Building Trust Before Revenue: Inside Cleafy’s Threat Intelligence Marketing Strategy

When selling security solutions to banks, leading with product pitches rarely works. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Cleafy CEO Matteo Bogana revealed their unconventional approach: build trust through threat intelligence sharing.

Early on, Cleafy faced a credibility challenge. “We are mixing together actually cybersecurity and the fraud in the same context and in the same solution,” Matteo explains. “So people were not actually very willing to discuss and to open up their problems when were presenting because were not IBM, were not a consolidated company.”

Their solution? Cleafy Labs, a threat intelligence unit that shares insights about emerging threats. “The most effective way that we have identified the lung disease to produce an effective marketing pipe is what we call Cleafy Labs,” Matteo shares.

Instead of pushing for sales conversations, Cleafy focused on demonstrating expertise. “We never go to the customer asking if they have a specific problem to solve, because we understand that there is a lot of friction in customer in opening up, which are their complexities in the space of fraud or cybersecurity.”

Their alternative approach proved transformative: “We prefer to have a market in which we create trust, describe into the market what we are able to see, to identify and to manage in a very neutral way.” This strategy elevated Cleafy from unknown startup to trusted authority, with their team now presenting “not only in public events, but also to NATO events or to Interpol events, FBI events.”

This credibility-first approach aligned perfectly with their target market – “mid large banks and financial institutions… Fortune 500 customers for sure.” By demonstrating deep expertise through Cleafy Labs, they overcame the typical resistance these institutions have toward new vendors.

The strategy works because it inverts the typical sales dynamic. Rather than asking prospects to share their security challenges, Cleafy proactively shares threat intelligence, creating “more open discussion on what is going on and what might be fixed.”

Looking ahead, this foundation of trust positions them well for the AI era. As Matteo notes, “More and more AI based attacks will rise.” Their established credibility helps customers trust their vision for combining AI automation with human expertise.

Cleafy’s journey shows that in complex B2B sales, especially to risk-averse enterprises, demonstrating expertise through knowledge sharing can be more effective than traditional sales approaches. Sometimes, the best way to build a sales pipeline is to focus on building trust first.