Keep on carving, because a narrow and precise focus is everything

As you can see from my previous post on building a niche for your cybersecurity SaaS marketing program, there isn’t much focus at the very beginning of the exercise. The first four steps end up creating multiple problem statements and personas to target. It’s only in step five that when the organization begins testing its niche identification with potential CISOs, it begins to understand what makes a potential buyer tick. By the end of the exercise, they had been able to craft a very rough product message: 

Defensible financial reporting for CISOs.

Once you have identified your niche and crafted a rough product message, it’s time to start testing and refining various versions of it. These messages should resonate deeply with your target audience and communicate your product or service’s value to their specific challenges. To be successful in this niche-carving stage, you must avoid generic marketing language and jargon, as it will dilute your message and fail to emphasize unique pain points. When messaging to your niche audience, use language that speaks directly to needs and aspirations. You need to show a deep understanding of your buyer’s industry, challenges, and goals. Doing so will establish trust and credibility, positioning your company as a reliable partner in a customer’s cybersecurity journey. 

The results of transforming from a generalist to a specialist 

In the early stages of a SaaS cybersecurity startup, the allure of becoming a generalist is understandable. 

Founders may believe that offering a broad range of features and capabilities will attract a larger customer base and provide a competitive advantage. Additionally, they might use it to address various customer needs and adapt to changing market demands.

But it’s hard to sell mediocre

Developing and maintaining a comprehensive and fully integrated platform requires significant resources, time, and effort. It often leads to challenges such as prioritization issues, feature bloat, and diluted brand identity. Trying to excel in multiple areas can result in mediocre performance across the board rather than excelling in a specific domain. 

The compounding power of specialization

On the other hand, embracing specialization and carving out a niche offers SaaS cybersecurity companies a clearer direction and an opportunity to stand out. By focusing on a specific area or pain point within the industry, these companies can channel their efforts, resources, and expertise to excel in providing tailored solutions for a target audience.

When a SaaS cybersecurity company specializes in a niche, several benefits come to light:

Market differentiation

 Specialization differentiates the company from competitors, helping to establish a unique market position and a strong value proposition. This clarity attracts customers seeking a solution precisely tailored to their needs. Starting with a drawer full of dull knives can be frustrating. You can get much more accomplished with one good knife.

Deep expertise

 Focusing on a niche allows the company to develop deep expertise and understanding of the challenges faced by its target audience. This expertise fosters trust and credibility among customers, as they see the company as an authority in the specific domain. In sales conversations, it allows the focus to be on a meaningful solution rather than words salad or layers of “wrapping paper.”

Higher customer satisfaction

Tailored solutions lead to higher customer satisfaction. Customers are more likely to choose a SaaS provider that meets their specific needs rather than a one-size-fits-all platform. Once you get these satisfied customers you can use them in your marketing materials to amplify your niche’s core value proposition. 

Easier market penetration

Entering a new market or industry becomes more manageable when the SaaS company focuses on a specific niche. The company can align its marketing efforts with the needs and preferences of the target audience, making the message more resonant. Especially if a “partnership” program becomes part of the product distribution strategy, it allows you to penetrate the most sought-after firms and individuals who often act as channel gatekeepers. These individuals have built long-standing relationships over time and can help accelerate your niche’s adoption on a much faster and broader scale. 

Brand identity and recognition

Do one thing and do it very well. This is the cornerstone of niche carving. Building a strong brand identity within a niche market fosters recognition and loyalty among customers. As your company becomes synonymous with expertise in that area, word-of-mouth referrals become more frequent.

Potential for Expansion

You can’t grow if you don’t have good healthy ground that’s been properly maintained and nurtured. Once the SaaS company establishes a strong foothold in its niche, it can gradually expand its offerings to adjacent areas while retaining its core expertise. This organic growth allows for steady expansion without diluting the company's focus.

When the lazy boy and blabber boy meet 

The biggest obstacles to niche carving often lie in your very own marketing team. I have encountered two memorable characters that often inadvertently puncture the tires of your marketing vehicle. Often they are interchangeable. They are the lazy boy and the blabber boy. Succinctly put they often talk a great deal about strategy, sit on calls, and make detailed lists about what they are going to do

These individuals often have grandiose ambitions when they enter an organization. They want to do big things—and make monumental changes on a grand scale. Their strategies are often very detailed. Unfortunately, the outcomes usually are dependent on long timelines, consultants, and months of research. If they can’t move the needle in the first ninety days, they may need to get re-educated on focus. Often, they have the following strategic statements they throw at the executive team to placate their broad focus:

• “No need to put all our eggs in one basket, let’s throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and see what sticks.”

