How Opal Security Sells Technical Depth to Non-Technical Buyers

How Opal Security Sells Technical Depth to Non-Technical Buyers

The conference room has three people. Your VP Engineering wants to discuss API architecture and integration patterns. Your CISO wants to know how this reduces audit findings. Your CFO wants ROI proof and budget justification. You have 45 minutes to convince all three that your technical product solves their completely different problems. Lose one, and the deal dies. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Umaimah Khan, CEO and Co-Founder of Opal Security, shared how her team mastered this exact challenge—selling sophisticated identity governance technology to buying committees where technical and business stakeholders have fundamentally different evaluation criteria.

The solution isn’t simplifying your product or choosing between audiences. It’s developing the ability to speak multiple languages fluently within the same conversation.

The Translation Problem in Technical Sales

Identity governance is inherently complex. It involves just-in-time access provisioning, privilege escalation workflows, entitlement mapping across dozens of systems, and integration with cloud infrastructure. These concepts matter deeply to engineers evaluating implementation feasibility. They mean almost nothing to executives evaluating business impact.

“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. This disconnect kills deals. Technical teams love your architecture. Business stakeholders see unnecessary complexity. The purchase stalls.

Opal’s breakthrough came from recognizing that the same technical capability can be expressed in completely different narratives depending on the audience. Dynamic access provisioning isn’t just an architectural pattern—it’s risk reduction, operational efficiency, and audit readiness packaged differently for different stakeholders.

Building Multi-Layered Narratives

The key to selling technical products to mixed audiences is creating narrative layers that connect at different levels without contradicting each other. For Opal, this meant developing three distinct but complementary value propositions from the same core product.

For engineering teams, conversations centered on technical implementation. API flexibility, integration depth, deployment architecture, workflow automation. These buyers needed to understand exactly how Opal would work in their environment and what operational burden it would add or remove.

For security leadership, the narrative shifted to risk frameworks. How does identity governance reduce attack surface? What visibility does it provide into access patterns? How does it support zero-trust architecture? “We started talking about identity governance as a strategic initiative, not just a compliance checkbox,” Umaimah explains.

For finance and executive teams, the discussion became about business outcomes. Audit efficiency, engineering time savings, reduced security incidents, compliance cost avoidance. These stakeholders didn’t need to understand OAuth flows—they needed to understand return on investment.

Reading the Room in Real-Time

Building different narratives helps, but enterprise sales rarely happen in sequential meetings with homogeneous audiences. The real challenge is navigating mixed stakeholder meetings where you need to address everyone simultaneously.

“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 requires more than prepared talking points. It demands real-time audience calibration. Watching body language. Noticing when technical details lose non-technical buyers. Understanding when business outcomes feel too abstract for technical evaluators. Knowing when to go deeper and when to move on.

Opal’s sales team developed a rhythm: establish technical credibility with engineering stakeholders early, then elevate the conversation to business impact for executives, while maintaining technical depth available on demand. The key is making technical stakeholders feel understood while ensuring business stakeholders stay engaged.

The Enablement Infrastructure Behind Translation

Developing this multi-stakeholder fluency required significant investment in sales enablement. Sales reps couldn’t just wing it in mixed meetings—they needed systematic preparation for every stakeholder type they’d encounter.

“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.”

Each enablement asset served specific stakeholder needs. Technical architecture documents for engineering evaluators. Risk reduction frameworks mapped to security standards for CISOs. Financial models showing total cost of ownership and value realization timelines for CFO discussions. Compliance matrices showing audit coverage for compliance teams.

This wasn’t just about having answers—it was about having the right answers in the right format for each stakeholder. Engineers wanted technical depth in documentation they could review offline. Executives wanted visual summaries they could present to boards. Finance wanted spreadsheets they could modify with their own assumptions.

When Technical Depth Becomes the Differentiator

Paradoxically, Opal’s ability to sell to non-technical buyers didn’t come from hiding technical complexity—it came from being so technically credible that business stakeholders trusted the underlying capabilities even when they didn’t fully understand them.

“When we started going upmarket and selling to Fortune 500 companies, we realized we needed to change our messaging,” Umaimah says. “We weren’t just selling to engineers anymore. We were selling to CISOs, to boards, to compliance teams.”

But maintaining technical depth remained critical. Non-technical stakeholders don’t need to understand every technical detail, but they need confidence that someone in their organization—usually the VP Engineering or security architect—has validated the technical approach. If your product can’t pass technical scrutiny, business value propositions become irrelevant.

Opal’s strategy was earning technical validation first, then using that credibility as foundation for business conversations. When the CISO asks if this really reduces risk, the answer carries more weight when it’s backed by the VP Engineering’s technical assessment.

The Problem Explanation Challenge

Selling identity governance presented an additional complexity: many enterprise buyers didn’t realize they had the problem Opal solved. This meant sales conversations needed an educational layer before value propositions even mattered.

“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.”

Problem education required different approaches for different stakeholders. For engineers, it meant demonstrating operational pain: manual access reviews, standing privileges that never get deprovisioned, access requests taking days. For CISOs, it meant showing risk exposure: privilege creep, lack of visibility, audit findings. For CFOs, it meant quantifying hidden costs: engineering time on access management, security incident costs, audit inefficiency.

The most effective problem education connected technical reality to business impact. Showing executives that 40% of employees have standing access to production databases is technical data. Translating that into regulatory risk and potential breach exposure is business impact.

What This Means for Technical Founders

Opal’s approach to multi-stakeholder selling reveals a framework for technical founders facing similar challenges. You don’t need to choose between technical depth and business accessibility. You need to develop the ability to express technical capabilities in multiple registers.

Build narrative layers that connect technical implementation to business outcomes. Invest in enablement materials for each stakeholder type. Train your team to read rooms and calibrate conversations in real-time. Use technical credibility as foundation for business discussions rather than treating them as opposing concerns.

The companies that succeed in enterprise technical sales aren’t the ones who simplify their products for business buyers. They’re the ones who maintain technical depth while developing fluency in business impact—speaking engineering to engineers and ROI to finance, often in the same meeting, without losing either audience.