Way back in 2011, I was wandering through a trade show, numb from the identical sales pitches.  Then I saw a booth advertising the “Next Generation Firewall.”  What the heck was that? As a cybersecurity geek, I had to find out more.

I trotted over to the booth, which was hopping with excitement and activity.  I listened to a passionate and absorbing presentation from the company’s founder.  This was the coolest thing to come along in cybersecurity in years.  The company was a startup, named Palo Alto Networks (PAN).  PAN is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world today.

While PAN’s technologies did not live up to the hype, their messaging was spectacular.  The concept of a “next generation” security technology was catnip to buyers desperate for something that could stop attacks.  This messaging was so effective, buyers were rushing to buy their products, infuriating PAN’s larger, more established competitors.

The Wall of Buyer Skepticism

When companies (especially startups) bring a new product (or service) to market, they face an imposing set of disadvantages. A lack of people, money, reputation, and customers all conspire to keep paying customers away.  However, the most insidious obstacle is Buyer Skepticism.  As a startup, you are nobody.  Prospective buyers have no reason to trust you.  Why take a chance on a startup when there are larger, more established providers?

Consequently, any startup GTM strategy must address how the company will overcome buyer skepticism.  This was exactly the conundrum PAN faced in their early days.  Their solution was to sneak right past the wall, exploiting one of the most potent human weaknesses: curiosity.

Evaluating a Product

When buyers evaluate a company and its products, they will consider a wide variety of factors.  However, we can simplify these factors into four categories (which conveniently begin with the letter “c”):

• Credibility: Is the company trustworthy? Does it have references?  Do the people at the company sound and look like they know what they are doing?
• Capability: Does the company’s products work? Do they integrate with other technologies?  Do they relieve pain?  Can the company prove that?
• Capacity: Is the company able to deliver what they say? Do they have the people, relationships, and network to function?
• Cost: Are the prices and terms reasonable? Does the company have the financial resources to delivery capability and capacity.

When a company succeeds in all four areas, they usually make the sale.

Most startups and founders focus their energy on building capability and capacity, which makes sense.  Without a product or service everything else is moot.

However, once the product is working and the company is ready to sign up customers, it is critical to start building credibility.

Established competitors already have credibility.  This is why buyers feel more comfortable buying a mediocre product from a trusted brand versus an innovative product from an untrusted company.  Credibility allows a company to pass over the Wall of Skepticism.

Using Curiosity to Build Credibility

Building credibility is exceptionally difficult, unless a startup can overcome Buyer Skepticism.  This is where curiosity becomes your superweapon.

1. Define a strong vision for your products and services
2. Pique curiosity with enticing words and ideas
3. Reassure the prospect with expertise and empathy
4. Close the deal

Let’s step through this strategy.

Define a Vision

Why?  This is the ultimate question all startups must answer about themselves and their products.

• Why you?
• Why your product?
• Why are you better than what is already out there?
• Why not your better funded, more established competitors?
• Why now?
• Why are you doing this?

As the marketing guru Simon Sinek says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”  To make buyers curious, you must know why you are interesting.

Consider Disney’s vision statement: “to make people happy.”  That is a simple, strong answer to why: “Why does Disney exist? To make people happy.”  Although, considering the last Star Wars movie, their success in meeting that vision is debatable.

Exploring these why questions helps a startup understand why they are unique.

Action Plan for Building Vision

1. Get your key team members or advisors together
2. Find compelling, concise answers to those questions asked earlier
3. Document those answers
4. Ensure everybody in the company can repeat those answers with conviction

Be careful with your answers.  Keep them concise and focused on customers, not yourself or your investors.

Pique Curiosity

Modern buyers are overloaded with options, sales pitches, and marketing content.  After a while, all the marketing content sounds the same.

Curiosity is both a strength and weakness.  While curiosity can make people seek out answers to vexing problems, it can also make them lower their defenses.  This is why hackers use enticing emails to convince people to click on malware.  Curiosity makes people click.

