By Jake Dearstyne, Chief Revenue Officer – published on Forbes.com on 11/17/20
It seems like a no-brainer. Your company provides a platform or tool for clients to better manage their sensitive consumer data. That data may be emails, addresses, phone numbers, all three of these or even more attributes merged together. With data security and privacy on everyone’s mind these days, you know that what you offer can bring value and help your prospects achieve their stated goals, but the C-level decision-makers are hung up on letting your system access and process this data for them. Headlines have them scared about the data leaving their environment in any way due to fears of it being hacked or stolen.
At my company, this a challenge we see almost daily. Clients use our system to manage email and phone number suppression lists, so their marketing partners know who not to contact in any messaging sent on the client’s behalf. These datasets are now consistently viewed legally as “personally identifiable information” even when hashed and without any other identifying info attached. However, applying suppression is a legal requirement in any email or SMS-based marketing effort. So, how do we articulate the safety and security of using a service like ours so they can reap the rewards of utilizing these high-performing marketing channels?
1. At the outset, keep things high level.
Our marketing and development teams work together to create documentation speaking directly to the most common concerns we hear around data privacy: data hashing and encryption, infrastructure security, and testing for system vulnerabilities. The decision-makers don’t often want or need to get in the weeds with fine details. They just need that push over the initial mental and legal hurdles. We address this with oversimplified and highly customized data flow charts, visually communicating exactly how their data is entered, stored and accessed in our system. We provide a case study or endorsement from an enterprise-level client with a recognizable name that carries some cache and resonates with the prospect. And finally, we include a brand sheet, showing other notable clients with whom we’ve gone through a data security vetting process that has been extremely effective.