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This week, I look into cybersecurity sales, developer content marketing, and fundraising pitches through a common lens: The importance of understanding your audience and putting it first. — Anna
Bridging the gap between cybersecurity vendors and buyers
Budget cuts brought on by the economic downturn have caused a shift in the priorities and mindsets of chief information security officers (CISOs). As security practitioners start reporting to corporate boards, they need to understand how to do so and be more business-focused than technical-focused, says marketing expert Dani Woolf.
Woolf knows CISOs well; having spent her career in B2B tech marketing, she spent months interviewing cybersecurity buyers for her podcast before launching her own audience research agency, Audience 1st, to help vendors get better at understanding their target.
A key challenge at the moment is for cybersecurity vendors to adapt to the buyers’ new mindset — which Woolf thinks will remain even after the market recovers. “There’s this huge gap right now in that vendors are adding more complexity to the security buyer job, and they don’t understand that simplicity is the goal.”
Simplicity, however, doesn’t mean pitching one tool to replace them all. One of the main things that buyers want to hear from a vendor, Woolf told me, is how well are you integrating with their existing tech stack. “Because as a buyer, I can’t rip out what I have right now.”
Understanding CISOs
While the disconnect between cybersecurity vendors and buyers has been made more salient by budget concerns, the gap isn’t new. And since CISOs are under pressure by nature, they have little patience for bad pitches. Woolf learned this firsthand when she was still an in-house marketer:
I quickly realized that the way things are done in other verticals, from a marketing and sales perspective, doesn’t necessarily fly with cybersecurity buyers. I learned the hard way [by] upsetting particular CISOs with specific tactics that I thought would work, because they worked in the past. It was a rude awakening, let’s just say that. And I think that was a blessing in disguise, if you will.
This “wake-up call” is what eventually led Woolf to launch Audience 1st. Its stated goal is to help “go-to-market teams in both growth-stage and established cybersecurity companies quickly and cost-effectively get access to true buyer insights, cut the guesswork, gain and retain loyal customers.” In practice, this includes a range of services like 1:1 customer interviews, CISO validation panels and a training academy.
Talking to infosec folks is a great way to learn what they like — and what they hate. Woolf hears her fair share of the latter in the podcast she co-hosts, “WTF Did I Just Read? Tech Sales & Marketing Edition.” One of the bad practices she and her co-host exposed is “ambulance chasing.”
If you’re a cybersecurity vendor, it might be tempting to use the latest security breach as a hook to sell your product. But it won’t land well with a target audience that’s already under a lot of stress, Woolf said. “If you can’t refrain from using headlines as leverage for getting a meeting, you’re not going to survive for very long as a rep or marketer, because that tactic will not fly.”
While marketers who start selling cybersecurity services may not know all of this from the get-go, they shouldn’t be afraid to experiment and ask for feedback, Woolf said.
“The surprising thing about my job [and] that I noticed in my previous roles as a revenue marketer was that there are so many people who want to help and provide good feedback.” This is perhaps even more true in the cybersecurity community; while it can seem intimidating, Woolf insisted it’s also very tight-knit. “I love the fact that there’s this camaraderie to the industry.”
“It is your birthday.”
Just like CISOs, software developers can look like an intimidating target for marketers. Woolf and I touched on content marketing as a great way to generate demand, but it’s not easy to get right when it comes to this type of audience.
“Most of the technical content published misses the mark with developers,” author and developer marketing expert Adam DuVander told me in 2021 when I interviewed him about his book “Developer Marketing Does Not Exist.”
Why generic marketing approaches don’t work on software developers
DuVander has a new book out, “Technical Content Strategy Decoded,” which is meant to be a more actionable follow-on. I haven’t read it yet, but he gave an interview about it to the Scaling DevTools podcast, and an example he gave resonated with me.
One of the common mistakes companies make, DuVander said, is to write blog posts that are centered around their announcements, rather than what a developer might care about. A bit like this episode of “The Office” (U.S.) in which the protagonists can’t come up with a better birthday party banner than one that reads “It is your birthday.” Keep that in mind next time you come up with a headline — or any type of content, really.
You, not me
The mantra of keeping your audience in mind also applies to startup fundraising. For instance, VCs don’t want to hear founders say they are raising money to increase their runway.
“In a sense, that is accurate, but only from the startup’s point of view. However, that’s not what an investor is looking for,” Haje Kamps wrote for TechCrunch+.
In this case, this isn’t only about wording, but more generally is also about framing your ask and rethinking your timeline. “Founders should communicate to investors what a round of funding unlocks.” And, Haje noted, “that’s expressed in milestones, not in time.”
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