by Thomas Roper, Lead Account Executive & GTM

Compliance Is Part of the Revenue Engine

For a long time, compliance was treated mostly as a cost of doing business.

Get the audit done. Get the report. Spend what you need to spend. Move on.

That mindset gets harder to justify when your SOC 2 report or ISO 27001 certification is one of the things standing between your sales team and a new customer.

For a growing number of B2B companies, compliance isn’t happening somewhere in the background anymore. It’s showing up directly in the sales process.

Compliance can affect whether a deal moves forward

Say you’re selling into a larger company. The buyer likes the product. The demo went well. You’ve got an internal champion. Then Security gets involved.

They ask for your SOC 2 report. Or ISO 27001 certification. Or they send over a security questionnaire asking questions your team hasn’t had to answer before.

If you have everything ready, the deal keeps moving.

If you don’t, you’ve just introduced friction into a deal that Sales was trying to close.

Maybe the prospect waits. Maybe your team spends the next three weeks pulling together evidence and answering questions. Maybe the buyer decides another vendor is easier to approve.

That’s the revenue connection.

Compliance doesn’t close the deal for you. But it can absolutely help a deal move faster or give it a reason to stall.

This changes how you should think about compliance

Once compliance starts showing up in the sales process, the cheapest possible audit isn’t necessarily the cheapest option for your organization.

You have to start asking different questions:

• Will we be ready when a customer asks for our report?
• Are there gaps we’re going to discover during the audit that we could have caught months earlier?
• When Engineering has a question about a control, can we actually get someone on the phone?
• Are we building a program we can maintain, or are we rebuilding everything every year when audit season comes around?

Those things are harder to put into a procurement spreadsheet, but they matter. And they’re a big part of what you’re actually paying an audit partner for.

The report isn’t the only thing you’re buying

Technically, yes, you’re hiring an audit firm to perform an audit and issue a report. But the experience of getting there can look very different depending on who you work with.

An effective audit partner:

• Provides clarity on necessary requirements while highlighting any areas where your documentation might fall short of the standard.
• Understands enough about your environment to give you useful answers when something isn’t black and white.
• Helps make the process predictable enough that your team isn’t scrambling every time an audit, or a customer security review, comes around.

It’s also worth paying attention to who is actually performing the audit. When you’re relying on a SOC 2 report to help satisfy the security requirements of an enterprise customer, the credibility of the firm behind that report matters. Working with an audit firm that has CPAs on staff and maintains a strong AICPA peer review pass rating provides additional assurance that the engagement is being performed by professionals operating within the standards and quality expectations of the profession. The goal isn’t simply to have a report—it’s to have a report that customers, prospects, and their security teams can have confidence in.

That’s where the value is.

The goal isn’t simply to get through this year’s audit.

It’s to build a compliance program that doesn’t become a problem every time the business grows.

And no, SOC 2 isn’t being replaced by ISO 27001

We hear this one pretty often.

SOC 2 and ISO 27001 aren’t interchangeable, and one isn’t replacing the other.

SOC 2 is an attestation report commonly requested by customers in the U.S. market. ISO 27001 is an internationally recognized certification built around an information security management system.

Depending on who you’re selling to, you may eventually need one, the other, or both.

And that’s another reason compliance strategy should be connected to the business.

If you’re planning to move upmarket or expand internationally, the question shouldn’t just be, “What framework do we need right now?”

It should also be, “What are our customers going to expect from us next?”

Compliance shouldn’t own revenue. But it can remove barriers to it.

Sales still has to sell. Your product or service still has to be good. Your company still has to solve a problem someone is willing to pay for. A SOC 2 report isn’t going to change any of that.

But once a buyer is interested, your security and compliance posture can make it easier, or harder, for them to say yes.

That’s why the companies getting the most value out of compliance aren’t treating it as an annual exercise they have to survive. They’re treating it as part of the infrastructure that allows the business to keep selling, moving upmarket, and earning the trust of larger customers.

And that’s a very different way to think about what compliance is worth.

Get in touch to learn more about how compliance can help you remove bottlenecks in the sales process.