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On this episode of Cyber GTM Talk, the podcast for cybersecurity go-to-market leaders, Ken Powell explains how cyber sales teams beat their most common competitor: the buyer who decides to do nothing. His rule is that every deal has to answer why the buyer would do anything, why now, and what happens if they do nothing, before a rep is allowed to pitch. He also shares the account research, the personal stakes buyers carry, and the deeper conversations that make understanding those answers possible. In this episode Why Ken treats Do Nothing as the real competitor, and what it usually means when a deal dies to it The three questions every deal must answer before a rep can say "why me" Why a buyer's stated need is the wrong thing to react to, and the question to ask instead The personal stakes: buyers who got fired for late, over-budget projects, and why Ken shows quick wins inside the customer's fiscal year Ask about payback, not ROI The one-page account plan, and the two days it took one senior seller to pin down a CEO's vision Why Ken builds the business case for his champion Why saying "that's nothing we do" builds credibility in cybersecurity sales About the guest Ken Powell is the founder of Sales Method and an operating partner at CXO Partners. A longtime enterprise and cyber sales leader, he has sold and led teams at Oracle, SAP, McAfee, Halliburton's Landmark and Honeywell, and he is the author of Raise the Bar. Step Up. The Habits of Great Sales Athletes, with a second book, Own the Account, out now. Ken's book: Raise the Bar. Step Up. The Habits of Great Sales Athletes (Amazon) Ken on LinkedIn Notable quotes "...why would they do anything? Why now? What happens if they do nothing? I call that why not?" "You should have started on that first call because you were asking, why do anything? Why now? What happens if you do nothing?" "...losing a deal to do nothing is not an option." Chapters 00:00 Intro 02:48 69% of sellers miss quota, 60% of deals lost to do nothing 05:12 Why cleaning the pipeline is a symptom 06:43 Modern BANT and grading every opportunity 10:50 Plan your call, and build the champion's business case 14:06 Getting a sales team to buy into new habits 20:39 Commoditization and believing in your product 24:29 Why do anything, why now, why not, why me 26:34 Why the stated need is a trap 30:50 Payback over ROI 32:35 Revenue play or cost play 37:25 Account planning and the CEO's strategy 50:58 Overrated or underrated 57:32 The $4M commit cut to $200K Cyber GTM Talk helps go-to-market leaders at cybersecurity companies grow sales, from start up sales to scale. 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.

On this episode of Cyber GTM Talk, the cybersecurity podcast for go-to-market leaders, Fred Descloux explains what actually wins cyber sales once your product makes the shortlist. Fred runs privacy, data security and GRC at Nu Skin and has sat on every side of the table: seller, implementer, operator, Big 4 advisor and now buyer. His view is blunt: when three or four products all fit, the product stops being the differentiator and the rep starts being it. In this episode Why a 60% product fit is now enough for Fred, and how vibe coding lets him build the other 40%Why the quality of the interaction with the salesperson breaks the tie in cybersecurity salesThe vendor who claimed to know Fred's boss "Jack" (his boss is Vince), and what it cost himWhy he'd rather a junior rep had 5 prepared meetings at an event than 20How his startup emailed 16 vendors and signed fast with the two reps who came preparedThe question he asks vendors on purpose, and the vague answer that wastes itWhy plenty of buyers don't know what they're buying, and why he wants a seller who'll tell him he's wrongOverrated or underrated: CISSP for sales reps, ChatGPT for account research, likable sellersAbout the guest Fred Descloux is Global Director of Privacy, Data Security and GRC at Nu Skin and the founder of Zero Drama Security, a boutique advisory practice. Before that he spent close to a decade at EY, led information security governance at the World Bank Group, and worked at Deloitte and CrossCountry Consulting. Notable quotes "Product is not going to be the differentiator.""If you match it 60% and I know I can build the 40% myself with an automation or something on the side, that's perfect.""It was like literally for me just a conversation he lost before even starting the game."Chapters 00:00 Intro 04:34 How a buyer researches sellers with AI 09:07 The vendor who invented Fred's boss 13:27 What great pre-call research looks like 18:04 Peer-to-peer, not lecturing 21:59 Five prepared meetings, not twenty 25:36 16 emails and a fast signature 27:44 The 60% fit and why the rep breaks the tie 30:30 Buyers who don't know what they're buying 34:09 What builds trust after the deal 39:29 Givers and takers 42:10 Selling confidence, not a security score 46:51 Overrated or underrated Cyber GTM Talk helps cybersecurity sales and marketing leaders grow sales, from start up sales to scale. 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.

