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Security Questionnaires for B2B SaaS: How to Answer Them in Days, Not Weeks

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October 26, 2026

5 min read

Selling into healthcare, finance, insurance, education or government means security questionnaires: SIG, CAIQ, HECVAT, or the customer's own spreadsheet of 300 questions. The documents that answer most of them, the order to produce them in, and how to stop every deal waiting on the same answers.

Security Questionnaires
SOC 2
B2B SaaS
Compliance
Sales

Questionnaires look different and ask the same things: who can access customer data, how it is encrypted, how you find and fix vulnerabilities, what happens in an incident, which vendors you use, and whether anyone independent has checked. Answer those once, well, and reuse them.

The common formats

Format

Where you will see it

SIG (Shared Assessments)

Financial services, insurance and large enterprises

CAIQ (Cloud Security Alliance)

Cloud and SaaS vendors generally

HECVAT

Higher education

Custom spreadsheets

Everyone else, usually derived from one of the above

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The documents that answer most questions

  1. An independent report: SOC 2 Type II is the most commonly accepted in the US; ISO 27001 more so internationally.

  2. A security overview of a few pages: architecture, data flows, encryption, access, logging, incident response, subprocessors.

  3. Core policies: information security, access control, incident response, business continuity, vendor management, data retention.

  4. A current penetration test summary from an outside firm.

  5. A completed CAIQ or SIG Lite you can send as a starting point.

Make it fast

  • Keep an answer library, reviewed quarterly by whoever owns security, and draft new questionnaires from it.

  • Publish a trust page with what you can share freely and gate the rest behind an NDA.

  • Never answer "yes" to a control you do not have. Contracts and audits will check, and a qualified answer with a date is accepted more often than people expect.

  • Track which questions block deals. They are your security roadmap, prioritized by revenue.

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As of October 26, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.