Vali Cyber’s Multi-Stakeholder Messaging Framework for Enterprise Security

Enterprise security sales require convincing multiple stakeholders with different priorities and technical depth. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Vali Cyber CTO Austin Gadient revealed their framework for messaging across the decision chain.

Understanding the Enterprise Security Buying Chain

“You have to be able to speak to all those different folks,” Austin explains. “The CISO is typically the person you have to intrigue first because they’re the one that sets the agenda and the overall strategy for the organization.”

This initial engagement with CISOs requires a different approach than communicating with technical practitioners. “We’ve developed different types of messaging for different types of people that we interact with,” Austin notes. “We do have higher level messaging which is focused on kind of big picture stuff, and lower level, more technical messaging for those folks that are going to be more hands on with the product.”

Technical Practitioners: Beyond Marketing Speak

For technical teams evaluating the product, traditional marketing approaches can backfire. “Technical buyers are not people that respond to marketing hype and fluff… Once they hear that sort of language, I think it turns them off very quickly,” Austin shares.

Instead, Vali Cyber focused on validation and transparency. They built open-source tools that allowed technical teams to verify performance claims independently. “We built some tools that make it easier for someone to validate our claims. One of them is called security perfect… Because that tool is open source, anyone can go with the code, you can run it themselves.”

CISOs: Strategic Value and Differentiation

For CISOs, the messaging focused on strategic differentiation and business impact. “Linux is all over the place. Something that we learned along the way is that there’s a best of breed product, which is what we are, which is what zero walk is,” Austin explains. “Then you also have platform plays and platform plays really focus on covering every type of system out there.”

This positioning helps CISOs understand where Vali Cyber fits in their security stack. “Different types of customers are going to prefer these sorts of approaches depending on how much they care about the actual security of their systems as opposed to coverage.”

Building Trust Through Transparency

Across all stakeholders, maintaining transparency about capabilities was crucial. “I think it was very important to be transparent and truthful about what we’re providing and what our product could and could not do,” Austin notes. “You definitely don’t want to oversell. I think that’s very easy way to lose a customer early on if you try to promise things that aren’t true.”

For B2B founders navigating complex enterprise sales, Vali Cyber’s experience highlights the importance of crafting distinct but aligned messages for different stakeholders. Their framework shows how to maintain technical credibility while still communicating strategic value to executive decision-makers.