2026 Customer Trust Benchmark

Build the case for a Customer Trust Program

Most customer trust teams are under-resourced. The number of customer security reviews goes up, headcount stays flat. AI can help, but to make a bigger impact you need internal buy-in. This tool will help you make the case for more resources. Built on the 2026 Customer Trust Benchmark.

Enter your numbers

Start here. Everything below is set to the 2026 benchmark average — change it to match your team and your case builds itself as you go.

Benchmark average: 287 per year

Benchmark average: 2.9 FTEs

63% of enterprise teams say a week or more

65% have an SLA. Only 33% hit it more than 90% of the time.

Benchmark average: ~2.5 hrs

Your number

Current state / Recommendation

Average

Load Average99 reviews per personBenchmark average: 99 a year
Turnaround Average5 days addedMost teams add a week or more
SLA PartialSometimes metOnly 33% of teams hit their SLA

Revenue this team supports

87% of teams say security reviews are important or critical to closing business. This is the revenue your team touches and moves forward every year, and it is the number most trust teams never put in front of leadership. 85% of CEOs already say cybersecurity is critical to business growth (Gartner, 2025) — the framing isn't the hard part, the evidence is.

Revenue supported$21.5MReviews × average deal size, per year
Days added to sales cycle1,435Across every review, per year

The Trust Tax

What it costs to prove your security to buyers, every year.

Hours a year71821 hrs per person, per month
Annual cost$72KAt $100/hr fully loaded
Headcount0.3Full-time people, all year

How you compare

Against the average team in the 2026 Customer Trust Benchmark. For wider context: 89% of CISOs describe their teams as stretched thin or understaffed, and only 11% report being adequately staffed (IANS Research & Artico Search, 2025).

Reviews handled per person, per year

You
99
Benchmark
99

Source: The 2026 Conveyor Customer Trust Benchmark Report

Hours per person, per month

You
21
Benchmark
21

Source: The 2026 Conveyor Customer Trust Benchmark Report

Reviews per year

You
287
Benchmark
287

Source: The 2026 Conveyor Customer Trust Benchmark Report

How much of the workflow is AI covering?

88% of customer trust teams use AI for this work, or plan to within the year. Only 46% see real business impact from it. The issue is depth of usage. Most teams point AI at the questionnaire and stop there. Everything that separates the advanced half sits downstream of it.

AI covers 1 of 6 steps

Where to start

What capacity would buy you

Your team spends 718 hours a year on security reviews. Handed back, that is the kind of work a security function gets credit for.

  • Live conversations with your largest customers Working through security questions and concerns directly with your biggest accounts, instead of only answering them inside a form.
  • A new audit certification Pursuing the certificate that keeps coming up in deals — or consolidating to one set of controls that maps cleanly to the rest.
  • Signal back to product and security Reading what customers keep asking about: the recurring gaps, the emerging topics, and the questions that were hardest to answer honestly.
  • Automation that GRC tools still don't cover Evidence collection for audits, access reviews, and the rest of the work that stays manual because nothing on the market has automated it.

Volume tells leadership how busy your team is. This tells them what it's worth.

Assumptions and formulas
Default ≈ $160k salary × 1.3 overhead ÷ 2,080 hrs
  • Load — reviews ÷ people, against a benchmark of 99 (287 reviews ÷ 2.9 FTEs). Stretched is more than 1.5× that; resourced is below 0.85×.
  • Turnaround — days added to the sales cycle, plus whether you hold an SLA. Best in class means 3 days or fewer and an SLA you hit; behind means 8 days or more, or no SLA at all.
  • Revenue supported — reviews × average deal size. Revenue that passes through your team each year, not revenue at risk or revenue lost.
  • Days added to sales cycle — reviews × days added per review. Reviews run in parallel, so this is total delay across all deals, not days added to your calendar.
  • Trust Tax — reviews × hours per review for hours, × loaded rate for cost, ÷ 2,080 for headcount.
  • AI coverage — how many of six workflow steps AI touches. It measures configuration, not how well any tool performs.

On the tier thresholds. The load bands come straight from the benchmark averages. The turnaround bands do not — the benchmark reports that 63% of enterprise teams say a review adds a week or more, but no public research defines a best-in-class response time for customer security reviews, so those cut points are our judgment rather than a surveyed figure. For context from the other side of the table, KPMG's 2026 Global TPRM Survey found 60% of organisations complete due diligence on critical vendors within 30 days.

On the 2.5-hour default. The benchmark average works out to roughly 2.5 hours per review — 2.9 people spending 21 hours a month each, across 287 reviews a year. Most teams answering manually are well above that.

What this does not count. Time spent by engineers, legal and other SMEs answering routed questions, sales time spent chasing, and the cost of deals lost outright when a review stalls. Every one of those pushes the real figure up.

Sources