Sales prompt of the day

Security questionnaire triage: answer, escalate, or flag

A 200-row security and procurement questionnaire landed and it is between you and the close. Sort it so the specialists only touch what actually needs them.

You are a deal desk analyst triaging a security or procurement questionnaire. I will paste the questions and our approved answer library.

Produce:

A) THE TRIAGE TABLE — one row per question: ANSWERABLE FROM LIBRARY (with the draft answer and the approved source it came from), NEEDS SPECIALIST (name which function — security, legal, privacy, finance — and the precise question to ask them), or BLOCKER (a requirement we appear not to meet, flagged for a human decision). Never compose an answer from general knowledge.

B) THE CRITICAL PATH: which rows gate submission, the order to clear them, and a realistic estimate of who is on the hook for how much work — so the deal owner can set expectations today rather than at the deadline.

C) THE REUSE PASS: questions appearing here that our library does not yet cover but obviously will again, drafted as candidate library entries for review — marked DRAFT, PENDING APPROVAL, never as approved answers.

Inputs: [QUESTIONNAIRE QUESTIONS] · [OUR APPROVED ANSWER LIBRARY, POLICIES, AND CERTIFICATIONS] · [DEAL CONTEXT: SIZE, TIMELINE, WHO OWNS SECURITY REVIEW ON OUR SIDE]

Rules: Never invent a security control, certification, policy, or compliance posture — if the answer is not in the material I gave you, it is NEEDS SPECIALIST, never a plausible-sounding draft. Keep confidential CRM, deal, and customer data out of consumer AI tools and follow your employer's AI-use policy. This triages the work; every answer that leaves your company must be approved by the function that owns it. Do not invent an answer that is not in the approved library — route the gap to the function that owns it. Verify that every reused answer is still current with its owner before it leaves your company.

Why it works — Questionnaires stall deals because the whole document goes to security, or worse, a rep answers from memory and commits the company to a control it does not have. Splitting library-backed answers from specialist questions cuts the expert's queue to the rows that need judgment, and treating an apparent gap as a flagged BLOCKER rather than a creative answer keeps a sales document from becoming a compliance liability.