Anyone who has thought about buying a car, home, or turned on the news recently has probably heard: interest rates have risen a lot from their Pandemic lows. The federal funds rate, which banks use to set their loan terms, sits at about 2.5% after hovering near 0% for most of 2020. And we may not be finished with near-term rate hikes.
For startups and public companies alike, rising rates have meant taking a hard look at expenses with an eye toward reducing capital deployment while fundraising is less appetizing. Go-To-Market teams will need to make the biggest changes in this environment and entire companies need to pivot their mindset and embrace (relative) opportunity scarcity to succeed in our emerging business landscape.
Even before the Pandemic, most sales teams spent years working in an opportunity-rich environment. The question was less “How will I get enough meetings to make quota?” And more “How many of these opportunities can I close by the end of the quarter?” As organizations pull back from channels paid search and event marketing, another critical metric is coming under scrutiny: Win Rate. Reduced marketing spend has made every opportunity more valuable as sales teams aren’t able to count on the influx of paid leads they’ve built their workflows around.
Go-To-Market teams can make up any sales pipeline gap with organic approaches (as they should; we’re about to see an influx of fantastic viral campaigns). But there’s more to the story: innovative companies will also look down-funnel to better understand where and why deals are stalling out. Many will discover that the greatest sales hurdles aren’t around discovery; they happen when procurement joins the deal.
One of the largest leaks in the deal funnel happens around the Security Review, where either slow response times or a lack of adequate and detailed answers can sink a prospect’s interest right before they reach the finish line. Companies are faced with a choice: do they bulk up the slew of teams that handle Security Reviews and hope for more productivity, or do they partner with companies whose raison d’etre is accurately completing Security Reviews?
Scaling internal Questionnaire and Review teams is dicey – orgs have to spend months interviewing and hiring, embed employees across the individual teams that handle Reviews, equip them with tools, ramp them, pay their salary and benefits, require them to work with a constantly changing cast of subject matter experts, and retain them to do something – let’s be honest – not all of us want to do. Organizations have to do all of this without being able to forecast their Review volume or complexity – a tough headcount case to make to the Finance team.
The easiest way to tackle Security Reviews head-on – without growing headcount or worse yet creating an entire new business unit – is to identify a partner that can expertly absorb your existing Security Reviews and Questionnaires into a continuously maintained Answer Library for your product(s). SecurityPal has leveraged this approach to provide “white-glove” delivery and customer service to industry leaders like Monday.com, Figma, Airtable, Loom, and many more. They’re finding that a hybrid of human-in-the-loop expertise and enterprise-ready tools, like Answer Library access with SecurityPal’s app, puts their team closer to revenue at a time when every dollar matters.
Organizations can no longer afford to receive a deluge of Security Reviews every quarter and play internal “whack-a-mole” to see how many they can possibly complete. They all need to get done. Offloading Security Reviews frees half of your organization to reinvest in the company instead of drowning in an endless process of back and forth. Security can prioritize in elevating the org’s security posture; sales can focus on building new relationships, solutions engineering can drive greater customer satisfaction – the benefits are truly organization-wide.
Companies gain process-based inertia as they grow. Even if a tool or process isn’t the right fit, organizations will hold onto it because it has worked before, to some degree. Forward-looking teams know that reviewing and optimizing their deal experience from end-to-end will set themselves apart, no matter what the broader economy looks like.
Curious what SecurityPal can do for you? Book a meeting with us today.
