The Questionnaire Is Not the Problem. The Second One Is.
The first time it happens it feels like bad luck. A deal is going well, procurement gets involved, and a spreadsheet arrives with two hundred rows and a column headed Vendor Response. Somebody loses three days to it. Everyone agrees it was painful and moves on.
The second time is the one worth paying attention to.
Because the second questionnaire is not a new problem. It is the same forty questions, asked in different words, by a different company, four months later. Do you encrypt data at rest. Do you enforce MFA. What is your retention period. Where is the data hosted. You have answered every one of them before, well, after real thought, and you cannot find any of it. So somebody writes them again, slightly differently, and now two customers hold two versions of your security posture.
Why it lands on the wrong person
Ask a twenty-person company who owns security questionnaires and you get a pause.
Sales owns the deal and cannot answer the questions. Engineering can answer them and has no reason to care about the deal. Whoever has "compliance" in their head, usually a founder, has it there alongside nine other things. So it goes to whoever is least able to say no, and it goes there at the worst moment, because a questionnaire only ever shows up when a deal is close.
That is also why nobody fixes it. The work is urgent every time and important none of the time.
What actually changes the cost
Three things, roughly in order of how much they help.
Keep the answers. Not in a spreadsheet somebody has to remember to open. Somewhere the next questionnaire looks first. This is the whole game: the tenth questionnaire should be a review rather than a rewrite.
Make the answers traceable. Every answer should come from something written down, and you should be able to say which sentence. That is what makes review fast, and it is what stops the answer drifting the fourth time somebody paraphrases it.
Say when you do not know. A plausible sentence in a gap is worse than an empty cell. An empty cell is a question; a confident wrong answer is a representation you made to a customer, and it will be read back to you.
Where a tool fits
A tool can read your SOC 2 report and your policies, draft each answer from them, and show you the passage it used. That turns a writing job into a reading job, and reading two hundred short answers with their sources attached takes an afternoon rather than a week.
What it should not do is fill in the ones your documents do not cover. Those are the ones that need you, and there are usually about two of them.
FillTrust drafts each answer from your own documents and shows the passage behind it. Anything your documents do not support is left blank and flagged. See a finished questionnaire.