Joseph Hoban, the company’s first head of sales, lays out his plan to make Sentra a winner in a hot market segment.

Data Security Posture Management [DSPM] startup Sentra is gearing up its sales machinery. The have announced the appointment of Joseph Hoban as their first VP of sales, and have also just hired someone specifically to lead their channel. The goal is to drive sales in a hot market space with no dominant player and to become that dominant player in the market.

Joseph Hoban, the new VP of Sales, was most recently at Axonius, and earlier held senior sales positions at Centrify, FireEye and Mandiant. While VP of Sales is a key sales role, Hoban is actually the first executive to fill the position at Sentra, as the Israeli company builds out their Go-to-Market presence in North America.

“That’s how I prefer it,” he said. “It’s much easier to do things organically instead of trying to fix what someone else created.”

The area that Sentra plays in is termed Data Security Posture Management.

“I think cloud data security is more accurate, but they key thing is that no one has claimed leadership,” Hoban said. “The market is wide open.” It was to take advantage of that that Sentra put their Go-to-Market team in the U.S. and established offices in New York City.

“There is no leader in this space – but that leader will be us,” Hoban stressed. “That’s my objective.

He emphasized that their focus on data rather than infrastructure is critical given how the market is evolving.

“Data security is a unique discipline that requires a unique solution,” he said. “The data is generally the target, and you have to have visibility so you can implement controls. The problem for the infrastructure security companies is that data moves all over the place. It has legs.”

Sentra views the infrastructure players as complementary rather than as competitors.

“Infrastructure security companies are very good at what they do,” he said. “For us, it’s a good qualifier if someone like Wiz is already deployed there. It means that the organization is serious about its security posture.”

While Sentra’s solution is enterprise grade, Hoban said that their Total Addressable Market is broader than that.

“Any enterprise whether private, or SLED – anyone who has sensitive data in the cloud – we can have a very good conversation with them,” Hoban said. “We fit in the enterprise, the midmarket, technically even the SMB, although we don’t want to go too far down market. You make it easier to avoid the trap of trying to do too much by starting in the enterprise. It’s easier to roll downhill.”

While Sentra sold mainly direct in its initial proof-of-concept stage, Hoban said that the channel will be central going forward.

“My experience with the channel when I was running sales at Axonis will be the same here,” Hoban said. “Invest heavily in channels and avoid direct at all costs. I just hired someone to build the channel and build out our channel team. We achieved remarkable things with the channel at Axonis. I expect 30% of our ARR coming out of partners right out of the gate.”

Hoban also said that they are not interested in recruiting a lot of partners, or signing up a bunch in the hope that some will become top performers.

“I’m not interested in going out to recruit partners,” he said. “We will do it organically. We ask customers who their preferred security VAR is, and we engage with the VAR at that point.

“Every good partnership starts with a relationship between sales people,” Hoban added. “I’ve tried the other way, recruiting partners based on the business they might have with us in the future. The problem is that attractive partners like Guidepoint and Optiv already have a lot of vendors. Just adding another without a piece of business attached to it makes no sense for them. That relationship-based strategy is what I did at Axonis, and it worked very well.”

Hoban’s goal is to develop tight relationships with a relatively small number of partners,

“If a year from now, we have 5-10 really great partners, one of whom has national coverage, and a predictable run rate of business, I will be satisfied,” he said. “Traction with that many partners to me is a victory.”