage is yours.
Joshua Hammer: Helps if I unmute, huh? Hello everybody, my name is Joshua Hammer. I’m a Sales Operation Manager here. Just a little bit about me, been with Sucuri now for four years. Once again, the title is Sales Operations Manager, which means I do a little bit of everything. I’m married with two little girls, beautiful daughters and I love games, video games, board games, doesn’t matter if it’s a game I’m into it. I even look at security like a game or a puzzle so it’s where my passion lies with that. I’m going to hand your off to Victor, so he can introduce himself.
Victor Santoyo: Thank you Joshua, some of you may know from previous webinars, I’m the Account Executive here. I’ve been here about 3 and a half to 4 years, with a boy and another one on toe in January with my wife. We’re very much sports lovers and so NBA season’s upon us here in the States, so that’s something we’ll be definitely to and for. If you’re on social, Twitter is where like I’m more active, share a lot of technology and security related things but if you want to have an active sports discussion, by all means I am game for that as well. From here, I’ll hand it over to Steve, be kind. And otherwise Steve, take it away.
Steve Renteria: Hey guys. This is Steve Renteria, Account Manager here at Sucuri. Also, on social platforms you can find me on Twitter, I also have a large presence on LinkedIn. I do regular posts as well, so feel free to stay in touch with me there. A little bit about me, I’ve been here now at Sucuri for two years, father of three beautiful daughters, been a musician for most of my life so I’ve been playing multiple instruments, guitar, base, I know a little bit of piano, some drums, I’ve written and recorded a lot of my own music so it’s just a big hobby and a thing that I do. I’m a huge foodie, so I’m always in the kitchen trying out new recipes, doing new stuff, so I love to explore new things and try out different things. I used to be in the Marine Corp, served about fours years in there, learned all kinds of stuff like how to blow things up and keep people safe. So, definitely a right fit here at Sucuri there’s a few of us ex military here.
Steve Renteria: Yeah, I’m looking real forward to working with all these new agencies, helping you guys get started and be successful right off the gate by using our product and making sure that it’s working for you and your clients. I’ll hand it back to you, Josh.
Joshua Hammer: Fantastic. Alright. So, this is one of a four part series of our sales enablement team, we’ll be going over a lot of different things. In this one, basically we wanted to introduce ourselves, give you a little bit of background about what the sales enablement team is here for, some upcoming resources, how to contact us, and mainly answer any questions that you may have out there. So, if you got questions, get them in so at the end of the webinar we can help you out. As always, with my webinars I like to be short, sweet to the point. So, let’s get started.
Joshua Hammer: Sales Enablement, what exactly is sales enablement? Basically our job here is to help you with our product, get out there and show it to your customers, and help protect that. It’s an interesting field because you know nobody likes to talk about security until it’s too late. So, we prefer to be proactive than reactive and we wish everyone else was like that but it’s just not the case.
Joshua Hammer: So, what kind of resources are we talking about here? In the next couple of months we’ll be seeing a new agency knowledge base coming up on our site. Victor’s going to be putting that together for us. This will be specific to questions, answers to our larger customers that are more high level stuff and less in the kind of end user kind of thoughts. Video walkthroughs on how to do things in bulk, and my favorite, lunch cause man I love food. Lunch and learn calendars, basically where we’ll do a webinar with you individually or your sales team and perhaps provide lunch and just kind of go over things with everybody because you got a lot on your plate. So, training the sales people for one more thing is probably not the thing you’re jumping up and down to do. Let us do it for you. So, with that, like I said, short and sweet I kind of want to hear from you guys. What kind of questions do you have?
Valentin Vesa: Yeah so actually we had a question coming in, even this week like right before we did the webinar. Alfonso he sent us an E-mail and I’m going to read the question to you, Josh and everybody else that wants to pick it up. So, the question was how to approach and win a potential client if a website that you noticed is infected? Upon reporting the issue most of the times, they tend to think that you’re the one that hacked the website, when they don’t, they tend to go into the company they initially contacted for building the website instead of realizing that company was usually negligent in one way or another instead of contracting your services. So, basically how to get them to talk to you instead of going back to whoever developer did the website.
