No matter what niche your organization specializes in, building trust with your customers is a major pillar around which a business is built.
Compliance automation tools provide you with a faster way to ‘check-the-box’ and achieve compliance with SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and so on. Enterprises who read your compliance reports will quickly see that you’ve done the bare minimum to get through your audit. Furthermore, compliance automation tools don’t help you accelerate your sales process with assistance responding to security questionnaires, or inviting customers to view your security documents.
In a world where customers are picky with who they work with, data security practices are quickly becoming a competitive advantage. Trust assurance platforms showing your customers that you take your regulatory and contractual obligations seriously goes a long way in earning their trust, while also reducing exposure to risk and liabilities.
Trust is about helping companies track their obligations and making it the responsibility of the entire company.
Earning your customer’s trust with a Trust Assurance platform can help your business shift security certification processes from being a cost center to one that accelerates revenue in numerous ways:
1. Improve your company’s reputation
A company’s success largely depends on how third parties view the organization. A company that aims to achieve the highest standards of trust can ensure that the public’s perception is positive, and have potential customers feel safe to interact with the brand — a major competitive advantage. Trust allows organizations to be ready to commit to new business, as the public will recognize your company’s commitment to security, and possibly attract investors as well.
2. Kickstart that referral engine
You’re aware of your risks and liabilities, and continually close the gaps to prove that you’re meeting your customer and contractual obligations. Customers appreciate that, and for their fellow business partners, they can’t help but to recommend you. To take things one step further, proactively sharing your security and privacy posture makes it easy for potential referrals to begin to vet you. When more customers decide they want to work with you before you even speak with them, you’re more able to scale your sales efforts far beyond what was previously possible.
3. Increase cross-department collaboration
By making trust the responsibility of the entire company, you reduce reliance on a single team. This creates opportunities for cross functional collaboration and relationship building that would not have been facilitated otherwise. Additionally, putting the onus for creating trust on every department accelerates the rate at which you achieve the highest security standards, consequently increasing your organization’s ability to close bigger deals faster.
4. Let your money makers make the money
Let’s face it, you don’t pay the brains of your company to deal with security questionnaires for hours on end. You pay them to grow your product and generate revenue. By giving your high performers the tools they can trust, it makes them more capable of automating away the tedious and repetitive elements of security. This, in turn, allows them to get back to focusing on their highest leverage tasks. While every other competitor has its best performers bogged down with minutia, your talent will be fully unleashed.
5. Trust broadens your business horizons
Tracking and knowing where you are in terms of your security posture will allow you to plan and execute on a whole different scale, even across continents. Being that security certifications are intertwined, one control optimization can be the same requirement for another certification as well. As a result, with the right tools, you can pursue additional certifications in a fraction of the time. For example, if you pursued SOC 2 certification to do business with US customers, then you might already be halfway towards unlocking international customers with ISO 27001 as well.
6. Confidence boosts your performance
It is a common practice for companies to chase after compliance certifications only after they start being asked to have them. With a trust-based mindset, you’re not waiting for a customer to prod you into doing compliance, you’re ready to close deals at the drop of a hat. This makes it easier to speed up your sales cycle and accurately forecast cash flow, so that you can make the most of the resources you have.
All relationships — business and personal — are enhanced or broken based upon whether or not the parties involved are transparent, approachable, and do what they say they are going to do.
Flip the script, and it becomes obvious. Who would you rather work with: Organizations that continuously take action to test, display, and fulfill their security commitments, or ones that don’t? The answer is obvious. Perhaps it’s time to apply these principles to your own business as well. Whenever you’re ready, we’ve got you covered with:
- TrustOps: Achieve SOC 2, CMMC Level 1, HIPAA, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA and ISO 27701 compliance in weeks, at a very low cost basis with API-based automation
- Respond: Unblock sales by automating your ability to complete enterprise security questionnaires in less than 1 day, using AI
- TrustShare: Securely track data privacy and security information shared with customers, using a live, auto-generated trust share portal that saves marketing budget and time
Trust Assurance is the future. Let’s leave the old fashioned methods of compliance in the past. Schedule a demo today.
