What is your highest priority right now?
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As a vendor, the success of your business is directly tied to the trust and confidence your customers have in your product. Flashy marketing and gimmicky features may make quick sales, but you want to build lasting relationships, not transient ones. Increasing customer retention by just 5% can increase profits anywhere from 25-95%. And thus, it is understandable why the sales organization so urgently needs security questionnaires answered as quickly as possible.
While some may be quick to judge data security activities in the sales cycle as non-essential, there is clear data that customers do prioritize trust when choosing services and products. According to a 2020 report by Prevalent, over 50% of organizations are conducting third-party risk assessments, highlighting how important vendor risk management is to them. Some of this is driven by regulatory requirements (SOC 2 and PCI DSS, for example, have requirements around vendor review), and some of it is due to being burned by exposure to cyber risk in the past (SolarWinds, anyone?)
If you’re a company who’s on the receiving end of these custom security questionnaires, making it easy to share your security posture is more important than ever before. In addition to adding potential value to your sales process, the work you do to become trustworthy can directly benefit your organization’s day-to-day operations. The financial and reputational impact from data breaches is much more impactful than any resources spent on internal compliance activities.
If you are breached, potential impacts include:
The list above is not exhaustive, but it paints a clear picture that actions that build trust benefit not only your customers but could potentially protect your business from significant losses.
As a vendor, what are some activities you can pursue today if you want to improve your ability to build trust with customers?
