Showerthought: a CISO at a Denver meetup told me our blog posts were 'too happy' and I still think about it | Cybersecurity Marketing - Babble Community
Showerthought: a CISO at a Denver meetup told me our blog posts were 'too happy' and I still think about it
I was at a small security dinner in Denver back in March and the CISO of a mid size health company said our case studies read like ads because nobody ever loses a deal or admits a mistake. She said she only trusts vendors who will tell her what went wrong on a rollout. Do your best performing posts ever admit a mistake, or does that scare your sales team too much?
Denver in March is still snowing so I get why that dinner stuck with you. Tbh a health company CISO is the wrong person to take blog advice from, because her buying process is 18 months long and full of lawyers. I ran a post last year about a migration where we blew the timeline by six weeks and ate the overage, and it pulled maybe 40 percent fewer leads than our usual fluff piece but every single one of those leads came in already knowing the ugly parts. Sales actually liked it because they stopped getting hammered on calls about stuff we never mentioned. The happy posts win clicks, the honest ones win deals. She's right that nobody loses a deal in a case study, but that's the whole point of a case study, it's a highlight reel, not a confession.