At a leading provider of an integrated corporate travel and expense-management solution, delays to the sales cycle related to lengthy security reviews can be costly. With clientele ranging from high-growth startups to enterprise organizations, the travel software provider needed a way to demonstrate their security posture quickly to build trust and move deals through their pipeline faster.

Whistic’s Trust Center gave them a modern solution for proactively sharing security posture, improving transparency, and dramatically increasing speed-to-sale time. Let’s see how they did it.

Turning security from a cost center to a revenue enabler—one deal at a time

The organization’s Head of Security and Trust is well aware that cybersecurity attacks and the people who perpetrate them are continuing to grow in sophistication. In the ongoing battle between enterprise security teams and cyber threats, it’s already been years since security teams could win the battle with human skill alone.

Businesses that want to stay ahead need to innovate continually. One area where the Security leader and his team have done this recently is in driving more transparency with customers about the company’s security posture. Sharing their Whistic Trust Center plays a critical role.

This helps with transparency, but making this change also produces positive ripple effects throughout the organization.

Security as a sales catalyst

Transparency about security posture helps organizations collaborate to protect against potential attacks. That’s the obvious takeaway, but there’s another less obvious added benefit: helping the sales team close deals faster.

“In the current business landscape, security has become extremely critical to move the business forward,” noted the head of security. “As a security function, we want to be proactive and build our Whistic Trust Center in a way where we can share it with our customers and prospects and enable and empower our sales teams to do this earlier on in the deal cycle to reduce any friction that may be caused during the sales process.”

Before implementing Whistic, this software company had a lengthy, manual process for responding to questionnaire requests. The time involved in this process frequently caused the sales process to grind to a halt. But now they proactively share their security posture (contained in the company’s Whistic Trust Center) and use this as a tool to drive deals forward by speeding up the security questionnaire process—or even deflecting questionnaires entirely.

“Our approach to security is literally what allows me to be successful,” says the company’s Senior Manager for Commercial Sales. “If we didn't have such a strong focus on security, we wouldn't be able to sell to half the companies we do.”

Conducting a security review has long been a part of the SaaS buying process. The security review was often viewed as a thorn in the side of both the sales team and the buyer. That’s because vendors took a long time to respond to review questionnaires. And even once those responses roll in, they usually require clarification—leading to more delays.

Whistic offers a powerful solution for closing that loop through proactive transparency

“Having our security program buttoned up with Whistic, we’re able to expedite the processes associated with closing the deal,” says the sales leader. “We're able to get through the security review in about a day because of the approach that we have to security and how buttoned up we are, when previously it could take two weeks or more.”

With sales projections, benchmarks, and performance indicators built on monthly closed deals, this two-week time savings doubles their measurable output.

“Previously, getting a customer commitment midway through the month made it a little risky that we could get the deal signed before time ran out,” explains the head of sales. “Now, with two weeks left in the month, we know there’s plenty of time. We don’t have to worry like we used to.”

The Head of Security views his team as an extension of the sales team. Without the work they do to maintain their Whistic Trust Centers and enable the sales team to share them proactively, deals wouldn’t get done. But this work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes collaboration across numerous functions and departments to succeed, and Whistic powers that collaboration.

“Whistic makes it very simple for us to tie Profile shares with closed deals because it’s tracked in our enterprise system. So we can easily look and see how it is impacting revenue generation and report that up to the leadership team.”

The company is also getting positive feedback from customers about how their security documentation is presented to them using Whistic.

“One of our Fortune 100 customers mentioned that our security enablement process and the security review process is the fastest they have experienced,” says the Head of Security. “This company has thousands of vendors and hearing them say that is validation that what we’re doing is working.”

Security visibility crucial to marketing and public relations

As a travel and expense management company, the business handles all sorts of sensitive data for its customers: known traveler number (KTN), TSA information, driver’s license numbers, home address, gender preference—not to mention client bank accounts and other financial information.

From a marketing and PR perspective, proactive transparency on security is vital for the company to back up its branding and image claims as a user-first, privacy-focused business.

“As a company, we are all about our users all the time. But you can’t really claim that if you’re not taking user security as seriously as you would want someone else to do with your own data,” says the company’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications. “If we don’t have the trust of our users, we don’t keep those users. Without trust, we don't even have a brand.”

Security has gone from a perfunctory feature no one highlights to a core piece of brand identity in the past few years. For a brand that’s on the cutting edge of digital transformation in its market, getting the security component right—visibly and publicly—matters on an existential level. Their communication team points to the Whistic Trust Center as a pillar of that public security posture built into the bedrock of the company’s brand identity.

Whistic delivers value at the security practitioner level

In addition to the global security, sales, and marketing benefits the software company enjoys thanks to Whistic, Navan’s security staff benefit from it at the practitioner level every day.

One security analyst explains how the company uses Whistic: “We use Whistic to share our privacy and security documentation. We house all our compliance reports, including SOC 1, SOC 2, ISO certificates, and all the rest of our information and policies. It’s all communicated via Whistic for our customers and prospects.”

Using Whistic in this way drives significant efficiency gains for the rest of the security team, too: “We’re all about efficiency, and Whistic allows us to be proactive and efficient in our sales cycle. Our sales and customer success teams can share our Whistic Trust Center early on, in just a few clicks. This allows our vendors to get our security posture early on in the sales cycle and vet us from a security standpoint while they vet our product.”

The security team estimates that adding Trust Center sharing to the sales cycle reduces sales cycle time from 40 to 60 percent. By eliminating low-level, repetitive questions and inevitable documentation delays, the security and sales teams can focus on higher-level questions.

Can Whistic Help Your Team?

Whistic is the industry leader in AI-first, Modern TPRM and Customer Trust. Our platform automates the TPRM assessment process for both vendors and their customers with an AI engine that eliminates manual steps, accelerates sales and review timelines, and reduces the reliance on lengthy, resource-intensive questionnaires.

For more information, visit www.whistic.com. If you’d like to see our AI platform in action for yourself, schedule some time with our experts and we’ll show you how it works.