Saving 70% of the dev resources on every integration

About Trustpage (by Vanta)

One of the most important components of a high touch SaaS sales cycle is the security review, which at many companies is not a well built out process. Trustpage turns security into a competitive advantage by providing B2B SaaS companies a dynamic Trust Center that covers every stage of the software lifecycle, from product discovery and sales through to security reviews.

“Our embedded integrations are as important as any other part of our product and are included in our product roadmap and strategy,” shares Ivan Sugerman, Trustpage’s Head of Product Engineering.

In the short term, this includes enabling their customers’ sales teams to securely request and share documents, all within their CRMs.

Adam, their Senior Software Engineer, says “we got direct feedback from customers who’ve said, almost verbatim, ‘our sales team lives in Salesforce - can we push this data to Salesforce?’ - So we wanted to turn it around rather quickly.”

Beyond existing customers, multiple prospects in their sales pipeline also needed to make sure that all their teams could effectively leverage Trustpage with the tools they were already using, which further drove urgency to turning these integrations around quickly.

Searching for a solution

“At past companies we've gone down the path of building our own integrations. While this option provides the most flexibility and control, the benefits did not outweigh the time investment in building and maintaining these integrations.” - Ivan, Head of Product Engineering

The team started searching for solutions and consulted their network on suggestions for recommendations on offloading the engineering work for their integration strategy.

“By partnering with an embedded integration solution, the hope was to quickly provide value to our customers and spend more of our time on the things that make us unique,” says Ivan. “As a security company, we were able to quickly narrow the list based on a set of key security and privacy requirements.”

After narrowing down the list of options based on their security and privacy requirements, the team proceeded to engage in a proof of concept (POC) with both Paragon and one competitor (who can’t be named due to confidentiality) and make a decision based on the following criteria:

1. Security review: They needed to ensure the solution met their requirements when it came to managing authentication and end-user credentials.

2. Resource savings: The platform needed to save substantial engineering resources on each integration to justify the costs.

3. Feature completeness: Their integration use cases must be feasible through the platform.

4. Technical and account support: They needed a partner they could have confidence in that would be reliable and would provide the necessary support.

Right off the bat, the account and technical support they received gave them tremendous confidence that Paragon was the more reliable partner.

“We even made feature requests. They were very quick to respond with timelines to get those features into the product, and they hit those timelines. That communication and followthrough gave us confidence right away.”

Additionally, the clear and simple step-by-step documentation made it very clear just how easy it was to set up their Salesforce integration. “The workflow builder was really easy to use and test with, so we were able to quickly build out these integrations.”

By the end of the POC period, it was clear to the team that Paragon was the superior solution.

The outcome

Trustpage shipped 3 integrations in 13 days, instead of the 13 weeks that they estimated it would’ve taken to build in-house.

Without Paragon

1. Event-driven API = 1 week

They would’ve had to spend at least a week building an event-driven API for Trustpage, before any integration work could even begin.

2. Learning the API documentation for each integration = 1 week/integration

One of the largest time sinks to build in-house is that due to every 3rd party app’s API docs being different, the team would have had to re-learn how to properly interface with every single integration API to properly implement the desired business logic.

3. Build out desired business logic = 2 weeks/integration

Beyond that, it would’ve taken 2-3 weeks to build out each individual integration, and that isn’t accounting for the maintenance and involvement required for any updates to the workflows.

With Paragon

“First one took five days from start to finish. Second one, same thing. And by the third one, I was getting pretty comfortable. It took three days, so I’m already seeing the returns coming through.” - Adam, Sr. Software Engineer

The main advantage was that the built-in actions made it much easier to build the integration, as the workflow endpoints were translated into common language and an intuitive interface.

Additionally, being able to provide their users Paragon’s out-of-the-box UI (Connect Portal) for enabling integrations made it really easy to ship quickly with a seamless user experience.

Beyond having the confidence that they can release future integrations very rapidly, the ability to easily make updates and improvements to their users’ integration experience has been a key advantage.

“When requests come in from the product side, such as the end-user modal and simple functionality changes, they can be done within the same day with Paragon.” - Adam, Sr. Software Engineer

As with core product features, constant iteration and improvements are expected, so it was important that changes/updates could be implemented easily and quickly.

The integrations

The CRM/Slack integrations enable Trustpage’s customers’ commercial teams to get notifications for private document requests from right within Salesforce/HubSpot/Slack with a direct link to their Trust Center. 

Additionally, since all engagements are tracked by Trustpage, when an external user views the private documents, a notification is triggered for the sales team to follow up and drive towards the next steps.

“It is shortening up the sales cycle, giving teams their time back, and enables them to close deals a lot faster.” - Adam

Looking ahead

Trustpage intends to continue expanding their integration roadmap past CRMs and messaging apps and into other verticals.

“Software is a very big ecosystem and it's getting more and more connected. Being able to interface with these different tools is more critical now than ever, and that's going to be a really critical part of our strategy moving forward.”

As for their core product, they’ll continue building out and improving their AI assisted security reviews, which helps SaaS companies move their security reviews to the front of the sales process.

This removes the challenge of trust and security becoming a blocker for closing deals, and instead equips sales teams to provide their prospects with the confidence they need to proceed with their purchasing decision.