The Salesforce “Small and Medium Business Trends” report identified four key trends that are currently defining SMB’s.
Focusing on areas such as local community support, how SMBs are deepening trust, the role of technology, and what the future looks like after these rollercoaster years of the pandemic, the report shares a snapshot of entrepreneurial vision and inspiration.
Alongside communities and governments offering more support and increased importance on engaging with employees and customers, SMBs’ are increasingly embracing digital-first approaches, and it seems that the long term changes brought about by the pandemic are here to stay.
We talked to Detectify, a Stockholm-based startup that has been using Salesforce to fuel its CRM. Founded in 2013, Detectify is a fully automated EASM solution powered by a leading ethical hacker community. The startup now has over 130 employees, is available on the global market and is trusted by over 1500 security-conscious companies including popular app-makers Spotify, King, Trello, Grammarly.
What is the mission behind Detectify?
Detectify is a SaaS security company built by ethical hackers who have a track record of hacking companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. We monitor and scan companies’ web-facing assets for security vulnerabilities, and help them stay on top of the latest threats online. Behind our scanning engine is a global pool of handpicked ethical hackers. They probe the internet for security holes, and when they find a new attack method, they submit it to us, and we build it into our product as a security test. For our customers, it’s like having hundreds of hackers on their team as part of their online security, constantly feeding them their latest findings.
Founded around 7 years ago, Detectify aims to give companies better access to the security knowledge of world-class hackers, and that continues to be our mission. Since then, we’ve grown to 130+ employees with a community of over 350 ethical freelance hackers and have tech platforms including Spotify, King, and Trello as clients.
What is the long term vision for the company?
To put it simply, our vision is to drive the future of internet security. There is a huge knowledge disparity when it comes to cyber security and we believe in making that knowledge more accessible. Our approach is to leverage crowdsource vulnerability research and scale the application of that knowledge using automation.
How were you impacted by the pandemic?
We have continued to grow significantly during the pandemic, both in terms of revenue and headcount. One thing that became very clear to us, and the whole industry for that matter, was how important web security became when we entered a never seen before pace of digitalization. Data is the new oil, or so it’s said, and every company is generating more of it. But only a few know how to secure that data. The growth that we are most proud of is the one that benefits our customers the most – growing our crowdsourced vulnerability submissions by circa 35%.
Can you tell us about your experience with Salesforce?
We rolled out Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Pardot in 2019.
We needed a solution that was scalable, easy to customize, and integrated well with our technology stack. Our goal is to automate as many processes as possible so we can scale rapidly and free up our team to focus on giving customers a great experience.
Implementing Salesforce has been crucial in establishing a common understanding of our customers and our business functions. One example is how sales and marketing are working together with a joint view of our customers, from early engagement throughout the whole journey to becoming an advocate. With automation at the core of our business, we strive to work smart in setting our processes up for scale.
How is Salesforce helping you grow?
As a startup, growth is a lot about hiring the right people, but for them to be successful in their roles having the right tooling in place makes all the difference. Partnering with Salesforce was a natural next step after creating business processes that could facilitate our scaleup.
Everyone talks about being data-driven but data – more often than not – is scattered across different business functions and has to be turned into actionable insights. That is where Salesforce has created a common ground for our commercial teams.
Being that central version of the truth for our commercial teams, Salesforce has really helped us clarify our customers’ journey. This enables a much better understanding of their pain points and how we can work together to deliver more value to them.
What would be your advice to other SMB leaders?
The last two years fast forwarded digitalization, both from a customer experience and an employee engagement perspective. Even for businesses that were born digital have been challenged with facilitating a flexible remote workforce. Leadership, innovation, and flexibility will be key areas in enabling continued success in the year to come when we adopt ways to engage our customers and employees in new ways.
One piece of advice coming from our area of expertise is how SMBs can balance agility to allow speed and innovation with making sure your products and services are kept secure. One of our customers summarised that security should follow your business. If you have adopted an agile development process, you will sooner or later face the challenges of security testing becoming a source of noise instead of being an enabler. Continuously scanning your external attack surface will allow you to see what a potential attacker can see and act proactively while staying nimble enough to keep your pace up.
Salesforce is the world’s #1 CRM, powering SMB across the world to grow sustainability. Don’t hesitate to get in touch to see how its software and businesses insights can help your business flourish and thrive. To get you started, download their CRM handbook where you’ll find practical advice on how to get started with building your CRM strategy.
