Cyber Go-To-Market Talk | Cybersecurity B2B Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

You've nailed the demo and the POV, and then procurement asks why they'd bet on you instead of CrowdStrike, Palo Alto or Zscaler. Robbie Tyrie has been the buyer on the other side of that question at some very large organisations, and he said yes to the startup more than once. He walks through the math he ran, what he wanted back from the vendor in return, and the trial structure he says a buyer can't argue with. Now a fractional CISO for 50 to 200 person companies, he also explains why buyers stopped turning up at trade shows and what he responds to instead.

In this episode

• The two answers a big vendor gives when you ask for a feature (neither of them are that helpful)
• Robbie's math on the risk of a startup vendor: what you actually stand to lose is a couple of months
• Why smaller vendors treated him "more on a human level", reacted faster in 99% of cases, and gave a better deal than tools costing hundreds of thousands of dollars
• What "work with them" means in practice: quarterly meetings, and knowing the CEO, head of development and head of customer ops instead of an account manager juggling several accounts
• How he de-risked the bet: an agreed baseline, get-out clauses, and an open source tool running in parallel
• The FNZ story: a startup pen test vendor covering 100+ wealth management clients, and the six extra tests that earned everyone kudos
• The managed free trial: two weeks, a month maximum, run as a mini case study
• Why buyers aren't at RSA or InfoSec any more, and the Chamber of Commerce talk that landed him a CEO client
• What JP Morgan did to Fortify's roadmap, and how Robbie would stop your biggest customer doing it to you

About the guest

Robbie Tyrie has spent 26 years in IT and cyber security across the Scottish Government, NHS Scotland, Tesco Bank, J.P. Morgan, Clydesdale Bank, Aegon and FNZ Group, where he ran the Cyber Fusion Centre and application security, before joining pen testing startup OSec as CTO. In 2026 he founded Torridon Cyber, where he works as a fractional CISO for fintech scale-ups getting ready for SOC 2, ISO and enterprise buyers.

Notable quotes

• "So is the risk really there? At the end of the day, what are you going to lose? A couple of months' time putting some effort in at your side, for what?"
• "If it's a big vendor and you're asking for a feature, they'll probably turn around and say one of two things. First thing is no, or yes, that'll cost $100,000 and we'll have it delivered in 6 months."
• "You're just a bit-part player, no matter how big you are."

Chapters

00:00 Why a buyer would bet on a startup over CrowdStrike

04:02 Robbie's early days helping startups with pen testing

07:15 The 50 to 200 person company: the CTO is still running security

08:22 Security as a business enabler, not a cost centre

11:56 Big name or startup? How Robbie decided as a buyer

13:24 What "work with the vendor" actually means

14:21 Mitigating the risk: baseline, get-out clauses, open source in parallel

15:32 The FNZ story: a startup pen test vendor across 100+ clients

18:00 Coaching a founder to win mid-market early adopters

19:55 What's changed about getting in front of buyers

24:57 The managed free trial

25:53 Going around security to the COO

27:55 The Chamber of Commerce and the "knitting club"

31:12 Field CISOs: do they work?

33:01 The AI governance wave, and building your own LLM

40:02 Cyber Donut hot seat: what JP Morgan did to Fortify

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

David Gee is the former CIO and CISO at storied companies such as HSBC and Eli Lilly. Rather than quietly disappear in his retirement, he's been writing books. And not just any books, two of his published books are "A Day in the Life of a CISO" and "How to Sell to the CIO and CISO". And not just tiny little ebooks! Each of them is 500 days of details. Specifics. Stories. Advice. Explanations. Basically everything you need to raise your game selling to senior security and IT leaders.

In this episode 

• Why the CISO's default rule is one in, one out, and what the CFO says that makes it so
• The exception: a new category the current stack doesn't cover, and why it's worth the extra procurement work and intensive POCs
• Security budgets are "one pot of money," and AI is now crowding it. Some boards are asking whether AI could replace whole packages
• Why the strategy that's already written down is too late for you, and the 12 to 15 month window before anything is budgeted
• The two-sentence intro that got a meeting with a large Australian company agreed within hours
• "AI alerts are 9 times more chatty": the one soundbite that made David stop a startup mid-pitch
• The three Cs of trust, and why swapping the A team for the B team after the contract is the mistake CISOs remember
• What David wishes CIOs understood about security, including the HSBC mobile banking story

About the guest 

David Gee spent around twenty years as a CIO, including at Eli Lilly, before deliberately moving into the CISO chair at HSBC Asia Pacific. He now sits on boards, advises a small number of startups, and has written three books, the latest being How to Sell to the CIO and CISO.