Startups can exploit curiosity to sneak into a buyer’s mind and past the Wall of Skepticism.  The buyer must see or hear a word, phrase, artwork, or design that instantly makes them think, “What is that?” or “I want to know more about that!”

To accomplish this, a startup must sound intentionally different and unique.  PAN used the phrase “next-generation,” Nike invented the phrase “Just Do It,” and Apple was “Think Different.”  All of these were unique phrases that made people want to know more about the brand.  You do not want to reveal your entire vision, merely tease it.

Action Plan to Create Curiosity

1. What is a word, phrase, or idea you can use that makes people curious?
2. Do those words reflect the company’s vision?
3. How can you deliver those concepts effectively?

Be careful that your words do not create confusion.  Using obscure, obscene, or outlandish phrases may seem funny, but they may repel buyers.

Demonstrate Credibility

Once a curious buyer approaches, you must quickly demonstrate credibility.  This means rapidly accomplishing two things:

• Show you understand the customer’s pain
• Show that you can alleviate that pain

Only a person with extensive domain expertise can do this.  Consequently, startups must place intelligent, experienced people “upfront” to engage with potential buyers early in the sales process.  These “pre-sales” experts must be able to start and maintain engaging conversations with prospective buyers.  Mostly, they must be able to reassure the customer they are capable and credible.

Pre-sales experts are the single most important component of any go-to-market strategy.  It is a perfect role for a founder, which is exactly what PAN did back in 2011.  They deployed their founder Nir Zuk into the booth to talk directly with prospective buyers.  Zuk is a brilliant and passionate engineer, who can instantly create credibility.  Zuk continues to play a key role in evangelizing PANs products to this day.

Curiosity followed with credibility supercharges your GTM efforts.

Action Plan for Intelligence Upfront

1. Ensure the first meeting with all potential customers includes a subject matter expert
2. Ensure these experts:
   1. Communicate the company’s messaging and vision
   2. Show the customer they understand their pain
   3. Demonstrate their ability to alleviate that pain

For more information about building rapport with customers, see How to Get Sales Prospects to Discuss Pain.

Close the Deal

Once the Wall of Skepticism is down and credibility is established, it is all downhill from there.  The final stage is to pivot to a product pitch, reassure the buyer you can solve their problems, and close the deal.

In this final phase, be careful not to destroy the credibility you built.  You want to sound confident, not desperate.  Desperation is repulsive to buyers.  Allow the buyer to drive the product demonstration.  Let them explore the capabilities.  Show confidence in your products, even if they are not perfect.

Once this stage is complete, you should be sending a quote or proposal to the customer, ready to close the deal.

Conclusion

Buyer skepticism is a massive impediment for startups entering the market.  Spending millions on far-reaching marketing campaigns to reach potential buyers may feel like the right thing to do, however it rarely works.  Most buyers are not going to take a small startup seriously, regardless of how many emails you send them.

Conversely, unique, targeted messaging is relatively inexpensive to produce and disseminate and, if done correctly, can be significantly more effective.  This will attract curious buyers, which is exactly what a startup wants.  Curious buyers are open to hearing an innovative, disruptive new approach.  Skeptical buyers are not.

Palo Alto Networks was not the first company to use these GTM strategies.  Many successful companies have employed these techniques.  Curiosity is potent.  If you can make prospective buyers curious and then build credibility, you may see the same explosive growth.

What do you think?  Share your feedback: andrew.plato@zenaciti.com.  If you are looking to develop a creative GTM strategy, let’s chat.  Zenaciti can help.

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PAN is not the first to try this strategy. Cisco, Symantec, and McAfee all tried, and all failed at building a platform of security products. Microsoft (MS) is well on their way toward a single security platform as well.

PAN’s strategy may be flawed, but the idea is not.

