# Selling with star power

By [Doug Lane](https://paragraph.com/@axalane) · 2022-03-30

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I’ve been thinking about what it would take for a buyer to **_want_** to talk to your company.

Like, instead of you needing to hammer them into submission with increasingly desperate emails and phone calls, they would actually seek you out.

Sounds improbable, right?

But consider the trend of vendors hiring industry analysts to be “field CTOs.”

It’s happened a bunch of times. But the best example in security was when Palo Alto Networks hired John Kindervag (aka “the creator of Zero Trust”) away from Forrester Research some years back.

Field CTO is basically another way of saying “really knowledgeable person who prospects and customers want to talk to.” Security startups can sometimes create this star power organically. Think about the charismatic CEO who is engaging on social media and quoted frequently when security industry news breaks.

But there are two problems with selling with star power:

1.  It’s hard to scale.
    
2.  It doesn’t help much at the top of the funnel (home of [our broken SDR model](https://mirror.xyz/axalane.eth/zZPra-wZnycVMLmwmGWolFE_44l8mFiqZA-xmhpvdMs)).
    

But I think both of these problems may be solvable.

Let’s explore this more tomorrow.

\-Doug

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*Originally published on [Doug Lane](https://paragraph.com/@axalane/selling-with-star-power)*