What ISMG Editors Are Seeing in the Field

Contributions from Tom Field, SVP of Editorial, Matthew Perry, VP of Editorial, and Katie Hinderliter, Director, Events & Operations.

If you want to know what’s really happening in cybersecurity, don’t ask a vendor. Ask the people who spend their days in rooms full of practitioners with no agenda beyond understanding the problem.

That’s the vantage point ISMG’s editors occupy. At our roundtables, workshops and dinners across the country, they sit shoulder to shoulder with CISOs and security leaders and they’re trusted precisely because they aren’t perceived as sellers. They bring intellectual curiosity instead of a pitch. Our news may not always be first to break, but it goes deeper, and that depth is what earns practitioners’ candor.

“ISMG’s editors prize the time we get to spend talking to the practitioners,” says Tom Field, senior vice president of editorial at ISMG. “Talking to the people who are responding to the threats and building out governance processes in real time is the bleeding edge for us. It’s at the roundtables and other events that we can validate what we’re reporting and maintain a virtuous feedback loop with our audience.”

“We’ve never chased being first. Anyone can be first,” Field adds. “What our audience counts on us for is context — what a story means for the person who has to defend a network on Monday morning. Depth is the differentiator, and depth is what these rooms run on.”

The depth and analysis we focus on in our reporting helps you reach further, too — and it translates directly to how we run our roundtable events. But only if you know how to play the game. And the game is won by sitting back and building trust, not by leaning in with a pitch.

Here’s what our editors are seeing on the ground, and what it means for how you show up.

Return-to-office may have happened across much of the economy, but cybersecurity remains an outlier. Many practitioners are still at home, heads down in technical work, connecting with peers mostly through screens. Even years past the pandemic, the profession simply doesn’t bond the way it used to.

Which is exactly why the invitation lands so hard.

The moment a practitioner gets invited to an in-person roundtable, something shifts in their brain. Security professionals have built tight communities in their cities, and they jump at the chance to sit across the table from peers and mentors they otherwise only see in a Zoom grid. The appetite for genuine, face-to-face connection is stronger than it’s been in years — and our editors see it in every room.

I learned this firsthand almost immediately. When I first started at ISMG (for the first time) in 2019, back at CyberTheory, a CISO from Los Angeles called my phone — wrong extension, as it turned out — asking to be added to one of our roundtables. Think about that for a moment: a senior C-level executive picking up the phone and calling us, requesting a seat at the table. That was a first in my book. It shows how much our events are loved, and it’s why we seem to run one every day of the year.

For marketers, that’s the opportunity: to build trust where there’s already demand. While much of traditional cybersecurity marketing and engagement is positioned as “creating demand,” ISMG takes a different approach — fulfilling demand where it already exists.

You’d assume roundtable conversations stay theoretical — big-picture strategy, frameworks, threat trends. That’s not always the case. Practitioners are genuinely happy to see how your product or solution helps solve the problems they’re wrestling with.

But the way you engage has to be positioned completely differently than a sales conversation. Instead of pitching, our objective is always to get practitioners around a table discussing how they each approach a shared problem. Your product will show up in that conversation — organically, in context, as part of how the problem gets solved.

We often advise sponsors to let their solution be a guiding light in the background, not an opera singer commanding the stage and blowing notes at the audience. When the product emerges naturally from the discussion, practitioners lean in to what you have to say. Obviously, you won’t stay silent — but you should let the audience do 80% of the talking while you take notes and act as a social listener. There’s a great deal of talk about intent data in this industry, and sitting at a live event is the highest-quality intent data you can get.

Obviously, you won’t stay silent — but you should let the audience do 80% of the talking while you take notes and act as a social listener.

Ideally, the sponsor brings a subject matter expert. An SME lends credibility: practitioners can tell within minutes whether the person across the table has actually lived the problem, and a technical peer earns a different kind of respect than a commercial one.

“Your SME’s title should mirror the titles in the room,” says Katie Hinderliter, director of events and operations at ISMG. “If you want CISOs at the table, send a CISO or a field CISO — the entire evening is built to be a peer-level conversation. When a sales or marketing title gets proposed as the speaker, we push back immediately. That’s not a stylistic preference. It’s the difference between a room that opens up and a room that stays polite.”

Our events team has a rule of thumb that makes the choice simple: your SME’s title should mirror the titles in the room.

But it doesn’t always work out. Sometimes the client simply can’t provide an SME — schedules, travel, staffing. And here’s a truth worth acknowledging: even when an SME is available, deep expertise doesn’t guarantee storytelling skill. A brilliant engineer who can’t hold a room may do less for the evening than a well-prepared speaker who knows the material and, more importantly, knows how to listen.

The practical answer is to plan for both scenarios. If you have an SME, brief them on the format — this is a conversation, not a conference talk. If you don’t, send someone fluent enough in the problem space to engage credibly, and coach them to ask questions rather than answer them.

There’s always an uncomfortable scenario to prepare for: what happens when a sponsor can’t send an SME at all, and the only person available is a sales or marketing rep?

It’s rare — our events team estimates it comes up in maybe 5% of engagements — but it happens, and there’s a playbook for it. The first move is honesty: when we see a sales or marketing title proposed as the speaker, we push back right away and advise against it. These events are built on peer trust, and a commercial title at the head of the table works against everything the format is designed to do.

If the sponsor truly can’t make a switch, the work moves to preparation. Our events and editorial teams get on a call with the proposed speaker to firmly walk through the format — the no-pitching rule above all — and to gauge something harder to teach: whether they’re conversational enough to lead a discussion without defaulting to selling. Selling is muscle memory for a good rep. The question is whether they can leave that muscle at the door for one evening.