Joshua Hammer: You want to take that one Victor? Or at least start.
Victor Santoyo: I’ll take it. So, I think a lot of times that mindset comes from a site owner that thinks that their site is small, so how can it possibly compromise why they’d even receive that type of attention. We actually had one of our mediation analyst put out a post on our blog in June talking about why security still matters on small sites. And the reason for that is mainly because most of these attacks are automated in mass now so, whether the site’s small or large, built on WordPress or anything else, it’s going to get some type of attention. I would tell… if I were that provider, I would tell that client, Look ultimately hackers don’t discriminate.
Victor Santoyo: So, the size of the site or what you’re putting out as content makes no difference. You should still be able to put yourself in a position to succeed, to minimize risk because ultimately most cases, sites will always get hit, attacked, targeted in some form. So, how long ago did you change your password? Five months ago? Well that’s probably a problem, how long ago did you update your software? Are you enabling 2FA wherever you can? And if you get No to any of those questions, there’s an open possibility there for the reason of the compromise. It’s just making sure you’re covering all your tracks there.
Steve Renteria: Yeah, just to touch on what Josh said, the idea being proactive rather than reactive. So once you address the main point and get that going, that could be a further continuation of the conversation. Let’s put something in place to keep this from happening ever again.
Joshua Hammer: One of my favorites, is a story of a customer I had probably 2 years, 3 years ago, where they called in and they immediately started attacking us because obviously we hacked their site and put the malware on there, that way they’d pay us to clean it up. I can’t tell you how many of those I get. It’s amazing. They first, they blamed the host, okay it’s the host’s fault, you didn’t protect me. Or the host put it on there so they could get the referral money to send me over to you guys and after you’re like, okay why would somebody even do that? Because long run, yeah you know the ten bucks we’re going to pay to refer you over is going to mean so much more to us than you being a happy customer. Then, they turn around and start blaming the security analyst that, you guys hacked it, cause why else would my site get hacked?
Joshua Hammer: To build off of what Victor said though, it doesn’t matter the size of your site. The fact of the matter is that it’s a CPU that they’re attacking, right? They can use that to… big one right now was BitCoin mining, they can use your server’s resources to BitCoin mine. It has nothing to do with your site, it has the fact that your site is hosted on something. So, there’s an end result of profit out there and your site just happens to be profitable. So, got to protect that.
Valentin Vesa: So the website is kind of a collateral damage?
Joshua Hammer: Exactly. Casualty of war unfortunately.
Valentin Vesa: Yeah. I think the questions coming in from agencies are really interesting cause they’re kind of tying to how to get them to scenarios. So, the one we got here now says, How do I not scare clients away when asking to add costs while they expected that I have the security part covered already? I think that’s a big issue.
Joshua Hammer: Who wants to grab it?
Valentin Vesa: To jump at it, yeah.
Joshua Hammer: Go for it Steve.
Steve Renteria: Yeah. I mean, the idea of adding an extra cost to and then requesting that that cost be raised, it’s always that jump in the chest real quick like, Oh gosh, are the going to say yes? Are they going to say no? Are they going to leave me? The fact of the matter is that any of those are true. But, it’s the way that you position it. Similar to answering the first question, where we talked about How do we talk people into it. Really it’s a matter of talking about the benefits and the things that protect their site, you move the fear away from the costs of it, over to what could happen if they don’t apply this cost. That’s really the key portion of it. That’s really the hurdle that needs to be crossed or jumped over when it comes to talking to your clients about this kind of stuff because they’re unaware.
Steve Renteria: When you’re unaware of something, you know, fear sets in and really that’s the emotion that is governing whether or not they’re going to say yes. So, what we’re going to do is do our best to get rid of that fear by giving them all our knowledge that we have and that’s part of this enablement team, to be able to enable you guys to be able to get rid of that fear, to be able to explain these features and what we do, and why security is so important and why we’re the best choice for that.