Kristen Twining is the SVP of Sales at Reco, a company that secures AI and agents, and she's rebuilding its go-to-market to be AI forward. Her argument is that agentic GTM can't be a sales project. She explains why marketing and RevOps have to be in it from the start, what she told her reps when she pulled their tech stack, and the go-to-market engineer hire nobody knew existed a year ago. In this episode Why Kristen calls it "a company agentic motion" and who has to be in the roomThe unglamorous foundation work: data, the CRM, access and the tech stackWhat she told her reps when she took the traditional tech stack awayHow scoring for signal cut Reco's outbound target list by about 80%The manual middle: reps working their lists with a go-to-market engineer while the automation catches upWhat a great go-to-market engineer looks like, and why the job description took five or six draftsHer favorite AI interview question for BDRs and AEs, and the answer her dad in his 70s would giveOverrated or underrated: Black Hat, a degree in sales, and work-life balanceAbout the guest Kristen Twining is SVP Sales at Reco, which she joined in January 2026 after running Americas sales at FireMon, global sales at Illusive, ITDR sales at Proofpoint and a long run at HPE. She also hosts the podcast My Stilettos Hurt. Notable quotes "You can't confuse that with, I'm building a sales agentic motion. This is a company agentic motion.""Nobody even knew what a GTM engineer was a couple years ago, maybe even a year ago.""There's a language to AI and there's a translation."Chapters 00:00 Intro 03:28 Spin the wheel 04:23 Why Kristen went AI-forward 07:14 The unglamorous foundation work 11:14 A company motion, not a sales one 12:26 Cutting the target list by 80% 19:37 Hiring for an AI-forward sales team 30:43 The go-to-market engineer 35:39 My Stilettos Hurt 41:11 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.

When Wiz brought in new go-to-market leadership and decided to go big, Lauren Lynch's commercial org went from about 40 people to more than 80 in a couple of months. She explains why hiring at that speed made her process tighter, not looser, and walks through the steps she used at Wiz and took with her to Drata to keep the bar where it was. If you are about to scale a cyber sales team, this is the episode to hear first. In this episode The numbers behind the Wiz commercial build: 35 to 65 AEs, 4 to 12 RDs, and three new RVPsWhy a hot brand and a flood of inbound applicants made defining "good" more important, not lessHer process stage by stage: a casual 30 minutes, a deeper hour, 3 or 4 cross-functional interviewers with assigned roles, and a final presentation panelThe "my why" slide, and why she wants the panel to meet the person, not just the resumeHow the panel catches candidates who interview well, including AI-written prospecting samplesThe one question she uses to test coachabilityWhat changes when the hire is a leader: more time, sometimes a flight, and backchannel references before the first callKeeping a team focused on the number while new leadership rewrites the playbookAbout the guest Lauren Lynch has spent more than a decade scaling sales teams in cybersecurity: nearly ten years at Rapid7, then commercial sales leadership at Snyk and Wiz, where she was AVP of Commercial Sales for the Americas. Most recently she was VP of Sales, North America at Drata. Notable quotes "It was really important that we defined what good looked like and what the right profiles were that we wanted to go after because there was no shortage of talent.""A leadership hire is a way more expensive mistake to make if you do it the wrong way.""If they fall apart in that, no matter how likable they were or how good the answers were, I just can't move forward."Chapters 00:00 Intro and the spin of the wheel 03:48 Rapid7 and the in-office sales floor 09:20 Joining Wiz to build mid-enterprise 10:50 Hypergrowth: about 40 people to 80+ in a couple of months 14:29 The hiring process, stage by stage 19:30 How she tests for curiosity 23:42 The panel that exposes weak candidates 25:24 Hiring first-line leaders 29:25 Testing for coachability 33:19 Twenty-one days later: the Wiz leadership change 36:29 Leading a team through new GTM leadership 46:30 What she took to Drata 50:24 Enablement and AI call analysis 53:17 It's personal: the wheel questions 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.