Our events and editorial teams get on a call with the proposed speaker to firmly walk through the format — the no-pitching rule above all — and to gauge something harder to teach: whether they’re conversational enough to lead a discussion without defaulting to selling.

If they can, we’ll sometimes go a step further and massage how their title appears on the event landing page — removing references to sales, product, growth or business development — so attendees walk in ready for a peer discussion rather than bracing for a pitch.

But here’s the candid part, and it’s worth sitting with if you’re a marketer weighing this trade-off: of that 5% of cases, our events team reports that nearly 95% of those reps fail to lead the discussion well. Rarely, if ever, does a sales rep succeed as a roundtable speaker. The prep helps. The title massage helps. But there’s no substitute for a speaker the room accepts as a peer — which is why solving the SME question early is one of the best investments a sponsor can make.

“Guarded doesn’t mean they have nothing to say — every person at that table is sitting on stories,” says Matt Perry, vice president of editorial at ISMG. “Our job in the first twenty minutes is to ask questions that invite experience instead of opinion. Once one person tells you about the night everything went sideways, the rest of the table gives itself permission to match it. Rush that, and you spend the whole dinner getting position statements.”

That’s where a skilled moderator earns their keep — opening with questions that invite experience rather than opinion, letting one candid story give the rest of the table permission to match it. Once the first CISO shares a war story, the dam usually breaks. The mistake is rushing it. Trust in these rooms is built in the first twenty minutes or not at all.

Most roundtables open with an icebreaker before dinner. Fewer think about what happens during. That’s a missed opportunity our teams are actively working on: how do you keep the energy and connection alive through the meal itself, rather than letting the evening settle into side conversations?

There’s no single formula yet — structured discussion prompts between courses, a rotating question, a moment where each guest shares a lesson learned the hard way. What matters is intentionality. The dinners people remember, and talk about afterward, are the ones designed as an experience rather than a meeting with food.

Behind every roundtable that looks effortless is weeks of work. Recruitment takes time — assembling the right mix of practitioners in a given city doesn’t happen overnight. But the payoff of that runway is that everyone goes in prepared: a defined topic, clear talking points and a moderator who knows where the conversation should go and where it shouldn’t.

The best results come when editors and sponsors treat prep as a shared exercise. The editor brings the practitioner’s perspective and the questions that will open people up; the sponsor brings the problem-space expertise and the outcomes they hope to learn about. Align those before the invitations go out, and the evening runs itself.

The framing matters as much as the format. These events work when they’re positioned as what practitioners actually want: educational networking. It gives them the chance to compare notes with peers and makes for a memorable evening that feels like community, not a funnel stage.

Because when a dozen security leaders talk candidly about their challenges, their vendor frustrations and their priorities for the next budget cycle, you’re getting something no analyst report can give you. You’re picking up the clues that make everything else you do more valuable: sharper messaging, better-targeted campaigns, product feedback straight from the buyer’s mouth. The practitioners get the peer connection they’re starving for. You get an unfiltered read on your market. Everybody leaves the table better off.

These events work when they’re positioned as what practitioners actually want: educational networking. It gives them the chance to compare notes with peers and makes for a memorable evening that feels like community, not a funnel stage.

You can feel it before you can measure it.

The clearest signal comes at the end of the night. When an event has worked, nobody wants to leave. Practitioners linger over coffee, trade contact information, keep a conversation going by the coat check. When it hasn’t, the room empties the moment dessert is cleared.

“At the best events people keep talking after we officially wrap up the conversation,” Field says. “They’re exchanging contact information, returning to parts of the discussion. It’s gratifying to see that. It’s evidence we’re holding up our part of the bargain, and bringing the value we promise as moderators.”

Other signals follow: attendees asking when the next one is, unprompted follow-up emails, guests offering to recruit a peer for the next dinner. These are the metrics that matter most — not badge scans, but whether the room chose to stay. Or, like my CISO caller from Los Angeles, whether they pick up the phone and ask to come back.

Yes, we let sales teams attend our roundtables. But the ground rules are firm, and they exist for your benefit:

• Lean back and enjoy the show. Don’t pitch anything. Not a soft pitch, not a “quick mention.” Nothing.
• Be the social listener. A dozen security leaders talking candidly about challenges, vendor frustrations and budget priorities is intelligence no analyst report can match.
• Take notes on problems, not prospects. The clues you pick up — the language practitioners use, the pain points they rank highest — will make every future conversation sharper.
• Follow up as a human. A “great to meet you” note lands. A meeting request the next morning undoes the whole evening.

• Position the event as educational networking, because it is. Practitioners come for peers and mentors, not for content. Market the connection, and the content will land.
• Fulfill demand instead of manufacturing it. The appetite for connection and candid problem-solving already exists — build the event around it.
• Let the product be the beacon, not the opera singer. Build the discussion around the problem your solution addresses, and trust it to surface naturally.
• Solve the SME question early — and match titles to the room. Decide who represents you at the table well before the event, aim for a speaker whose title mirrors your target attendees’, and prep them for a conversation, not a presentation.
• If a sales rep is your only option, invest in the prep call. Take the editorial briefing seriously, embrace the no-pitch rule, and know the odds: the reps who succeed are the ones who lead with curiosity, not a script.
• Mine the room afterward. The themes, objections and phrases you hear are raw material for messaging, campaigns and content that actually sounds like your buyer.

The field is telling us something simple: trust is the currency, and it can’t be rushed. Practitioners will open up — about their problems, their stacks, even your product — but only in rooms built around them, not around you. Go deeper instead of louder. Sit back. Listen. The reach follows.