Notable quotes

• "The CFO's telling you, hey, stop buying new crap from new vendors. Can you just use the vendors we have?"
• "The strategy that's been written down and being executed often is too late."
• "I can't just spam them because you asked me to. That would be going against my book."

Chapters

00:00 Why a CISO wrote a book for salespeople 

10:39 Guarding the network, and getting in before the budget exists 

13:05 What a CISO actually wants from a first meeting 

17:29 Building trust: the three Cs 

21:28 Selling change, and why procurement slows it down 

23:10 How a CISO's career stage changes what they'll buy 

26:50 The CIO and CISO tension, and the HSBC story 

30:25 Turning the CFO into an ally 

33:45 Startups, one in, one out, and AI 

39:41 Where vendors fit after the sale 

41:10 What to bring to the CISO meeting 

46:39 Overrated or underrated 

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Zach Lewis runs IT and security at a university on a tight budget, and when he needs a problem fixed, he goes looking in the startup community. He's been a sub-10 customer at Concentric AI, a very early customer at Island, a design partner for Jazz DLP, and he ran an email security product from a barely-out-of-stealth startup for four years. He explains what he gets for buying early, what he needs to see before he'll take the bet, and why your LinkedIn message almost certainly isn't how you'll reach him.

In this episode

• Why a four-year run with a sub-10 email security startup turned Zach into a repeat startup buyer
• The trade he makes for being early: lower pricing locked in for three or five years, and features built in weeks
• What he watches during a design partnership: the whole problem solved, the team growing, the product moving fast
• How his DSPM vendor ended up working like a remote member of his team
• Why nobody inside the university pushed back on buying from startups
• 10 to 20 LinkedIn pitches a day, three replies in seven years, one purchase, and where he finds new vendors instead
• How a deal actually gets funded in a July-to-June budget, and why something usually gets switched off first
• Why two out of three startups he sees are pitching shadow AI, and why he covered it with tools he already had

About the guest

Zach Lewis is CIO and CISO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis, a Venture Advisor at Glilot Capital Partners, and the author of Locked Up (Wiley, 2026), the story of his university's response to a LockBit ransomware attack. He was named Non-Profit CISO of the Year in 2023.

Notable quotes

• "I've done a 5-year on a couple startups just because we want to lock in that low pricing."
• "Best email security product I've ever seen."
• "I don't think anyone even really knew they were a startup, nor did they care."

Chapters

• 00:00 Intro
• 03:18 Advising at Glilot and the St. Louis "cyber mafia"
• 07:23 What he listens for in a first startup conversation
• 09:31 How a design partnership really works
• 13:37 Why legacy DLP failed and what Jazz does differently
• 16:41 His first startup bet: email security
• 20:00 Price, multi-year lock-ins, and features in weeks
• 21:00 How much time early-stage vendors actually take
• 23:38 Does anyone push back on buying from startups?
• 24:38 Sorting out AI security without adding tools
• 28:04 "Stop messaging me on LinkedIn," and what works instead
• 33:28 How deals close: budget cycles, sunsetting, the CFO
• 39:09 Buying after a breach
• 41:00 Locked Up
• 43:31 Visionary or smoking crack

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Cyber startups churn through heads of sales, and the usual explanation is a bad hire. Matt Calligan, Director of Growth Markets at ArmorText, argues something different. Founder-led product-market fit only proves the founder can sell, and there's a stage between that and scale that most companies skip. He calls it the Vanguard stage and lays out what has to be true before anyone hands a VP of Sales a number.

In this episode

• Why early cyber buyers are "buying access to the founder," not the product
• The four lights that have to turn green before you scale: a defined motion, a non-founder who can sell it, proof at volume, and junior reps who can run it without churn
• Why junior AEs vs. a seasoned VP is a false binary, and the personality type Matt hires for instead
• Why your President's Club rock star is often the wrong person for the first seat
• How ArmorText's founder-run hour-long demo became a five-minute UI walkthrough
• What to do when your founder won't let go of the long feature demo
• How the unicorn math of a VC fund pushes founders to skip the middle stage

About the guest

Matt Calligan is Director of Growth Markets at ArmorText, which builds secure out-of-band collaboration for incident response teams. He has spent two decades in enterprise sales, including co-founding Influents as VP of Sales, and has worked on ArmorText's go-to-market since 2018.

