Why Your Best Cyber Sales Rep, Not Your CRO, Drives AI Adoption: Tal Peretz CEO & Co-Founder at OnFire

Most cyber companies bought the Claude or ChatGPT seats, handed them to every rep, and are now asking "now what?" Tal Peretz, co-founder and CEO of Onfire AI, has watched that play out across hundreds of mid-market and enterprise security vendors, and his answer is to stop pushing from the top. Start with your best rep and let the rest of the team chase him. Then take the same idea outside: skip the CISO, find the director who owns the budget, and make him the one who carries you up.In this episodeThe three tiers of AI adoption Tal sees in cyber sales teams, and why 85 to 90 percent are stuck at "we gave it to the rep"Why he starts every rollout with the A-players even though they're rarely the best AI usersThe on-site workshop where one rep's transformed week pulled his whole region along"Five by five": the agent that picks a rep's five accounts and five prospects for the week, and why each rep tweaks itWhy trust from the front line, not the tooling, makes or breaks an AI transformationOnly about 2 percent of account entries go through the CISO, so at $50M to $100M ARR the target is the directorWhy "agentic SOC" vendors pitching the CISO are talking to the wrong personHow to reach out on a signal without sounding like a creeper (and why you never mention Reddit)Tal's 2030 take: reps flip from 80 percent admin to 80 percent selling, and quotas go with itAbout the guestTal Peretz is co-founder and CEO of Onfire AI, an AI-driven GTM platform for companies selling to technical buyers. Before Onfire he was CTO at OwnID and spent nearly seven years in Israel's Unit 8200, the last two as Head of R&D.Notable quotes"Sales is a competition. Once you put the best reps first with the AI, everyone wants to fall in line.""Probably your best reps are not the best with AI yet.""If you have fifty million of ARR and you need to grow to 100 million, the CISO is not your target.""Everyone goes to the CISO. So you go to that person, and no one is connecting with him."Chapter timestamps00:04 Why an 8200 alum built for salespeople, not cyber01:55 Spin the wheel: visionary or smoking crack02:51 Three tiers of AI adoption in cyber GTM05:24 Start with your best rep, not your CRO08:15 The five by five use case11:09 Scoring your whole TAM off five years of closed-won16:39 The three barriers to agentic GTM (and the one that matters)21:16 Quality beats volume: the A/B test with people26:46 Only 2 percent get in through the CISO30:59 The SOC example: hundreds of vendors, one buyer32:40 Where the real signals live: Reddit, Discord, GitHub38:11 How to reach out on a signal without being a creeper41:34 What Onfire is building next43:41 Visionary or smoking crack: the reveal Support the showThe Cyber Go-To-Market Talk is the show for cybersecurity sales leaders, founders, CROs, and go-to-market operators looking to improve cyber sales performance and build more predictable revenue growth. Hosted by Andrew Monaghan, founder of Unstoppable.do, covering cyber sales leadership, revenue leadership, sales onboarding, forecasting, pipeline generation, and cybersecurity go-to-market execution.Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts about growing your cybersecurity startupWant to grow your revenue faster? Check out my cybersecurity sales consulting and trainingNeed ideas about how to grow your pipeline? Sign up for my newsletter.