PAN correctly identifies that companies can benefit from a single, unified interface for security monitoring and management. However, their execution is the problem. PAN and MS are both building a Platform for Products. The PAN platform only manages other PAN products, and likewise for Microsoft. This makes these platforms limited and constrained.

What the security industry really needs is a Platform of Platforms (PoP).

What is a Platform of Platforms?

In an ideal world, cybersecurity teams would have a single portal where they could go to interact with their entire information security environment. This is a Platform of Platforms. A PoP would not necessarily manage every aspect of all those disparate products, but rather provide a simplified way to see their status, access key data, and perform routine functions. A PoP unites the entire security infrastructure into a single portal.

With a PoP, security teams could integrate any security product, whether it is PAN, Cisco, Wiz, MS, Crowdstrike, etc. into the platform. Those products would then publish a set of capabilities to the platform.

For example, the PoP would not manage an endpoint security product like Sentinel One. Yet, it could show a list of endpoints not secured along with other useful reports, such as malware blocked. It might also perform some common management functions, like kicking off a network-wide scan or search for a specific file-hash value.

The PoP is a window into endpoint security, but does not replace Sentinel One’s native management tools.

Now before you dismiss this idea, have you looked at ServiceNow or SalesForce lately? They are essentially PoPs.

PoP Drop

Naturally, you are shaking your head saying this is impossible. Ten years ago the management portals companies built for their products were completely closed. Now everybody uses an API, and those APIs are published (some publicly.) APIs are insanely powerful. They open up a product’s possibilities in ways most vendors cannot even imagine.

PoPs could use these APIs to interact with each product, to obtain data and execute functions. SIEM and XDR platforms have been building huge databases of functionality to accommodate a vast library of third party tools. This effort would only be slightly more complex than those efforts. Moreover, this is exactly the kind of problem AI could help solve.

Sounds like a SIEM

SIEMs are the closest relative to a PoP. The challenge with SIEMs is that they are focused exclusively on managing data from products. A PoP would go a step further to actually interact with a product’s native API. However, a SIEM would make a logical starting point to build a PoP. Some of the larger SIEM products are rapidly approaching a PoP-like functionality.

Who Runs PoP Town?

Naturally, the question is who owns or runs this PoP. No single security vendor could do this. Building a PoP would require a company with vast resources and a reasonably neutral position to the vast set of security products on the market.

This is why PAN’s platform is unlikely to succeed. It demands you buy completely into the Cult of Palo Alto Networks. PAN has made it clear they are not going to sell a platform that manages non-PAN products.

The obvious answer to who could do this is the cloud service providers: AWS, Microsoft, and GCP. They have the resources and are reasonably neutral to security products. AWS is already partially there with their Security Hub product. Azure has a security console now, but it is a clunky mess. And GCP has not been acquiring security companies for fun. They obviously have big ideas as well.

A PoP was part of my own vision for a product years ago. I envisioned a platform that could not only build itself but configure a disparate set of tools and provide a single management interface. My vision was too big for my funding, so I downgraded it into a compliance product.

PoP Benefits

The single greatest challenge in cybersecurity is and always has been complexity. The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to protect it. Modern enterprise environments are insanely complex and insanely complex to secure.

The ultimate purpose of a PoP: create a simpler, more streamlined way to interact with the security architecture. Provide a single place where a diverse group of people, from leadership down to operations can access and interact with the security environment.

A PoP would not replace existing management consoles. Those would still have a place in a PoP environment. There are plenty of use-cases where administrators would need to drop down into a native console to perform administrative functions.

I fully admit that a PoP is a bit of a pipe-dream at this point. The effort necessary to build a viable, working PoP is extreme. However, this is yet another way that cloud providers could continue their consumption of the security industry (see Cloud Eats Security.)

NOTE: Since writing this blog in February of 2024 I have started seeing actual products making a run at this concept. Google’s acquisition of Wiz and Zscaler’s acquisition of Red Canary are two prominent examples of consolidation in the pursuit of an “all in one” style platform.

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