Slashed budgets

Last week Mutiny, the website-conversion specialist, hosted a superb webinar on marketing in the current economic climate. Speakers included Jason Lemkin, Founder at SaaStr, Sarah Franklin, CMO at Salesforce, and Chris Koehler, CMO at Box. Mutiny’s community poll found 75% of teams have had or are preparing to have their marketing budgets cut.

So if you think it’s just your company slashing budgets, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Performance is taking a hammering worldwide.

The cybercrime boom

But, one booming industry is cyber security. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025.

When I was at Infosec last month, it didn’t look as if budgets were low at all – I saw two F1 cars on display within a few metres of each other. In our June Superuser Forum on cyber security, we discussed how the annual rise in cybercrime is likely to accelerate this year, through factors of cyber warfare, the great resignation, inflation and hybrid working.

Boards now regard cybersecurity as a business risk rather than an IT problem, according to a Gartner survey. Yet the British Computer Society found that only nine percent of organisations surveyed had resources they needed to tackle it.

This points to a shift in risk appetite. While marketing budgets are being slashed, investors and boards expect commercial performance to improve – only with a more risk-centric approach.

Ready to secure opportunity

It’s a perfect environment for cyber security companies to sell in. “We can help you keep the lights on while it’s scary out there.”

Of all the companies we’ve spoken to this year, cyber security ones have been the most engaged and I think this is a telling sign for the rest of the year.

That said, having worked with many cyber security firms over the years, they really struggle to differentiate and engage business leaders. They either leave money on the table when clients want something off-menu or fail to articulate wider business value.

Talking of value 

Our research at Tollejo keeps uncovering real dollar opportunities ($92m in 2021) for our clients with their existing customer base.

To do that, our clients deployed The Mirror – our customer research programme that finds money on the table and identifies the gaps in operational potential. (Yes, it holds up a mirror to your organisation.)

Have a lovely summer and I hope you get some time away.

Dan