Markets in SaaS, AI, and cybersecurity are crowded and noisy, and early stage companies often struggle to be heard beside larger, well‑funded players. While many try to keep pace with competitors through volume or visibility, real progress comes from understanding who truly drives the purchase decision. For Jonathan Buckley, breakthrough happens when companies focus on the buyers who care most about the problem they solve.
“Your message must shift from what the product does to what the product changes inside the customer’s business,” says Buckley, a seasoned enterprise marketing strategist who helps early stage B2B tech companies define their real buyers and build clear, outcome‑focused go-to-market foundations. Traction improves when companies identify the true decision-makers and clearly articulate the business changes those buyers value. In crowded markets where larger competitors dominate attention, this level of precision becomes essential for earning early momentum. The real advantage, then, lies not in outspending competitors, but in out-understanding them.
Positioning for Outcomes, Not Features
Feature-level differentiation has a short shelf life in AI and cybersecurity because competitors quickly match or narrow functional gaps. This makes it harder for early stage teams to stand out by relying on product capabilities alone. “AI claims are hardly differentiated these days,” he says, which is why once a company understands its true buyer landscape, it must rethink how value is communicated. For AI, where claims are abundant and sometimes inflated, tying technology to measurable business outcomes becomes essential. For cybersecurity, where threats continuously evolve, outcomes such as risk reduction, onboarding speed, or compliance acceleration resonate more effectively than protocol-level detail.
Winning Through Education
Across SaaS, AI, and security markets, buyers tend to reward brands that teach rather than those that promote. “You’re going to win through education, not promotion,” says Buckley, who encourages early stage founders to build thought leadership, publish insights that contextualize problems, and share knowledge ahead of pitching product. Take CrowdStrike, which, in its early growth phase, built trust by publishing threat intelligence reports and educating the market about evolving attack patterns. This educational strategy positioned them as credible advisors and helped them rise above competitors with similar technical claims.
AI as a Force Multiplier for Go to Market
Ironically, though many early stage companies build AI products, they often underutilize AI within their own go to market processes. But that is changing.“A single person now can do what five or six people needed to do five years ago,” he says. The potential of AI here is significant given how many people must be involved in an enterprise purchase. Most decisions involve six or seven stakeholders, each with different priorities, which means a single message will never be enough. By using AI to tailor and scale these touchpoints, startups can reach each persona several times with relevant, timely communication. When done well, this steady, multi-channel cadence builds familiarity, trust, and ultimately demand.
Forward‑thinking marketers should already be building fluency in these methods, otherwise they will struggle to compete with teams that can deliver personalized, relevant, multi-touch engagement at scale. “These tools are very powerful in accomplishing multi-channel personalizing of messaging.” For him, successful teams supply context, set clear prompts, and maintain human oversight while letting AI handle volume, variation, and speed.
Adopting a Continuous Learning Loop
Buckley’s framework distills years of pattern recognition from some of the most innovative sectors in technology. One of his most consequential principles is that early stage marketing works best when it mirrors product development, with teams iterating quickly, testing assumptions, and learning in real time. “Make sure your product people and your marketing people and your sales people are tied together and reviewing results in near real time,” he says.
Readers can connect with Jonathan W. Buckley on LinkedIn or learn more through his website.
