How Chili Piper built a lean Security team using HyperComply

Chili Piper has built a tool that enables Sales teams to optimize and accelerate their inbound lead motion through advanced automation and lead routing. While the team has built technology to dramatically improve the efficiency of inbound lead processes, even Chili Piper had not yet solved the issue of overcoming security questionnaire delays in their own sales cycle.

Scott Haney joined Chili Piper in 2017, first working in a sales role and later transitioning to Revenue Operations. Like most Operations roles, Scott finds himself operating across many cross-functional teams, ensuring there are tools and processes in place to keep the company moving forward smoothly.Intro the problem

Manual security processes reach a breaking point

Initially Chili Piper was only seeing a small number of security questionnaires per month from prospective customers. With only one or two questionnaires to tackle at a time, Scott was able to manage handling this process on a regular basis. But over the course of several months, Scott realized that the questionnaire volume was steadily increasing, rising from only one or two per month to one or two per week.

Scott prioritized responding to security questionnaires and aimed to get questionnaires completed in less than 3 days so he could unblock the Chili Piper Sales team. But as questionnaire volume grew from 6 to 10 per month, it became harder to manage questionnaires on top of a full project workload.

"We had to take time out of our day to focus on questionnaires, and then still get back to our other projects. It was just slowing us down and we were getting bored of doing them to be honest."

The differing formats and specifications of each questionnaire was another complicating factor as Scott tried to keep up with the workload. Questionnaires arrived in Scott’s inbox as Excel files, Word docs, or even web portals with unique logins that he had to navigate. Scott started actively tracking the volume of questionnaires he completed each month to track how much time was being spent on this manual and cumbersome task.

While Scott considered potentially hiring interns or even a full time employee to manage the security questionnaire process, he knew that bringing on additional headcount wasn’t the most efficient solution for Chili Piper as they planned for future growth.

"Even if you decided to hire someone to do the questionnaires, it’s still the opportunity cost that that person could probably be doing other stuff."

Finding the right security solution

As a process-minded person, Scott wanted to make a thoughtful decision about how to tackle Chili Piper’s security questionnaire problem moving forward. After thorough research, Scott identified three potential tools on the market that might help their team to scale: SecurityPal, Whistic, and HyperComply.

Over the course of several months, Scott went through the process of sending multiple questionnaires to each potential vendor to compare turnaround times, accuracy, and customer experience. While SecurityPal lacked the automated technology Scott was looking for, and Whistic didn’t support their use case, HyperComply offered advanced machine learning with a human review layer as well as strong customer support throughout onboarding. Scott made the decision to move forward with HyperComply, and was able to get the system integrated with his existing tools in less than an hour.

"We did an assessment to have a general feel of it. To me, HyperComply was just a cleaner process."

In addition to the core HyperComply product, Scott was impressed with the Chrome extension and Salesforce integrations, which made it even easier to implement HyperComply across Chili Piper’s workflows. Now, Chili Piper sales reps are able to submit security questionnaires to HyperComply direction from Salesforce, so they are able to stay focused in their primary tool throughout the day.

Regaining time to prioritize strategic work

With all of Chili Piper’s security questionnaires now being managed in HyperComply, Scott has seen an increase in his own bandwidth. Rather than spending upwards of 20 hours per month completing security questionnaires, Scott only takes 5-10 minutes to review and finalize completed questionnaires before they are sent back to the customer.

Since security questionnaires no longer take up a substantial amount of his time, Scott is able to re-focus his energy on higher priority projects to keep Chili Piper’s revenue teams running smoothly.

"Now it’s just a quick scroll through the questions. It might be five or ten minutes just to review, and it’s actually done right."