My co-founder Kraig and I were lucky enough to serve as executives at Salesforce during a very formative time for the company and the enterprise cloud computing industry. During that time, Salesforce proved that moving mission-critical business information and processes to the cloud was not only a more efficient and scalable way to run a business, but a more secure and trusted approach as well.

It’s been nothing short of amazing seeing how Salesforce has executed. Even more impressive is how the company has managed to retain its core values over the years, through hypergrowth, and now operating at massive scale.  

What’s the secret? A focus on customer trust has been at the center of it all. Customer trust is the number one value at Salesforce today and has been so for more than two decades.

What does it mean to have trust as the #1 value for your company? As Marc is famous for saying, running a business is a “crisis of prioritization,” and “if everything is a priority, nothing is really the top priority.” With trust as your #1 value, it means prioritizing customer trust above all else, all the time.

Here at Qualified, we’ve taken that same pledge. 

Customer Trust is the #1 Value at Qualified

This includes not only how we build software and secure customer data, but also includes being transparent into how we do it, our internal process and controls, and how all of the data we manage is used and stored.  

When you are scaling a successful business, you want to move fast. You want to build more features and functionality. You want to go! Given that desire for innovation, it’s easy to push things like security, compliance, and availability down the road because they’re not shiny new features. That’s NOT the mentality at Qualified. We’ve believe that trust, security, availability, compliance, and transparency are job number 1. That means before we even discuss building a new feature, we put in place the proper infrastructure, safeguards, and processes to ensure we’re doing everything we can to protect and secure customer data. 

A focus on trust is one of the many reasons we chose to run our codebase on the Salesforce platform. It's also one of the reasons that we discuss daily the constantly-changing security and compliance landscape globally. Prioritizing trust is not easy thing to do in a fast-growing company with big sales targets, but it’s the right thing to do, and every employee at Qualified knows it as we put it on top on our V2MOM at every company all-hands meeting.

Qualified has passed our SOC 2 Type II Certification 

Today, I am pleased to announce that Qualified has achieved our SOC 2 Type II certification. For those of you not familiar, SOC 2 was developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (“AICPA”), and SOC 2 audits provide an industry-wide recognition that companies conform to the standard, which measures security and availability. This serves as assurance that your data is being managed in a controlled and audited environment, capturing how a company safeguards customer data and how well those controls are operating. SOC 2 Type I involves taking a picture of your controls at a point in time by a third party auditor. SOC 2 Type II is more rigorous, and involves measuring and monitoring your operating controls over an extended period of time.  

Thank you to our customers for your confidence. We strive to earn and maintain your trust everyday, in everything that we do. As we grow Qualified, we will continue to keep trust as the #1 value in our business.