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 monthsWhy 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 dollarsWhat "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 accountsHow he de-risked the bet: an agreed baseline, get-out clauses, and an open source tool running in parallelThe FNZ story: a startup pen test vendor covering 100+ wealth management clients, and the six extra tests that earned everyone kudosThe managed free trial: two weeks, a month maximum, run as a mini case studyWhy buyers aren't at RSA or InfoSec any more, and the Chamber of Commerce talk that landed him a CEO clientWhat JP Morgan did to Fortify's roadmap, and how Robbie would stop your biggest customer doing it to youAbout 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 soThe exception: a new category the current stack doesn't cover, and why it's worth the extra procurement work and intensive POCsSecurity budgets are "one pot of money," and AI is now crowding it. Some boards are asking whether AI could replace whole packagesWhy the strategy that's already written down is too late for you, and the 12 to 15 month window before anything is budgetedThe 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-pitchThe three Cs of trust, and why swapping the A team for the B team after the contract is the mistake CISOs rememberWhat David wishes CIOs understood about security, including the HSBC mobile banking storyAbout 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 buyerThe trade he makes for being early: lower pricing locked in for three or five years, and features built in weeksWhat he watches during a design partnership: the whole problem solved, the team growing, the product moving fastHow his DSPM vendor ended up working like a remote member of his teamWhy nobody inside the university pushed back on buying from startups10 to 20 LinkedIn pitches a day, three replies in seven years, one purchase, and where he finds new vendors insteadHow a deal actually gets funded in a July-to-June budget, and why something usually gets switched off firstWhy two out of three startups he sees are pitching shadow AI, and why he covered it with tools he already hadAbout 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 Intro03:18 Advising at Glilot and the St. Louis "cyber mafia"07:23 What he listens for in a first startup conversation09:31 How a design partnership really works13:37 Why legacy DLP failed and what Jazz does differently16:41 His first startup bet: email security20:00 Price, multi-year lock-ins, and features in weeks21:00 How much time early-stage vendors actually take23:38 Does anyone push back on buying from startups?24:38 Sorting out AI security without adding tools28:04 "Stop messaging me on LinkedIn," and what works instead33:28 How deals close: budget cycles, sunsetting, the CFO39:09 Buying after a breach41:00 Locked Up43:31 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 productThe 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 churnWhy junior AEs vs. a seasoned VP is a false binary, and the personality type Matt hires for insteadWhy your President's Club rock star is often the wrong person for the first seatHow ArmorText's founder-run hour-long demo became a five-minute UI walkthroughWhat to do when your founder won't let go of the long feature demoHow the unicorn math of a VC fund pushes founders to skip the middle stageAbout 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 game01:51 Why cyber startups go through three heads of sales05:16 What product-market fit actually proves08:57 Founders are always salesperson number one11:20 Fund math and the pressure to skip steps16:11 Why cyber's chasm is inverted18:49 The four lights of the Vanguard stage21:28 Who to hire for the first seat24:48 Do it a hundred times: hearing why the baby is ugly26:32 From a 60-minute demo to five minutes30:40 How to get the founder to let go32:52 When to stop preserving runway and floor it38:47 The reverse channel program43:35 Questions to ask before joining as a founding AE45:57 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 numbersThe 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 uncomfortableWhy AI has learned to skip marketing language, and what it cites insteadThe testimonial format that works on AI: a close rate and a timeframe, not a complimentWhy the self-promotional listicle, a cheat code for two years, now hands visibility to your competitorsWhat to measure instead of brand mentions, and how to get attribution when the click never happensWhere the hype has run ahead of reality, in the words of someone selling the serviceAbout 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 "CMOs tell me, “When I go into Claude and look for our service, I see our competitors and it's driving me crazy."”"AI is so thirsty for data points.""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 usersThe 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 itWhy trust from the front line, not the tooling, makes or breaks an AI transformationOnly about 2 percent of account entries go through the CISO, so at $50M to $100M ARR the target is the directorWhy "agentic SOC" vendors pitching the CISO are talking to the wrong personHow 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 itAbout 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 saleThe step-by-step model for turning an earnings report into a cost per minute and a headcount numberWhy he tells reps not to present that model to a customer straight awayHow he runs the technical-pain-to-dollars conversation inside a one-on-one deal reviewWhy "I'm not technical" and "let me bring in my engineer" are career-limiting in this categoryThe