Victor Santoyo: Yeah and I would add on like in a lot of cases, you the development provider, as an agency, you’re going something to an extent right to maintain visibility or update to prevent issues, right? I think being honest with your based listen, we’re doing a lot that we can on our own, we always have. It’s something we’ve been transparent with you about. But similarly, we’re going to be very honest with you about the fact that we need more and there’s always so much time we could dedicate to security even though we’re proficient at it. So, we’re going to need to ask you guys to put in a little more to prevent issues cause you’re reading about all data security features, tie in something recent that they can understand, and tell them, look we’re going to work with this specific security provider because they give us the best route forward to ensure that not only our stuff is safe, but yours. And so, to do that though, we have to make some adjustments and costs. Keep it honest and very transparent so that they feel like what you’re doing ultimately is in their best interest, not so much in disguise the fact that you weren’t doing anything. Oh no, we were, just we need more and we can’t do more. That’s why we’re reaching out to the vendor.
Steve Renteria: Obviously security is an ever changing topic. You know, so things change all the time. The online presence changes, the internet changes constantly, what’s required of websites, what these hackers and bots are doing it’s always changing. Having a company that’s on top of those changes like Sucuri is, is extremely important.
Joshua Hammer: Sometimes it’s even okay to say, you know what, we’re all experts at something, right? I can pretty much guarantee you Steve, Victor and I could probably build a website. We’re probably not as good as you are at it. I mean, if that’s something you’re focusing on, you know that really well. As Steve said, security changes daily. Zero days are out there every day and if you’re studying to build websites, you’re not studying to know all the ins and outs of the security field out there. Just like your end user who may, who knows, sell nails. They could know everything about nails but when it comes to a website, they’re just hearing headlights going, oh that’s technology I ain’t touching that. It’s kind of the same thing. They’re paying you money per hour to do something for them. If you tell them, look you’re paying us, and we’re doing a good job at doing it, but it’s time to get experts on there, and if you want to pay me to become an expert that’s going to cost you a heck of a lot more than paying somebody who’s already an expert.
Valentin Vesa: Things are heating up. Just to remind those who joined us later, we will be having this webinar as a video recording available maybe within a few days after today, so no worries if you missed anything. You can always go back and replay. Moving on with the questions. Here’s another interesting one. Are there specific features of this service that resonate with the website owner I can highlight? In other words, how can I add on service better for a possible customer?
Joshua Hammer: I like this CD and I think that’s a great go-to for an end user is… guys, it will speed up your website, it will help you with different areas of the world viewing your sites, lower the DDOS risk. Everybody likes the word DDOS and they just like hearing it so, it will lower that risk. That’s some of my favorite go-tos.
Victor Santoyo: I think it also has to do more with what technologies are you using for your sites cause we have a lot of different benefits that can cover a lot of different aspects. So, for example most CMS platforms have some type of plug in extension theme or module that you’re reporting onto. We do a lot of virtual patching to get ahead where there are potential zero days, recurring theme here. When the zero days come out, in a lot of cases our default rules already pick up on that. Right? So it doesn’t require you to update, which basically eliminates windows of opportunities for attackers to swing by. It gives you also time to properly push those patches through in the event that you have a thorough staging production workflow that you accounted for before you make changes. Virtual vouching for me is probably the biggest thing because it just takes a lot off your plate. In addition, it eliminates that urgency and panic whenever people talk about a really high critical patch, right? So, that for me is one of the bigger features that will help not just the agency but the customers themselves.
Valentin Vesa: Awesome. Very short questions here. How do I schedule a training session? So I guess somebody is already obviously convinced that they need it.
Steve Renteria: I think the easiest way would be just to Email one of the three of us. We can get that scheduled. We’ll set it up on a calendar. That way we’ll get everyone involved in your company and then one or all of us will be on that same call and go over marketing ideas, sales strategies, things like that to try to help move the business forward and get secrusal.
Joshua Hammer: Yeah. Just shoot us an Email, we’d love to have a high level call with you and then we can drill down exactly what you want us to do and set up a time to do it.
