ARTIFACT: The segmentation strategy that unlocked Corelight’s growth

This season of Spotlight On, we’re inviting guests to share artifacts—decks, emails, agendas, dashboards—from an inflection point in building their business. Together, they offer a wealth of wisdom on how great companies navigate pivotal moments.  

When you’re first bringing a new product to market, it’s tempting to think your TAM is your go-to-market strategy. You go wide with a small team and a great product. Six months later, deals are stalled in pipeline. 

This is what was happening for Corelight when the now CEO Brian Dye first joined the network detection company. He knew they had a strong sales team and a great product with organic, open-source adoption – so why was the sales pipeline a mess? He sat in on a few sales calls and immediately figured out what was happening. 

“We were talking to the wrong customers,” Brian told us on his recent Spotlight On interview. “We had to get really crisp on where we were playing and not playing because there is a segment of the market that we’re designed for, and there is a whole bunch of the market that we should not be talking to.  You can waste a tremendous amount of cycles trying to sell to the wrong customers, because you’re ultimately not going to win those deals.” 

That required a better understanding of what motivated their ideal customers. Corelight’s network detection and response platform works for companies of all sizes. Still, they found that the very biggest organizations – large enterprises or comparable government agencies – tended to have the most acute need for a tool with Corelight’s sophistication. They also found that teams that viewed cybersecurity as part of a more holistic risk mitigation and management strategy (the upper right “Risk” quadrant), rather than merely checking a box for compliance, were more likely to appreciate Corelight’s full capabilities. 

They created this segmentation strategy to map the market, and decided to focus on the upper right-hand corner of the map first before eventually expanding their product suite to serve the rest of the map. They zoomed in, and they started winning deals.‍

‍To hear more lessons on scaling and leadership from Brian Dye's journey leading Corelight, check out our entire Spotlight On episode with him.