If you're a SaaS organization, work with SaaS vendors, or share data with literally any customer, partner, or vendor, you rely on a solid security posture to protect your internal and third-party data. This is the truth of today's open-source environment: access is king.

Building a robust and secure connection between these parties is also a critical part of any partnership, and the sales team often spearheads this focus. With security controls carrying so much weight during a partnership conversation, sales team resources must know precisely what they're talking about and have access to as many resources and documentation as possible to leverage your organization's security posture correctly.

Tips for sales teams looking to leverage security posture correctly

For most InfoSec teams, building a solid working relationship between security and sales means building a self-sufficient, fully educated sales team that doesn't require any hand-holding or constant support from security resources. InfoSec teams already have a full plate of responsibilities that doesn't involve getting into the weeds with every sales conversation.

To trust and rely on a sales team to correctly leverage your security posture and ensure that any potential partners are aligned with your security controls before they move forward in the sales process, your team must take an active role in educating, training, and supporting sales resources – without stooping to hand holding.

Here are some tips to ensure your sales team is leveraging your security posture correctly:

Make security part of your new sales team onboarding process.

When sales team members come to an InfoSec team with security posture questions, they are usually just looking for a point in the right direction to the answer. Your team can eliminate this run-around by educating and training new sales team members on security posture, the importance of vendor security, and other critical access information during the onboarding process.

Set up a secure documentation site where sales team members can go if they have any questions.

The new world of data security is built around access and transparency. Any high-functioning InfoSec team needs to have a fully realized, secure site with all relevant security controls, posture information, and documentation that is easily accessed by any internal team member that needs it. This way, sales team members can quickly find the answer to their questions without pulling in a live InfoSec resource.

Publish your security posture publicly so that potential partner also has visibility into controls.

It's also a good idea for InfoSec teams to put some of the responsibility for a compliant security posture audit on the other team. By publishing your security posture publicly, the potential vendor/customer/partner team also has insight into your security controls, meaning they can bring ideas and strategies to the table that are already compliant with your security guidelines.

Want to learn more?

The relationship between sales teams and InfoSec resources is only getting stronger as the importance of secure information sharing, and access grows. If your InfoSec team is ready to enable an entirely self-sufficient, security-focused sales team, the suite of vendor risk management solutions at Whistic can help. You can learn more about the solutions available and get started with a free personalized demonstration here.