Lessons from Anjuna: Why Selling Security Through CIOs (Not Security Teams) Led to 4x Growth

Lessons from Anjuna: Why Selling Security Through CIOs (Not Security Teams) Led to 4x Growth

Sometimes the fastest path to growth means ignoring conventional wisdom about who your buyer should be. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Anjuna CEO Ayal Yogev revealed how breaking from the traditional enterprise security sales playbook led to quadrupling revenue and six-month deals with major banks.

The Conventional Wisdom Trap

After 25 years in enterprise security, Ayal had seen countless companies follow the same playbook: build a security product, sell to security teams, focus on risk reduction. But when building Anjuna’s go-to-market strategy, he discovered something unexpected.

“What was surprising to me is that we end up talking to the CIO or the infrastructure team and not necessarily to the security team,” Ayal reveals. This insight emerged from a deeper understanding of how enterprises actually make transformative security decisions.

Reframing Security as Business Enablement

The key was shifting the conversation from risk reduction to business enablement. “Security is an enabler. If you build security the right way, then you can do things that you just couldn’t do before,” Ayal explains. This perspective resonated particularly well with infrastructure leaders looking to accelerate cloud adoption.

For example, when working with a major bank, Anjuna positioned confidential computing not as a security solution, but as an enabler for “moving PII data, private information, private customer information, to the cloud for the first time.”

Breaking Through Enterprise Barriers

This positioning led to remarkably fast enterprise adoption. “We’re growing extremely fast. We’re about to quadrupling every year now,” Ayal notes. Even more impressively, they’re “closing deals with very large banks within a six month cycle, which is extremely fast compared to how these banks tend to move.”

The secret? By selling to infrastructure teams instead of security, Anjuna bypassed the traditional enterprise security sales gauntlet. Infrastructure leaders were more focused on enabling new capabilities than adding another security tool to their stack.

The VMware Parallel

This approach mirrors another infrastructure revolution: virtualization. “VMware is a great example… I’m seeing a lot of similarities, kind of what we’re going through and what VMware went through in their early days,” Ayal observes. Like VMware, Anjuna is creating a new infrastructure category by making complex technology accessible and valuable to enterprises.

Beyond Security: Selling Transformation

For software vendors and SaaS companies, Anjuna’s value proposition focused on competitive advantage rather than security compliance. As Ayal explains, when these companies face customer questions about data access, “today they have to be on their back foot trying to kind of answer and kind of sell around that question… But when they use our solution, or when you use confidential computing, the answer to that becomes no.”

Lessons for B2B Founders

Anjuna’s experience offers crucial lessons for technical founders:

1. Your ideal buyer might not be in the department your product category suggests
2. Sometimes enabling new capabilities is more valuable than reducing existing risks
3. Enterprise sales cycles can be dramatically shortened by finding the right buyer
4. Category creation requires rethinking not just technology, but who you sell to

For founders building new enterprise categories, the message is clear: don’t let conventional wisdom about your buyer dictate your go-to-market strategy. Sometimes the fastest path to growth means selling to someone else entirely.