2026 DDQ Response: Examples, Checklist, and Automations
Learn what a DDQ response is, what it includes, and how to complete one faster. See how AutoRFP.ai uses AI to automate your due diligence responses.
Robert Dickson
RevOps Manager, AutoRFP.ai··25 min read
A strong DDQ response is less about saying “we’re secure” and more about proving it in a way reviewers can trust quickly. That means clear scoping, consistent wording, and evidence that matches what you claim, without burying the reviewer in noise.
This article gives you a practical DDQ response playbook: examples you can model, a checklist to prevent gaps, and a process guide for owning inputs, approvals, and version control.
You’ll also learn how to use AI and automation to standardize and reuse trusted responses, so your team can spend more time on exceptions, nuance, and high-impact details.
What Is a DDQ Response?
A DDQ response is the completed set of answers a vendor submits after receiving a Due Diligence Questionnaire from a buyer, prospect or procurement team. It helps the buyer assess whether the vendor meets their internal policies, risk standards and external compliance requirements before moving forward with a deal.
A DDQ response often includes details such as:
Company information
Financial information
Legal information
Customer case studies and past performance
GDPR compliance
ISO 27001 and SOC 2 compliance
Modern slavery compliance
Environmental, social and governance practices
Security, privacy and operational controls
DDQ responses are commonly completed in Word, Excel, PDF or online vendor portals. Some are short, with around 10 questions, while others can include hundreds of detailed questions, especially for enterprise, government or regulated industry deals.
What Does a DDQ Response Typically Include
A DDQ response typically includes the information a buyer needs to assess a vendor’s risk, compliance readiness and ability to deliver. The exact requirements vary by industry, but most DDQs ask for proof that the organization is financially stable, legally sound, secure, compliant and operationally reliable.
A DDQ response may include:
| Elements | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Company information | Legal entity structure, ownership details, key personnel and governance framework. |
| Financial information | Audited financial statements, professional insurance coverage and financial stability details. |
| Legal and regulatory information | Regulatory examinations, legal risks, corrective actions and current compliance status. |
| Risk management framework | Operational risk management, risk identification, assessment, monitoring, mitigation procedures and business continuity planning. |
| Cybersecurity information | Incident response plans, notification procedures, recovery protocols, encryption standards and security auditing schedules. |
| Data privacy and protection | GDPR compliance, data mapping, consent management, data subject rights and breach notification procedures. |
| Cross-border data transfer safeguards | Standard Contractual Clauses, data residency requirements and jurisdiction-specific compliance requirements. |
| Compliance certifications | Certifications such as SOC 2, ISO 27001 or other frameworks relevant to the buyer’s industry. |
| Customer case studies and past performance | Client examples, challenges addressed, measurable outcomes, implementation experience and references. |
| Team composition and qualifications | Proposed team structure, individual qualifications, relevant experience and role responsibilities. |
| Operational capabilities | Backup systems, disaster recovery testing, uptime SLAs, support structure and recovery objectives. |
| Integration and compatibility | API architecture, authentication methods, rate limits, webhooks, SDK availability and integration support. |
| Industry-specific compliance | Frameworks such as HIPAA, FedRAMP, NIST, FINRA, SEC, ILPA or ESG requirementsFor private equity investments, standard frameworks like the ILPA DDQ are used to streamline the evaluation. |
| Supporting documentation | Policies, certificates, reports, templates or evidence that validate the DDQ response. |
| Follow-up process | Clear owners, additional documentation access and a process for handling further buyer questions. |
“Buyer due diligence has moved from the final procurement step to the first presentation. Most sales teams haven’t caught up yet. Security reviews, ESG questionnaires, and governance checks used to be the final checkbox exercise before ink hit the paper. A formality. That’s changed. What I’m seeing now, both in our own sales process at AutoRFP.ai and across the teams we work with, is due diligence moving much earlier in the buyer’s process. Security, ESG, and governance aren’t just checkboxes anymore. They’re genuine competitive differentiators. Buyers are using them to shortlist, not just to validate a decision they’ve already made. If you’re slow, disorganized, or evasive when these questions come up early, you’re losing to competitors who can answer quickly.” - Jasper Cooper, CEO & Co-Founder of AutoRFP.ai
The DDQ Response Audit: A Practical Checklist Before You Hit Submit
A DDQ response is not something you should submit after a quick proofread. It often includes legal, financial, security, compliance and operational information that buyers use to decide whether your company is safe to work with.
Standard DDQ frameworks, including ILPA and AIMA questionnaires, exist because buyers need structured, comparable information before making risk-based decisions.
Use this audit checklist to catch weak answers, missing evidence and approval gaps before your response reaches the buyer.
1. Check That Every Question Has A Clear Answer
Every DDQ question should be answered directly, even if the answer is not ideal. Blank fields, vague replies or “N/A” without context can make the buyer think your team is avoiding the question or does not have a mature process.
When this check is skipped, buyers may come back with more clarification requests, delay the deal or mark your response as incomplete.
What to check:
Every required question has an answer.
“N/A” answers include a short explanation.
Conditional questions are answered only where relevant.
No sections are left blank without a clear reason.
2. Make Sure Claims Are Backed By Evidence
A DDQ response should not just say your company is secure, compliant or experienced. It should prove it with policies, certifications, reports, case studies, customer outcomes or other supporting documents.
When evidence is missing, even a strong answer can sound like a generic promise. Buyers may question whether the claim is current, verified or approved internally.
What to check:
Security claims are supported by certifications or audit reports.
Customer outcomes are backed by case studies or measurable results.
Compliance statements link to policies, controls or certificates.
Financial or legal claims are approved by the right internal owner.
Pro tip: Create a central evidence folder for SOC 2 reports, ISO certificates, insurance documents, policies, case studies and legal templates. This makes future DDQ responses faster and more consistent.
3. Review Security, Privacy And Compliance Answers Carefully
Security, privacy and compliance sections carry more risk than general company information. These answers may cover encryption, incident response, GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, data transfer safeguards or other requirements depending on the buyer’s industry. Vendor DDQs commonly assess cybersecurity, operational risk, financial health, legal compliance and ESG areas, so each answer should match the actual risk being reviewed.
When this review is skipped, teams may submit outdated certifications, overstate controls or give answers that conflict with legal or security policies.
What to check:
Certifications are current and applicable.
Data privacy answers reflect current processes.
Incident response timelines are accurate.
Security controls match what your team actually uses.
Cross-border data transfer answers are reviewed where relevant.
Pro tip: Do not let sales or proposal teams guess on security or privacy answers. Route these sections to security, legal or compliance owners before submission.
4. Check For Consistency Across The Entire Response
A DDQ response often pulls information from different teams, documents and past submissions. Without a consistency check, one section may say your company has a 24-hour response SLA while another says 48 hours.
These conflicts create doubt. Buyers may assume your team has weak internal alignment or unreliable documentation.
What to check:
Company name, product names and legal entity details are consistent.
Security and compliance answers do not contradict each other.
Dates, certifications and policy names match across sections.
Terminology is used consistently throughout.
Reused answers still fit the buyer’s question.
5. Validate Financial, Legal And Company Details
Financial, legal and company information should be treated as high-risk content because mistakes can create trust issues quickly. Buyers may use these answers to assess company stability, ownership, insurance coverage, regulatory history and potential legal exposure.
When this check is skipped, the response may include outdated insurance details, old financial figures or incorrect legal information. That can slow procurement and trigger unnecessary follow-up from legal or finance teams.
What to check:
Legal entity structure is accurate.
Financial statements or financial information are current.
Insurance coverage details are correct.
Regulatory disclosures are reviewed.
Any legal limitations or exceptions are clearly explained.
6. Confirm Operational And Delivery Answers Are Realistic
DDQs often ask about business continuity, disaster recovery, support coverage, implementation timelines, uptime, backup procedures and operational capacity. These answers should reflect what your team can actually deliver, not what sounds best in a sales process.
If these answers are overstated, buyers may expect service levels your team cannot meet. That can create problems later during contract review, onboarding or service delivery.
What to check:
Uptime SLAs are accurate.
Backup and recovery details are current.
Implementation timelines are realistic.
Support coverage matches actual availability.
Business continuity and disaster recovery answers are approved.
7. Get The Right Internal Owners To Review Their Sections
A DDQ response should not be reviewed by one person only. Legal, finance, security, product, operations and leadership may each need to validate different parts of the response before submission.
Skipping owner review increases the chance of inaccurate answers, outdated content or unsupported commitments. It also makes it harder to defend the response if the buyer asks for clarification later.
What to check:
Legal content is reviewed by legal.
Financial content is reviewed by finance.
Technical or security answers are reviewed by SMEs.
Product claims are verified by product owners.
Final approval is given by the right decision-maker.
Pro tip: Assign owners by section before the audit starts. This prevents last-minute chasing and makes accountability clearer.
8. Remove Drafting Errors, Placeholders And Formatting Issues
Even if the content is accurate, small drafting errors can weaken the buyer’s confidence. Visible comments, placeholders, copied text from another buyer or inconsistent formatting can make the response look rushed.
These mistakes may seem minor, but they signal poor quality control. In a risk review, that can affect how buyers judge your company’s attention to detail.
What to check:
No placeholders remain.
No track changes or comments are visible.
Buyer names are correct throughout.
Spelling, grammar and punctuation are clean.
Formatting is consistent across Word, Excel, PDF or portal fields.
9. Prepare For Follow-Up Questions Before You Submit
A DDQ submission is often not the end of the process. Buyers may ask for evidence, clarification, updated documents or deeper explanations after reviewing your answers.
If your team is not prepared, follow-up can become slow and messy. That can delay procurement, contract review and final approval.
What to check:
Supporting documents are easy to access.
Internal owners know which sections they support.
High-risk answers have backup explanations.
Clarification questions can be routed quickly.
The team knows who will respond after submission.
Need a broader response review checklist? A DDQ checklist helps you validate risk, compliance and supporting evidence.
But if your team also handles RFPs, security questionnaires or other buyer documents, a broader pre-submission review process can help keep every response complete, accurate and ready to send.

Download our RFP pre-submission checklist to review content quality, compliance, formatting, SME validation and final approval before your next submission.
“The DDQ process has become increasingly demanding. What was once a straightforward information exchange has evolved into a complex, resource-intensive evaluation that can make or break investor relationships.” - Jasper Cooper, CEO & Co-Founder of AutoRFP.ai
How High-Performing Teams Build DDQ Responses
Writing a strong DDQ response is easier when you break it into clear stages. A due diligence questionnaire is not just an admin task. It is a buyer’s way of checking whether your company is financially stable, legally sound, secure, compliant and operationally reliable before they move forward.
Step 1: Qualify The DDQ Request
A strong DDQ response starts with understanding whether the opportunity is worth the effort. DDQs can be short, but enterprise, government, financial services and regulated-industry questionnaires can quickly become complex.
AutoRFP.ai’s Proposal Win Rate Report 2026 found that 71% of high-win teams have a Go/No-Go qualification step, showing that strong opportunity selection is part of a more disciplined response process.
Confirm fit: Buyer type, deal value, timeline, compliance requirements and delivery capability.
Identify response risks: Missing certifications, unclear requirements, tight deadlines, legal concerns or weak stakeholder access.
Define success conditions: What must be true for your team to respond confidently and accurately.
This video shows how to qualify tenders using a stronger Go/No-Go process, with AI helping teams assess fit, risks, win probability and bid effort before deciding to proceed.
Video transcript
Transcript is auto-generated and may contain minor errors.
starting topic today, all about go, no go. So, yeah, we're both really keen to jump into it and as we go, if you're not aware, we're So, Jasper and I from AutoRFP.ai, as the name would suggest, we're an AI RFP software. I know we've got quite a lot of customers on the call today. We've also got some non-customers. Yeah, as it says on the housekeeping slide there, our goal today is really you walk away with something actionable. Yes, we'll be showing some AutoRFP near the end, but Jasper's going to dive really deep into a lot around calculating your Pwin, cost of an RFP, to incorporate that into your go, no go. Uh and then I'll be covering off quite a lot in regards to Claude and everything else, but I'll get to that in a sec. So, everything that we put in today, so whether it's like URLs, prompts that we're sharing, that will also be included in the email as well, as well as the recording. So, if you need to duck off early, no problem. Please do. We've all got work and so, you'll get an email probably like a couple of hours after the webinar today with the recording and all the materials.
Any questions, please do put through the chat Q&A. I'll try to figure out to hopefully get the chat working. I'd love to chat to everyone as we go, but of course, feel free to throw it in the Q&A and I'll get to touch on those as we go or we'll have a dedicated space at the end to to go through the Q&A as well. Awesome. Today's agenda. I'll be going a little bit in regards to definitions and learning starting from the basics of go, no go or bid, no bid or all the different names it may go under. Jasper's going to go into, like I mentioned, really talking about calculating the cost of an RFP and taking that into account with regards to your go, no go. Really solid stuff there. Have an example framework which will he'll share and everything else. I'll be using some AI tools, so Gemini and Claude. So, effectively how you can use AI for go, no go without AutoRFP. Or if you do use AutoRFP and you want to go that little bit further as well, although there's obviously a lot you can do with our platform. You know how to use those as well. So then Jasper will be covering
auto RFP, how to use project analyzer feature and go no go there. We've made some recent changes, that's really cool. And then at the end we'll have that Q&A as well for everything that we may not get to as we go through. Awesome. All righty. Hey, so one of the cool things that we did recently was the proposal win rate report. We did that with the Stargazy community which is an online bid community run by Chris Carter who I think might be on the call today. Um, if you're bid management, I recommend joining. It's a cool it's a good community. Lots of really helpful stuff there. Jasper and I are both active as well. But what we did together with the Stargazy community is we surveyed over a hundred proposal managers, bid writers, RFP teams and crunched the numbers about some of the things that winning bid teams or bid teams in general do. And of course some of the questions were about go no go. What we found interesting is 71% of all teams have a go no go qualification.
They're actually between the a high win team, so a team that won more than 50% of their bids, and team that won less than like 10% of their bids, both had go no gos. So there's actually no difference in who you did no go. A lot of it came down to review and governance and automation. So 65% of high win teams have a formal review and governance with regards to their process including go no go. So what we're going to go show today is yes, it's kind of like different tiers to go no go that you can incorporate in your workflows in relation to your complexity of bids, uh the cost of bids and everything else as well. Probably no surprise to everyone is something else the data showed was that teams with a high bid workload win less. So there's actually this great graph within the report and of course I'll share the report as soon as I get the chat working. but you'll get an email afterwards as well with it. But effectively, so less FTE to bid ratio, winning less. And then, high win teams yeah, consistently at higher automation,
systematic customer insight, and a strong governance and go no go with that as well. So, we're going to be covering one part of that. But, I'll throw it to Jasper to cover the next kind of portion. >> Cool. So, I guess yeah, an interesting thing is like AI was built for go no go. Someone say even more than RFP response, like AI has this ability to summarize at extremely high performance levels across insane amounts of documents. Probably as everyone knows, right? But, I think AI allows you to finally say no to more because of a few things, right? So, not only can it do that analysis, but it can do it so quickly that when someone runs to you with a bid and goes, "No, this is due in a week." You don't have to start going, "Oh, we need to do the go no go process first, and that takes 2 days, and we need to go through all 247 pages." You can actually run one in minutes and find red flags immediately, so you don't even need to have the conversation in the first place. So, that's a pretty big game changer, just reducing it from 2 days to have an initial result in a few minutes. Really sad one, but we've found it to be true
is that the results come from a third party. God forbid the bid manager knows what the win rate might be, or that this is a serious red flag we've seen a hundred times. But, just the fact that it's generated by AI has this third party, "It's not me, it's the AI." effect and halo around it, which makes it easier for some people that want to say yes and donate their nights and weekends. It makes it easier for you to say no. And then, the experience of having better than human performance as well, right? So, it can find needles in haystacks and do rationalization and do things that only SMEs could pick out really if they were doing the go no go. From really niche security or environmental governance requirements that you might not fully understand on first glance, it's able to pull those things out immediately without having your SMEs go through every single bid that you look at, and it's able to pull that red flag up for you. So, it finally lets you say no, and then that's of course good. To make it clear for everyone, no is a very good thing. It saves organizations tens, hundreds,
millions of dollars in costs. It protects your team's morale and culture as well. It's There's nothing worse than having a low win rate and going back to back on lost bids and oh, sorry, and hey, can we jump on a call to debrief? No one wants that. You just want to be winning back to back. That this process helps shield your team from that morale that can cause a negative spiral. And then of course, the time that you're investing in those opportunities that you should have said no to, that actually degrades your ability to win the ones that you said go to. So, yeah. Highlight for anyone that's not currently having this process to definitely invest in it. But, I wanted to jump into go no go from the CFO seats. So, a lot of the time we just think about it as a softer framework where hey, let's fill out this form, let's get some numbers, and let's do it that way. But, I thought let's pull it all the way back to first principles as an investment as an organization even. What makes sense to bid on? What doesn't make sense to bid on if we're just talking numbers? So, there's a few numbers here that are super important to understand going into an RFP. One is the
total contract value, right? This should be somewhere in the document. You should be able to calculate the price. They should maybe have the terms that they're open to. Maybe it's 3 years, 5,000 users, great. Then you can use that to forecast what the pricing range might be. The gross margin. So, actually how much profit there would be in this particular contract. A lot of that it can be assumed. So, you might talk to your finance team and say, "Hey, what is the average gross margin on an opportunity like these that we've worked on? Can you give me a ballpark to start?" But, different things will impact the gross margin. Maybe you offer implementation or professional services for free. Those have a real cost, but if you're going to have to provide those for some customers and not for others, that is going to impact the gross margin and how profitable one RFP would be should you win it versus another. So, those are the two things that may sit a little bit outside of the bid function, not something you necessarily have control over, but something is really good to understand you'll need in your calculations if you want to put
your CFO hat on and do the go no-go process. The next ones are purely owned by the proposal team in my mind, which is that probability of win. So, how likely you to actually win this opportunity with a non-biased approach, how accurate can you get that percentage of win, what elements fall into that, what have you learned over time. It's a hard thing to nail. You start in ballparks and then start to optimize that over time to get more and more accurate. Uh and then the cost of the bid as well. I think even a high-level idea of how much you spend on a bid is an insane tool for leverage in saying no to something. But, if you can start to understand the cost of one bid versus another because they are very different a lot of the time. Sometimes orders of magnitude for double the contract price or sometimes the smaller contracts take way more time than than even some of the largest. So, have that cost of bid and have a methodology for that is is really useful as well. So, those are the four numbers. And
basically a CFO would ask themselves, will this bid make me more money than the other things I could do with that same investment? To talk really macro, they could just spend that money on ads, right? And get a certain amount of leads to the business. That might be a way to do it. They might be able to buy a certain amount of sales development reps to hammer the phones and look for opportunities that way. There's a lot of different ways to spend money in the business. So, being an effective use of that money is awesome. It's going to be awesome for your career. It's going to be awesome for your team. It's going to give you the reinvestment and the resources you need to go far and basically be a winner. And the calculation is, let's take the contract value, great, so we've got that, it's a big contract, amazing. Then what is the actual margin? Like how much money we're actually going to make on that contract as far as the margin, the profitability, and what is our actual probability of winning that? So we take that together and that gives us kind of the expected value of that. And then we take away what it actually costs to bid on that and then we get our expected value. So this is a calculation that the CFOs might run all the time for different things, but basically, yeah, is this a worthwhile investment at all?
It's like a mini business case nearly for that particular bid. So there's a classic one here as an example, like a million-dollar trap, right? Which is salesperson runs over, oh my god, we have a $2 million contract opportunity, it's crazy, the CRO's excited, everyone's super excited, and we do have a chance, we do have a real chance. Even if it's 15% it's worth bidding on. Um and it would be a great logo, blah blah blah. But here, looking at the math, we've got a $2 million contract, we've only got a 40% profit margin, and we have a 15% opportunity to win. It's going to cost us $120,000 once we factor all of the labor from the implementation team, through our SMEs, through our security review, our external lawyers, and the process of answering 800 of their different requirements and customizing the solution for them in that proposal to even have a chance to have that 15%. And we can effectively see that the expected value of this particular contract is actually $0. So there's no
point in doing this $2 million opportunity, but as like crazy as that sounds, that's the math, right? Whereas at the same time that someone's bringing that to your desk, you might have something else, like a $400,000 contract with a 55% margin, so only slightly more, and only a slightly higher win rate at 20%. But the big difference here being that you may have already completed an RFP like this in the past. It's very similar. You can expect a high automation rate maybe from the tool that you use because of that. You've done a very one that's recent. This is amazing because your expected value is huge now because your cost of actually going into that bid is so much lower. So, you find really weird opportunities where it's actually because of that number, the gross margin being high or the probability of win being very high or maybe the cost being pretty high as well. You get these interesting combinations where the expected value is actually higher than you think or you get the exact opposite where the expected value is actually lower than you think. So, to think in these terms is very interesting in a go no go and
it's the type of language that people can understand as well outside of like our softer like we're in the debating club. Oh, but they have this requirement. Oh, but they have this and we don't have that and last time we did why? This really brings the conversation down to the math level and they can start to see the factors at play. So, I think that's really powerful. Now, you know, a lot of people in in in AI is about doing like is doing about doing it faster which means you can do more and that is great. That is like a fundamental piece of this maths, but if your probability of win is not great, if the gross margins on the contracts you're going after is not good, if the contract value doesn't make sense and your cost of bid is still super high, that is going to be bad and much like closing a lot of bad deals, that's actually bad for your business, right? So, not all it's you get the right to increase the number of bids once you have a solid process down and a good expected value on those bids. And basically, your total return as maybe a bid team as an RFP team is the total expected value
that you can put out in a month, in a year, in a quarter and how you can grow that over time. So, really you want to think about how can we decrease the cost of bids? Sometimes there's really easy solves there. We'll talk about go no go today. Maybe that can save you a bunch of time and therefore resources that you can reinvest and then you can reinvest that maybe in your probability to win. What are the things you could be doing that you're not now that you know would increase it further customer research and insights and other things from the win rate report. And then, great. Once we've got that nailed down, then yeah, how can you increase the number of bids, right? You've got a machine that works, then scale it. And that's what I see as a lot of the fundamental values that a great bid team knows and can drive to drive their total expected value and that's how we turn the bid and RFP proposal function from what is seen as a cost basis big cost generator because yeah, you're basically just like spending a bunch of money and then trying for stuff to oh, this is how revenue generation works. I can invest in this maybe like I invest in ads. Oh, and you can tell that ads get get a ton
of investment, right? And that's because there's just certainty is built around the metrics and the numbers that go into it. Let's talk about probability of win. A lot of people will already know about this, but just to kind of recap different example criteria you might consider when building a probability of win model is one of the big things is strategic fit, right? What are the key pain points of that customer? What are they actually looking to solve and how do you map against those? Do they have a certain geography, industry, size and how do you fit in there? Do you not work with German customers at all because of some data laws? Do you specifically do very well in California because you've got your office space there? These are all high-level considerations that are super important, sometimes complete critical do no go elements. Legal fit is a lesser one I would say, but in certain areas you want to look at things like the required warranties, the caps that are required. There are a lot of times what people leave to the very end is the legal stuff and that's really the kicker. There is some stuff that they're solid on that they say you do
one thing wrong in this contract and we will send your company insolvent with a lawsuit that will send you after that and that just can't be done by most companies. So, those are things to to look into immediately. Compliance, right? Do you meet the regulations, mandatory internal policies, the service fit, service levels, professional services required, the commercials, of course, making sure that the expected margins are good enough to warrant your bid and they're working on the desired pricing model that you can operate on against your competitors effectively. And then the technical fit, of course, is there integrations, is there certifications that are mandatory. Now, this is a lot of stuff. Like this can This is a lot of work to do properly. We see people have very simple don't know go frameworks, which are a great foundation. You need one, for sure. Five questions gives you a high-level thing, gets you if like 80/20 for some, they're able to get a lot of the value. But for those that are rock solid, they really are going into all of these different areas, qualified across them all, and finding the red flag maybe just in one of these sub areas, and being able to drag that right up to the front of the
procurement and go, "Hey, wait to bid on this interested party, we would need this legal thing to be changed. Great, we're not even starting the RFP process until that can be confirmed from your legal team." Saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars in bid time per year. And then the types of criteria that that we generally think about is like the binary, so the non-negotiables. What are just the things you cannot and will not do under any circumstance. So, that's one class, and the other class would be the weighted uh category, which is where you're maybe doing something like assigning a percentage, or what I like more so is like raw scores to things and saying, "Great, for opportunities above 90% fit or above an 80% fit, we're going to go ahead with those." Or what I prefer, which is things above 1,000 score to 256 score, whatever that range is out to, to know that you proceed. So, basically, cool, does it pass all the non-negotiables? Great, then we can even consider moving along. And then on top of that, does our score add up to
something that is above our threshold in order to proceed? So, that's our probability of win. And not only we're not just doing the go no go there, right? We're just working towards are we doing this at all or is it an absolute no based on the binary or the very low score? So, even on probability of win in general, like it's just too low to even consider the opportunity. If we're above that threshold, then we're actually trying to calculate the probability of win. So, we can go 60% great, that's awesome. Or maybe a 70%, like how can you start to dial in and figure out what those margins might be? What separates like something where it's basically in the bag to something that is a coin toss, one you're willing to play. Cool. And then the cost of bid. There's always the writing time, right? So, you're considering how much of my hours is this going to take to do the information gathering, the drafting, the editing, and that's the most straightforward part of calculating the cost. But there's so many other elements that you need to consider that a CFO would, right? Which is the costs of the management time. So, is there kickoff meetings? Is there communications? Are
you pulling executives into those? What kind of level of people you can have people's people in an organization whose time is worth at least a thousand dollars an hour sometimes being pulled into the largest opportunities. So, this can be excessively increase the costs. The review time. What kind of subject matter experts do you need? For example, like if you've got you know, I'll give you another example, if you've got an AI engineer of some sort and they need to review some of this, like that could be a serious material cost because their opportunity cost of what else they could be working on just brings so much value to the organization. So, you think about those different subject matter experts and how much their time costs. Solutioning, right? Is there is it custom? Do we need those SMEs involved not just to review, but actually to build something out custom? Do we know the kind of cost range involved with that versus what they could be working on, right? So, some of our customers in like professional services, they could just bill out that same person that's going to build the scope of work for free on this opportunity that they could bill out to a real customer to basically
do the same thing. The legal element, right? So, the costs of that, if they if you have to rely on external parties or the specialist lawyers in some cases, that can get very expensive very quickly. So, having an understanding of the documents that have been provided, can they just sign your standard contract? So, that can basically be zero or do they need their own terms? Maybe times that by the number of pages and just start to get rough ballpark ideas of what these costs are. And then planning, right? So, implementation, product road maps, other elements like that. So, you might look at a security review component and say, "Great, we take the number of requirements that are to do with security, we times that by an average of 8 minutes per security questionnaire per question, and then times that by the opportunity cost." So, let's say $150. So, for 80 questions on this particular bid, the security review component is $1,000. And that's one of our many inputs, which makes up our total cost of bid, right?
So, here we've got all of those calculated out, the writing time, the management time, review time, solutioning, and you can see it really starts to stack to the point where maybe you thought this was like a $10,000 bid roughly and now it's like $24,900, which is going to materially impact those types of calculations. So, cool. We've gone through how to get all of those four. And I'll just start with some light examples of what you might ask to ascertain this information immediately. So, one is super easy, contract value. Just like, "What is the contract value and the methodology to calculate that?" You should have that down pat or someone in your team should be able to give you something for a ballpark. The gross margin, can we reach out to the team on that? And also, what are the elements? Maybe ask your finance team, "What are the elements that would impact the profit margin of a particular customer, and they might be able to tell you some of those aspects. You might ask some questions around that. And then, the probability of win. So, that's really where you get into all of the different types of questions you can ask. We have a template which has all of
the very generic and standard ones that we have observed, but these are usually down to the company and really something only a bid team can really know for sure. So, you really need to take ownership for that, understand the trends, and what influences that probability of win. But here, is this with our ideal Does this customer meet our ideal customer profile? Are there mandatory certifications? Does there need to be custom development? What are your strong suits and what are the weak points? And then, ask all the questions around that. And then, the cost of bid, right? So, go get those different elements that they require. Standard contract, how many requirements are there? What is the estimated word count? Will this require us to do X? And then, bring all of those elements. So, this is quite a lot of questions, right? If you were to hand this over to like a junior business analyst and give them this job, it would really be quite something. But luckily, we're handing this job over to AI, at least in the first instance, to be able to run through hundreds of pages and check it across all of these different criteria. So, it makes a whole new level of a go no-go process actually feasible.
So, we find that even some of the smallest businesses are able to achieve better go no-go processes than the largest Fortune 500s on Earth, just because of that. So, we do a lot, of course, around AI models. So, when we work with our models, we work probably like you, agnostically. So, we will switch from Gemini to Claude to GPT, all in the course of a day, it seems, these days. But when we're talking about go no-go, there's some important things to factor in for the actual model you use. Um because it's quite a different use case to your day-to-day chatbot, or even the writing component of the RFP process. So, just want to break down some of the more technical speak, but what you're looking for in these models and what benchmarks actually mean something for this use case. So, one is the context window. This is really important in certain industries in particular, but the context windows of a lot of the state of the art models are actually very small. What that means is how much can it actually see at once?
So, in the RFP game, we need a lot of content in there. We need all of the customers appendices, we need all of the invitation to respond, we need the Excel matrices, we need the word doc form fill out, we need everything in one place. And potentially even context about the customer at a higher level like where they're based, their employees, about us page, etc., etc. So, you can see the models here, some of the state of the art and like leading ones right are like your Claude Opus models. With a good amount of information per page, you can end up only fitting 93 pages into that model's window. Where Google apparently runs the state of the art and the highest level of performance in the large context sense, so they're up at 466 pages of yeah, detailed information. They're able to load huge amounts of data into that model and it can see all of that context at once. And why it's important to see that at once is so that it doesn't do this. So, if
you use Claude or ChatGPT a lot, you'll have this compacting kind of situation where it has the context and then it compacts it, which is basically writing a summary and then putting the summary in. So, it can miss correlations, it can miss things that you would miss if you would just have a summary of part of the document and then the rest maybe you can't make the correlation required to answer what the contract value is or to answer how big the implementation is and what that's going to require. So, context window is it was a huge limitation until Gemini, the Google team, stepped up to to really take care of that. Although, it's still possible in these smaller models to compact it and get the get the what you need, particularly if you're working on smaller amounts of documents or one document at a time. There's another aspect of it, which is the technical term for it is needle in a haystack recall. But basically, it's how much attention to detail does the model have? Because as much as we put the documents into different models, like, "Wow, that's an amazing result." It will
miss things. Certain models will miss things a lot more than others. Now, all have in profit impressive performance when you look at them because that's the benchmark. That's what it's all centered around is looking plausible, but you know, whether or not it is actually correct and it's completed the entire document is another question, right? So, you don't want to miss things in the go no go process. And that's why this needle in the haystack part is important. This is basically a benchmark they run where they can upload an entire book, for example, and then put in a very specific word or term or sentence and then ask it a question based on that book. And certain models are able to pull out on page 248, there was this phrase. And other models miss it completely as if it wasn't in the document at all. So, that's really important, of course, for this use case. So, again, the Gemini models from Google do extremely well on this, but also the Claude and GPT models, I believe, are nearly up to the stage of the Gemini models on this. So, they don't miss as much as they used to. There used to be quite quite a large gap. So, here you can see the older Gemini 1.5 model
benchmark. It would, yeah, find the needle placed in all of these different places and it missed the needle in the haystack very few times across a thousand a million tokens, which is a huge amount of information. Yeah, 500 or so very detailed pages or potentially thousands of lesser detailed pages. Whereas, the GPT-4 model turbo at that in that case couldn't you actually couldn't upload that much content even to start with. So, yeah, that's another aspect. And then reasoning. So, when you hear about new models and new benchmarks and which one's the best, most people are just talking about reasoning, which is basically its level of like intellect, right? Is it able to reason? And that is important, but it's not probably the most important thing for this use case. Just because in this case, the answers a lot of the time, for a lot of use cases, are just like stated in fact. They're just somewhere in the document and they just need to be found and then summarized. They don't really need to be connected. We don't need to think about it too much at a super big level of detail. Certain products, certain services, you might
need this if you're doing custom solutioning, but if you're selling, say, a software as a service platform out of the box or you're selling a you're doing DDQs for like asset management firm, you're selling financial products, a lot of the time you're going to be able to find that immediately. You're going to pick that needle out of the haystack and present that as the answer for the go no go process. You're not going to need all this reasoning. And if you do need reasoning, that's also not really where you'd want to rely on a model to do this particular part, I would say, just yet. Yeah, but that's the three aspects of the models. But I'll hand over to you, Rob, to step us through a Gemini example of how you can use that tool for go no go. >> Yeah, awesome. Thanks, Jasper. And apologies, everyone, regarding the chat. I had a deep into it and there was a setting on our Zoom account. I think it's a new setting Zoom added in, which disabled chats and I wasn't I'm not able to re-enable it for this webinar, but going forward, I've configured the setting. Always love when a software adds something new and make things change compared to last time you did a webinar, which is
always fun. Cool. So, I'm going to go into Gemini first using AI for go no go and then go into go into Claude. And yeah, really interesting stuff from Jasper just then about things like context window or token limit. Uh cuz we want to take that into account and that's where Gemini Pro 3.0 and million plus or million tokens really valuable for that. It's a huge context window as Jasper just explained. And then Claude as well, generally it's coming off very strong with things like following instructions. So, I'm going to show a new agent framework called Agent Skills, partially new probably in the last 6 months, and show you that in regards to Claude and it's very good at yeah following task list. Of course, you use ChatGPT as well, but I just won't necessarily be covering that today as well. Perfect. Awesome. Hey, one thing we're going to share in the webinar, sorry, in the email afterwards is our kind of free to download template of a go no-go decision template. So, Excel spreadsheet
and it goes through quite a lot of those components that Jasper mentioned towards the start around team, like cost of bid, RFP fit, where it's technical fit, legal, compliance, everything else. And effectively, I'm using this spreadsheet or you could use a spreadsheet you create yourself. I know a lot of people already have their go no-go spreadsheets. And you can feed that to the AI model. So, in my example, I'm actually going to be sending this to Gemini and it's going to use my own scoring matrix see criteria in its go no-go AI analysis, which is really powerful stuff. And that's how you can again, I'll be sharing prompts and the spreadsheet and everything else in the email afterwards. But again, you can use the same models and the same logic for your own prompts, your own spreadsheet, and everything else as well. Or of course, you can take what we're providing and customize it further to your specific business. I really implore you implore you to do that. One, I know
a lot of people already do this, but one kind of hack when it comes to creating really great prompts for the models is again, use the AI to do it for you. So, when I'm using when I'm creating this prompt for Gemini, Gemini created that prompt for itself. Like I asked it I find I work with it to improve the prompt, but models themselves are very good at creating prompts for themselves. That's generally the kind of the thing. So, if you're creating a prompt Claude, use Claude and Gemini use Gemini. But, let's jump into it. So, I have my prompt here, which I'm copy and pasting just from the other side of my screen. I'm putting it into Gemini. Now, what I'm using as an example is Cursor. Those who might be familiar, Cursor is a cloud Oh, sorry. It's an IDE, which is a effectively a developer coding tool. It's also one of the fastest growing B2B SaaS companies for in the last couple of years. Really on the frontier of AI SaaS development and taking developers by
storm and and everything else. Why I'm using them as an example because a few months ago and I did a YouTube video on this is that the Australian Tax Office, or the ATO, brought out a tender on coding agents and so on. So, that's the kind of the example tender I'm going to use. So, I'm going to use a real company, obviously a company I don't work for. I'm with no affiliation with Cursor, but yeah, I'm going to just chuck in all those different tender documents that I found via the government tender. So, this is a good example of private company Cursor maybe maybe looking to bid on a public tender. And then so, we download those documents. Probably I haven't even scanned those documents just yet. Let's say I was running this process. But, on the public portal we're saying, "Oh, before I even get into it, I want to use AI to give me that cursory glance." And Jasmine touched on that throughout around. Cool. We can use AI for very quick and strong analysis, and then human can come in and check and and so on. So, in this example would be a public tender that I found, and before I
even like bring it to the rest of the team, let's run just like a bit of a go no go and give me an analysis of that tender before I start having to read the tens or hundreds of pages that we find. And then what I'm going to drag in is my go no go decision template. So that is that Excel spreadsheet. So I've got my prompt. I've got the tender documents, and I've got my go no go spreadsheet. And now I can ask Gemini 3.0 to do the work. I want to go on to I'll kick it on thinking actually, for I feel like it'll take actually too much time for today's webinar, but I can check and make sure things like when we're using the models, let's say you're using ChatGPT and using 5.2, make sure it's on the thinking mode. Using Claude, make sure extended thinking is on. In this example with Gemini, thinking is on. Effectively, you're telling it to use more thinking, like more grunt work to complete this task, which is really important for something as detailed as large amount of documents and go no go. So I click submit, and then that's going to go
through and do its analysis as if I was someone from Cursor. I haven't obviously provided it too much details regarding Cursor, but there's quite a lot on the webinar. So it's going to go through, and as you can see, evaluate the different documents and so on. So I can open in here, and we can see the AI's own reasoning, and it's going through and effectively following my prompt to now try and present the go no go. And from that, you can see here it's starting to come out again. Where the Gemini models are, they're also quite fast, which is great. And so we can see here, it's giving me the detailed analysis. Effectively, it's saying you're not going to go for this, which I actually agree. I don't really know too much about Cursor, but they generally they are selling to enterprise, but I don't think they want to get bogged down necessarily in Australian government implementation. So it's probably not as good strategic fit, which is one of the one of the components in the spreadsheet and one of the components just I spoke about. They're a US company with a US data residency. They're probably not going to
go for that. And you can see right here, technical non-functional requirements regarding data residency and hosting presents a significant barrier. The ATO managed solution must be hosted in Australian region not stored offshore. And then it matches that against the technical requirements. So before I've even read the tender documents, Gemini in what was that? Maybe like 20, 30 seconds has a analyzed that for me. And I can go, "Okay, great. We're not going to even invest time into this bid." And I can but I can chat to it. I can say, "Okay, you found this functional requirement. Whereabouts do you find it?" And it would provide that detail. But before I give that prompt to it and chat to it about the documents, I'm just going to read back through further. And you can see it's given me a tender analysis, budget, and kind of what is the potential contract value. It knows that the ATO go to tender must be $10,000 or more. You can see a big range. I'm hoping this is in the millions of dollars. Key dates. You can see this was from a little while ago. So that it's obviously passed by now. Hosting, data residency, integration points. It needs
to integrate with Visual Studio and so on. Cursor actually doesn't meet that requirement. Which I'm surprised it didn't necessarily come up here. Cursor is a fork of Visual Studio Code but not necessarily meet that requirement. So you again you want to cross-reference and check this as well. And it's given me an information security summary as well. So I can talk to it and say, "Hey, what page of the documents did you find this information?" And I can ask for a sources. And then it can provide that information to me and so on. And And this is that just the point about needle in a haystack. You can go back and go, "Okay, in that recall, where did I find that information?" And you can see here it's specifically in the hosting requirements, which is a requirement 3.101. Great. So look at the document, verify that. And then if the AE Listen, AE just sent this to you or a sales person just sent to you, like, "Oh, we need to bid on this government tender, you can be like, actually, in 3.01 it specifies mandatory hosting requirements that we do not we do not fit. So, it's not a technical fit, it's not a strategic fit, we're not going to bid on it.
And I've done all of that in less than 5 minutes. So, that's one way where AI in this example of no go can be really powerful. And again, you can ask it more information. In my YouTube video, I do go further into having it like specifically look at the spreadsheet and fill out the spreadsheet for me, or at least provide me a table within the chat window. So, you can also you can get really deep into it and continue that conversation with it. So, what I'm going to share with you after, as I mentioned, is the prompt I used, the go no go decision template, this Excel spreadsheet that we have. And then you can take that and go even further with it as well, as you would like. Cool. Next is Claude. Jasper already knows that >> 13 minutes, Rob, as well, so you might >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, Jasper already knows, Fabby, I am a bit of an Anthropic fanboy, but one thing that's really cool about Claude, and it's actually become an open framework across all of the different models, is agent skills. So, this is actually maintained by Anthropic, but you can read up on it,
agentskills.io, and effectively it's great way to specify how it's going to use it. So, I've already uploaded my skill for Claude, and this one is an RFP shredder skill. So, it's going to go through the RFP and find the relevant information for it. So, I've made a fake RFP here. It's a Japanese bank, and I'm a B2B I'm a B2B banking software, and I'll ask it, can you use the RFP shredder skill to analyze go no go for this RFP? And you'll notice that my prompt that's all my prompt is. This is not in a project or anything else. And effectively, you can see here that skill sits in the back end of Claude in this example and it has all its detailed prompts to do list reference materials in that skill. And it'll go through and reference that to then complete the task. So what a skill is good for is a task. Anyway, it's going to go through that, complete
that information and again, what I'll share afterwards in the email is a link to the skill, but I implore you again to customize that to your business's needs. But this is where a skill is really powerful. Now that's going to complete. I think we're all going to know details quickly, but I'm going to throw back to Jasper and let him cover off kind of the next parts of the webinar. Oh, Jasper, you're on mute, sorry. >> Awesome, thanks. Yeah, let that run in the background. Sometimes it can take quite a bit. So we'll jump into like how we're approaching this at AutoRFP and it might give you some inspiration for other tools, internal workflows, etc., but what we set up specifically is project analysis. And go no go is a part of the broader project analysis. I'm just going to focus on on on go no go today's webinar, of course, but what I've set up here is a quick example where I've broken down those different areas, cost of bid, contract value, gross margin, win probability and then assigned some
basic questions to each of those. And these are just basic examples to kind of get your head thinking through what that could look like. example, reference cost, right? Under the cost of bid. So what are the customer reference requirements and then estimate a cost of $1,000 per reference. So I'm estimating it's going to take about $1,000 worth of time of the account manager to reach out to them and so on and so forth in order to get a reference. So just take the number of references we need and estimate those at $1,000 each. Then the writing cost, let's estimate the total writing cost of $40 per requirement. So I've done some math previously and then said, "Okay, cool. looks about $40 based on our current labor spend and the amount of efficiency we're able to get from our platform, let's say." And then, for security, what are the number of security questions, and assume a cost of $60 per security-related requirement, blah blah blah. So, I've built this in as that section, and then I've got similar things for what is the contract value, and I can even give it like a calculation methodology for estimating the contract value. So, here,
for example, I've just said number of projects will inform the pricing, estimate the pricing assuming that XYZ. So, you put your own pricing model in there, and then it's able to calculate based off that. The gross margin, is there anything that will impact that? The win probability, right? We could do a lot of different things, but for example here, if they need SOC ISO 27001 and SOC 2 type 2, that's a great fit. That's where we're going to be really strong, so return 100. If there's another standard that's mandatory, give it a score of 20. If there's other standards mentioned, give it a score of 80. So, depending on if there's other mandatory ones, whether how we fit into that particular thing, we're returning scores on a 0 to 100 point scale for that requirement. And then you can see there's a lot of other ones as well, like where do they need their data hosted? Return a score between 0 and 100 based on that. Is there an appetite for AI in their RFP workflow? If it's not mentioned at all, then maybe that's not a good fit for us versus they're very serious about it as part of their core business case, and
that's where we're going to to do better. So, all of those are built in, and I guess a point around what Rob's waiting for at the moment is that analysis is we run that analysis then automatically on any opportunity that's uploaded. So, if they've got like a Salesforce integration, the AE comes in, they upload their documents, and then all of that runs in the background. So, that allows us to use the best and slowest models and methodologies over time that can take extremely long amounts of time to get the best results, but we're able to to do that because of this approach. When I log into Auto RFP, I'm going to have the intake already created in this case. So, sure, I could create one manually, come in and upload the tender files, and start the import process, and then I can run that project analysis in real time. So, this is going to look through and find the customer name, and then start to run those calculations that we were talking about. But, in a lot of cases, that's already run. So,
I've even got one here for the intake, where someone has submitted this to me. It's pending, and I jump straight in. I can see all of the requirements, so I can see that the vendor must provide a minimum three case study references. There's 10 functional requirements that need reviewing there or these different areas. There's the security component that's being calculated out, the contract value's being calculated out. All of these different elements are all good to go, and we can also see the confidence scores actually coming from the AI as well. It's really hard to validate sometimes whether that's true or not at a glance. Like we saw in Rob's example, like it says all of that, but that's great, but is that true? Like where is that? And you're asking, is this on this page? And then I'm opening up the doc and finding the page and such. But, this is all sourced and linked specifically back to verbatim text in the particular document. So, here I can see the source. It literally says in the RFP, "Vendors must supply a minimum of three client references." So, it's showing me that, and I think that verbatim quotes is the
best way to rely on AI to make sure that's actually in the document as stated, and you can trust it. As well as just being able to view the underlying documents easily. So, yeah, that's a really quick workflow, and yeah, you can see here the other project I've created is all spun up, and exact same results there, and we're able to export that as well. So, now I can take that out of the system directly in this kind of format and take that over to a manager, CRO, AE and go, "Hey, here's the reason that we're not going to go for this opportunity, right? It's going to cost us XYZ. The estimated contract value is only this. The gross margin is less than 60% and because of these points, etc., etc." So, I've got nearly a business case for this particular response to say go, yes, we should 100% do it or no go. And we think this is really just the start of that entire workflow as well. Good to show that. I can cut you back I cut back to you, Rob. Unless you had anything else that I skipped over there. >> No, I was just going to say with that RFP project analysis or any project
analysis or go no go that you're doing and Jasmine just showed you how you can export that. I know a lot of customers, for instance, that would upload they have a central place they want to store their go no go decisions. And it's really strong to have that. And I know Jasmine's going to cover more in relation to feeding that back into a really strong loop. But that that's why and it's actually a new feature that little export button probably in the last couple of weeks that the team brought out. You can also do it from the project details point of view when you're having existing project. So, if you have some no go go that you've ran through Auto RFP already and you want to export out of your projects, you can do that as well. Uh but yeah, I know customers >> Sorry, yeah, that's a really good point though around the structured information, right? Because you're not necessarily getting structured information unless you're capturing that manually inside of your CRM or something every time. The nice thing about this is not only having that to reference back to. Like, why did we say no to that opportunity last time or why did we ultimately choose to go to that red flag not come up and then have that in a
structured way. So, over time we could even gently run reports on, hey, here's new go no go criteria that you should be putting in or one worth removing that actually doesn't have a material impact on your win probability. >> Absolutely. Yeah, and then Yeah, Amy just asked as well in just a relation to that. Yes, you can definitely see that now in in order RFP as well. Yeah, perfect. So, I'll just I'll just quickly show you the that Claude analysis and then I'll throw it back to Jasper just to tie off the webinar today as well. Claude has gone through with that RFP shredder skill that I showed. Uh and again, I will share the skill after the webinar. And it's gone through and it's completed that entire analysis. It actually took quite a bit of time. So, it took about 5 minutes. So, that entire time Jasper was presenting, it went through and broke down everything there as well. It's pretty strong stuff. Other mandatory requirements, in this example it said, "No, do not go ahead." This was a Japanese bank. We don't have Japanese hosting requirements. I use a lot of SaaS examples just cuz I'm from
that SaaS background. But, it brought out some really good stuff. My one also then says, it if we were going to go for this as win themes we can incorporate. And that's where you can really use AI again to further not not replace a workflow, but just to help optimize and help make a process more efficient. And then the human comes in and provides more details there as well. So, yeah, there's this you can see here it's weighted every single criteria and that's why it's gone no go there as well. Yeah, really powerful stuff. Won't go into too much detail. I just want to show that final report that I can then download and so on. So, that's a good way how you can use Claude for your kind of RFP analysis. But, yeah, well then we're going to we'll tie off the webinar today and we'll finish off and yeah, we'll go from there as well. Jasper, did you have Did you want to share those last couple ones? That's right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Perfect. >> Cool. And yeah, jump in with any questions generally on go no go in general. Happy to weigh in on anything. But, yeah, I think I I I ran through that right in capturing that information. And I think the last part
system or not is you just want to make sure A to set up that framework, set up that math, analyze each opportunity using it, make decisions, and capture that reasoning somewhere. And then ultimately come back to that. Actually come back to that in a quarter, in 6 months, at the end of the year, whatever that looks like. And then have a review of what is actually pushing wins versus losses, and regularly implement the questions that would actually catch that out next time. And keep those a continuous flow. The market's going to change, your product offering's going to change, your services, etc. It's constantly changing. So for you to be able to predict the probability somewhat accurately, you're going to really need to be on top of what's actually driving wins and losses realistically. So yeah, constantly evolving thing. And I think that's what's maybe next for AI is going us in the right direction going, "Hey, I looked at 100 of the previous RFPs, and here's our current no-go. No, I would like to propose to make this change." But for right now, I think yeah, being really ingrained in that process, you'll
definitely see a return on your time. Oh, and yeah, as Rob said, we're going to provide out all of the different links. So no need to copy these off the screen. You'll get the email with all the different resources you could jump into the tools and the prompts and etc. And yeah, thank you very much for everyone's time today. We're looking forward to even more better prepared webinars in the future as well. So just getting started, and appreciate you joining us on these first ones this week as we figure it all out. >> Yeah, definitely. We'll have the chat for the next one. No, thank you. I was just going to say as well, just to Jasper's point, and if any feedback Thank you so much. So yeah, it's great to see Catherine, Shane, Chris, and Amy, everyone in the chat saying well done. So yeah, if you have any particular feedback on the webinar or things you'd like to see for next topics. So you've got I know a lot of people have Jasper's email, but from that email that I send out afterwards, feel free to reply to that email as well. I see that. And yeah, we can just keep working out. We look into these every month or so on very applicable use cases and how you can use AI. So if anyone
didn't have any particular questions, we do have a couple minutes, but otherwise we might finish up shortly. I know Jasper was jumping on that one question that was in there, but yeah, honestly that's a lot of it, guys. >> Yeah. >> As well. Jasper, do you have anything? >> around. Sorry, if a question within the go no-go matrix relates to a third document, does that need to be uploaded? >> And yes, like 100% you're going to want all of the context related to be able to answer that go no-go. Otherwise, the model might step out of its lane and kind of make assumptions and hallucinate the context that it might not have access to. So, definitely have a bias for uploading more content over less or even having two stages, one where you ask it, "Do you have the necessary content to accurately answer all of these go no-go criteria?" And then if not, then let me know and I can go dig that up for you so it's not tempted to go and just make it up. >> Definitely. I think another really important part about when you're sharing documents, like you'd have noticed >> I used >> fake data and examples, public examples,
is you do want to be cautious, of course, with data sharing back to training the models. So, in Claude's example with Anthropic, uh a paid subscription, have data sharing turned off. Same with ChatGPT, paid subscription, data sharing turned off. Talk with your IT team if you're unsure or the team in your company who manages AI use across the company. The last thing you want to be doing is putting in a private invite-only RFP with a lot of commercially sensitive information about a potential customer of yours or your company's own commercially sensitive information and uploading that and having the model train on it. So, that's one thing that we focus very heavily on with Order RFP. Of course, with our own product, we're not training on any customer data at all. It's explicit in our terms of use, and also when we're then using third-party APIs via Azure, like Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google, we're also then not absolutely not
sharing any data back to models to train on. So, it's a really core part of our product and our ethos. But yeah, just making sure I know Jasper, you actually had it regarding Gemini. Exactly. >> All the personal accounts do go straight to training. So, yeah. That's good to know before you use it too heavily. Yeah, in your personal life or in your work life. >> Definitely. So, yeah, with Gemini, you can't necessarily turn off the training as well. So, again, customer sensitive data, being really cautious of that as well. Perfect. Everyone, yeah, thank you so much. And yeah, Jasper, do you have anything else to say at the end? Otherwise, I think we'll call it there. >> Not at all. Enjoy the rest of your mornings, evenings, and all of the above. >> Awesome. Thanks, everyone. >> See you. >> See you. >> Bye.
Pro tip: Use an RFP or DDQ tool with built-in go/no-go analysis so you can score fit, risk and capacity quickly instead of debating in circles.

Step 2: Assemble The Right DDQ Response Team Early
A DDQ response breaks when the right people are missing or when reviewers get involved too late. Many DDQs include sensitive legal, financial, security, privacy and operational information, so one person should not be expected to answer everything alone.
Response owner: Owns the full DDQ lifecycle and keeps the response moving.
Proposal or response manager: Manages content, reviews, compliance and final submission quality.
Account executive: Owns buyer context, commercial momentum and stakeholder alignment.
Security or IT owner: Validates cybersecurity, data protection, access control and incident response answers.
Legal and compliance: Reviews regulatory, contractual, privacy and policy-related responses.
Finance: Validates financial information, insurance coverage and stability-related answers.
SMEs: Validate specialist areas such as product, implementation, support, ESG and service delivery.
“Project management of all the different parts of a bid is often overlooked. Ensure you have clear responsibilities and when you want content, answers, and revisions completed by. I would know, I once lost an RFP because I submitted it 26 seconds late.” – Jasper Cooper, CEO & Co-founder at AutoRFP.ai
Step 3: Set Ownership, Timeline And Working Rules
A clear plan prevents last-minute chaos and keeps quality stable across sections. DDQ responses often require multiple internal approvals, so teams need ownership rules before drafting starts.
Assign section owners and deadlines.
Lock review rounds: SME validation, legal review, compliance review and final approval.
Define version control: One source of truth, one final editor and one submission checklist.
Step 4: Build A Buyer Risk Brief Before Drafting
Insight is what turns a basic DDQ response into one that directly answers the buyer’s risk concerns. Before drafting, your team should understand what the buyer is trying to validate and which sections could create concern.
In a survey of 94 bid professionals, AutoRFP.ai found that high performers used a defined customer-insight process far more often, with formal customer research showing up 88% of the time versus 67% for lower performers.
Buyer goals and success criteria: What they need to validate before approval.
Stakeholder priorities: Procurement, legal, finance, IT, security, compliance and business users.
Risks and constraints: Data handling, certifications, regulatory requirements, service continuity and contract terms.
Proof strategy: The policies, reports, certificates, case studies and examples you will use to support claims.
Pro tip: Write a one-page “buyer risk reality” summary and make it the required input for every section owner.
Step 5: Build Trust Themes And Lock Your Storyline
In a tender response, win themes help you persuade. In a DDQ response, trust themes help you reassure. The goal is to show that your company is not only capable, but also controlled, compliant and reliable.
Win themes show up strongly in higher-performing teams, with 71% of the high-win cohort using them. For DDQs, those themes should be reframed around risk, governance and proof.
Create 3 to 5 trust themes in buyer language, not product language.
Tie each theme to: a buyer concern, a clear assurance and proof you can back up.
Use a simple format: Because you need X, we have Y, proven by Z.
Assign each theme to the sections where it should appear.
Build a short proof bank under each theme: policies, certificates, audit reports, case outcomes and risk mitigations.
Pro tip: Build a DDQ compliance matrix that breaks every question into sub-requirements and maps each one to an owner, evidence and where it is answered, so you do not miss pass-fail items.
Step 6: Decide What To Reuse Versus What To Tailor
Reuse saves time only if the content is current, accurate and clearly relevant. DDQ responses often include repeatable answers for security, privacy, legal, insurance, company background and compliance controls.
Teams that used content library automation were far less concentrated in the lowest win-rate tier, with 36% in the low-win band compared with 51% for teams without automation.
Reuse: Standard security answers, legal policies, company credentials, insurance details, compliance language and approved process descriptions.
Tailor: Buyer-specific risk concerns, implementation details, regional requirements, data processing needs and commercial assumptions.
Keep one approved source: This keeps DDQ answers consistent across buyers, teams and submission formats.
Step 7: Draft With One Voice And Clear Evidence
Speed matters, but consistency builds trust. A DDQ response should not sound like separate answers stitched together from legal, finance, security and sales.
Provide each owner with the same inputs: buyer risk brief, approved answer library, proof list and tone rules.
Keep responses tight: direct answer first, then evidence, then detail.
Add a clear proof point where the question affects risk, compliance or buyer confidence.
Pro tip: Have the response manager do a single “consistency pass” across the full DDQ before final review.
Step 8: Use AI And Automation To Accelerate The Repeatable
AI is now common in strong workflows, with 65% of the highest-performing cohort using AI proposal tech, but the advantage comes from how it supports a solid process.
For DDQs, AI is most useful when it helps teams retrieve approved answers, map questions to existing evidence and reduce the time spent hunting through old files.
Use AI to draft from approved sources, then validate and tailor.
Use automation to retrieve evidence quickly, especially for security, compliance, privacy and product details.
Reduce time spent searching across drives, spreadsheets, inboxes and old questionnaires.
Pro tip: Use AI-native response tools like AutoRFP.ai to extract DDQ requirements, generate compliant first drafts on brand and pull supporting content through library-less semantic search across tools like SharePoint, Google Drive and Confluence.

Step 9: Validate With SMEs, Do Not Outsource The Response To Them
Specialists protect accuracy, but they should not own the entire narrative. In DDQs, SMEs are most valuable when they validate the facts, risks and evidence behind each answer.
High performers relied on SMEs to write first drafts only 6% of the time, while lower performers did this 22% of the time, which often leads to inconsistent tone and heavy rewrites.
Ask SMEs to validate key claims, risks and feasibility.
Collect evidence: policies, certifications, audit reports, support processes and implementation artifacts.
Prepare Q&A: security, data privacy, integrations, delivery risk, business continuity and commercials.
Pro tip: Give SMEs specific questions to validate, not a blank page to fill.
Step 10: Run Final QA, Submit Cleanly, Then Debrief
Final QA is where DDQ responses quietly get stronger or weaker. A complete answer can still create problems if it includes outdated certifications, unsupported claims, visible comments, inconsistent dates or missing attachments.
Stronger teams showed formal review and governance more often, at 65% versus 42%.
Completeness check: Every required question is answered directly, with no unexplained gaps.
Proof check: Claims are current, supportable and consistent across sections.
Compliance check: Certifications, policies, legal statements and security answers are accurate.
Submission check: Formatting, attachments, file names, portal fields and deadlines are correct.
Debrief: Capture what worked, what slowed the team down and what should be reused next time.
Pro tip: Track a simple “wins and losses” log by theme and requirement type, because teams that stack automation, reuse discipline and systematic insight are much less likely to sit in low-win bands, at 16% versus 47%.
Where Most DDQ Processes Break and How AutoRFP.ai Fixes It
Investment firms face an ever‑growing volume of due diligence questionnaires (DDQs). Research shows the typical private‑equity firm responds to over 100 DDQs annually, each containing 50-300 questions, and that the documents have grown 40% longer in the past five years.
Completing these questionnaires manually is resource‑intensive: a typical DDQ requires weeks of work involving many departments, and delays or inconsistent answers can jeopardize investor relationships.
Here is a breakdown of common DDQ process problems and how AutoRFP.ai’s features address them.
1. Manual, Time‑Consuming Responses
Issue
Traditional DDQ workflows involve manually reviewing dozens or hundreds of questions, copying and pasting responses from various documents, and formatting answers to match each investor’s preferred template.
This manual process means a 200‑question DDQ can take more than 50 hours to complete, and even short questionnaires can stall deals for weeks.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
AutoRFP.ai uses AI‑powered semantic search and response generation to dramatically reduce manual effort. The platform automatically extracts questions from Excel, Word, PDFs and web portals and matches them to relevant content in your approved documents using semantic analysis, context recognition and intent classification.

It then drafts answers with confidence scores, so high‑trust responses need little editing while flagged answers prompt subject‑matter‑expert review.

Customer Example: Fiddler AI Cut Security Questionnaire Work With AutoRFP.ai

Fiddler AI’s results show what a stronger DDQ and security questionnaire process can look like when teams reuse approved knowledge instead of rebuilding answers manually.
With AutoRFP.ai, Fiddler AI achieved 87% time savings on security questionnaires and a 90% automation rate on recent RFP responses. In one 600+ question security questionnaire, recent analysis found that 99% of responses required only minimal editing.
Across Q1 2025, 63% of all responses needed zero or one-word changes, showing how AutoRFP.ai can learn from approved content and produce accurate, submission-ready answers with less manual rework.
“The dread of a new Security Questionnaire hitting our inbox is gone. AutoRFP.ai makes the process so much easier, the workflow is a breeze and we haven’t lost weekends to RFPs since.” - Amanda Bell Senior Manager of Revenue Operations at Fiddler AI
2. Duplicate Work and Scattered Information
Issue
Investment teams often answer the same question multiple times because each DDQ phrases it differently. Without a centralized content repository, responses are stored across emails, spreadsheets and shared drives, leading to inconsistencies and duplicate work. Maintaining a Q&A library manually is labour‑intensive and can require weekend upkeep.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
AutoRFP.ai’s libraryless semantic search eliminates the need to build and maintain a static Q&A library. The AI reads the meaning of a question rather than just keywords, retrieving relevant answers from existing documents, emails or templates.

The platform continuously learns from every edit and approved answer, creating a single source of truth that automatically recognizes similar questions and pulls the most recent approved response. This approach reduces duplicate work and ensures consistency across all investor communications.
3. Collaboration Bottlenecks
Issue
Completing a DDQ involves multiple stakeholders (investment analysts, compliance officers, risk managers, portfolio managers, etc.). Coordinating contributions via email chains and spreadsheets often causes bottlenecks, unclear accountability and missed deadlines. Gathering subject‑matter expert input can be especially challenging.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
The platform provides real‑time collaboration and workflow management. You can assign questions by expertise, track completion status and manage approvals in one workspace.

AutoRFP.ai supports unlimited users on all plans, so entire due‑diligence teams can collaborate without seat restrictions.

The system offers roles such as Editor and Reviewer and supports approval workflows for compliance sign‑off. Notifications through email, Slack and Teams and real‑time progress tracking help teams meet tight deadlines.

4. Difficult Multi‑Format Imports and Exports
Issue
Investors send DDQs in multiple formats: Excel spreadsheets with dozens of tabs, Word documents, PDFs or proprietary web portals. Manually copying content into a single system or re‑formatting responses for submission wastes significant time.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
AutoRFP.ai imports questions from Excel, Word, PDF and online investor portals. Its spreadsheet importer automatically maps columns, detects drop‑downs and fields, and handles multi‑tabbed spreadsheets with over 10,000 requirements.

After drafting responses, the platform exports the completed DDQ back into the original format or a branded template while maintaining formatting. It also provides a browser extension that lets teams respond directly in online portals or even draft answers while on the phone.

Customer Example: Cubiko Cut Security Questionnaire Response Time By 85%

Cubiko’s results show how AI security questionnaire automation can reduce the manual burden on leadership and sales teams.
With AutoRFP.ai, Cubiko achieved an 85% reduction in security questionnaire response time and became 7x faster, cutting the process from one week to one hour.
This helped Cubiko’s COO and Head of Sales reclaim time previously spent on questionnaire responses. Instead of getting pulled into repetitive answer work, leadership could refocus on strategic initiatives, core business operations, and growth-driving activities.
“Being in healthtech, we get a lot of security questionnaires. AutoRFP helped me save time so I could provide better quality results.” - Bryn Tardent-Powell Head of Sales & Marketing at Cubiko
5. Language Barriers
Issue
Global investors may request DDQs in different languages. Manually translating responses or relying on external translators slows down the process and risks losing nuance.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
The platform supports 40+ languages, enabling IR teams to generate and submit multilingual responses without external translation services. This feature makes it easier to respond to DDQs across international markets.

6. Inconsistent Messaging and Compliance Risks
Issue
Without rigorous version control and review processes, inconsistent or outdated answers can slip into different investor communications. This inconsistency raises red flags and exposes firms to compliance and regulatory risks.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
AutoRFP.ai maintains a single source of truth for all DDQ answers and automatically tracks historical responses. The platform flags inconsistencies and uses confidence scoring to highlight responses that need human review.

Built‑in audit trails, version history and approval workflows ensure that all changes are documented and compliant with regulatory requirements.
The system’s private AI runs on ISO‑certified infrastructure and keeps customer data segregated in regional data centres to meet data sovereignty requirements.

7. Content Aging and Regulatory Changes
Issue
In fast‑moving financial markets, fund policies, performance numbers and regulatory requirements change frequently. Without regular review cycles, responses can quickly become outdated, leading to incorrect or non‑compliant answers.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
AutoRFP.ai’s AI continually learns from new responses and updates its content repository automatically. The platform allows teams to schedule content review cycles and supports modular content blocks that can be updated centrally and reused across future DDQs. This proactive approach ensures responses reflect current practices and regulatory requirements.
8. High Cost and Slow ROI of Legacy Tools
Issue
Traditional DDQ software often requires months to implement, extensive Q&A library migration and high per‑seat licensing fees. Legacy platforms frequently rely on keyword matching, resulting in low automation rates and high editing overhead.
AutoRFP.ai Solution
AutoRFP.ai’s libraryless architecture deploys in days rather than months and eliminates manual library building. All plans include unlimited users and a risk‑free trial, avoiding per‑seat fees. Semantic search and AI learning drive automation rates above 80%, with many responses requiring no edits, delivering a rapid ROI.
What A Strong DDQ Response Looks Like
A strong DDQ response does more than answer questions. It gives the buyer enough confidence to keep your company in the deal.
That means every answer should be clear, specific, evidence-backed, and easy to verify. Buyers are not only checking whether you have the right policies in place. They are also checking whether your team is organized, transparent, and mature enough to handle enterprise requirements.
A strong DDQ response usually includes five things:
1. A Direct Answer To The Question
The best DDQ responses answer the question first before adding context.
If the question asks, “Do you encrypt data at rest and in transit?”, do not start with a broad statement like, “We take security seriously.” Start with the actual answer.
Example:
This gives the buyer what they need immediately. Then, you can add supporting details, such as key management, audit frequency, certifications, or links to security documentation.
Side note: Weak DDQ answers often sound like marketing copy. Strong DDQ answers sound operational, specific, and review-ready.
2. Clear Evidence Behind Each Claim
Enterprise buyers do not want unsupported promises. They want proof.
A strong DDQ response should include the documents, certifications, policies, or records that support the answer.
For example, security and technology DDQs often ask for details on encryption standards, compliance certifications, incident history, backup procedures, disaster recovery, API architecture, and privacy controls.
Your example source also shows that strong responses often include specific protocols, audit schedules, compliance certifications, recovery objectives, and supporting procedures.
For example, instead of saying:
Say:
This works because it explains what exists, how it is managed, and what proof the buyer can review.
3. Specific Details That Reduce Follow-Up Questions
A weak DDQ response creates more questions. A strong DDQ response removes them.
Whenever possible, include measurable details such as:
Timeframes: 24-hour review, 72-hour breach notification, annual testing
Standards: SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, AES-256, TLS
Ownership: Security team, compliance lead, legal team, customer success team
Cadence: Quarterly reviews, annual audits, monthly access reviews
Outcomes: Uptime, response speed, resolved findings, completed corrective actions
This is especially important for enterprise buyers because vague answers slow down legal, procurement, security, and compliance reviews.
For example:
That is stronger than:
The difference is simple. The first answer shows a controlled process. The second answer sounds incomplete.
4. A Repeatable Process, Not A One-Off Answer
A strong DDQ response should show that your company has a repeatable system behind the answer.
Buyers want to know that your process does not depend on one person remembering what to do. This matters across security, compliance, risk management, privacy, legal, and implementation questions.
For example, if the DDQ asks about incident response, a strong response should explain:
How incidents are identified
Who owns the response
How incidents are escalated
How customers are notified
How recovery is handled
How lessons are documented after the incident
This gives the buyer confidence that your team can act consistently under pressure.
The same logic applies to other DDQ areas. For risk management, explain how risks are identified, monitored, and mitigated. For compliance, explain how policies are reviewed and updated. For implementation, explain how responsibilities, timelines, and support are managed.
5. A Response Tailored To The Buyer’s Industry
A strong DDQ response should not feel copied and pasted from a generic template.
Different buyers care about different risks. Financial services DDQs often focus on governance, regulatory compliance, operational risk, cybersecurity, business continuity, and audited financial records. Technology DDQs usually focus on infrastructure, security, data privacy, uptime, integrations, APIs, and scalability. Professional services DDQs often focus on methodology, team experience, measurable outcomes, and conflict management.
That means the core answer can stay consistent, but the emphasis should change.
For a financial services buyer, lead with risk controls and compliance.
For a SaaS buyer, lead with security, uptime, privacy, and integration support.
For a consulting or services buyer, lead with methodology, team structure, experience, and measurable results.
This does not mean rewriting every answer from scratch. It means adjusting the framing so the answer speaks to the buyer’s actual concerns.
Example Of A Strong DDQ Response
Question: Describe your business continuity and disaster recovery process.
Strong response:
This answer works because it is direct, structured, and specific. It explains what the company does, who is involved, how the process is maintained, and what evidence is available.
DDQ Template Example For Banking And Insurance
Banking and insurance DDQs usually focus on regulatory compliance, operational resilience, security, and risk controls. These buyers need more than a general answer. They need a response that proves your company can operate under strict oversight.
Here is a simple template you can follow:
Question: List all regulatory examinations in the past three years, including outcomes and corrective actions taken.
Template Response Structure:
Examination date and regulatory body
Scope of examination
Key findings, if any
Corrective actions implemented
Current compliance status
Regulatory contact or relationship owner
This structure works because it gives the buyer a complete audit trail. It does not only state whether an examination happened. It also explains what was reviewed, what was found, what changed, and where the company stands today.
You can use the same structure for other regulated DDQ areas. For example, if the buyer asks about data encryption, your answer should include the encryption protocols, key management process, audit schedule, compliance certifications, and any incident history or response.
Your source example highlights details like AES-256, TLS 1.3, SOC 2, ISO 27001, regular security audits, and incident response as useful response elements.
For more DDQ examples across financial services, technology, SaaS, enterprise software, consulting, professional services, and legal services, read our full guide on real-world DDQ examples.

DDQ Response Best Practices
These are the core best practices teams should follow to complete due diligence questionnaires faster, reduce review risk, and give buyers more confidence in every response.
1. Start With Qualification And Risk Triage
Before answering, teams should first assess the deal, questionnaire type, risk level, and required reviewers. Strong responses start with clear qualification, discipline and governance, not a rushed attempt to answer every question the same way.
This means separating routine questionnaires from high-risk ones. A standard security questionnaire may only need pre-approved answers and InfoSec review.
A complex enterprise questionnaire involving data residency, AI governance, financial stability, or legal exceptions may need security, legal, product, and executive input before submission.
What to do:
Identify the questionnaire type: Security, privacy, ESG, financial, legal, vendor risk, or mixed.
Flag high-risk questions early.
Confirm who owns the final answer.
Decide which questions need SME, legal, or leadership approval.
2. Capture Buyer Context Before Drafting
Content quality alone does not create a strong response. The best answers are shaped by buyer context, decision criteria, industry expectations, and known risk concerns.
This matters because buyers are not just checking boxes. They are assessing whether your company is safe, reliable, compliant, and mature enough to work with. A generic answer may be technically correct, but it may not address the buyer’s actual concern.
What to do:
Understand why the buyer sent the questionnaire.
Check the industry, region, and regulatory context.
Ask sales or customer-facing teams what the buyer cares about most.
Tailor sensitive answers around the buyer’s risk, not just your internal policy.
3. Let SMEs Validate, Not Own The First Draft
SMEs are essential to accuracy, but they should not own the first draft by default. When every security, legal, product, or finance answer starts from scratch, responses become slower, less consistent, and harder to review.
A stronger model is to let the response owner prepare the first draft using approved content. SMEs then validate whether the answer is accurate, current, and safe to submit.
What to do:
Let the proposal, sales, security, or response owner prepare the first draft.
Use approved content as the starting point.
Ask SMEs to verify accuracy and exceptions.
Keep final wording consistent across the full questionnaire.
4. Build A Governed Content Library
Strong response teams do not rely on old folders, scattered documents, or repeated Slack searches. They use a governed content library where approved answers are easy to find, reuse, and update.
This means building a source of truth for common answers, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, encryption, access control, subprocessors, data retention, disaster recovery, AI governance, privacy, ESG, and incident response.
What to do:
Store approved answers by category.
Add owner, review date, source, and approval status.
Retire outdated answers.
Link answers to evidence such as policies, certificates, reports, or security documents.
5. Automate Repetitive Answers, But Keep Human Review
Automation should reduce repetitive work, not replace judgment. AI can help teams pre-fill common answers, retrieve approved content, and route questions faster.
However, human review still matters because buyers may ask about legal obligations, security exceptions, compliance commitments, and product-specific risks. Automation creates time for strategic review, but humans must still protect accuracy and credibility.
What to do:
Use automation to pre-fill common answers.
Route questions to the right reviewer.
Surface approved sources and evidence.
Require human approval for sensitive or non-standard responses.
6. Review For Accuracy, Evidence, And Consistency Before Submission
A final review should go beyond grammar. It should confirm that every answer is accurate, consistent, defensible, and supported by the right evidence.
This matters because one weak answer can slow the deal, trigger more follow-up questions, or create doubt about your operational maturity. In high-value deals, the response is not just an admin task. It is part of how buyers evaluate trust.
What to do:
Check for outdated product, security, or compliance claims.
Make sure answers do not contradict each other.
Confirm attachments match the response.
Review exceptions, caveats, and commitments carefully.
Keep a record of the final submitted version.
Respond to DDQs Faster & Win More with AutoRFP.ai
A strong DDQ response should give buyers confidence before the deal reaches final approval. But that is hard to do when answers are scattered across old questionnaires, security documents, spreadsheets, emails and SME inboxes.
AutoRFP.ai helps teams complete DDQs faster by extracting requirements, drafting responses from approved content, surfacing supporting evidence and routing answers for review. Instead of rebuilding every response from scratch, your team can reuse trusted knowledge, focus on high-risk questions and submit more consistent, evidence-backed answers.
Book Demo today to see how AutoRFP.ai can help your team respond to DDQs faster, reduce manual work and keep more deals moving forward.
Frequently asked questions
1. How Does AutoRFP.ai’s Chrome Extension Handle Portal Questionnaires That I Cannot Export?
Many security questionnaires and vendor assessments live exclusively in web portals with no export option. AutoRFP.ai’s Chrome Extension solves this by working directly within the portal. It identifies each requirement on the page, generates responses using your AutoRFP.ai content library, and lets you review and submit directly within the portal interface.
2. Does AutoRFP.ai’s Gap Analysis Work Across Different Types Of Questionnaires?
Yes. AutoRFP.ai’s gap analysis covers RFPs, security questionnaires, DDQs, and any other type of submission processed through AutoRFP.ai. It identifies compliance patterns regardless of the document type, giving you a unified view of where your organization's gaps are across all response types.
3. Beyond RFPs, What Other Types Of Questionnaires Can AutoRFP.ai Automate?
AutoRFP.ai is a versatile automation platform capable of handling a wide range of documents beyond traditional RFPs. It effectively automates RFIs, DDQs, tenders, and various security questionnaires, providing consistent and accurate responses across all these critical business documents.
4. How Does AutoRFP.ai Handle Version Control And Approvals?
Every response maintains a full audit trail showing who provided information, who edited it, and who approved it. The system tracks all changes with timestamps, so you always know the current state of every response. This is particularly important for compliance heavy RFPs where you need to document the review and approval chain.
5. How Does AutoRFP.ai Help Me Coordinate Multiple SMEs Across An RFP Or DDQ?
AutoRFP.ai gives you a single dashboard showing every team member's workload and completion status at a glance. You can assign specific questions to individual SMEs across security, legal, finance, technical, and compliance teams, set deadlines, and instantly see who is stuck or falling behind. No more checking three different spreadsheets to see if someone finished their section.
6. What Is The Best Way To Handle Security Questionnaires To Ensure Compliance And Speed?
The best approach involves automating the response process for security questionnaires and DDQs. A unified knowledge hub for security responses, coupled with AI that can auto fill answers and flag gaps, significantly reduces turnaround time and improves consistency. AutoRFP.ai specializes in security questionnaire automation, ensuring compliance and faster vendor reviews.
7. Why Is An Audit Trail Critical For Compliance Heavy RFPs And Security Questionnaires?
Compliance heavy bids often require proof of who provided and approved specific information. A built-in audit trail provides a defensible record of your internal review process, which is essential for meeting the strict requirements of many enterprise and government contracts.
8. How Can Teams Maintain A Single Source Of Truth When Responding To RFPs In Web Portals?
By using a browser extension that connects directly to your main content library, you ensure that every answer provided in a portal is based on the same approved, up to date documentation used for your Word and Excel RFPs, maintaining consistency across all channels.
9. How Can Real Time Answer Access During Prospect Calls Improve Sales Velocity?
Being able to provide immediate, accurate answers to technical or security questions during a call builds trust and prevents the need for follow up emails. This keeps the sales momentum going and can significantly shorten the overall deal cycle.
10. How Can Organizations Reduce The Risk Of Errors In AI Assisted Content Generation?
To minimize errors and hallucinations in AI assisted content, organizations should use AI systems that are grounded in their own approved content. Features like trust scores, source attribution, and a human in the loop review process are crucial. AutoRFP.ai employs a multi step LLM workflow and never trains on customer data, ensuring high accuracy and reliability.