• “Let’s pick three more messages to focus on in this quarter, it will be great for message testing.”

• “We need to redo the entire website. Without a strong website, we won’t get any leads.”

If you hear any variations of these statements, your organization is in trouble. This is the opposite of building a niche. 

Stay tuned for my next post as i discuss what to do if your company is focused on being a generalist organization!

Letting go of everything else

Defining a niche as a cybersecurity marketer requires humility as a company (and you as the marketer!) must admit you can’t defend and protect everything. For startups, this is a cold and hard truth that needs to be recognized. You will not become an operating system for cybersecurity risk management—not on day one as a vision and probably not on day one thousand, as an executed strategy. 

Certain CEOs at large public cybersecurity companies have come out to say that buyers want more integrated products. But it's important to understand their message is catered specifically to their advantage—they already have a significant customer base, have stable cash flow, and have incredible brand recognition. After a decade of being a niche, they now want to become generalists. This is an outlier situation that must be avoided as a startup. Startup founders often must start with nothing but a few close relationships to build trust.

The term "niche" originated from the French language and was used in architecture to describe a recess or hollow space in a wall that displayed a statue or ornament. Over time, the term evolved, becoming a metaphor in business and marketing, emphasizing the importance of finding a unique space within an industry. The carving begins in the mind as an ideation phase, continuing long in the digital realm of features and capabilities. 

While becoming a generalist may seem like a tempting route, it often leads to a lack of coherence and disconnection with customers. Instead, focusing on a niche allows companies to hone their expertise, build authentic connections, and excel in solving very specific problems that have a strong emotional connection with the buyer. In the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, carving out a niche is essential for companies seeking sustainable success and market dominance. By choosing the niche path and embracing it wholeheartedly, cybersecurity companies can embody Frost's sentiment and embark on a journey that leads to a fulfilling destination – a successful and impactful position in the market.

 Finding your niche direction 

Selecting a niche is not just about making one decision; it's a strategic process that requires careful consideration and a deep understanding of the market and customers. While some companies might fear narrowing their focus, it's crucial to recognize that finding a niche doesn't mean limiting opportunities; instead, it enables businesses to excel in a specific area and create a strong foundation for growth.

The process of identifying the right niche involves thorough research and analysis. Here are seven essential steps to help guide companies in finding their focused direction. They should be ultimately compiled into a single-page document with a conclusion of a few sentences reached per step:

1. Market Research: Start by understanding the broader market landscape. Identify trends, pain points, and unmet needs that exist within the cybersecurity industry. Look for gaps in the market where your expertise can make a significant impact.

An example: 

The reporting of cybersecurity risks is too vague (heatmaps and t-shirt sizes) and creates tensions at the board level. There is doubt of preparedness and resilience to potential high financial impact cyber-attacks. Cybersecurity reporting is too technical. Stakeholder understanding would be enhanced if the language of bits and bytes could be translated to dollars and cents. 

Niche, not Quiche

Marketers in the cybersecurity industry don't build products. We must work with what has been given to us by a higher power. This higher power is not some deity or magical force; rather, it's the voice and vision coming from the very top of the organization. How does this all begin? For starters, the executive team will collaborate to determine the company's direction, with an end goal in mind and an ideal state they wish to achieve. However, executing this strategy is far from easy. The road to success is often fraught with doubt and debate,  as well as the frequent clash of various egos and insecurities among the organization’s top decision-makers. As marketers, we often wait on the sidelines and are either blessed with clear direction or become cursed to navigate a maze filled with obstacles often compounded by a thick fog of incompetence from above. 

There are a lot of phonies out there who claim they have built cybersecurity products. You can spot them quickly by their indecisiveness to act and produce measurable results in a limited time frame. The executive team's product strategy should be one page long and take a few weeks to develop. Anyone who needs months to develop a product strategy should not be privileged to have an executive-level position. The devil may be in the details, but the devil is also a ticking time bomb. Choosing the right path to success is critical, and in the cybersecurity world, there are essentially two choices your leadership can make when building a product for the masses. 

Path 1: Become generalists and serve multiple buyer groups.

Path 2: Be selective and carve out a niche

In Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken," the speaker faces a similar decision – two paths diverge, and he must choose one, accepting the inevitability of missing out on the other. Just like Frost, cybersecurity companies must choose a path and embrace it fully. Although seemingly attractive, the path of the generalist often leads to a lack of direction, a myriad of poorly developed features, and a diluted brand message. On the other hand, the path of the niche builder will lead to distinctiveness, competitive advantage, and customer loyalty. So there is one choice—to embrace the niche wholeheartedly.