Notable quotes

• "If your process is still requiring the founder, then what you have is a founder and an AE in a trench coat." (tightened)
• "This stage takes as long as it takes."
• "Founders are always salesperson number one."

Chapters

• 00:06 Welcome and the spin-the-wheel game
• 01:51 Why cyber startups go through three heads of sales
• 05:16 What product-market fit actually proves
• 08:57 Founders are always salesperson number one
• 11:20 Fund math and the pressure to skip steps
• 16:11 Why cyber's chasm is inverted
• 18:49 The four lights of the Vanguard stage
• 21:28 Who to hire for the first seat
• 24:48 Do it a hundred times: hearing why the baby is ugly
• 26:32 From a 60-minute demo to five minutes
• 30:40 How to get the founder to let go
• 32:52 When to stop preserving runway and floor it
• 38:47 The reverse channel program
• 43:35 Questions to ask before joining as a founding AE
• 45:57 Differentiation teardown

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Sales channels in cybersecurity have been the same list for years: ads, LinkedIn, cold calling, cold email, ABM, inbound. Then AI search turned up and started sending qualified, bottom-of-funnel leads straight to BDRs. Scott Johnson runs an SEO and GEO agency that works only with cybersecurity companies, and in this episode he lays out what is actually happening in that channel, why most cyber vendors are invisible or badly described inside it, and what to do about both.

In this episode

• Why some cyber companies are already seeing 5% of new business come from AI search, and why nobody can see it in their numbers
• The Apollo study Scott cites: visitors from Google convert at 2.8%, visitors from AI search at 14.2%
• The incognito test he wants every listener to run tonight, and why it will make them uncomfortable
• Why AI has learned to skip marketing language, and what it cites instead
• The testimonial format that works on AI: a close rate and a timeframe, not a compliment
• Why the self-promotional listicle, a cheat code for two years, now hands visibility to your competitors
• What to measure instead of brand mentions, and how to get attribution when the click never happens
• Where the hype has run ahead of reality, in the words of someone selling the service

About the guest
Scott Johnson is the Founder and President of Amplifyed, an SEO and GEO agency working exclusively with cybersecurity and SaaS companies. He has been in SEO since 2010, ran a branding agency before this one, and Amplifyed landed at number 1,957 on the 2025 Inc. 5000.

Notable quotes

1. "CMOs tell me, “When I go into Claude and look for our service, I see our competitors and it's driving me crazy."”
2. "AI is so thirsty for data points."
3. "If you want to feel uncomfortable, go do that. Cause you will see what AI thinks of you."

Chapter timestamps
01:40 Nothing in seventeen years of SEO has moved like this
02:27 The sentence cyber CMOs open with, and the channel that came from nowhere
04:50 What you can and cannot see about how buyers search
07:53 The conversion numbers, and the incognito test
10:22 Reputation, quality content, and why PR is having a moment
12:04 Testimonials AI will actually cite
19:29 AI slop, and the four-minute recording that replaces it
24:29 Measuring visibility without fooling yourself
26:49 Write the problem, not the product
29:55 Why listicles started backfiring
33:07 Where the hype has run ahead of the leads
39:38 Spin the wheel: overrated or underrated

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Most cyber companies bought the Claude or ChatGPT seats, handed them to every rep, and are now asking "now what?" Tal Peretz, co-founder and CEO of Onfire AI, has watched that play out across hundreds of mid-market and enterprise security vendors, and his answer is to stop pushing from the top. Start with your best rep and let the rest of the team chase him. Then take the same idea outside: skip the CISO, find the director who owns the budget, and make him the one who carries you up.

