Know Before You Go: The Empathy Codified Playbook for RSA Conference 2025

Stop Measuring What You Can’t Influence

The prevailing tendency among vendors at RSA is to equate activity with strategy. Metrics such as badge scans, demo bookings, or “net new opps” are often cited as success indicators. But these are lagging indicators. They reflect movement, not meaningful buyer engagement.

This approach introduces misalignment between what vendors track and what buyers actually experience. It reinforces a quantity-over-quality mindset and drives reps toward performative behavior - overreliance on scripts, superficial conversations, and pressure tactics.

The more useful unit of measurement is what you can actually influence: the quality of the buyer interaction. Did your presence create safety? Did the buyer feel they could express uncertainty or say no without consequence? These are the conditions under which real commercial conversations begin. They’re harder to quantify - but far more predictive of future intent.

Your Mission Must Exist in the Buyer’s Frame of Reference

Most vendors enter RSA anchored to internal narratives. “Showcase the platform.” “Drive awareness of feature set X.” “Educate the market.” These messages are organizational goals - not buyer missions.

Effective messaging is functional. It meets the buyer inside a specific context: operational stress, compliance strain, tool fatigue, integration risk. It speaks directly to what they’re trying to prevent or stabilize - not what you’re trying to promote.

The distinction is subtle, but critical. Marketing built around your organizations internal objectives feels like positioning. Marketing built around the your buyers’ internal and external conditions feels like partnership. One forces attention. The other earns it.

Normalize Disengagement

In most RSA interactions, buyers are navigating dozens of competing stimuli. Their cognitive load is high. Their guard is up. They’re not looking for another pitch - they’re looking for permission to disengage.

“No” is a safety behavior. It’s a boundary-setting cue. When reps respond to “no” with composure and neutrality, it signals emotional maturity and reduces perceived interpersonal risk.

When “no” is punished - through guilt, pressure, or forced re-engagement - it activates defensiveness and severs trust among buyers.

The most effective vendors in high-stakes buying environments normalize “no” as a valid outcome. It increases the likelihood of future re-engagement because it preserves psychological safety.

Empathy Is Not a Persona. It’s a System Constraint.

Empathy is frequently misused in marketing discourse. It is described as a tone, or an effect - something a rep can “project” with enough practice. Empathy, however, is structural, not interpersonal performance.

Empathetic systems allow buyers to control the pace, direction, and depth of the conversation. They contain mechanisms for disengagement. They support ambiguity. They do not rely on emotional leverage, artificial urgency, or binary outcomes.

Most vendors who claim “empathetic marketing” are simply using softer language to push the same transactional goals. Empathy is not what you say. It’s what your system allows.

Every Touchpoint Is a Trust Filter

At RSA, buyers are not evaluating technical superiority on first contact. They are evaluating intent.

Do you want to help - or capture?

Are you here to understand - or convince?

Am I safe to explore uncertainty - or will I be funneled toward a pre-scripted outcome?

Trust is assessed rapidly, often non-verbally. In high-stimulus environments, most buyers subconsciously use heuristics - body language, tone regulation, eye contact, pacing - to determine whether a conversation feels safe or extractive.

Your brand is not what you say in these moments. It’s what you signal.

Boundaries Outperform Charisma

Charisma may attract attention, but boundaries build credibility. The best-performing vendors at RSA weren’t the ones with the most outgoing reps. They were the ones who communicated clearly what they do, who they help, and what they don’t do.

They didn’t chase. They didn’t pander. They didn’t “handle objections.”

They created space.

That space allowed for qualification, disqualification, and real inquiry. They reduced threat perception. That’s what buyers remember.

Unpersonalized Follow-Up Is an Integrity Violation

The post-RSA follow-up is not a logistical step. It is a trust signal.

If the follow-up is generic, outsourced to someone the buyer didn’t meet, or contains a CTA the buyer never agreed to, it signals that the vendor either wasn’t listening - or doesn’t care.

Worse, it confirms the buyer’s suspicion that the entire interaction was transactional. Many security professionals provide burner emails for this reason. It’s a form of boundary enforcement.

If a buyer gave you a real contact, the follow-up should demonstrate three things: recall, restraint, and relevance. “You mentioned X. Is it still a priority?” will go further than any automation sequence ever could.

Regulation Is More Effective Than Performance

When a vendor shows up with excessive energy, forced charisma, or aggressive attention-seeking, it increases the buyer’s cognitive load. This leads to disengagement or avoidance.

The vendors who succeed in this context are not the loudest - they are the most emotionally regulated. They speak less. They listen more. They don’t need to prove they belong. That’s what earns psychological permission to continue the conversation.

Informal Settings Are Still Data Points

Buyers do not suspend judgment during happy hours. If anything, they observe more closely. How a vendor behaves in unstructured environments is seen as predictive of future partnership behavior.

Disrespectful conduct, over-familiarity, or a lack of self-regulation at a cocktail hour is often interpreted as a risk factor: this is how they’ll behave under stress, or when no one is watching.

Professionalism is not situational. It’s behavioral consistency across contexts. Trust is maintained or eroded in these informal moments.

Most Vendors Don’t Need Better Messaging. They Need Self-Awareness.

Ultimately, GTM effectiveness is not a copywriting issue. It’s an identity issue.

Most vendor messaging fails not because it lacks clarity, but because it lacks conviction. There is no meaningful differentiation, because there is no meaningful point of view. The vendor is trying to be everything to everyone - and buyers can feel that.

The teams who perform best in buyer-led environments are those who have clarity on:

• Who they help

• Why it matters

• Who they are not for

That clarity doesn’t just sharpen messaging. It transforms posture. And posture - not pitch - is what drives trust in high-stakes commercial environments.

Until next time,
Dani