From SMB Struggles to Fortune 50 Success: Silent Push's Unconventional Path to Enterprise Sales

Most cybersecurity startups follow a predictable path: start with small businesses, gradually move upmarket. Ken Bagnall, founder and CEO of Silent Push, discovered this conventional wisdom was completely wrong.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ken shared how Silent Push captured 50% of Global Fortune 50 companies within 18 months of launch. But before this remarkable achievement, he learned some painful lessons with his first cybersecurity startup.

The SMB Trap

"It's pretty horrific, to be honest," Ken says about his first company's strategy of selling sophisticated email security through MSPs to small and medium businesses. Despite building incredibly complex detection capabilities, the appreciation for their technology was missing. "We used to do incredibly complex things in that email security product and detect all sorts of things that other people couldn't. But it was a complete waste of time because the customers didn't know if you're stopping it or not."

Everything changed when FireEye acquired them. Suddenly, enterprise customers were calling, amazed by their capabilities: "How the hell are you guys managing to stop this? No one can stop this stuff." The revelation hit hard: "Oh my God, we just wasted so much time in our lives selling to the wrong people. This is our actual audience."

The Three-Year Build

Learning from this experience, Ken took a radically different approach with Silent Push. Instead of rushing to market, they spent three years building their platform – becoming "one of the most aggressive data collectors" in the world to monitor all changes on the Internet daily.

"It's a tremendously difficult thing," Ken explains. "We monitor all changes on the Internet every day and we collect all the information ourselves... we're equally monitoring all infrastructure that exists as the threat actor infrastructure."

The "Small Room" Strategy

Rather than broad marketing campaigns, Silent Push adopted what Ken calls the "shout loudly in a small room" approach. They identified tight-knit threat intelligence communities within industry verticals and positioned themselves as experts.

"We offered ourselves as experts for all of these different threat intel groups," Ken shares. "When they're concerned about something that's going on, we would always speak... we give information so that people get to know who we are. And it raises our brand awareness for sure. And you also establish an awful lot of trust."

Rethinking Free Products

While many cybersecurity companies struggle with free products, Silent Push developed a unique approach. "One of the things that we want to see is whether our free users are clever or not," Ken explains. "What do they do with your product? Do they do kind of the obvious or do they start playing around and doing some clever things? Because then they're probably from a pretty decent and mature team."

This strategy paid off spectacularly. Ken recalls how "the largest company in the world came to us, they'd been using us for six months before we really knew. And by the time they booked the first meeting with us, they'd like 13 people on the call and stuff. And they all knew everything about what we could do."

Breaking Industry Assumptions

Perhaps the most surprising insight from Silent Push's journey is that enterprise sales isn't necessarily harder than SMB. "It is just as easy to sell to the largest company in the world as the smallest," Ken asserts. "That's a complete illusion."

The key is market fit. As Ken explains, "The United States enterprise market is definitely far more open to new ideas... It's easier to start here and then take on the rest of the world than start somewhere incredibly difficult."

Looking ahead, Silent Push is focused on global expansion and reaching smaller companies through technical partnerships. But one thing remains clear: sometimes the conventional wisdom about B2B sales is completely wrong. The key is finding the right audience who truly values your innovation – regardless of their size.