In this episode

• The three tiers of AI adoption Tal sees in cyber sales teams, and why 85 to 90 percent are stuck at "we gave it to the rep"
• Why he starts every rollout with the A-players even though they're rarely the best AI users
• The on-site workshop where one rep's transformed week pulled his whole region along
• "Five by five": the agent that picks a rep's five accounts and five prospects for the week, and why each rep tweaks it
• Why trust from the front line, not the tooling, makes or breaks an AI transformation
• Only about 2 percent of account entries go through the CISO, so at $50M to $100M ARR the target is the director
• Why "agentic SOC" vendors pitching the CISO are talking to the wrong person
• How to reach out on a signal without sounding like a creeper (and why you never mention Reddit)
• Tal's 2030 take: reps flip from 80 percent admin to 80 percent selling, and quotas go with it

About the guest
Tal Peretz is co-founder and CEO of Onfire AI, an AI-driven GTM platform for companies selling to technical buyers. Before Onfire he was CTO at OwnID and spent nearly seven years in Israel's Unit 8200, the last two as Head of R&D.

Notable quotes

• "Sales is a competition. Once you put the best reps first with the AI, everyone wants to fall in line."
• "Probably your best reps are not the best with AI yet."
• "If you have fifty million of ARR and you need to grow to 100 million, the CISO is not your target."
• "Everyone goes to the CISO. So you go to that person, and no one is connecting with him."

Chapter timestamps
00:04 Why an 8200 alum built for salespeople, not cyber
01:55 Spin the wheel: visionary or smoking crack
02:51 Three tiers of AI adoption in cyber GTM
05:24 Start with your best rep, not your CRO
08:15 The five by five use case
11:09 Scoring your whole TAM off five years of closed-won
16:39 The three barriers to agentic GTM (and the one that matters)
21:16 Quality beats volume: the A/B test with people
26:46 Only 2 percent get in through the CISO
30:59 The SOC example: hundreds of vendors, one buyer
32:40 Where the real signals live: Reddit, Discord, GitHub
38:11 How to reach out on a signal without being a creeper
41:34 What Onfire is building next
43:41 Visionary or smoking crack: the reveal

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Mark van Oppen is 90 days into the CRO seat at SecureAuth, after four years selling a developer-led product at FusionAuth. He walks through the pre-call research he wants reps doing to connect technical pain to a business number, and why he tells them to be careful about showing it too early. He also covers his three hiring filters, what a muted seller says to a buyer, and what he's doing with the rep at 200 percent of goal who automated his own follow-up.

In this episode

• Why Mark calls identity a non-optional problem, and what "critical path" changes about the sale
• The step-by-step model for turning an earnings report into a cost per minute and a headcount number
• Why he tells reps not to present that model to a customer straight away
• How he runs the technical-pain-to-dollars conversation inside a one-on-one deal review
• Why "I'm not technical" and "let me bring in my engineer" are career-limiting in this category
• The alley-oop between AE and SE, and what twenty minutes on mute tells a buyer
• Energy, excellence, experience: his three hiring filters, in that order, and why experience comes last
• What he's doing with a rep at 200 percent of goal who built his own Claude workflow

About the guest: Mark van Oppen is Chief Revenue Officer at SecureAuth, which he joined in 2026. He was previously VP of Sales and then CRO at FusionAuth, and before that held go-to-market roles across Blue Box, IBM, Heptio and VMware.

Notable quotes

• "I refer to identity as a non-optional problem."
• "You're not going to be right, but you're going to be in the right ballpark."
• "It should not be the seller goes on mute and disappears for 20 minutes."

Chapters (approximate)

• 00:36 — Ninety days in, and how the SecureAuth motion differs from developer-led
• 04:04 — Identity as a non-optional problem
• 10:28 — The cost-per-minute homework
• 13:24 — Coaching it inside deal reviews
• 19:09 — Empathy for goalposts that moved
• 23:30 — The AE and SE alley-oop
• 25:42 — Energy, excellence, experience
• 32:31 — The rep who automated his own follow-up
• 38:08 — The next 90 days

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

AI made it cheap to produce content, and now every cybersecurity vendor sounds the same. Brian Reed, CMO at Corsha, argues the answer to that sameness isn't more AI, it's the human layer: real stories, congruent brand moves, and community. He gets specific on how to use AI as a story partner rather than a content mill, why your customer is the hero of every story, and how to stand out in a market of 4,000 vendors.

