Symantec unveils SymBrain Toolkit 17 October, 2008 By Vanessa Ho

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In recent years, Symantec has broadened its portfolio significantly and now offers a wide range of solutions that help customers secure and manage their information, which means increased opportunities for Symantec partners to broaden their footprint and become even more strategic to their customers.

"You are really asking partners to know an awful lot in addition to all the other things that they have to know for the other vendors and manufacturers they represent," said Randy Cochran, Symantec's vice-president of channel sales for the Americas.

He further explained that SymBrain was created to better enable their sales and partner teams to understand Symantec solutions and identify the best offerings for their customers based on their IT projects and initiatives. 325 partners beta tested SymBrain.

"When a partner is sitting across the table from a customer and having a discussion on what IT projects they are working on & those projects can be keyed into SymBrain which then translates to various solutions. We are giving [partners] this tool to help give [them] the verbiage; the questions to ask, what the answers should look like and some white papers to support why customer needs to look at [these solutions] now," said Cochran.

He added that SymBrain helps partners be more effective in order to drive sales to be bigger and better.

As well, SymBrain is a comprehensive resource that educates partners on how to cross-sell products and sell solutions to broaden their opportunities and expand their business. For example, VARs who have been focused on endpoint security can start to address broader issues around information risk management with solutions such as data loss prevention. Another example is partners who tend to focus on storage solutions such as backup and storage management can start to take advantage of e-mail and file system archiving as a natural adjunct to their existing business.

Other features of SymBrain include an interactive Solution Mapping Tool that can help partners not only identify cross-sell opportunities but also expand the potential of every deal and obtain additional sales tools and training materials to go deeper on customer issues, competitive analysis and sales strategies.

Sheri Atwood, vice-president of global solutions and programs with Symantec, added that SymBrain features the same solutions and products that are in Symantec's latest taxonomy that lists all of Symantec's solutions and products available to customers.

She detailed that SymBrain gives partners key words to listen for their customers IT projects.

"Most solution sales are sold to people that don't know there was a solution to solve that problem," Atwood said.

Partners can go into SymBrain and look up a particular IT project, which is then linked to a particular Symantec solution. For example, if a customer wants to protect customer information, SymBrain would recommend Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP). SymBrain would also list the industry standard definition of DLP, lists challenges to DLP and a particular conversation point is blue and underlined, it links to an article about that challenge.

SymBrain then lists key facts about DLP. It then lists questions to ask and why ask them. SymBrain also lists the benefits and lists them according to who you are talking like a CSO or chief privacy officer. Partners will also find with SymBrain a list of resources such as whitepapers.

When partners want to learn more about a Symantec solution, SymBrain lists all customer IT projects associated. The tool also lists Symantec differentiators and success stories with a link to case studies on how other are using the Symantec solution. There are also links to online sales training modules about the project and links to the product page.

SymBrain also lists competitors and also provide links to the competitor's project page. "[We will give partners a battle card, which is a Symantec document that gives a side-by-side comparison of Symantec and competitor product," said Atwood.

Finally, SymBrain then lists what customers should do next in order to get the customer to purchase the product.

"The notion is you can push a button and it all goes into a power point [or a word document] that partners can take back [to customers] for the second and subsequent conversations to have a more meaningful discussion," explained Cochran

Atwood also recommended that partners not say a product name for the first three sales calls. "If you talk about product too soon, you get pigeon holed. It is about value and you eventually will get to products."

Atwood added that Symantec will always be adding new IT projects to SymBrain and if there isn't an IT project in SymBrain, partners are encouraged to use the feedback button on the tool to request a project.

The benefits of SymBrain said Atwood is that it allows partners to gain new opportunities that they weren't able to identify before and in current accounts, it allows partners to sell more products.

SymBrain is available now in English only at no cost to partners. Training for SymBrain involves a 90-minute WebEx training session.

In addition, Cochran added that a promotion around SymBrain, called Just Say Know to the SymBrain Challenge, will run from November 1, 2008 to April, 2009. The promotion allows partners to earn extra money when using SymBrain. If the promotion is successful, he added that it might continue beyond April.

The opportunity registration promotion requires sales reps to take training in order to qualify for the rebate. The rebate increases if partners register two or more products from different product families.

Partners enter a promo code when registering an opportunity and are then rewarded back-end rebate that increases by two points if they close two or more products.

"With SymBrain we are asking a partner to sell multiple products and we are going to tie [the promotion] to deal registration," Cochran explained.

Greg Rokos, president of Montreal-based ESI Information Technologies Inc., said there are 23 to 24 leading Symantec products out in the marketplace but the number of Symantec products that customers are using is less than five. Using SymBrain, he hopes to increase that number to 8 to 10.

"SymBrain accelerates our sales team to be relevant a lot quicker with clients," said Rokos."And [the tool] is the right direction to increase our sales of solutions and professional services."

Tom Maloney, director of corporate software sales for CDW, added that SymBrain will be a great tool for his company.

"Getting 3000 sales people trained the same way [without SymBrain] is impossible," said Maloney.

Todd Wilson, director of Laurus Technologies, added that SymBrain helps his reps get ramped up on different Symantec product lines, which has been an issue in the past.