How Flashpoint brings tomorrow’s buyers into today’s growth decisions

Building growth around a deeper understanding of buyers

Flashpoint is the largest private provider of threat intelligence, bringing proprietary data and insights to governments and large businesses around the world to help them to protect their people and assets.

Joe Sawyer, Chief Marketing Officer, leads marketing and business development. His approach to AI starts with the company’s growth goals: where can it help the team identify opportunities, create pipeline, and move buyers toward a decision?

Qualitate supports that work by giving Flashpoint a deeper understanding of the buyers it wants to reach. The team can explore unmet needs, test assumptions about new offerings, and understand what buyers will support before committing to a direction.

For Sawyer, that access also creates an opportunity to expand the value marketing brings to the business.

Making the CMO the authority on tomorrow’s buyers

Sawyer came to marketing leadership through industry research and operating roles in product and sales. That experience shaped his view of what a CMO should contribute to the executive team.

He sees a risk in becoming what he calls a “derivative CMO”: repeating signals gathered by sales, customer success, or company leadership without bringing an independent perspective on the market.

The opportunity is to understand the customers the company does not yet have and the needs its current strategy may not address.

“The answer to the identity crisis lies in the title itself, the market part of marketing,” Sawyer said.

Qualitate helps him put that mandate into practice. Direct buyer research gives marketing its own evidence to bring into discussions about where the business should invest, what it should build, and how it should go to market.

Hearing what existing relationships cannot tell you

Flashpoint already has valuable feedback from sellers speaking with prospects and customer success teams working with customers. Qualitate expands that view to include buyers outside the company’s pipeline and customer base.

Those conversations also create dedicated space to explore future plans and budgets. Sawyer can investigate where buyers intend to invest and what might prevent them from adopting a new offering - questions that can be difficult to explore in depth during everyday commercial interactions.

The setting matters, too. Buyers can speak candidly without a Flashpoint representative in the room.

“People give different feedback when you are in the room and when there’s a relationship or a context there. Here, they have no reason to hold back.”

Bringing buyer evidence into business decisions

Flashpoint’s AI monetization strategy offers one example of how that intelligence translates into action.

Through Qualitate, the team gathered input from more than 20 threat intelligence decision-makers across North America. The research explored their priorities, plans for agentic AI, and reactions to capabilities Flashpoint was considering.

Sawyer brought the findings into leadership and board discussions. At a leadership offsite, the research helped the team choose the monetization model it would move forward with.

For Sawyer, the value is having buyer evidence available while the business is making the decision. Qualitate makes research practical alongside launches and other work that would previously have been difficult to support with direct buyer input.

Making buyer intelligence part of how the company operates

Sawyer now wants to use Qualitate to revisit Flashpoint’s best-fit customers. Like many companies, Flashpoint’s understanding of its best-fit customer has developed through years of experience, sales data, and market feedback. He sees an opportunity to test those accumulated assumptions against what buyers need today.

That reflects his broader ambition for primary research: a regular part of how companies make consequential decisions.

As AI reduces the time and cost of gathering buyer feedback, Sawyer expects research to become more closely connected to the people building products, setting strategy, and taking offerings to market.

“With Qualitate now, direct buyer intelligence can be part of the operating decisions and it can move at the same speed that we need to move at in order to take advantage of opportunities in the market.”