Sales organizations are seeing longer and longer processing times when being evaluated for their security and compliance posture as a vendor. This lengthy process commonly referred to as the procurement process, can considerably slow down your deals and create frustrating wait times when communicating with prospects.

One common way to reduce the time spent answering your prospects’ questions during the procurement process is by becoming compliant with the SOC 2 standard. Compliance with this standard allows your prospects to quickly review a SOC 2 report, rather than having to ask specific questions about how data is handled within your organization. Companies leveraging their compliance program to its full advantage stand out further and have the edge over companies that, unfortunately, don’t maximize the use of these assets.

Next, you should publish a trust page on your website. Having a trust page is becoming the norm for businesses that invest in their security & compliance programs. Prospects will be looking for information about the security posture of your company. A trust page is a great location to publish your SOC 2 badge, discuss your data retention policies, and mention other standards you are compliant with (ISO 27001, FedRamp, GDPR, etc.).

Embedding a lead generation form dedicated to compliance documents gives prospects the opportunity to learn more about your security posture without taking up valuable company time monitoring leads manually. Prospects visiting your compliance page have already evaluated your solution and are interested in learning more. They want answers now, not when someone manually checks your email inbox.

Hacker One and Bonus.ly are two companies that do a great job at showcasing their compliance accomplishments. Each website includes a page detailing the company’s security posture and allowing prospects to input details for more information.

You’ve worked hard to become compliant. Leverage your accomplishments to attract hot enterprise leads who are curious about your reports — a trust page on your site is the perfect way to share these accomplishments.

Automating NDA signatures should be your next objective. Handle the delivery of your compliance documents automatically, and greatly reduce the time spent chasing NDA signatures.

Set up a solution such as Pima.app, which will track which compliance documents require a signed NDA before they can be accessed by your prospects. Set it and forget it, and let the tool do the work.

Another benefit of using a tool to manage your compliance documents is receiving activity notifications over Slack and email. Pinpoint the perfect moment to reach out to a prospect who has accessed your latest security report.

Manually sending out reminder emails is time-consuming and frustrating. Instead, use a tool that automatically sends out reminders. Pima and Docusign have great workflows to automatically remind prospects of an agreement that needs a signature.

Also, you don’t necessarily need the legal department’s approval for every request. Lawyers are essential, but can be time-consuming and are often expensive. Involving a lawyer or legal team too early in the procurement process can result in an unfortunate waste of time and money. You shouldn’t have to deal with lawyers redlining your Non-Disclosure Agreement just to be able to send standard compliance documents. When a prospect is in a discovery phase, and they are evaluating your product and security posture, the fastest way to close a sale is to have these documents available in advance.

Companies often have a single, frequently lengthy, NDA for everything. However, there is a big difference between sharing trade secrets and sharing compliance documents as part of a product evaluation. Having an NDA scoped specifically to the types of documents that you exchange during the procurement process is key to avoiding lengthy and expensive back and forth between lawyers. 

Zendesk does a great job at this. 

Here are some final thoughts: Many companies invest a lot of time and effort in their security and compliance programs but don’t take full advantage of their accomplishments. It’s time to feature your achievements and generate more business for your company. Create a page on your website where prospects have access to the documents and agreements they need, including NDAs specific to your security standards. Instead of wasting time chasing signatures, get custom notifications when a prospect has signed an agreement, so that you can respond to new leads on your schedule. Pima provides all of these solutions, and more, with a creative team always looking for innovative ways to save you time and money. And, as a bonus, it’s an intuitive tool with a simple user interface that your team and prospects will both enjoy. Create a win-win solution with Pima.app.