September 24, 2019

Last Updated on January 12, 2024

You’re a salesperson. You’ve spent untold hours cultivating an awesome prospect: wining and dining, arranging presentations, making site visits, and so on and on. The contract is all but signed.
Then the prospect hands you a security questionnaire. For them, it’s just company policy. But for your business, it’s a herculean struggle.
You push and you pull. You cry and you scream. You plead and you threaten. Still the questionnaire is not complete. Half of the questions seem irrelevant, or even unreasonable. (Or maybe the questions are fine and it’s the answers that aren’t so great.)
Either way, the prospect won’t sign the contract until they have the information they need. Now time is running out. Your hard-won deal is circling the drain…
Even for businesses with mature information security programs, the mounting strain of more and more security questionnaires and assessments can roadblock the InfoSec team and obstruct the sales cycle.
The trend is clear; security questionnaires are a key part of third-party risk management (TPRM) due diligence, and the future holds more of them, not fewer. The answer is not to shake your fist at the heavens, but to manage them effectively and (hopefully) decrease the time your team is spending on answering these questionnaires.
A number of vendors now offer cloud-based solutions to help automate questionnaire responses to some degree. But even the best of these still require considerable human intervention to achieve acceptable results.
In response to discussions with members of our SaaS vendor client base, Pivot Point Security now offers a new Security Questionnaire Response Management (SQRM) service. It combines artificial intelligence (AI) driven automation with real InfoSec experts to ensure accurate, consistent results. We submit the completed questionnaires on your behalf—so your time spent is almost zero.
Some of the benefits clients will see with this new managed service include:

  • A faster sales cycle
  • Fewer roadblocks to closing deals and less risk of losing deals
  • Security can be your competitive advantage – answers to your security questionnaires will promote your commitment to security and demonstrate value to your potential customers beyond your competition
  • Less stress on your InfoSec staff (not to mention your sales staff)
  • Increased stakeholder trust thanks to quicker questionnaire turnaround and high-quality responses
  • No more worries about organizing, storing and leveraging completed questionnaires

Contact us to talk through the possibilities for your organization… before a major deal is at risk.