In 2021 we were hired to take a data leak product into a market that had never heard of it.
The product answers a question most security teams have stopped asking: when a document leaks as a photograph of a screen, who took the picture. It had customers at home and none in the Middle East, and the company wanted to know whether the region was worth the effort before spending on it.
What we did
Four weeks of customer development first. Twenty or more interviews across government, healthcare, banking and insurance, to hear the problem described by the people who own it before anyone pitched anything. Then three months of outbound into the segments the interviews pointed at.
The interview month paid for the other three
The security buyer in this region sits in a large organisation and hears a vendor pitch every week. The four weeks of interviews were what let the outbound that followed open with the buyer's own words. Government and banking came back with the sharpest description of the problem, and that is where the three budgeted projects came from.
A hundred and eight meetings in three months is a high rate for a niche product, and the twelve qualified leads show the honest ratio underneath: most conversations confirm the problem and go no further. Three with budget is the number that mattered.
What it shows
Interview before you sell, and let the interviews choose the segment. A product nobody has heard of does not get a hearing on its features; it gets one because the caller can describe the buyer's own leak better than the buyer can.