Valentin Vesa: Awesome. Michelle is asking here, I would like to sell them on the protection rather than response but seems like a hard sale, any tips?
Steve Renteria: Well, I think our agency plan falls perfectly into that. If your clients are more concerned with protection, this is even better if nothing is wrong with the site currently. Our agency plan licenses in general start off with protection and monitoring, incident response is handled on an as needed basis, so this isn’t even… that’s just an extra bullet in the gun there for you to get that one closed.
Joshua Hammer: Keep in mind guys that, you know it’s a lot easier to prevent an issue than to fix an issue. Once a damage has been done on a Google ranking, for those of you who do a lot of the SCO, you know that it’s hard to get it back up there.
Joshua Hammer: So, to point out that you’ve paid a lot of money to get your ranking up there, you want to keep it up there. Cause if it falls, there’s no easy fix. Getting somebody to go in there and fix the malware, does not immediately fix the ranking. That takes time again and all the money you put into it, you’re going to have to do it again. So, it’s better to be proactive than reactive.
Valentin Vesa: Awesome. We have another question here from David. Let me just read it. It’s a bit long-ish. How best do you explain the value difference between Word Fence paid version, Sucuri server, I Think Security and others? Cost seems to be a major obstacle in selling Sucuri to other free plug-ins typical client response is, We already used Word Fence and haven’t been hacked, why should we pay so much more for Sucuri? Anybody want a shot at it?
Victor Santoyo: Yeah. I think in those types of cases, right, you’re talking about ithemes and Word Fence, you’re installing something in your environment to address the issue locally. Now, you might have to do that across a ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred and sixty you’re managing. What is that going to do eventually? Well, depending on how you deploy your server and how you get server resources allocated. Be very transparent with your customer, like, Hey look itheme and Word Fence are valuable pieces but if you face a large volume base attack, we got group force, we got DDOS in some cases group force can come in large ways. So, if the server is not built to run efficiently enough to have Word Fence spin up, as an example, and cannibalize your resources, that may impact performance of the site.
Victor Santoyo: In a lot of cases, the reason that we can be really effective is cause we’re cloud based by design and we can offset that load to you server and all that. We observe the front of it and your server never sees it. That’s just one immediate benefit off the bat, where it’s like, we’re not only trying to protect your site, we’re also trying to optimize your site and optimize your server your site is on. Every security vendor is going to have their features. One offers remediation services, one doesn’t. So, I think not every security vendor is apples to apples. I would encourage listing out benefits and having comparison take on our site for those two as well. We get to sort of get better and understanding well, Word Fence is effective but there are other benefits and other things you’re missing out as well. That’s something I think of that.
Valentin Vesa: Awesome. Anybody else want to?
Joshua Hammer: Well you know, I love plug-ins. I do. But, anybody who knows that the more plugins you have on the site, the harder that site has to work to run, which is why you really want to be careful about what plug-ins that your installing on your site because we don’t sit on the site. We sit before the site like Victor said. That’s not really an issue on our end. We’re not going to affect the server load in a negative way, but because we’re the CDN as well, we’re actually going to reduce the server load which means that your server which is designed to display your site, can use all of its resources for what it’s designed to display your site. Let somebody who’s not on that server to display your site. You’re right, you haven’t been hacked and we’ll cross our fingers that you’re never hacked. But, just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it won’t happen, unfortunately.
Valentin Vesa: Yeah, moving on here. Unless, Steve you want to add anything?
Steve Renteria: No, I was just thinking you know, if anything for that, from a sales point of view really the best way to answer that question is to just you know, address the fact that yeah, the benefits of what you’re using are free or they cost a lot less than what we’re providing here, but the reason why this costs more is X, Y and Z. Josh and Victor did a great job of kind of explaining X, Y and Z there. So, it really is the matter of explaining things to people in a way where you’re not knocking what they’re saying because obviously it is a benefit. Money is something that’s always on people’s minds so being able to address that but also explaining the benefits of Y and all that, I just use that the best way to sell anything is to explain the benefits over and over again or keep explaining benefits until the cost doesn’t matter or it makes sense. So, just something to keep in mind when you’re talking to your clients.
