Before Crossbeam set up their SafeBase Trust Center, security assessments were painful to complete. They would take too much time from the already-busy security team and prolong the sales process by days or weeks.
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Computer Software
Industry
Philadelphia, PA
Headquarters
100
Employees
Crossbeam is the world's first and most powerful partner ecosystem platform. The company acts as a data escrow service that finds overlapping customers and prospects with your partners, all while keeping your company and customer data private and secure.
When Chris Castaldo, Chief Information Security Officer at Crossbeam, first came to us, there was never enough time in the day for him to do everything CISOs need to do. Between speaking with customers, maturing a cybersecurity program, enabling the business to move faster, to staying on top of the latest threats, the last things Chris needed to spend more time on were multiple security questionnaires with hundreds or thousands of questions each week.
The one problem he'd never been able to solve throughout his years in security was the continued existence of those pesky, gargantuan security questionnaires that he received from the sales team. To make matters worse, he would usually get them with the caveat that they came from some crucial prospect, and that the deal needed to be closed as soon as possible. He'd often have to drop everything to answer a variation of the same 400 questions he'd responded to so many times before.
After implementing SafeBase, Chris sent Al Yang, CEO of SafeBase, a quick email with this message: "I'm excited about SafeBase because in my two-plus decades in cybersecurity it might be the only security tool I’ve seen that can save me time, and it is hard to put a price on something which you cannot create more of," he said.
With Crossbeam's pain points in mind, the SafeBase team set out to help Chris achieve two major goals:
Chris quickly onboarded and had a Security Portal within hours. He then gave an internal demo of the new platform to both management and the sales team. After hearing that the sales team members could send a single link to prospects that would address security concerns, the team was fully on board. Instead of forwarding endless emails to Chris, they could now proactively allow prospects to complete the security review process at the start of the sales cycle, rather than at the end.
"Besides saving myself and our sales team time, it has increased customer confidence in our platform and shows one of our core values very transparently - Trust is Our Business. Our Security Portal puts that on display for all to see," said Chris.
“In my two-plus decades in cybersecurity SafeBase might be the only security tool I’ve seen that can save me time”
Within a few weeks, the Crossbeam team began to notice a significant increase in overall efficiency during the sales process. Prior to SafeBase, it normally took 2-3 days, and several emails, for a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to be fully executed by all parties. With SafeBase's built-in NDA clickwrap, this process shrunk to less than an hour due to how quickly sales team members were able to approve access requests from prospects.
Prospects were able to quickly review Crossbeam's security using a visually pleasing, interactive web page instead of an antiquated spreadsheet with multiple tabs and hundreds, if not thousands, of questions. Chris also noticed that despite considerable customer growth, the overall number of questionnaires he had to complete dropped, further improving the speed at which their team finalized deals.
On top of this, the Crossbeam sales team was finally able to gain visibility into where prospects were during the sales process. "Our sales team is more informed when deals move to the security review process, as well as our customers, who sometimes don't have visibility into their own procurement processes. And with the self-service capability cybersecurity teams can quickly complete their review and keep the deal moving forward. This is huge for our customers’ cybersecurity teams to support and enable their own businesses," said Chris.
“We've reduced sales cycles by an average of 7 days with our Security Portal and the Salesforce integration”
In a SaaS industry that has become increasingly concerned about supply chain security risks, Crossbeam has been leading the way as the only partner ecosystem platform with an interactive Security Trust Center. And they're not alone. After viewing Crossbeam's Security Portal, several other leading SaaS companies realized the value of having their own, including e-commerce platform BigCommerce.
At SafeBase, we're envisioning a future in which all companies, regardless of size or sector, can easily communicate their security posture with the world.
