In the sales world, closing new business and staying on top of revenue goals is a team effort. Salespeople rely heavily on multiple other departments to push new deals over the finish line. Traditionally, security assessments and vendor risk management protocols often cause serious roadblocks when closing new business, causing sales timelines to lengthen significantly.

With the success of their new deals on the line, many modern sales teams are taking the lead to bring a renewed sense of transparency and flexibility to vendor relationship management, especially when it comes to security and assessments.

Why Transparency Matters

Understanding and accurately managing the vendor security assessment process is not easy, which is often why vendor sales teams dread bringing up security protocols in new deal conversations. This late introduction can then cause internal friction with InfoSec teams, who have other things on their plate to deal with instead of last-minute sales requests that are often more work than expected. Without transparency, flexibility, and scalability, both new customers and internal team dynamics can suffer the consequences.

With sales and InfoSec teams on the same page, salespeople are better equipped to manage and lead conversations about security protocols and measures. InfoSec teams, on the other hand, are no longer tasked with trying to answer one-off questions and requests as they come up. Instead, new deals can run efficiently and smoothly without any security-related roadblocks.

Here are a few actions your sales team can take to increase transparency during your vendor relationship conversations:

1. Start talking about security protocols early on in the sales process.

While some salespeople drag their feet when it comes to talking about security assessments and compliance, introducing the topic early in the sales process can help move things along and highlight your team as a security thought leader.

2. Build a scalable internal process with InfoSec leaders.

Many times, it’s one-off requests and questions to InfoSec team members that can derail a new deal and cause delays. Instead of waiting for these questions to come along, create a scalable, proactive internal process for managing and, hopefully, answering these questions before they get out of control.

3. Let your prospects and customers know what you are doing.

Paying attention to the security process and vendor risk management is critical, especially now that security is considered atop competitive advantagein the SaaS space. Be transparent with your prospects and let them know how your team is making security a priority internally and, down the road, for their team as well.

Optimize Your Vendor Partnerships with Whistic

With the Whistic Security Profile, your sales team can easily share security information with new customers without needing any input from InfoSec teams. Now, instead of having to go back-and-forth with security (which can drag the sales cycle out by days or even weeks), sales teams have the power to kick-start security conversations at their fingertips.

The Whistic Security Profile allows teams to:

Securely send and receive questionnaires from new customers.
Easily update profile information in real-time, so sales teams always have access to the most up-to-date information.
Confidently talk about and answer questions around security protocols during sales conversations—without requiring InfoSec input.

For modern SaaS teams, time is of the essence when it comes to closing deals. The Whistic Profile makes it easy to streamline the sales process and puts the power of security transparency in your sales team's hands. You can learn more about the Whistic Security Profilehere.