Valentin Vesa: Awesome. Aminet, Hopefully I pronounced the name correctly, is asking a question here. Let me read it. How can we enable our customer to manage your own CDN web? for those unaware, web application firewall.- As a partner I’ve been asked about this, and there’s no way to do so apart from the worker’s plug-in.
Joshua Hammer: Well, I wouldn’t say there’s no way to do it. What I’m going to point out is that earlier I told you, this is part one of a four part web series. The next part is probably going to be interesting to you because that’s all about our API. There is a lot of things that you can do via the API including creating buttons on your dashboard that would allow them to manage content on their waif. There’s a lot of things behind the scenes that you can do via de API, such as changing or clearing the catch offhand, clearing the catch is such an easy one. In fact, every single site in any of our dashboards has it’s own private API link that you can hand out. They never need to log into their dashboard, or you never need to log in. They just need to follow that link and it clears the catch for that individual site. That’s just one example of something you can do with the API, so you could create buttons on your cPanel if you wanted that to immediately link into our back end for each individual site. We’ll have more for that on our next webinar.
Victor Santoyo: I think another thing about that, is just, I think the API tools are really useful in a lot of cases, not just for your customer, but the team. You might have a lot of remote working teams that may not have direct access to the web portal that we offer, so having something that can communicate externally through API and even IP allowlisting and modifying counter blocking and that kind of stuff, those are the things that I’ve worked with a lot of developers that have had a lot of attraction. We’ll dive into that further in the next part of the series. But, there are ways. There’s not to say there’s no way beyond the plug-in itself.
Valentin Vesa: Awesome. Next question here from Tom, I’d like to add your product to our dashboard, any help you can give?
Joshua Hammer: If by dashboard you mean the cPanel or Plesk or, what’s the other one I get the acronym wrong, WCM master…
Victor Santoyo: WHMCS.
Joshua Hammer: Thank you! Yes, that’s the one. It’s an acronym, I don’t know this stuff. We are working on a plex support plug in. That should be available soon. In fact we have another follow up call with them next week. The WHMCS is hopefully in the works, it hasn’t been on the calendar yet so that’s a little ways off but I’m going to point to the API again. That is something that with a little bit of development time you can pretty much do anything that you want to do with our API.
Victor Santoyo: We have document version to help with the APIs we have available. So, if you need them, want to see them, our Emails are out, we can produce those.
Valentin Vesa: That was one of the questions, where they can find more details about the agency plans or what exactly they include and stuff like that.
Victor Santoyo: Our website has a little spot that talks a little bit about that. But, honestly the best way to learn more about the agency plan is just to get an appointment scheduled with one of our account executives. We can go over everything.
Joshua Hammer: Just come on in to chat and ask for one of the consultants and we’ll jump right on that with you.
Valentin Vesa: Perfect. Well if nobody has anything else to add, we do have a lot of extra questions but our time is up today. It’s really interesting to see so many agencies coming on and asking questions, the dialog has been really productive.
Valentin Vesa: Thank you so much Joshua, Victor and Steve for joining us today, taking time out of your busy schedules. I’m sure the same for our audience, thank you so much for being with us. Again, I’ve seen some questions and yes we are recording this session as every other session we do for webinars, and you will be able to see it on our website. If you are a registrant you’re always going to get an Email afterwards with the recording, with the slides. Of course, mind what Josh first said. We will be having three more episodes for this series. It’s a four episode series. We’ll be welcoming you back. Thank you from my side. Josh if you want to end with a greeting for everybody.
Joshua Hammer: Yeah. Absolutely. We appreciate you guys coming out, turning on to our webinar here. Reach out to us, our Emails are on the slide here and they’ll be posted the next couple of days. If you had a question that wasn’t answered, we’ll definitely get that answer through on the site for you and we hope to see you next time.
Joshua Hammer: The next part of the webinar series is about how to leverage our API and some more information on the API. So, hope to see you all there and I appreciate your time. Hope you guys have a fantastic day!
Victor Santoyo: See you guys.
