The challenge
iScan had innovative, patented cybersecurity technology and hundreds of customers, but growth had stalled.
The company was selling several products primarily to small businesses, where it faced price pressure and low margins. Leadership had hired an enterprise sales team to move upmarket, but the team was struggling to gain traction.
The technology was strong. The market position, ICP and sales narrative had not caught up.
Finding the higher-value market
We started with a focused discovery process: leadership and customer interviews, market research and competitive analysis.
The work surfaced an important disconnect. iScan’s technology could quantify security exposure as a financial risk. That capability had limited value to its existing small-business buyer. But for enterprise CISOs facing increasing scrutiny from boards and business leaders, it addressed a much more strategic problem:
How do we translate cyber risk into business risk?
That changed the ICP — and the value of the company’s technology.
Repositioning the company
Working with the leadership team, we repositioned iScan from a collection of SMB security products to an enterprise Data Breach Risk Intelligence platform.
The new position connected three things:
- Priority ICP: CISOs in medium and large enterprises
- Differentiated value: quantifying security exposure in financial terms
- Market context: increasing board-level accountability for cyber risk
The resulting growth narrative moved the conversation from security tools and technical features to business risk, financial exposure and executive decision-making. The core message became:
Data Breach Risk Intelligence: security matters when it’s connected to business results. Prioritize data breach risk in the language of the C-suite — dollars.
Activating the position
Positioning only creates value when the organization can use it.
We translated the new strategy into the tools Sales and Marketing needed to take it to market — the website narrative, sales presentation, partner materials, infographics and a cornerstone CISO benchmarking report. The result was a more connected GTM approach built around the same ICP, market position and narrative.
The result
Within six months of the repositioning, iScan was acquired by LOGICnow (subsequently acquired by SolarWinds). The Risk Intelligence positioning became part of the acquiring company’s portfolio.
View the acquisition announcement →
← Back to all posts“Jean helped us reposition our security product into a risk intelligence platform. It definitely worked well — we were acquired within six months.”