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Information security and privacy programs are generally about managing risk, but they can also impact your sales team by either slowing down or speeding up deals.
The scenario
Your team has a lead, but your potential new customer wants to check out how you handle security or privacy to make sure you are not going to be a problem for their security and privacy programs. This is especially common with enterprise customers.
The barrier
Your team is working on this new opportunity, but instead of talking about your service, the conversation had pivoted to a discussion about potential problems. What started as a conversation about value and vision has now become an exercise in removing "sales objections".
It may not just be a concern about actual security and privacy. Your sales team may have found a customer that sees the value in your product or service, but believes that their own compliance burden prevents them from moving forwards.
This is all part of their Vendor Risk Management program (VRM) which is an important part of any security or privacy program.
The solution
Get in front of these objections by showing your prospects that you security and privacy under control in a way that will meet their needs:
- Get certified by an independent 3rd party. SOC2 is a common choice for service providers
- Build a robust customer questionnaire handling workflow. Use information security staff - not R&D to respond to the questions. If you don't have the staff - outsource it to specialists. Let your R&D team focus on building more of the awesome
- Look into reusable questionnaires like the Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) Questionnaire
- Having a penetration test performed and make a version available to prospects. This should be a sanitized version that does not disclose information that would be useful to a hacker if it fell into their hands
- Put together a pack combining some of the above that you can provide under NDA. Sales can use it, they can also respond to customer questionnaires requests with it to see if that is going to be enough for smaller deals
- You can handle privacy concerns in exactly the same way
Customers worry about the privacy and security impact of their vendors - and rightfully so. Being ready to handle this quickly gives you a competitive advantage. Truvantis is experienced with building and operating these workflows. You keep doing what you do well - let us handle what we do well.
