But are you ready to turn this growing demand into lasting revenue for your business?

Ransomware cost companies 325 million dollars in damages worldwide in 2015, while the last five years have seen a steady increase in attacks targeting small-medium businesses (SMBs) who bore the brunt of 43 percent of all attacks in 2015.

SMBs may be more likely to suffer a cyber-attack because their IT team may be at best stretched too thin – and at worst non-existent. This is why many are looking to their managed service providers (MSPs) for specialist help.

Have you already had that first sales conversation with your customers about BDR?Have you begun the BDR education process? Have you been able to make the time for the investigative conversations needed to position you as a trusted BDR adviser?

If not, the following 20 questions could help you to get the BDR ball rolling.

Building awareness

1. Do your customers fully understand the concept of BDR?
2. Are they aware of the main ransomware threats and how these are distributed?
3. Have you drawn their attention to the security breaches that are publicised in the press?
4. Do you warn them about the type of systems most vulnerable to cyber-attack?
5. Are they aware that they may be targeted as an entry point to systems further up their supply chain – those of enterprise-level companies and government entities in particular?

Once bitten…

1. Do you know if any of your customers have suffered a cyber-attack over the last year?
2. If they have, do you know what kind of cyber-attack it was?
3. What was the impact on their business in terms of cost, downtime and reputational damage?
4. Were you involved in helping to resolve the situation?

…but possibly still at risk?

1. Do you know if your customers have dedicated IT security specialists in-house?
2. Do they provide regular employee security training?
3. Are you familiar with the measures they have in place to recover data and restore service in the event of a cyber-attack?
4. Do they have a written business continuity plan that is tested regularly?
5. Are you familiar with the security systems they are using?

Building your role as trusted adviser

1. Have you identified any security mistakes your customers are making and how these could be resolved?
2. Have you moved the BDR conversation to a more detailed level with each of your customers?
3. For example, do you know their recovery time objective (RTO) – i.e., how much downtime they can tolerate? Have they established this?
4. Or their recovery point objective (RPO) – i.e., which data needs to be recovered and from when. Do they know this?
5. Have you worked through the cost of downtime with them?
6. Have you included in the total figure the cost of potential reputational damage resulting from a cyber-attack or security breach?

Making time to focus on BDR

If you are already having these conversations with your customers, then you should be well-placed to move the sales discussion forward and turn this growing BDR opportunity into lasting revenue for your business.

If you never seem to have the time to focus on high-value areas like BDR, you may want to think about partnering.

With the right partner, you can free up time to develop the customer relationships so essential to selling in new services and redeploy your technicians to higher-value areas of client concern like IT security, while ensuring that high standards are maintained for ‘bread and butter’ services such as Network Operations Centre (NOC) and Service Desk.

Because if your own resources are too occupied in the ‘here and now’ of routine maintenance and troubleshooting to focus on helping customers with their BDR strategies– you could be missing valuable opportunities for recurring revenue.

And with many SMBs planning to increase their cybersecurity budget in 2016, you want to be in a position to win some of that new business.

Download our ebook to find out why you should be turning this growing opportunity into lasting revenue for your business.