SalesTechStar Interview with Aaron Froberg, Senior Director of Value Acceleration at Egnyte

Aaron Froberg, Senior Director of Value Acceleration at Egnyte chats about a few B2B best practices in this quick Q&A:

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Hi Aaron, welcome to this SalesTechStar chat, tell us more about your journey through the years and the story behind Egnyte?

Egnyte is a cloud software platform that allows businesses to more easily work with their file data by closely resembling what they’ve used for years but with numerous advanced capabilities around remote access, collaboration, and sharing, as well as industry-leading security and governance. My journey was a bit unconventional in that I didn’t start in sales or value engineering but spent almost 20 years in technology in both technical and leadership roles. I led IT strategy at multiple organizations, where we selected Egnyte as the best solution to meet our many needs. After developing a close relationship with the Egnyte team, they asked me to join them to help build out their Business Value function. 

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What are some of the biggest challenges sales-marketing and other business teams face when meeting security needs and ensuring safety of their digital content?

One of the biggest challenges is granting their teams the ability to be flexible with how they access, edit, and collaborate on data while at the same time maintaining control and integrity of what is usually valuable and often proprietary information. With flexibility comes unintended consequences such as data sprawl, complexity, and more risk that something important may go unnoticed. Not having a solution that includes effective data classification, lifecycle reporting, and alerting results in either higher risk or a great deal of time and resources spent cleaning and protecting an ever-expanding data set. 

On this note, how should sales and marketing leaders step forward to enable businesses to protect their digital assets and content in today’s hybrid-remote first and multi-device world?

I suggest they start by establishing clear data owners and outline what it means to be an owner of their critical assets. They should also create rules for how they wish to classify their data and leverage a solution that can help them do this in line with common data classification labels around sensitivity, industry regulations, and company importance. If there is an opportunity to centralize data in a single repository, do that and use it as a single source of truth to be integrated into your other business applications where file storage is needed. The more you can simplify and consolidate on platforms purpose-built to help address these challenges, the easier it will be for your teams to get back to their day jobs.

In what ways can businesses today limit the instances of insider threats, what should they be paying more attention to and what fundamentals should they focus on?

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Perform regular access reviews to ensure that only those that need access are granted the permission. As I mentioned earlier, with so much data being produced by businesses these days, companies must identify what data is the most important to secure against threats. Once you’ve identified the most ciritcal data, configure robust activity logging and alerting to ensure that data owners understand what is being done with these important assets and by whom. Implement solutions that utilize behavioral analytics or highlight suspicious activity like impossible travel scenarios or unusual download activity to vastly improve your ability to detect and prevent insider threats to data.

A few thoughts on Egnyte’s key sales-marketing plans and initiatives and how partnerships with platforms like MediaFly have enabled this?

Egnyte has always been extremely customer-focused and the ability to better capture and articulate our customers’ and prospects’ high-value outcomes is a continuous target.

Before partnering with Mediafly, we were using spreadsheets to conduct value engagements. That limited our ability to form and communicate our value proposition to customers. Our data collection and version control were limited, and we had adoption challenges. We needed to replace static spreadsheets with a dynamic, interactive tool that could be personalized for each prospect and customer touchpoint. 

Mediafly’s Value360 tools have enabled us to quantify value to customers and help prospects differentiate us from our competition. We now approach our sales conversations with a value mindset and a lifecycle model at the heart of our approach, guiding prospects through the challenges of each sales stage. Every aspect of the buyer’s  journey is now connected, from product features to sales interactions, demos, proposals and prospect business outcomes. Implementing these tools and methodologies more than doubled our win rate from 30% to over 70%.

Some last thoughts and entrepreneurial / leadership takeaways before we wrap up?

Buyers have changed. Focus on finding out what matters most to the people you’re selling to. Discover their unique challenges and then help educate them on the value of solving them. The more tools you can leverage to capture and quantify these values while you listen and deliver, the better.

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