Jeff Zitomer Director Platform & Technology Strategy, Corporate Strategy Group, SAP and host, Shuchi Rana, Co-Director Women in Big Data Silicon Valley Chapter

On October 8, 2020, Women in Big Data hosted a workshop on Selling to the enterprise in the Age of GDPR with Jeff Zitomer, as a part of our Entrepreneur series. Jeff is the Cybersecurity, Privacy and compliance Lead in SAP corporate Strategy.

 Why cybersecurity is important?

Goal of session:

• Understand enterprises top security and privacy concerns when engaging startups
• Learn how enterprises evaluate 3^rd party securing risk (such as you)
• Identify next steps to talk and walk security.

Discussed:

• Massive breaches daily. Bots scan for vulnerability. Even startups.
• GDPR fines 4% annual global revenue or $20M per instance.
• Why trolling for data is big business? Data is valuable

Enterprise sales cycle could be derailed by not engaging security team at customer:

That “better way” was the subject of this workshop.

• Understand enterprises’ top security & privacy concerns when engaging startups
• Learn how enterprises evaluate 3rd party security risk
• Identify next steps to “talk and walk” security

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU law governing data protection and privacy for EU individuals. If you or your customers have past, current, or future users, suppliers, partners, or employees in the EU, then it most likely applies to you. It’s also important to note that GDPR is merely the first and most hyped of new, globally proliferating data security and privacy regulations (in China, California, India…).

5 Tips for startups when engaging in Privacy/Security conversations with large enterprises during the sales cycle:

1. Engage early and proactively
2. Know your stuff
3. Communicate
4. Manage your externally visible security posture
5. Demonstrate your flexibility and commitment

If your customers are excited about your products and you actively engage their security teams early on in the sales process, customers will work with you to make the deal happen. Bring up security aspects of your solution and ask customer to share with security team. Enterprise security teams are becoming “service enablers” instead of “blockers.”

Listen to the recording for more information on next steps in the security evaluation process and sales cycle.

Thank you, Jeff!