How Sprout Social automates 98% of security questionnaires with Conveyor

About

Sprout Social is an intuitive social intelligence platform powering customer connection for breakthrough brands, serving approximately 30,000 businesses worldwide.

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Challenge

Scaling security documentation across a multi-product platform

Sprout Social is a powerhouse enterprise software company. Four product lines with over 40 integrations, a global customer base, and security and compliance expectations that are anything but simple. Each product touches different customer data, maps to different compliance standards, and generates its own wave of security questions from buyers.

That’s what makes security reviews at Sprout so demanding. A single questionnaire can require answers across multiple product lines. Multiply that across hundreds of prospects, and the volume becomes overwhelming fast.

Leading the customer trust function is Patrick Sullivan, Senior Security Assurance Manager on the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) team. His five-person team oversees everything from internal policies and risk programs to SOC 2 reports and ISO certificates. Patrick’s job is to make sure customers feel confident enough in Sprout’s security posture to sign on the dotted line.

But as Sprout’s customer base grew, the process that supported those deals couldn’t keep up. Sales reps were sharing local copies of compliance docs from their laptops. Others pulled from an internal wiki that was rarely updated. That meant outdated reports, bad answers, and zero insight into which docs customers were actually getting. Without any tracking, every loose document was a risk to the deal and to the company.

“We really never knew what documentation was going to which customers,” Patrick says. “We didn’t know if they had an NDA in place beforehand so that our information would be kept confidential. We didn’t know what version was going out.”

On top of that, a team of roughly 30 solutions engineers was grinding through every security questionnaire by hand. The largest of questionnaires would take upwards of 2.5 hours of work with multiple engineers, spread across a week or more. When an SE couldn’t find the right answer, it went to Patrick’s GRC team. That happened on about 20-25% of all questions. It was eating up hours the team didn’t have.

Patrick knew what was at stake. Fast, accurate security reviews weren’t a nice-to-have. They were required to close deals. What Sprout needed was a tool that would scale the team, that sales reps would actually use, and that could deliver instant, accurate answers across every product line.

The team started looking at trust center platforms. They quickly learned that most vendors treated trust centers as a small add-on inside broader GRC software. None of them could handle a multi-product enterprise like Sprout. Then Conveyor’s sales team reached out.

After a proof of concept and close work across Conveyor’s sales, product, and engineering teams, Sprout knew they found the right partner. Conveyor was built from the ground up for customer trust, had best-in-class AI, and could plug right into the tools Sprout already used, like Salesforce and Slack.

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“We had no analytics on how our documentation was performing, no consistency in how it was being distributed, and no clear path to fix it at the scale we needed.”

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Solution

AI-powered questionnaire completion and automated trust workflows

After getting Conveyor set up, Patrick and his team focused on the next critical step: making sure people actually used it. Sprout’s CSM at Conveyor, Sarah, played a key role in driving adoption. She put together resources, recorded personal walkthrough videos, and worked with Sprout’s teams to get everyone on board.

“I’ve had multiple people at Sprout say that she’s the best CSM they’ve ever worked with,” Patrick shares.

Today, Sprout directs customers and prospects to a Conveyor-powered trust center. There, they can pull SOC 2 reports, ISO certificates, and other security docs on their own. This level of self-service cuts down the need for a full questionnaire, or eliminates it.

Conveyor’s Salesforce link controls access to these docs. When someone asks for access to Sprout’s trust portal, Conveyor checks Salesforce. It looks at whether they’re a current customer, an active prospect, or completely unknown.

For known contacts, the platform handles NDA checks and access approval on its own. For unknown visitors, it sends Patrick an alert via Slack. That process has already turned up warm leads that Patrick flags to sales, turning a security workflow into a deal opportunity.

When customers do send full security questionnaires, solutions engineers upload them to Conveyor. The platform pulls answers from Sprout’s knowledge library, which spans all four product lines. That library includes human-curated Q&A, help center docs, and answers from past questionnaires.

Sprout controls exactly which sources the AI can access, down to specific Confluence spaces, so the answers stay as accurate as possible. Instead of typing, copying, and researching each response by hand, SEs upload the file, let the AI run, and come back to check the results.

The accuracy has been the standout. Conveyor delivers an 87% perfect answer rate, meaning those responses need zero edits. Its overall answer rate sits at 98%. Just 2% of questions need a human expert, down from the 20-25% that used to need manual review. That’s exactly the kind of impact Patrick needed.

When questions do need human input, SEs turn to a dedicated Slack channel to tag the right people and get quick answers. A shared channel with roughly 15 Conveyor team members means bug reports and requests get responses in minutes, not days.

Sprout’s SE team now spends more time talking to customers. Patrick’s GRC team has shifted focus to big-picture work like new EU rules and supply chain risk.

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“Our team can get one-off answers on their own in seconds. Conveyor’s AI search pulls together related resources and delivers an accurate answer to any question we throw at it.”

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Results

Sprout Social reduces manual review to less than 2% of questions with Conveyor

With Conveyor in place, Patrick’s team has replaced a patchwork of local files, outdated wikis, and manual work with a single source of truth for customer trust data that scales with Sprout.

By the numbers:

• 200+ hours saved annually on questionnaires
• 87% perfect AI answer rate on the first pass
• <2% of questions need manual review, 98% automated

Sprout’s leaders recently named Conveyor as their go-to platform for handling RFPs along with security questions across the whole company. The plan: roll out Conveyor to more teams, build out the knowledge library with input from more departments, and use Conveyor’s AI for all questionnaires and RFPs.

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