Savvy Success Strategies: How to Efficiently Scale Up Your Cybersecurity Marketing and Sales Efforts

Effective marketing is the key to growth for cybersecurity firms. Does your cybersecurity marketing strategy set you up for success?

Having worked with over 50 cybersecurity companies in various stages of growth to build and refine their cybersecurity marketing strategies, we’ve accumulated valuable insights into best practices that can help you steer clear of common pitfalls as you scale. In the fast-paced and highly competitive cybersecurity industry, it’s often tempting to rush into developing ad-hoc initiatives based on the idea du jour or quickly ramp hiring in sales, believing this is the fastest path to increasing revenue. However, this seemingly agile and entrepreneurial approach can carry the risk of undermining your long-term growth objectives. To reach the top you must first build a solid foundation.

Don’t Put the Cart Before the Horse

We’ve seen many cybersecurity startups so focused on the end game—whether that be seeking a rapid exit or achieving certain growth milestones—that they skip over some critical foundational elements that will pave the way for their cybersecurity marketing and sales efforts to be fruitful. Jumping ahead can actually be more costly and derail reaching the coveted end goal. Instead, investing the time and energy to establish the strategic direction will enable your teams to scale efficiently and adapt quickly to changing market demands, extremely valuable traits in an ever-evolving industry like cybersecurity.

Instead, what we recommend is dedicating the time and energy necessary to establish a well-defined strategic direction. This strategic groundwork not only solidifies your cybersecurity marketing approach, but also empowers your teams to scale efficiently and remain adaptable in the face of rapidly changing market dynamics, particularly applicable for cybersecurity firms. You’ll also ensure that your cybersecurity marketing initiatives are well-aligned with your business objectives, ultimately driving sustainable growth and long-term success.

Stop… Are you on solid ground?

In the same way a house should be built on a solid foundation, so should your business.

At a high level, activities to build this foundation may include a market assessment and target audience identification, key messaging development and differentiation, and the mechanisms and tactics by which you will reach your target customer. Uncovering these  elements as part of your strategic roadmap will serve as the baseline for cybersecurity marketing and sales efforts and pay dividends. These efforts will also inform your hiring and budgeting decisions, increase ROI, and provide the ability to quickly adapt to changing market demands.

Some sample questions you may ask yourself during this stage:

• Where does our solution fit within the cybersecurity ecosystem?
• How are our competitors positioning themselves? What messaging gaps and untapped narratives offer potential for our offering?
• How can we differentiate our offering to stand out in a crowded market? Are there unique features, branding elements, or value propositions that matter to our target audience?
• What specific types of companies need our solution, and what criteria should we use to identify them?
• Who are the key decision-makers and influencers within our target organizations? What is our most effective channel and integration strategy?

While this list is certainly not exhaustive, it highlights why it is vital for you to take the time to explore these types of questions. Focusing first on this essential baseline work will be time well spent to ensure your future success and growth and allow you to articulate the unique value of your solution—in your target market’s language—which will translate to $$$ for your sales team.

To maximize success, it is critical that marketing and sales are in lockstep from the get-go with dynamic and closed loop interaction, as this will set the stage for your teams to scale up efficiently and in unison. Far too many times we have seen disconnected sales and marketing functions that play the blame game to the detriment of the business. Foster this crucial partnership into your culture and you will reap the rewards.

Scaling Up: Get these Right the First Time for Cybersecurity Marketing Success

While there are a lot of considerations when scaling up, over the years we have identified some key areas worth a little extra TLC. When done wrong they have long term implications, but when done right they can exponentially contribute to the bottom line.

1. Targeting and the Ideal Customer: Probably the most important area to focus on as you must determine who you are selling to and what their pain points are so you can articulate your unique value. Tip: Don’t forget to learn from your current customer base and utilize the sales feedback loop with what they are hearing in the field so you can pivot your messaging and positioning as needed.
2. Staffing: Make the right hires at the right time as adding staff to early or too quickly can be costly. Tip: Make sure to recognize that different skills sets may be needed at various stages of growth and outsource when appropriate.
3. Budgeting: Industry benchmarks show B2B companies should be reinvesting between 6-12% into their marketing budget, and in some cases upwards of 20%. Tip: Be thoughtful where and how you are allocating those investments and be sure to keep your sales and marketing budgets separate.
4. Infrastructure: The right tools and technology can enable both sales and marketing and provide efficiently and agility. Tip: Spend the time to establish sales and marketing processes before investing in technologies, and then implement the tools that best support those processes.
5. Metrics: Measuring outcomes across sales and marketing are important to understand where to maximize ROI. Tip: Make sure marketing and sales work together to define the metrics and create a unified dashboard that they analyze together on a regular basis.

Investing in cybersecurity marketing strategies and sales may seem like a daunting task, especially for organizations in the early growth phase. Careful consideration should be taken to build out these functions in the way that will best capitalize on spend and set you up for long term success. The benefits of outsourcing in areas such as marketing can mitigate your hiring risks and validate growth plans before making large investments on internal resources. It can also augment resource gaps that may not justify a full-time headcount or provide oversight on strategic initiatives such as market assessments or messaging development, where specialized experience is particularly useful. If you do decide to outsource, look for experts with specific experience in your industry for maximum results.

Want to learn more? Check out the webinar, Scale Up! Building Your Cybersecurity Sales & Marketing Machine

Magnetude has helped countless cybersecurity clients find the smart path to growth, key in on true differentiators, and get the attention of prospects through unified cybersecurity marketing and sales programs. Contact us to learn more about our services.