As a SaaS product hosted in Cloud, data protection is paramount to Freshworks and the customers they sell to. Before signing up to use the services, customers want to understand the information security and data protection capabilities. Because of this, a dedicated GTM (Go-to-Market) information security team was formed to respond to customer security reviews, due diligence calls, contract reviews, and other information security-dependent activities in the sales process.
Freshworks has a large customer base (50,000+ customers), and almost all of their mid-market and enterprise customers and prospects tend to do a security evaluation as part of their procurement and annual compliance processes.
For Freshworks, each information security review took 7-10 days on average from start to finish, and was entirely manual, consisting of tasks like email requests, ticket creation, spreadsheeds, NDA redlining, and more.
In addition to the sheer volume of questionnaires they were receiving, no two reviews were alike: based on the customer, the product, or the use case, the team fielded various questionnaires, which made the process even more dynamic.
All of this added to the Freshworks GTM Information security team looking for a solution to their security review quandary.
As they started their search for a platform, the team had three main goals:
Freshworks saw immediate improvements in their workflows on day 1 using Conveyor. Using their Conveyor portal to share security documentation earlier in the sales cycle proactively, they could avoid customer questionnaires with simpler requirements. And customers who had more detailed information requests could self-serve their answers through the internal Knowledge Base also available in the portal.
In the first six months of using Conveyor, the Freshworks team could already tell that their initial goals (speed sales cycle and saving time for the security team) were being met.
They saw the information security review stage of the sales cycle sped up by 75% (going down from 10 business days to 2.5 business days). On average, the security team spent 67% less time sharing documents & responding to questionnaires.
There were several aspects of the product that were particularly impactful to the Freshworks GTM Information Security team and have become a critical part of their new workflows:
“In terms of our biggest benefits, I’d put that in three categories:
For the customers, we have enabled greater assurance and a hassle free process in understanding and validating the information security capabilities by bringing all under one roof.
For the customer facing teams, it’s making their job easier and does not have any delays in sales cycle.. All they must do is perform minimal, easy steps to get customers & prospects access to the Freshworks Information Security Room.
For the Information Security teams, we’ve saved a ton of time. Processes are streamlined, automated, and we have the needed insights on each security review.”
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