Claims a client's engineer can verify

Nearly half our new detection contract value arrives through resellers and managed service providers, so a partner's sales conversation is effectively our marketing. I run a certification that ties co-marketing funds, lead sharing and discount bands to three things: trained presales staff, approved wording and honest deal registration. Partners receive a claims library that states each service promise with its conditions, and campaign material must come from it. When a partner's own advertising overstated our response times in 2023, we suspended its fund for a quarter rather than ignore it. I also ask partners what their customers misunderstood last month. Those answers have changed our service descriptions more often than any market research. The tension is real: partners want freedom to sell, and I want them to sell something we will deliver.

Large endpoint-security vendors now sell their own detection services, often at lower prices and through the same resellers. Competing on their terms would mean a price war we cannot win. I position Scudalpe around what a regional provider can evidence: analysts who speak Italian and German, on-site incident response across northern Italy and Ticino within an agreed four-hour window, experience with factory networks, and monitoring of the tools clients already own rather than a single vendor's stack. That positioning only works if the commitments are measured, so we publish response performance each quarter. It also requires saying where we are not the right choice. Firms with simple estates and one vendor's tools are often well served by that vendor, and saying so has made the rest of our message more credible.

Every competitor in our market now describes its detection as intelligent or autonomous. Our clients' engineers are the most sceptical readers we have, and they forward our claims to colleagues who will test them. I therefore insist that any statement about machine learning in our service names what the model does, what share of work it handles and who reviews the result. In 2025 our triage model closed 63 per cent of low-severity alerts under analyst-approved rules; every medium and high-severity alert still reached a person. We publish those figures with their definitions. I work with the head of the operations centre on the wording, and with our lawyer where a claim touches contract terms. The discipline costs us some memorable headlines. It has also kept us out of arguments about what a client was entitled to expect.

In security, naming a client tells an attacker something about its defences, and describing an incident can breach confidentiality or embarrass the people who handled it well. I treat references as a permission rather than an asset. Each logo, quotation or case story requires written consent stating where it may appear, and consent is renewed every two years. We never describe a client's tools or an incident without approval from its security lead and its legal counsel. For prospects who need assurance, we arrange confidential conversations between security leads, under a non-disclosure agreement, instead of public endorsements. That approach produces fewer showcase stories and slower tender responses. It also means that clients agree to speak for us because they choose to, which prospects can usually tell.

A security budget is often approved once a year by a finance director who did not choose the provider. When we change a price or a service boundary, I want that person to understand the reason before the invoice arrives. In 2024 we raised incident-response retainer prices by 8 per cent. We gave 120 days' notice, itemised the cost of extending overnight analyst coverage in Verona, and offered a smaller retainer for clients who preferred to hold their spending. Retention across those contracts was 94 per cent. I also publish what each service excludes, such as forensic work for litigation or the restoration of systems, because surprises about scope damage trust more than a clearly stated increase. Marketing owns the explanation; finance and sales own the commercial terms.