Sales is a CISO superpower (whether you like it or not)

Here’s the hard truth: as a cyber security leader, if you can’t sell security, you won’t get the funding, prioritization, or behavioral change required to make it real.

In our industry, "sales" is often treated as a lesser skill - commercial, transactional, even manipulative. Yet the reality is that modern security leadership is fundamentally an influence role. Every budget request, roadmap negotiation, policy change, and customer assurance conversation is a sales moment.If you can’t persuade executives that a risk matters, align engineering on priorities, or translate security initiatives into business value, even the best security strategy will stall.

Drawing on an unconventional journey from cyber security sales executive to Head of Cyber Security at a global SaaS company, this session challenges the industry’s discomfort with the word sales and reframes it as a core leadership capability.

We’ll explore the five sales skills every effective CISO must master, how they show up in real security leadership scenarios, and practical techniques to develop them. Attendees will leave with practical tools to strengthen their influence, align stakeholders more effectively, and position security as a business enabler rather than a blocker.

Because if security is going to move beyond being perceived as a cost center, we must embrace the very skill that drives business momentum.In the end, if you can’t sell it, you can’t secure it.