In this episode:

• Why AI content creates "mass sameness," and where humans still create meaning
• The golden triangle: AI as content assistant and community as the source of real stories
• Why your customer is the hero of the story, never your product, your rep, or your company
• The business-card test for a company story simple enough that every employee can tell it
• How to open a sales conversation with a 30-second customer story instead of an agenda slide
• Using AI to find patterns, sharpen, and retitle stories, plus building "persona" agents like his crusty OT engineer
• Where the line sits between a memorable brand moment and a forgettable gimmick (Wiz vs the puppies)
• The three kinds of community, why "build your own" is hardest, and why community is never lead gen

About the guest: Brian Reed is CMO at Corsha, working in industrial and OT cybersecurity. His background runs from database middleware and data warehousing in the 90s through application security and the DevOps / DevSecOps movement, including helping build the All Day DevOps community, and he writes regularly on AI and storytelling.

Notable quotes:

• "The tide raises all boats, but they're all drowning in content, and it all sounds the same."
• "Your product's not the hero, your sales rep isn't the hero, your company isn't the hero. The hero is the people."
• "Community is never, ever about lead gen. It's brand building and giving to get."

Chapters (approximate):

• 00:58 — The ugly underbelly of AI content: sameness
• 04:41 — Who the hero of the story really is
• 07:13 — The business-card test and "us and them"
• 13:13 — Using AI as a story partner, and the crusty OT agent
• 19:05 — Standing out vs gimmicks: Wiz, Island, and the puppies
• 27:53 — The coffee truck, and de-risking bold bets
• 33:16 — The three kinds of community
• 37:05 — Why community is never lead gen

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Patrick Dillon, three months into the CRO seat at Nudge Security, joins Andrew to talk about what "AI-first" actually means when everyone at RSA has slapped AI on the booth. The conversation runs from product (AI-native vs. bolted-on, and the shadow AI hiding inside companies) to the go-to-market side: how he's rebuilding the team around technology, process, and people, in that order, and who he'll hire to run it.

In this episode:

• Why companies without a deep AI strategy could be "zombie companies" that don't know it yet
• The difference between AI-native, AI-first, and just connecting an LLM to your old stack
• How one prospect thought they ran 2,000 apps and actually ran 5,300
• Why the buyers now include CFOs, compliance, and corporate counsel, not just security
• Flipping "people, process, technology" to "technology, process, people" for an AI-first GTM
• Why AI replaces reps who won't use AI, not salespeople as a whole
• How Patrick screens candidates for want-to, including whether they used AI to prep for the interview
• Why buyers now demand in one to three months what used to be a twelve-month roadmap promise

About the guest:
Patrick Dillon is CRO at Nudge Security. He and Andrew first spoke on the podcast at RSA 2025, when Patrick was launching a channel program at Airlock. Nudge closed its Series A last November.

Notable quotes:
"You can't secure, you can't govern what you can't see."
"The call is literally coming from inside your house."
"It's not a skill thing or an age thing. It's really a want-to thing."

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.

Emily Matthews, founder and principal of NOLA Marketing, partnered with the Ponemon Institute to ask CISOs directly how vendor marketing influences their buying decisions. The resulting State of Cybersecurity Marketing Influence Report 2026 holds some surprises: webinars beat CISO dinners, hands-on workshops build the peer references buyers trust most, and the first visitor to your website is increasingly a machine.

In this episode:

• The top two CISO complaints about cyber marketing: it differs from product reality, and it's too high-level. Emily's fix starts with coffee-walk conversations with your engineers.
• Why 44% of security leaders ranked webinars the most valuable event format, while peer roundtables and CISO dinners came last.
• Why hands-on workshops should always be free: "You should be paying them, not them paying you."
• How workshops become "investments in peer influence," the #1 credibility source in the research.
• The shift to answer engines: Bain's 80% zero-click prediction and how to make your website a better "buffet for LLMs."
• Emily's case study method: start with your selling points, validate them in the customer's voice, and pack the piece with reusable quotes.
• Why buyers rely on analysts less than they used to, and what fills the gap for the ~3,700 vendors outside the magic quadrants.
• Her advice for marketers coming from outside tech: keep asking why. "Fast is not an answer."

About the guest: Emily Matthews is the founder and principal of NOLA Marketing. A history and English major who started in mainframe system software, she has spent her career in technical product marketing and previously worked with the Ponemon Institute on the original Cost of a Data Breach report.

Notable quotes:

• "You should be paying them, not them paying you."
• "If it sounds like BS to us, it's probably going to smell bad to them too."
• "If you make up a case study, it sounds made up. Interview someone. Because it's real, it comes across."

Support the show

The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.

Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startup
Want to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and training
Need ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.