How Pave scaled sales volume without adding overhead

As candidates review job offers with increasing scrutiny, hiring teams are looking for the most relevant and real-time compensation data to help them craft an enticing package for top recruits. In just three years since their founding, Pave has become a leader in the this space, bringing transparency and accessibility to HR teams.

Chris Prinz joined Pave in 2020 as a product manager. But with only a handful of people at the company at that time, Chris wound up owning security and compliance programs as well as his core product responsibilities.

When Pave began seeing traction in the market, larger and larger companies started approaching them to use their product. And the larger the potential customer, the more likely they were to require a security questionnaire as part of the evaluation process. Chris quickly realized that Pave needed a way to automate security questionnaires to help the business grow. At the same time, the company couldn't yet afford to hire a dedicated security role, so they needed an easy, scalable solution that didn't require new headcount.

Testing homegrown solutions for security questionnaires

As the Sales organization grew at Pave, so did the volume of security questionnaires the team was seeing. Initially, Chris was able to support the questionnaire flow by collaborating with engineering teammates to manually complete individual surveys. This process typically took 3.5 hours per questionnaire to complete, and could stretch across several business days depending on the team’s other priorities.

Eventually the Sales team at Pave took the process into their own hands and attempted to build out a shared knowledge base in Google Sheets for the team to use. But this information quickly became stale, and wasn’t accessible enough for the team to actually leverage on a regular basis.

None of these homegrown solutions solved the real problem. Chris knew there was still an underlying issue that was holding the team back: they had no way to standardize questionnaire responses and ensure quality at scale. The lack of consistency and confidence was causing Chris significant stress.

"I've had recurring nightmares that I'll be on the witness stand for something that I've put in a security questionnaire. You can literally see my heart rate spike on my Apple Watch, whenever I have to do these things."

Finding a streamlined process with HyperComply

Initially, Chris considered whether Pave could respond to security questionnaires by bringing onboard a group of specialized contractors to complete and review questionnaires. After a small experiment with this model, Chris realized that dedicated contractors were too expensive and still needed a lot of oversight throughout the process, failing to substantially save him time.

"I was not about to spend like 40% of my time filling out security questionnaires. So obviously, I was looking for tools to just generally make that easier."

Eventually Chris realized the security questionnaire process needed to be centralized using a dedicated tool. Based on a recommendation from Vanta, who Pave used to complete their SOC 2 certification, Chris decided to give HyperComply a try. HyperComply provided the right mix of standardization and flexibility that Pave’s sales cycles needed. And unlike other questionnaire tools, HyperComply offered a strong machine learning feature, and intuitive product UI for the Pave team to work out of.

Scaling sales processes to support company growth

After deciding to test HyperComply as a security questionnaire automation tool, Chris was immediately impressed with both the product offering and the customer experience that he received. 

"HyperComply is like a real partner in our security compliance. We were working with the HyperComply team and they would handle everything."

Since onboarding, Pave has completed dozens of security questionnaires in HyperComply using their customer security knowledge base to ensure consistent, high-quality responses. Rather than spending hours of effort and days of back-and-forth just to complete a questionnaire, the Pave team now spends just 36 minutes on average reviewing and approving questionnaires in HyperComply.

"All we have to do is login and review. It eliminated many, many hours of work. Ultimately, the customer doesn't care how much time it takes us to fill out these questionnaires. They just want it done."

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