The Problem Isn’t What You Sell, According to ThreatCaptain. It’s What You Say.

The young security vendor helps MSPs who struggle at selling take a dollars-and-cents approach to quantifying risk.

Let’s put a great big generalization out there. Most MSPs are very good at service delivery, pretty good at security service delivery, OK at sales, and terrible at security sales.

Easy enough to see for yourself if you don’t believe that last part. Just ask the next 10 MSPs you speak with how many have never had a client refuse to buy even their minimum viable security service package. If you find one, I’d love to meet them.

According to ThreatCaptain, a security startup founded a little under three years ago, the issue isn’t that MSPs don’t know how to sell so much as that they don’t know what to say in a sales meeting that will actually break through with business owners.

“Typically what ends up happening is an MSP will explain what needs to be done, what the dangers are, and what the risks are, and then the client says, ‘So what?’” explains ThreatCaptain co-founder Adam Anderson (pictured).

Not because they don’t believe phishing and ransomware and autonomous agents skilled at breaking and entering exist, but because such things exist only as abstractions to cash-conscious decision makers.

ThreatCaptain’s software aims to make that abstraction concrete. Drawing on data breach cost statistics from sources like Verizon’s annual DBIR, frameworks like CIS and MITRE ATT&CK, and thousands of Monte Carlo simulations, the system (which was originally designed to help insurers model cyber risk) calculates how much financial damage a client would suffer after a successful attack. That, in turn, positions MSPs to have what Anderson calls a “normal, real” discussion with customers in plain, non-technical language about how much exposure they can stomach and what it would cost to stomach less.

“They have the leadership of their clients saying, ‘Well, I understand this is a $50,000 a month risk I’m carrying. I think I could probably deploy $15,000 a month to lower that. What can you do to help me?’” Anderson says. “Completely different conversation.”

That functionality, called First Mate and originally the whole of what ThreatCaptain offered, is now one of three modules in an expanded version of the solution. The second, named Anchor, helps MSPs find and research sales prospects. The third, called Admiral, is a “risk registry” system that draws on real-time threat intelligence to identify sales opportunities among existing customers. Say a report crosses the wires indicating that ransomware attacks on dentists are up 20% this year.

“Well, then we automatically have the ThreatCaptain risk registry look at the MSP’s customer base and identify all the dentists,” Anderson says.

Collectively, all three components form a platform offering “an all-in-one sales methodology backed up by software that guides MSPs, their salespeople, their sales engineers, and the consultants through that entire customer journey,” Anderson says.

First Mate and Anchor both enter general availability on August 3^rd. The former sells at $199 for 50 enriched leads a month, with more available at extra cost. The latter costs $599 a month. Admiral, due out in September, covers 10 clients for $399 a month, and users can add more clients on a pay as you go basis. Those are all easy sums to justify in Anderson’s view.

“The net impact of a platform that guides the conversation away from tech jargon and back to business outcomes and that is focused on salespeople and customer success people is that your MSP is going to sell more cybersecurity quicker,” he says. More revenue for you. Less risk for your clients.