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This week, I look into cybersecurity sales, developer content marketing, and fundraising pitches through a standard 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 within the priorities and mindsets of chief information security officers (CISOs). As security practitioners start reporting to corporate boards, they need to grasp easy methods to accomplish that and be more business-focused than technical-focused, says marketing expert Dani Woolf.
Woolf knows CISOs well; having spent her profession in B2B tech marketing, she spent months interviewing cybersecurity buyers for her podcast before launching her own audience research agency, Audience 1st, to assist vendors recover at understanding their goal.
A key challenge for the time being is for cybersecurity vendors to adapt to the buyers’ latest mindset — which Woolf thinks will remain even after the market recovers. “There’s this huge gap immediately in that vendors are adding more complexity to the safety buyer job, they usually don’t understand that simplicity is the goal.”
Simplicity, nonetheless, doesn’t mean pitching one tool to exchange all of them. Certainly one of the major things that buyers need 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 actually have immediately.”
Understanding CISOs
Read the room by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch
