The cost of manual security questionnaire responses
Security questionnaires are an unavoidable part of winning larger businesses as customers. However, dealing with security questionnaires manually comes with a cost, particularly for companies without dedicated compliance teams.
Last updated: December 19, 2025
Your time
Our customers tell us that security questionnaires take anywhere from half a day to 3 days to complete. This means that if you’re getting 5 questionnaires a month someone is losing a meaningful percentage of their working month completing security questionnaires.
The difficulty delegating security questionnaires often means that the person losing that time is the CTO or Head of Engineering. Even if the questionnaires have been delegated out to an ops lead, that person often has to go back to a senior technical team member for a lot of the questions.
This means that those senior technical members are pulled away from the critical work of hiring, building the product and talking to customers.
Automating the process of responding to security questionnaires in small teams can have a huge ROI because key team members like the CTO can find themselves reclaiming 3 - 5 days per month.
Deal momentum and stalled revenue
While your CTO is wrangling Excel and not working on the next important hire, that deal is getting stale. We all know “time kills deals” - buyers discover alternatives, budgets get cut, champions move roles. We have seen security questionnaires delay deals by 2 - 4 weeks because, although they are important, they are rarely as urgent as a technical outage or preparing for the weekly all-hands.
When security questionnaire responses are automated, non-technical team members can lead on security questionnaires and only escalate the few questions that cannot be automatically answered. And with an auto-updating Knowledge Base, new questions and answers get added after each questionnaire, meaning over time fewer questions need to get escalated to technical team members.
Inaccurate responses
Manual responses often rely on a mixture of previous questionnaire answers and a knowledge base managed in Notion or a spreadsheet. In this context it can be difficult to know which answers are the most up to date and most accurate.
This creates two risks. First, you might tell a customer you have a control in place when you do not, creating liability if something goes wrong later. Second, you might undersell your security posture because someone copied an outdated answer from a previous questionnaire.
With an automated knowledge base that tracks when answers were last reviewed and flags duplicates or conflicts, you can be confident that every response reflects how your team actually operates today.
Your sanity
Let’s be real, no one actually enjoys completing security questionnaires. In fact, they are a special kind of excruciating work - high stakes and utterly tedious.
Knowing you are delaying revenue, delaying important work like hiring all while wrangling Excel or a web portal, will test even the most resilient of people.
You are now faced with a lose-lose decision: do the mind-numbing work yourself or delegate to another team member and wreck their day.
Automating security questionnaires removes this entirely. Instead of blocking out half a day to grind through questions, you review AI-generated answers, approve the ones that look good, and focus your attention on the handful that actually need thought. It turns a dreaded task into a 30-minute review.
When manual processes stop making sense
If any of this article sounds familiar, then it is time to think about automating your responses to security questionnaires. We built ResponseHub because we experienced everything in this article first hand.
- Get your time back. AI-powered answers with confidence ratings let you review and approve rather than research and write from scratch.
- Keep deals moving. Non-technical team members can lead on questionnaires and only escalate the few questions that genuinely need engineering input.
- Stay accurate. An auto-updating Knowledge Base tracks when answers were last reviewed and flags duplicates, so you’re never sending outdated information.
- Stop dreading them. Turn a half-day slog into a 30-minute review by focusing only on the questions that actually need your attention.
Learn more about security questionnaire automation and explore different approaches to automating security questionnaires.