As founders start to get into aspirational sales cycles — whether it's with Series B+ darling software companies or large enterprises — security eventually gets in the way of moving as fast as you'd like.
We see it all the time: founders and scaling sales orgs think they have the "security step" covered, until additional topics come up after the SOC 2 review, especially when a questionnaire is involved. Great companies like Vanta, Drata, Secureframe, and others have helped companies reach compliance faster and given early- and late-stage teams a set of security best practices to follow. That said, there are still a lot of internal steps you can take to make sure you can meet the security standards of your prospects and customers.
Make the checklist actionable
For years, we've shared the SaaS CTO Security Checklist originally created by the folks at Sqreen. It's still highly relevant today, but to make it more actionable, the best approach we've seen is to turn it into an interactive internal doc your team can actually work through together. We've also made refresh changes and additions based on guidance from CTOs and security experts at some of the best startups in software.
Why this matters
SOC 2 Type II tells a prospect you've put a baseline in place. It does not answer the more specific questions a security team will ask once a deal gets real — data handling, access controls, incident response, vendor management, and the dozens of line items that show up in a questionnaire.
The teams that move fastest treat security as an internal discipline well before a prospect asks. They keep an up-to-date, owned checklist; they know who is responsible for each item; and they can produce evidence quickly when a security review begins. That preparation is what keeps the "security step" from becoming the reason a deal slips a quarter.
We all want to simplify the security step in our sales cycles. The work to get there happens long before the questionnaire ever lands in your inbox.