alley-oop between AE and SE, and what twenty minutes on mute tells a buyerEnergy, excellence, experience: his three hiring filters, in that order, and why experience comes lastWhat he's doing with a rep at 200 percent of goal who built his own Claude workflowAbout 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-led04:04 — Identity as a non-optional problem10:28 — The cost-per-minute homework13:24 — Coaching it inside deal reviews19:09 — Empathy for goalposts that moved23:30 — The AE and SE alley-oop25:42 — Energy, excellence, experience32:31 — The rep who automated his own follow-up38:08 — 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 meaningThe golden triangle: AI as content assistant and community as the source of real storiesWhy your customer is the hero of the story, never your product, your rep, or your companyThe business-card test for a company story simple enough that every employee can tell itHow to open a sales conversation with a 30-second customer story instead of an agenda slideUsing AI to find patterns, sharpen, and retitle stories, plus building "persona" agents like his crusty OT engineerWhere 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 genAbout 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: sameness04:41 — Who the hero of the story really is07:13 — The business-card test and "us and them"13:13 — Using AI as a story partner, and the crusty OT agent19:05 — Standing out vs gimmicks: Wiz, Island, and the puppies27:53 — The coffee truck, and de-risking bold bets33:16 — The three kinds of community37:05 — 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 yetThe difference between AI-native, AI-first, and just connecting an LLM to your old stackHow one prospect thought they ran 2,000 apps and actually ran 5,300Why the buyers now include CFOs, compliance, and corporate counsel, not just securityFlipping "people, process, technology" to "technology, process, people" for an AI-first GTMWhy AI replaces reps who won't use AI, not salespeople as a wholeHow Patrick screens candidates for want-to, including whether they used AI to prep for the interviewWhy buyers now demand in one to three months what used to be a twelve-month roadmap promiseAbout 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.

Are you struggling to capture the attention of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) in a saturated cybersecurity market? Join us in this enlightening episode of The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk podcast for cybersecurity sales and marketing teams, where we unpack the secrets to effective cyber security sales strategies that can elevate your approach and drive revenue growth.  Host Andrew Monaghan sits down with Chris Camacho, co-founder and COO of Abstract Security, who brings a wealth of experience from his previous roles as a buyer at financial services companies. Chris shares invaluable insights into the shifting dynamics of selling cybersecurity solutions, particularly to Fortune 500 companies. He emphasizes the critical need for cyber sales teams to either reduce current spending or replace existing vendors to gain traction, making a strong first impression that resonates with decision-makers.  This episode dives deep into Chris's unique journey from being a buyer of cybersecurity products to becoming a builder and seller, offering listeners a rare perspective on what works and what doesn’t in the realm of cyber security sales. With around 3,900 vendors vying for attention in the cybersecurity space, standing out is no easy feat. Chris discusses the challenges of differentiation and the evolving role of AI in both sales and product development, providing actionable insights that can help your team navigate these complexities.  Building and maintaining relationships is key in the cybersecurity landscape, and Chris stresses the importance of leveraging networks effectively to understand clients' specific needs. By creating tailored solutions that demonstrate clear ROI, sales teams can not only meet but exceed client expectations. Listeners will walk away with practical takeaways on sales onboarding, sales coaching, and metrics that matter in insurance, all aimed at accelerating growth in a rapidly changing environment.  This episode is packed with cybersecurity marketing insights and go to market strategies for anyone involved in cyber security sales. Whether you're part of a startup or an established company, the lessons shared here will empower you to grow sales and enhance team management capabilities. Tune in to The Cyber Go-To-Market Talk podcast for cybersecurity sales and marketing teams and discover how to navigate team challenges while building trust and scaling sales teams effectively. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get better at marketing and drive predictable revenue growth!  About the guest: Chris Camacho spent around ten years on the buy side in financial services, an early adopter of vendors like Crowdstrike and Flashpoint, before crossing over to build and sell security products. He is co-founder and COO of Abstract. Chapters: 00:51 — Crossing from the buy side to the "dark side"02:55 — Why he bought CrowdStrike and Flashpoint early11:45 — A market with thousands of vendors, and the spend arms race15:33 — Three ways to fill a regional CISO event18:23 — Relationships, Ninja Jobs, and meeting his co-founder22:20 — What he interviews for (and what he doesn't)26:22 — When an AI lab lands in your category29:59 — What CISOs are telling him about AI32:22 — Reduce or replace: the way in now34:17 — AI for sellers, and his 17-year-old BDR 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.