What I learned from SecTOR

BlueCat attended the annual event SecTOR for the first time in early October. This was also my first time attending an event in this dynamic industry.

Who am I? Glad you asked! My name is Mythri and I help with prospecting new accounts and logos for BlueCat.

So, how does a Sales Development Representative feel? Exhilarated!

Pre-event vs. During the event

On the morning of the event, I was a bit nervous. Over the next two days, I was going to have in-person conversations with numerous prospective customers! Usually, when I make calls from my desk, I have a person’s title and company name appear on my screen. The ability to research before making the call enables me to steer the conversation in the desired direction. Whereas, at an event, I would have no such privileges. But this was only an initial hiccup and I soon realized the advantages of an in-person conversation far outweigh the disadvantages.

While prospecting does demand interpersonal skills, It is easy to forget that there is a living, breathing person behind that name who has so information to offer. The prospect is little more than a voice and phone number before the rapport is established. This can have a powerful influence on the way the conversation is carried out. On the contrary, at SecTOR I got a chance to interact with real people (who are much more than mere prospects) at a “human level” and witness the verbal and non-verbal reaction to my questions and demos. This made having conversations easy and natural.

Hot topics on the floor

The BlueCat team comprised of people from four departments. This enabled multidimensional conversations, rather than it being technology focused, sales focused, product-focused or marketing focused. I was surprised to see that few conversations focused on security as a means to conforming with compliance standards. Compliance is a necessary factor in any cybersecurity strategy. At the same time, I noticed that most of the people I met built their cybersecurity stack based on their internal goals and use cases instead of goals set by outside compliance organizations.

I noticed that a lot of the folks who stopped by our booth were drawn to BlueCat by the concept of “DNS Security”. It was encouraging to see security professionals take note of DNS infrastructure as a necessary layer in the security stack rather than just a back-end piece of infrastructure that sustains their organization. A high ranking security professional of an automobile company told me that “the level of granular visibility DNS Edge would provide me and my team is incredible”.

Some other topics that drove exciting conversations were about the unique capabilities of DNS Edge against other solutions in the market, particularly the location where it sits on the network. Quite a few people were intrigued by the fact that it is a service point that runs on an existing DNS infrastructure, not a device-based agent.

Shall we play a game?

While other booths offered raffle draws, wheels-of-fortune, and popcorn as a means to attract visitors to their booth. We focused on conducting a contest that was engaging and true to our solution offering. The visitors were intrigued by the 3-D glasses and people shouting out random threats at the screen. This not only attracted more people to the booth but also encouraged the contest players to stay back and enquire about BlueCat and our Solutions.

SecTOR was an event packed with opportunities. Through the whirlwind of contests, demos and meaningful conversations, I had great interactions with people who manage DNS systems on a daily basis. I now think of DNS as a security solution backed by human beings as opposed to just a network solution that transmits packets between computers. I met the people who help the system do what it is capable of. After all, DNS is DNS is DNS! The people who manage the system is what makes having the conversation worth it.