Game Plan for Growth: Selling CaaS by Solving Problems

You’re the solution to your client’s technological problems. When the server goes down, you fix it. When software needs maintenance, you oversee the updates. When data gets lost, you recover it.

Suffice to say, your clients already see you as a problem solver, but selling Compliance as a Service (CaaS) enables you to step into the role of vCISO, and in an even more impactful way. Because CaaS is where you can solve problems that affect your client’s ability to grow.

Having a hard time framing that conversation? Let’s look at three common pain points, and how you can use a consultative sales approach to sell CaaS and become the problem solver of your client’s dreams. Want all the details? Download our Guide, “How to Win Big with CaaS and Become Your Clients’ MVP.”

Pain Point 1

Scaling

Compliance can be a huge hindrance to scaling a business. That’s especially true if that business is looking to venture into new locations. For example, if a business is moving into the European market, they need to be compliant with the California Consumer Privacy Act. If they’re entering Europe, they’ll need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Even undertaking new services can add weight to the compliance burden these days. Look at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Safeguards Rule, which now covers any organization engaged in “activities incidental to such financial activities.” Brokers, real estate services, investment advisers, and even retailers extending credit through their own credit card service are obliged to comply with this framework.

Even when location or service changes aren’t a factor, a bigger operation means more staff to train, more assets to manage, and a heavier compliance burden. Although it’s necessary to avoid fines, reputational damage and lawsuits, the time, money and resources it takes to comply with legal and regulatory frameworks often acts as a barrier to business growth.

How You Can Help

When you’ve got a client looking to scale, but unable or afraid to do so because of the potential compliance burden, you can take that load off. Compliance Scorecard allows for customization to meet the unique compliance needs of different clients, from small businesses to complex organizations.

It facilitates policy and procedure implementation for various frameworks, streamlines the assessments required to manage risk, and supports staff training through the authorization and adoption phase. The ability to duplicate and deploy these tasks with one click means that Compliance Scorecard reduces the manual workload for both MSPs and their clients — and it’s this efficiency gain that enables increased scalability as the number of compliance requirements grows.

Pain Point 2

Winning Contracts

We’re noticing an ever-increasing focus on supply chain risk management in the compliance world. For example:

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Cybersecurity Performance Goals (CPGs) lists Vendor/Supplier Cybersecurity Requirements as one of their 10 essential goals.
The Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 (CMMC 2.0), which is expected to start showing up in contracts as early as next year, emphasizes supply chain security, and alignment with the framework may be required by any company that handles controlled unclassified information (CUI) or does business with contractors who handle CUI.
The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) requires any holding companies and non-financial subsidiaries related to a federally supervised financial institution to follow the guidelines and institute the measures outlined in the framework.
The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) requires covered entities to report cyber incidents and ransomware payments to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within 72 hours of the incident.

There’s obviously a growing expectation that vendors and suppliers demonstrate a robust cybersecurity and data protection posture, sometimes equal to that of their partners, and often requiring audits and reports as proof. If they’re not compliant, this can hinder your clients from winning the contracts they’re after.

How You Can Help

As part of your CaaS service, you’d be offering some of the technical controls required for cybersecurity and data protection, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), antivirus, backups, and security awareness training.

When that’s not enough, you can use our scorecards and policy packs and take that service three steps further.

Begin by identifying relevant compliance frameworks and the specific regulations that apply to your client’s target market.
Use our Assessment Scorecard to scrutinize your client’s current compliance posture and identify the gaps.
Pull on our policy packs for CMMC, HIPAA, NIST and FTC, or the built-in support for more than 20 frameworks, to begin implementing the policy and procedures you need to align with these frameworks

Compliance Scorecard also facilitates the authorization and adoption of the improvement plans you’ve put in place, and you can pull on multiple scorecards to assess how well the program is doing before looking at certification or facing an audit.

Pain Point 3

Resources

Have a client that thinks they can manage their own compliance? It’s time to talk to them about what it takes to manage and maintain an effective program.

Compliance can be a full-time job. It requires regular assessments to ensure a program is up to snuff, regulatory reporting, secure data backups, training, and the administration of technical controls like encryption, multifactor authentication and antivirus.

Then, there are the costs: the cost of paying salaries of compliance staff, the cost of regulatory reporting, the cost of system upgrades, the cost of investing in data retention and security technologies, the cost of training staff, and the cost of audits and legal fees.

How You Can Help

Considering that nearly 80% of US small businesses have less than 20 employees at their disposal, chances are your clients have neither the time, money nor resources to do compliance on their own… at least, not correctly. But, in a growing number of industries, noncompliance simply isn’t an option. What’s a client to do?

CaaS is an outsourcing solution that simplifies compliance management by delegating the details to the specialists. By handing compliance over to you, your clients defer the administrative overhead of compliance, while at the same time mitigating risks that can significantly impact their revenue and reputation. They also free up their time to focus on their core competencies.

More Ways to Sell CaaS

Understanding compliance is only half the battle in becoming a CaaS vendor. The other half is learning how to sell it.

In today’s cybersecurity landscape, explaining the importance of mitigating risk shouldn’t be that difficult. But if that doesn’t quite do the trick, explaining how compliance can help them scale, win more contracts, and protect their revenue and reputation should more than convince them of the potential benefits of investing in a CaaS package.

To deliver on those promises, though, you need the right tools. Contact us or book a demo to learn how Compliance Scorecard supports your MSP in all your CaaS efforts. And if you want to know exactly how to use compliance to wow your clients, download our Guide, “How to Win Big with CaaS and Become Your Clients’ MVP.”