When growing companies break out from founding sales to their first enterprise customers, most encounter increased scrutiny. Enterprise buyers are looking for demonstrations, proofs of concept, and evidence that their data will be secure. 

In small teams, the burden of demonstrating that trust falls on the founders, who are some of the most resource-constrained people on the planet. As teams grow, this responsibility shifts to sellers, who then escalate to infrastructure or security teams, creating a loop of interruptions, document hunts, and delays. 

Most teams in regulated industries or those already selling to enterprises have figured out that a SOC 2 report is a great start in answering prospect and customer questions, but just having the report is increasingly viewed as insufficient. And even if you have a finding-free report on standby, you are spending time sending information back and forth. 

In this brief article, I’ll walk through the fundamentals of Trust Centers. 

What is a Trust Center?

A Trust Center is a centralized page that you can use to display your organization’s compliance information. It shows your current customers and prospects (as well as partners and investors) the security measures you have in place. Trust Centers allow these stakeholders to self-serve the documentation required for vendor reviews, risk assessments, and due diligence -without waiting on your team.

Consider your buyer: they’ve decided to purchase your product and now they have to clear the administrative hoops on their side with their Supply Chain, GRC, and Security teams to actually close the deal. The easier you make it for them to gather the information they need, the faster those approvals move, and the faster revenue lands. IDC research consistently shows that Trust Centers are the greatest contributor to brand trustworthiness in the area of compliance.

The best Trust Centers today enable customization of what you share: an overview, “badges” or logos for frameworks, and more documentation behind NDAs. They enable your internal teams, creating a straightforward process to manage information and confirm your compliance posture. As a Compliance Officer in a small company, I frequently answered questions and found documents for Technical Sales representatives to close deals. We deployed a Trust Center because we needed a better path for our own teams to find information; I’m a pretty responsive human, but a page is much faster and scales far better than a single person ever could.

What Do I Include in my Trust Center? 

Your Trust Center should be customized to your actual posture. At a minimum, list the frameworks with which you are compliant, provide full reports behind NDAs, and list your subprocessors. As you build experience answering prospect questions, an FAQ may be appropriate; customers interested in confirming your availability metrics appreciate a link to your status page or even specific control information. 

With Openlane, add: 

• Frameworks: A quick, scannable list of the frameworks with which you comply
• Subprocessors: Key information on your providers for clients to confirm
• Updates: News about your product, new achievements, and completed audits
• Customer Logos: A list of customers who trust you
• Documents (with NDA Click-wrap where relevant): Deep, detailed information for prospects to review and evaluate

 When Do I Build my Trust Center?

You don’t need a completed SOC 2 report to build a Trust Center. In fact, building one early often pays dividends: 

• Centralize security documentation: Keeping your information in one location streamlines customer requests
• Demonstrate trust: Creating transparency with customers by making information about your posture readily available
• Support no-touch security reviews: Enabling customers to self-serve the information they need, which accelerates their review process and can limit security questionnaires on your end

If you’re not complete with SOC 2 yet, you can still share control information, updates, and even a letter of engagement confirming you have entered a SOC 2 observation period. In fact, we’ve done this ourselves: https://trust.theopenlane.io/.

Why Openlane’s Trust Center Works for You

A well-designed Trust Center can eliminate the majority of inbound security reviews, reduce sales friction, and give both your buyers and your internal teams a faster path to “yes.”

With Openlane’s Trust Center, you get all of that, without being locked into a broader compliance platform before you’re ready. Whether you’re running a mature program or still building toward your first report, it meets you where you are and scales as you grow.

Using Openlane's Trust Center: 

• Build a custom-branded page and use your own domain
• Maintain a single, always-current source of truth for compliance and security
• Track analytics and understand how customers are using your Trust Center

Save yourself from 80% or more of inbound security reviews and requests and get back to building and selling!