The IT security market is crowded and complex. Capturing buyers’ attention in this market requires clarity and focus. Once that attention is earned, successful vendors will engage with curiosity and understanding rather relying on a rote recitation of product features and scary security statistics.
Many security vendors fumble these steps.
This is the story of a security vendor committed to getting them right. It’s also the story of how Fulcrum Group helped this vendor hone its sales and marketing efforts even further.
Sysdig is a cloud security company focused on protecting mission-critical workloads wherever they’re running: in a public or private cloud or on premises. To protect those workloads, the Sysdig Cloud Security Platform combines real-time threat detection based on the open-source Falco platform with AI-powered insights from Sysdig Sage™ GenAI. The platform’s agentic AI technology helps security teams detect and respond to threats quickly and efficiently.
The Sysdig platform is a powerful, widely trusted solution, but in a fast-changing market with inconsistent terminology and overlapping product categories, marketing that solution could be a challenge.
“We have a very technical audience,” says Ryan Davis, vice president marketing at Sysdig. “Security buyers have a lot of tools they need to sift through. They have to be able to figure out how any tool or solution is going to help reduce risk in their environment, and they need to understand value quickly.”
Adding to these challenges is the fact that the security market lacks a shared understanding of what a cloud security solution should be and what features and capabilities a cloud security platform should include. Analysts and vendors even disagree about what makes up the specific market category— Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) — that Sysdig competes in.
“You have confusion among the analysts, who are typically guiding the market,” says Davis. “You also have confusion among the vendors. So naturally buyers and customers end up confused themselves. Which features matter? Which architecture makes the most sense? How should customers think about cloud security in the first place?”
The Sysdig marketing team wanted to simplify the company’s story so that it would more quickly break through this confusion and deliver a message that resonated with buyers.
As Davis puts it: “We asked ourselves, how do we quickly convey what makes Sysdig unique and how it provides the critical security features and processes that organizations need today?”
Teaming Up with Fulcrum Group to Hone Sysdig Messaging
To answer those questions, Davis and his team at Sysdig reached out to Fulcrum Group. “We leaned on Fulcrum,” Davis says, “to hone our messaging and to help making our opening conversations with customers consistent and fruitful on a repeatable basis.”
Fulcrum Group met with Davis and other sales and marketing leaders at Sysdig, reviewing the company’s marketing approach and helping the company focus on its undeniable strengths.
“One of our core areas of differentiation is our ability to lean on our open-source heritage,” says Davis. “The Falco platform provides with the ability to make our product customizable and adaptable to the needs of specific customers. It’s not a black box. People know what rule sets exist. They know how to tune the rules. They know how to create their own rules. Falco is a battle-tested solution, which security professionals really appreciate. Fulcrum helped us communicate the benefits of this solution to the various stakeholders in organizations that use it.”
But along with telling the story of the Sysdig platform, Fulcrum emphasized the importance of taking the customer’s perspective.
“The whole goal of the project was to have our sellers speak about customer outcomes that the customer cared about,” says Davis. “We wanted to tell a story that resonated with the customer, but that also make it easy for us to ask questions along the way.”
No customer just wants to hop on a call and have a salesperson fire off ten questions at them. Instead, Sysdig wanted to take customers through their vision of the security market — how they see security teams moving from a posture-oriented mindset towards a more runtime-oriented mindset, and what that means and why that journey is happening.
“With Fulcrum’s guidance, we didn’t make this a one-sided discussion,” says Davis. “Instead, we made it an opportunity for asking customers questions. Where are you on your journey? What are you seeing happening in your environment? Questions like that.”
This approached allows Sysdig sales teams to ask proper discovery questions and to uncover more insights early on.
“It has opened a better line of communication with our prospects,” says Davis. “Through these discussions, we can help customers arrive at a point where they see that our vision makes sense. It meets their needs in the fast-moving world of cloud security. In a crowded market, taking this approach based on inquiry and discovery seems refreshing.”
Benefitting from Fulcrum’s Product Marketing Expertise
Davis found the Fulcrum teams’ product marketing, communication, and project management skills consistently strong.
“As a product marketing leader, it’s always nice to work with others that understand the fundamentals of Product Marketing and the value of creating a crisp and concise message and putting the customer first,” says Davis. “Working with the Fulcrum team in that aspect was great. I never had doubts that the project was ever going astray or moving in a direction that I wasn’t comfortable with.”
Davis also appreciated the Fulcrum team’s ability to look at Sysdig’s marketing challenge from different angles. “They brought a diverse point of view, and I was able to latch on to a number of different ideas that helped make the project stronger overall.”
Davis has no hesitation recommending Fulcrum to other product marketers tackling difficult problems in crowded markets.
“Anyone looking for help simplifying a complex problem and approaching with fresh perspectives, should reach out to Fulcrum,” Davis says. “They can really help with these difficult sorts of challenges with product marketing and product growth.”
