PerkUp was founded to help employers manage sending items out to their employees. This could be anything from merchandise to monetary awards and gift cards. Initially, they sold to small startups that had one or two decision makers and didn’t require a SOC 2 report.

However, larger companies started bringing in more decision makers, like Finance for pricing and IT for technical security questions. Without a SOC 2 report, PerkUp’s team found the process of filling out security questionnaires painful and time-intensive, adding several weeks to their sales cycles. It also impacted their deals in other ways.

“We were losing trust,” says Mirmotahari. “Not having a SOC 2 report was slowing down the sales process and it was preventing us from pricing our product higher.”

From the very beginning, Mirmotahari was impressed with the Secureframe team’s approach to onboarding. While internal work delayed the start of the SOC 2 process for PerkUp, the Secureframe customer success team continued to send reminders and pushed materials to keep them on track in a friendly manner.

“The Secureframe team really eased me into it. Once we actually started the process, it was really fast. The platform was intuitive and fun once we got into it.”

After going through the initial onboarding checklist, Mirmotahari logged into the Secureframe platform, reviewed the dashboard, and saw that many of the required steps were already done. He found that Secureframe provided all of the features and documents needed to get through the SOC 2 process right in the platform.

Overall, Mirmotahari found the SOC 2 readiness process was much more streamlined than he had expected. While the process took several months from beginning to end, most of the actual readiness work was done over the course of three weeks. After the audit, it took just a couple of weeks to receive the report.

“The process was so seamless with SOC 2,” said Mirmotahari. “It felt much more daunting before we started, but now that we’ve gone through it with Secureframe, it’s much easier than it seemed. That’s why we’re moving forward with Secureframe for GDPR.”

Not only that, Mirmotahari was pleased to discover that signing up with one of Secureframe’s recommended auditors made the audit itself much smoother.

“Rather than going out and trying to find an auditor, we used a recommended auditor and it was such a breeze. The clockwork between the auditor and Secureframe platform was amazing.”

Just two days after receiving their SOC 2 report, PerkUp sent it out to a prospect, which they quickly approved the very same day. This was a big difference from their previous experiences when not having a SOC 2 meant prospects would come back with lengthy security questionnaires.

“That process to get through a security questionnaire would typically take 2-3 weeks. Each time it would take me and my CTO 2-3 hours per deal to complete. And these are all deals that are very material for our business.”

Another area that the report helped with was building trust with customers. Having the SOC 2 report builds instant credibility with prospects and it’s easier to get buy-in from internal stakeholders.

And for Mirmotahari and his CTO, having Secureframe integrated into their systems and continually monitoring their compliance posture ensures they don’t have to worry about that part of their business.

“One thing that really stands out is the peace of mind we have. Knowing that the Secureframe Agent is there monitoring employee devices and their integrations are hooked into GCP and Github, it feels like Secureframe has our back.”