Read the room

April 23, 2023 ndowd

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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.”