#012 Building Trust to Unlock Growth
5 steps for turning security into a competitive advantage
In today's business landscape, it's not enough to build a secure company, you have to prove it's secure too. To gain the trust of customers and prospects, you'll need to fill out lengthy questionnaires and wait for security reviews that can take weeks, which can stall your deals. The bigger the company you're trying to sell to, the more hoops you'll need to jump through to demonstrate how you'll keep their data safe. Instead of playing defense, use your security posture as a competitive advantage. Positioning security as a selling point to your product will help you get ahead of customer questions, mitigate potential concerns, and demonstrate you care about protecting your customer's data. This will help you build trust with customers and close more deals, faster. These five steps will show you how:
Step 1: Build trust by showing off your security
Transparency is key when building trust with your customers. Show them exactly how your business will protect their data and resources by making your security visible.
Step 2: Streamline trust by centralizing your security requests
Receiving security request can be overwhelming, time consuming and repetitive. To become more efficient, establish a centralized located also know as a "Trust Center" to facilitate these request.
Step 3: Automate trust to speed up your review process
Are you still completing those security questionnaires manually? These tend to slow your sales cycle down, especially when there is hundreds of questions. Using an automation tool (like Vanta) can reduce time and effort needed to complete questionnaires. Ultimately, shortening the sales cycle.
Step 4: Leverage trust as a sales play
Proactively have conversations about security rather than being asked. Use security to speed up the sales cycle and beat your competition. Showcase your commitment by leveraging the Trust Center created.
Step 5: Extend your commitment to trust by assessing vendor risk
Chances are you are also using vendors to run your software business. Its important that the security program you're building to protect your customers data extends to the vendors connected to your product. Using a vendor risk management (VRM) process can help prioritize and streamline vendor risk.
Source: https://www.vanta.com/downloads/build-trust-unlock-growth-checklist
Have a great week,
The Cycore Secure Team
Cycore Secure partners with organizations to build cyber resilience and ensure compliance. Founded in 2022 and based in Miami, we are a security and compliance firm serving clients globally. Our founding team has decades of experience as security leaders, and compliance experts across highly regulated industries. Cycore Secure offers virtual CISO services , cyber risk assessments, compliance auditing and management for HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, and third party risk management. Learn more at cycoresecure.com or in our weekly newsletter.