How Tellennium Streamlined Security Questionnaires
The Challenge
As a leader in Enterprise Expense Management, Tellennium’s customer base consists of big companies with complex environments. They see a high volume of RFPs and compliance questionnaires that can slow down deals and distract their sales team. To ramp up capacity, their leadership team deployed 1up to automate the process.
The Outcome
1up was rolled out to the sales and marketing teams to automate questionnaire responses. By combining their compliance knowledge, marketing assets, and product documentation, 1up was able to quickly automate the process without any heavy lifting. Taking the human out of the loop allowed Tellennium to more than double the volume of RFPs they respond to.
Shawn Veitz, Chief Revenue Officer @ Tellennium We’re seeing immense growth and broke our annual goals way ahead of schedule. 1up has been a critical part of that journey.
Tellennium is a technology expense management (TEM) platform that helps organizations manage their telecom and IT expenses. Their tools provide businesses complete visibility into technology spending, processes, and ways to achieve significant cost savings.
Tellennium’s customer base consists of leaders in healthcare, energy, telecoms, and other highly regulated industries. Every opportunity comes with a long list of questions about security, compliance, technology, and regulatory requirements.
Security questionnaires can significantly slow down deals as the sale turns into a compliance review process.
Security Questionnaires Have Become a Staple of Every Opportunity
RFPs used to be about differentiation and positioning. Now they’re a mix of complex technical terms and probing questions.
Before 1up, Tellennium would pull in multiple teammates – sometimes as many as 5 subject matter experts – to complete a response.
Sales reps would spend hours searching through product documentation, researching answers, and then having someone else review their work. This was a terribly inefficient way to work that would slow down deals.
Shawn Veitz, Chief Revenue Officer @ Tellennium Security questionnaires are the longest time sink in any deal. You’re happy you won the RFP and then it’s like “Oh no… we’re at the risk management stage.”
For Tellennium it was not uncommon to take days or even weeks to complete an RFP response. The team would be required to write technical answers that inspired confidence while remaining true to their product capabilities. A normal process would have one person owning the response, a product SME, a technical reviewer, and a proofreader.
The biggest change to Tellennium’s workflow is that they no longer need a team of people to complete questionnaires. With 1up, they only need 1.
Before 1up, their response workflow looked something like this:
Today, their automated response experience is a straight line from point A to point B:
The moment a questionnaire comes in it gets uploaded to 1up. Hundreds of answers are then generated in minutes using trusted sources such as Tellennium’s product and compliance documentation. 1up does all the heavy lifting of searching, writing, and even proofreading the response.
In the end, Shawn’s team only needs to review and approve the final product before shipping it off to the customer.
Shawn Veitz, Chief Revenue Officer @ Tellennium The problem with RFPs is that they have NOT evolved. It’s the same 300 questions every time. That’s what makes them so painful.
The Biggest Impact? Increased Capacity.
1up’s lightning-fast responses ensure the team no longer needs to stop what they’re doing to focus on a questionnaire. Tellennium’s new streamlined workflow allows them to focus on closing new prospects while 1up gets deals over the finish line.
Tellennium maintains complete control over their knowledge base which consists of accurate sources of information. Their team does not need to worry about AI-generated factual errors because 1up is only allowed to use their approved internal content.
Moreover, creating a security questionnaire knowledge base has allowed them to fully automate the process without having to pull in the IT and InfoSec teams for help.
Shawn Veitz, Chief Revenue Officer @ Tellennium Sales teams often decline to respond to RFPs because they don’t have the capacity. With 1up’s automation we can take on as many opportunities as we want.
Why They Chose 1up: Speed and Security
This was a key sticking point in choosing 1up. RFPs and compliance questionnaires rely on sensitive customer information. As a leader in Enterprise Software, Tellennium set a high bar for privacy and data security.
1up’s commitment to never training Large Language Models on customer data was a key differentiator. 1up’s key data privacy elements allowed Tellennium to met this standard:
- Documents connected to 1up are never used to train any AI models.
- 1up never shares any company intelligence with anyone outside your organization.
- All data at rest is encrypted using AES-256 with customers retaining full control of their uploaded data.
Shawn Veitz, Chief Revenue Officer @ Tellennium We’re in a high growth stage so to be able to free up resources in a company like this is huge. Being able to safely streamline the workflow means everything to us.
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