Stop Blaming Your Marketing Budget

Funda Celebi | Cybersecurity Marketing Expert

Early in my career, I was the “everything else” person at a cybersecurity startup. My job covered every responsibility that didn’t involve writing code or pentesting. When our deals started hitting a wall or the pipeline dried up, I had a favorite scapegoat: the budget. I was convinced we just didn’t have enough firepower. I thought if we only had more cash for ads, more sales reps hitting the phones, and a bigger marketing team, we’d be flying.

It took me years of watching tiny teams with shoestring budgets absolutely smoke us to realize I had it completely backward. In cybersecurity, you can’t just buy your way into a CISO’s calendar. I was trying to put premium gas into a car that didn’t have an engine.

Now, when I sit down with leadership teams wondering why their growth has gone flat, I don’t ask about their spend. I ask one question: “Does anyone actually understand why they should buy from you?”

That question usually stops the room cold. Because when I work with companies across different sectors, I see one recurring mistake that transcends industry lines: treating growth as purely a marketing or sales activity.

In reality, sustainable global success is an orchestration, not a solo performance. It only happens when product, messaging, channels, and operations move in total alignment. Think of it like a four-engine jet. If one engine is misfiring or thrusting in a different direction, you don’t fly higher. You spin.

Most companies start by launching a marketing campaign when they should have started with a strategy. If your foundational positioning is off, even the most expensive, creatively brilliant campaign is like shouting at someone in a language they don’t understand. You’ll be heard, but you won’t be understood, and you certainly won’t be chosen.

Consider a scenario playing out right now in the cybersecurity sector. A company develops a brilliant, technically superior security product. Their website hero banner screams: “We have a Zero Trust architecture powered by proprietary AI and ML.”

To the engineers who built it, this is music to their ears. It describes the what and the how. But the chief information security officer, the person signing the check, is listening for something entirely different. The CISO is lying awake at 3 a.m. worried about a data breach that could cost them their job. They don’t wake up wanting “Zero Trust.” They wake up wanting zero liability.

What the CISO actually needs to hear is a translation of that technical expertise into business safety. Which specific regulatory risk, like GDPR or HIPAA, does this reduce for me? How does this integrate with the $2 million SIEM solution I already have, so I don’t have to rip and replace anything? Why is your solution better than the status quo, which, while imperfect, feels safe enough?

Without this clarity, your sales cycles don’t just slow down. They stall indefinitely. The product goes into a “competitive review” black hole, never to be seen again. This isn’t a marketing failure. It’s a positioning failure.

At its simplest, positioning is the strategic act of planning how you want your target audience to perceive you, and then communicating it with the surgical precision of a laser rather than the scatter-shot approach of a shotgun. Technically, it defines who the product is for, the specific problem it solves, how it differs from competitors in a way that matters, and, most critically, why the customer should care enough to change their behavior.

In a market where every vendor is shouting “We are the fastest” or “We are AI-driven,” phrases that have become almost meaningless due to overuse, positioning is the lens that clears the fog for the customer. It is the difference between being a vendor and being a strategic partner.

This is where the rubber meets the road. You don’t have one product. You have a solution that provides different value to different roles. The failure to articulate this is why many deals get stuck, scattered across various stakeholders with no consensus.

Take a standard customer relationship management platform. The codebase is identical, but the value proposition must shapeshift depending on the audience.

For sales teams, the users, it is about acceleration. Accelerate your pipeline. Automate your data entry. Know exactly who to call next so you can hit your quota and earn your commission. The value is ease and personal gain.

For the CEO, the visionary, it is about predictability. Make revenue predictable. Give me a live, accurate forecast so I can confidently guide the company through the next quarter. The value is control and stability.

For operations and finance, the gatekeepers, it is about efficiency. Consolidate fragmented processes into one source of truth. Cut the costs of maintaining three different legacy systems and reduce data redundancy. The value is efficiency and cost savings.

The product is the same. The feature set is the same. But the value perception is wildly different. If your sales deck only speaks to the sales team, the CEO and CFO will kill the deal for reasons the sales rep never even understood. And no amount of marketing spend can fix that.