When I was leading go-to-market, we learned something fast: no matter how good your product is, you don’t win deals by making the buyer feel exposed.
The 80% success POC framework wasn’t just a sales tactic, it was a trust-building sequence designed to show, not sell. The idea was simple: get prospects 80% of the way to conviction through positioning and education, then let a live traffic test quietly do the rest.
The early part of the journey was pure setup. Every asset—landing page, demo deck, outbound email—was written to prompt a simple, unthreatening question in the buyer’s mind: “Are we leaving risk or value on the table?”
What we never did (and I’d advise no one else to do) is throw the incumbent tool under the bus.
In many cases, that tool was chosen by the very person we were selling to. Sometimes they’d gone to the board to justify the spend. Or it was brought in by a partner with deep account history.
Undermining the existing stack didn’t just challenge the tool—it challenged the buyer’s judgement. And that kills trust.
So we never framed ourselves as the replacement. We framed ourselves as the reinforcement.
Our narrative was built around integration, not conflict. We mapped our value to specific gaps: late-stage detection, context enrichment, alert fatigue. Areas where even good tools struggle under load. We made it about coverage, not competition.
Then we offered a live showcase. Real traffic. Real threats. Our system running in parallel, no synthetic tests, no lab simulations. That final 20% was quiet but definitive. Side-by-side comparisons surfaced natural deltas. Not because we shouted. Because the data spoke.
When the buyer saw what we picked up that the existing stack didn’t, the decision made itself. But more importantly, it never felt like a loss of face. They could bring us in without needing to walk back past choices or alienate a partner.
This framework helped us scale mid-market and enterprise deals without burning bridges or playing political games. It worked because it respected everyone’s agenda, the buyer, the partner, the board.
My advice to anyone building a cybersecurity go-to-market motion today: stop trying to be the hero. Be the gap-filler. Don’t challenge past decisions. Illuminate what’s possible now.
Because in cybersecurity, the best wins don’t feel like replacements. They feel like progress.
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