7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Scaling Opal Security to $50M ARR

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Scaling Opal Security to $50M ARR

Building enterprise security software requires solving two problems simultaneously: creating technology sophisticated enough for technical buyers and packaging it for executive decision-makers who control budgets. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Umaimah Khan, CEO and Co-Founder of Opal Security, shared how her team navigated this challenge while scaling to $50 million in ARR. Here are the tactical lessons that shaped their go-to-market strategy.

Engineer-Led Sales Beats Top-Down Compliance Mandates

Opal’s first critical decision was choosing their initial buyer persona. Rather than targeting compliance officers or security managers—the traditional buyers for identity governance tools—they focused on engineering teams. “We really focused on engineering led sales,” Umaimah explains. “So our ICP was companies who had an engineering culture, who are building technology.”

This wasn’t just about product positioning. It fundamentally changed how Opal approached product development, documentation, and sales conversations. The product needed API-first architecture, seamless integrations, and flexibility that engineers demanded. Sales materials emphasized technical capabilities over compliance checkboxes.

The payoff came in adoption velocity and retention. When engineers chose Opal to solve their access management problems, implementation was faster and usage was higher. These technical champions became internal advocates, making the eventual enterprise-wide rollout significantly easier.

Transitioning Upmarket Requires New Narratives, Not Just Features

Many technical founders assume enterprise sales is about adding features—more integrations, better security certifications, enterprise SLAs. Umaimah discovered the shift required fundamentally different positioning. “When we started going upmarket and selling to Fortune 500 companies, we realized we needed to change our messaging,” she notes. “We weren’t just selling to engineers anymore. We were selling to CISOs, to boards, to compliance teams.”

The product remained largely the same. The conversation changed entirely. Instead of discussing technical architecture and API capabilities, enterprise conversations centered on risk frameworks, audit readiness, and business impact. “We started talking about identity governance as a strategic initiative, not just a compliance checkbox,” Umaimah explains.

This required creating multiple narrative tracks for different stakeholders in the same organization. The technical buyer needed depth on implementation. The CISO needed proof of risk reduction. The CFO needed ROI models. Success meant orchestrating all these conversations simultaneously without losing coherence.

Master Multi-Stakeholder Selling Before You Need It

Enterprise deals rarely involve single decision-makers. Opal’s sales team had to learn how to navigate complex buying committees where technical, security, compliance, and finance stakeholders each had different priorities. “You’re trying to explain why dynamic access is more secure than standing privileges, but the person across the table just wants to know if this helps them pass their SOC 2 audit,” Umaimah describes.

The solution wasn’t dumbing down technical concepts—it was developing the ability to translate technical depth into business outcomes. “We had to get really good at reading the room,” Umaimah says. “Sometimes you’re presenting to a mixed audience—CISO, CFO, and head of engineering all in the same meeting. You need to address everyone’s concerns without losing anyone.”

This skill became a competitive advantage. While competitors struggled to bridge technical and business conversations, Opal’s team could speak both languages fluently, moving seamlessly between architecture discussions and boardroom business cases.

Category Creation Starts with Problem Education

Opal wasn’t competing in an established market with clear definitions and understood buyer needs. Cloud-native identity governance was nascent. Most companies didn’t realize they had the problem Opal solved. “We spent a lot of time educating the market,” Umaimah explains. “Writing content, doing webinars, speaking at conferences—all focused on why identity governance needs to evolve for modern infrastructure.”

This educational approach extended directly into sales cycles. “We often spent the first meeting just explaining the problem, not even talking about our solution,” Umaimah notes. “Many companies didn’t realize they had an identity governance problem until we showed them their own access data.”

The strategy required patience. Early sales cycles were longer because Opal was simultaneously selling the category and the product. But it created sustainable competitive moats. By the time prospects understood they needed modern identity governance, they’d learned about the category from Opal. The company wasn’t just a vendor—they were the trusted authority who educated the market.

Professionalize Sales Infrastructure Before It Becomes a Bottleneck

Reaching $50 million ARR meant transforming from scrappy startup sales to enterprise sales operations. “We had to professionalize everything,” Umaimah says. “Hire experienced enterprise AEs, build out sales engineering, create proper deal review processes, implement Salesforce correctly—all the blocking and tackling of enterprise sales.”

This wasn’t glamorous work, but it was essential. The team created detailed battle cards for competitive situations, developed ROI calculators that finance teams trusted, and built reference architectures for different deployment scenarios. “We created detailed battle cards, competitive positioning documents, ROI calculators, reference architectures,” Umaimah explains. “Our sales team needed to handle objections about budget, timing, competitive alternatives, and technical requirements—often all in the same deal.”

Sales enablement became a force multiplier. New reps ramped faster. Deal cycles shortened. Win rates improved. The infrastructure investment paid dividends as the team scaled.

Align Compensation with Strategic Priorities

As Opal shifted focus from mid-market to enterprise, compensation structures needed to reflect strategic priorities. “We structured our sales comp to reward larger deals with better margins,” Umaimah notes. “We wanted our team focused on enterprise accounts, not churning through small deals.”

This alignment mattered more than it seemed. Without proper incentives, sales teams naturally gravitate toward easier wins—smaller deals with shorter cycles. Enterprise sales requires longer relationship building, more stakeholder management, and higher risk of deals falling through. Compensation needed to make enterprise focus the rational choice.

The change worked. Sales teams invested time in strategic accounts, built deeper relationships with enterprise buyers, and focused on deals that moved the revenue needle significantly.

Balance Technical Depth with Executive Accessibility

Perhaps Opal’s most important lesson was maintaining technical credibility while becoming executive-friendly. Many technical products lose their edge when they try to appeal to business buyers. Others remain so technical that they can’t penetrate enterprise accounts.

Opal threaded this needle by serving both audiences without compromise. The product remained technically sophisticated, with all the depth that engineering teams demanded. But the company built the positioning, sales process, and supporting materials that made executive sales possible.

The lesson for technical founders: you don’t have to choose between technical buyers and business buyers. You need to serve both, with different conversations that ultimately connect to the same powerful solution. The companies that master this dual fluency—technical depth and business impact—unlock enterprise growth without sacrificing product excellence.