Today, many technology vendors are placing SOC 2 compliance as a key objective on their roadmap. The reasons are simple: SOC 2 compliance proves that you have made a strong commitment to your security and data protection efforts, it offers an industry-recognized stamp of approval, and it automatically generates trust with enterprise clients that are willing to spend lots of money on your product.
In addition to that, a SOC 2 report makes the sales process a lot easier, reducing the time typically spent on filling out long security questionnaires to a tiny fraction. The problem here, however, is that companies don’t usually think about how they’re going to share their report with potential customers.
Companies aren’t allowed to publish their SOC 2 report publicly. They can share that they are compliant and use that to start conversations, but they can’t publish the report and make it readily available. If they do, they risk sharing proprietary information that puts the company at risk.
So, what’s the alternative?
Modern sales processes require sales teams to share confidential information with prospects as part of the “procurement process”, however sales teams are not given the tools they need to do this without exposing the company. A rudimentary approach to solving this problem is by having prospects sign an NDA and then (and only then) sharing the report with the buyer. This can quickly become a clunky process as prospects often require chasing — especially if they need their legal team to review the NDA — and it can take a long time to get a signature. This is time that sales teams often can’t afford to waste when they’re trying to meet their quarterly targets and not lose contracts to competitors.
In this regard, it can be easy to think that the legal team is holding sales reps back from being as efficient as possible — but there’s more to it than that. One tool that was designed to help remedy this disconnect is Pima.app. Pima.app was designed to allow salespeople to share confidential documents with their prospects, without compromising the legal shield offered by an NDA.
Lawyers can set up templatized Non Disclosure Agreements and enable their sales team to share most commonly asked documents such as a SOC 2 report or the results of a pentest.
Additionally, Pima can act as a lead generation tool by embedding a “Request center” on your website, allowing prospects to request your compliance documents directly, even if they’re not in a sales conversation yet.
Your sales team can then automatically approve requests, or filter them and approve them manually. Prospects will only be able to review the document after signing the NDA template provided by your legal team — but the beauty of the application is that it massively reduces the time it takes a prospect to sign. In addition, Pima offers a secure channel for sharing these sensitive materials, as opposed to email.
Curious to learn more about Pima? Check it out!
