3 Things Our UK Pilots Taught Us About Compliance Buyers

Ramkumar Sundarakalatharan
Aug 24
3 min read

When we began our early pilots in the UK, our goal was simple: validate whether compliance automation could resonate with SaaS founders beyond the traditional “audit checkbox” narrative. What we discovered was more nuanced.

Compliance buyers in the UK are not the caricatures we often assume – clipboard-wielding risk officers or lawyers chasing endless documentation. Instead, the real stakeholders we met were founders, CROs, and sales leaders trying to unlock enterprise revenue.

Over the past six months, three themes have stood out across our pilots. Together, they paint a clear picture of how compliance buying is evolving in the UK, and where automation needs to meet that demand.

1. Compliance as a Revenue Enabler, Not Just Risk Reduction

Almost every founder we met started the conversation with a similar anxiety: “How quickly can we get ISO 27001 or SOC 2? We’re losing deals.”

On the surface, this sounded like a risk problem. In reality, it was a revenue one. Their boards and CROs were not asking for a compliance certificate to look good on the wall – they needed it because enterprise customers were holding back contracts without it.

This matches what ENISA’s 2025 supply chain report highlighted: security posture is now embedded directly into procurement scoring. Compliance has shifted from a defensive shield into an offensive sales asset.

For UK SaaS startups, this means compliance buyers are increasingly sales-driven decision makers, not compliance officers. The motivation is less about passing an audit and more about accelerating revenue. Automation that speaks to this reality, “win deals faster” rather than “avoid fines”, gets attention.

2. Simplicity Wins Over Fear of Complexity

Another common thread across our pilots was overestimation of effort. Many teams believed compliance automation meant configuring hundreds of controls, learning new frameworks, or restructuring their DevOps workflows.

Once they saw how one-click remediation or auto-mapped evidence could shrink weeks of work into hours, adoption intent spiked.

One CTO told us:

“I expected another heavy GRC platform; what I found was 2–3 levers I can actually explain to my board.”

The FCA’s recent paper on proportional assurance for SMEs echoes this. Boards and leadership teams don’t want 200-page risk dashboards; they want clear signals, framed in language that ties to business outcomes.

The lesson? Simplicity is not a nice-to-have. It is the decisive factor in whether compliance tools gain traction in fast-moving UK startups.

3. Trust is Earned Through Engineering Proof, Not Presentations

In the enterprise compliance market, glossy slide decks and certification badges are the norm. But in our UK pilots, we found buyers were far more persuaded by a live GitHub + Jenkins demo than by polished marketing.

This is not surprising. Gartner’s 2025 Security Buyer’s Journey brief noted that 40% of SMEs prefer live proof-of-concept demonstrations over RFP documentation.

Our own experience confirmed it: buyers wanted to see evidence that automation could plug into their CI/CD, remediate real misconfigurations, and generate audit-ready evidence, not promises of future features.

For compliance automation providers, this changes the sales motion. Trust is not won with process documentation, but by shipping engineering-first proof.

The Bigger Picture

Taken together, these lessons suggest a broader truth: compliance buyers in the UK are shifting roles. They are less risk managers, more revenue enablers. They are not searching for complexity, but for clarity. And they do not trust slide decks; they trust working code.

For us at Zerberus, these insights have shaped how we design, demo, and deliver. Compliance must feel less like a burden and more like a sales accelerator.

What’s Next

We are now expanding early access to more UK and EU startups that want to experience compliance automation built for revenue outcomes.

If your startup is scaling towards enterprise clients in 2025, and compliance is standing between you and closed deals, join our pilot waitlist today.