In cybersecurity, while being technically sound is enough to get a job or start a business, it’s not enough to be able to sell. If your buyers don’t understand what you do – or more importantly, why it matters to their business – you’ll lose them long before a call gets booked.
This isn’t a new problem. In fact, it’s one of the oldest.
According to the 2025 Evanta-Gartner CISO survey, one of the top three ongoing challenges for CISOs is communicating cyber risk to non-technical stakeholders. This has been in the top three for several years in a row – and for good reason.
It’s not that cybersecurity isn’t important. It’s that most people outside the security team don’t know how to make sense of it.
The same problem applies to cybersecurity startups and service providers. Founders show up with deep expertise—red teaming strategies, detection engineering, offensive tooling—and often get stuck at the first question from a CEO or CTO:
“Okay, but what does this actually mean for our business?”
This disconnect becomes especially visible at events like BlackHat. Earlier this year, a senior security executive pointed out that “half of the startups on the show floor couldn’t even clearly explain what they do.” That’s not a marketing problem but a clear communication gap or failure.
So how can cybersecurity companies bridge this gap?
How do you market a deeply technical solution to someone who thinks in outcomes, not attack surfaces?
Let’s break it down.
Keep these in mind while marketing cybersecurity products
1. Don’t dumb it down. Just connect your features to business outcomes.
Let’s clear up a common misconception: simplifying your message doesn’t mean stripping away the technical strength of your product. It means reframing that strength in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn’t live in the world of logs, exploits, and zero-day CVEs.
Your buyer might be a CEO, a CTO, or a business owner – not necessarily someone who’s taken a cybersecurity primer.
They may not fully grasp the mechanics of how your AI model clusters threat intel. But they will absolutely care if you can show that it reduces response time, improves security team productivity, or lowers the risk of reputational loss and doesn’t hamper business operations much.
Every feature that matters must also have a direct link to a business outcome. That is the only lens that counts in the first conversation.
If you say your platform combines real-time threat intelligence with security automation, that’s good – but incomplete. What does that actually do for the business?
It likely reduces the time to detect and remediate an attack. It prevents threats from escalating and reaching critical systems. That’s what the buyer needs to hear: less downtime, faster recovery, lower cost of breach.
Again, if your product uses AI to discover new CVEs or detect anomalies in endpoint behavior, that’s impressive – but still not enough. What the buyer needs to understand is that this gives their security team time back. It means fewer false positives, faster triage, and a lower chance of missing a serious threat in the noise. Ultimately, it means better outcomes without expanding the team.
This translation doesn’t happen automatically though. You’d know what the entities on the other side of the table care about, when you talk to them.
Features rarely convert buyers. Outcomes do.
Especially in cybersecurity, where most stakeholders are making decisions under uncertainty and with limited internal expertise, what they need is confidence – confidence that this solution will keep their operations running, protect their customer data, and help them sleep better at night.
That confidence might not come from raw technical specs – but will surely be reflected in clearly articulated business benefits tied to every technical capability.
2. Technical → Business: Real Examples
Here are a few real-world simplifications that can help founders in marketing cybersecurity products better. Each starts with a technical framing and ends with a business-relevant message.
Original (technical):
“We detect anomalous lateral movement patterns in hybrid environments using ML-driven behavior baselines.”
Translated (business):
“We help your security team spot more vigilantly when attackers are moving silently across departments – before they reach any sensitive data or core systems.”
Original (technical):
“Our phishing simulation platform offers customizable payloads with industry-specific templates and granular reporting.”
Translated (business):
“We train your employees to spot real-world phishing attacks – and show you exactly where your team is most vulnerable.”
Original (technical):
“Our tool uses YARA-based scanning with memory forensics to detect fileless malware.”
Translated (business):
“We catch stealthy malware that traditional antivirus tools miss—before they trigger expensive downtime or reputational damage.”
Sometimes you might oversimplify. But if you stick to the business outcomes, it’s still gonna make you more effective than unnecessary jargon.
Once the buyer is interested, you can unpack the technical depth in demos, whitepapers, or technical validation calls.
But if your first few lines don’t land, they’ll never get that far.
3. You’re selling to many stakeholders than just CISOs these days.
You’re selling to the CEO or the COO, essentially in many cases CISOs are just evaluating on their behalf, but the signing authority is someone else, or even final decision is someone else’s.
And that’s why, this feature vs outcome debate for SaaS is not really applicable to cybersecurity.
Because in cybersecurity, features are oversold and underbought. What business stakeholders usually buy is more security promise, less hassle for the team, balanced cost and compliances.
If they can’t manage any one of them in your product, they lose interest.
They’re asking:
- Will this make us more secure in a measurable way?
- Will my internal team be able to operate this without chaos?
- Is the cost defensible in front of the board?
- Will it reduce our audit burden or raise new concerns?
This is what they’re really buying:
- A promise of security that doesn’t increase operational pain
- A smoother path to compliance
- Less work for an already overstretched team
- Predictability in spend and outcomes
Focus on these aspects, and your first conversation with any CISO might just take a very different turn than the monotonous and one-sided ones.
5 points to simplify your cybersecurity product messaging without losing substance
Here are a few techniques we use with clients when repositioning complex cybersecurity offerings:
1. Start with risk prevention, and then the “how” (the feature).
Open with what it prevents. Talk about downtime, data exposure, audit failure, the pain of managing fragmented tools, integration hiccups and other challenges. And then they say how you resolve any of them.
2. Anchor familiar outcomes.
Use language your buyer already understands. If you’re helping a hospital reduce third-party exposure, anchor that to patient data safety or faster vendor onboarding – not just API scanning.
3. Use better or relatable analogies.
They work. Comparing your system to a “digital bouncer” might be helpful. Or maybe you can draw parallel to the immune system for healthcare or alert systems in banks.
4. Take advantage of strong use-cases
One real example of how you helped a small bank automate alert triage will build more credibility than five bullet points about integrations.
5. Keep the tech details for later discussions
The purpose of your pitch, your website, or your content isn’t to exhaust every feature. It’s to start the conversation – and earn the right to go deeper.
But wouldn’t companies have consultants to help them understand & choose better?
It’s true – many buyers will have a consultant, advisor, or virtual CISO helping them evaluate solutions. But that doesn’t solve the communication problem.
In fact, it often makes it worse.
Because now your message needs to go through an interpreter. If your value isn’t clear to that consultant, they can’t effectively represent you to the final buyer. Worse, they might de-prioritize you altogether.
That’s why your product messaging, pitch decks, homepage copy, and LinkedIn content must stand on their own – even when someone else is doing the pitching.
Clarity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s essentially a performance booster for your sales team, and adds to their capacity.
And Finally
Simple messaging is increasingly rare in cybersecurity, not because it lacks value, but because most teams are too deep in the technical weeds to realize what’s missing.
When you spend your days working with attack surfaces, detection logic, and compliance controls, it becomes second nature to describe your product the way you understand it—not the way your buyer needs to hear it.
That’s where the gap begins.
Cybersecurity professionals, especially founders and product leaders rarely get the opportunity to zoom out and ask:
“If I weren’t technical, would this make any sense to me?”
And yet, that perspective is exactly what’s needed to reach today’s buyers. Because while your internal team may care about coverage depth, your decision-makers care about clarity, risk posture, audit readiness, and cost trade-offs.
Simple messaging isn’t a lack of intelligence. It’s a sign of maturity.
And in a space where fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) dominate the conversation, being the company that communicates clearly and value-based is a strategic advantage.
