A deal can appear “done” after the demo, only to quietly stall in procurement. Not because your product isn’t good, but because someone on the buyer side sends a security questionnaire and your team suddenly has to answer 60–200 questions about access control, incident response, logging, backups, vendor management, and more. For many SMEs, this is where timelines stretch, confidence drops, and deals lose momentum.
In the Netherlands, this is a common practice. Dutch buyers tend to be structured and risk-aware, and security due diligence is often a standard step before they onboard a vendor or share sensitive data. Without a clear, consistent security story—and evidence to back it up—questionnaires become a scramble: inconsistent answers, missing proof, and endless back-and-forth.
In this guide, we’ll explain what security questionnaires are, why customers use them, why SMEs struggle to respond, and how to avoid getting stuck every time one lands in your inbox.
If you’re not sure where you stand today, Sunbytes CyberCheck gives you a clear baseline and a risk-prioritized roadmap—so you can answer confidently, faster, and keep deals moving.
TL;DR
- Security questionnaires are now a standard step in vendor onboarding—especially in the Netherlands—because buyers need to manage third-party risk.
- SMEs often struggle because they don’t have one clear baseline, consistent documentation, or a clear owner for answers.
- Tools and scans help, but they rarely turn findings into a risk-prioritized plan or a story the business can stand behind.
- The fastest way to respond with confidence is to build a baseline you can reuse—then turn it into a repeatable “answer pack.”
- Sunbytes CyberCheck gives you that baseline and a prioritized roadmap—so questionnaires stop slowing down deals.
What is a security questionnaire?
A security questionnaire is a set of questions a customer sends to a supplier before they sign a contract, integrate systems, or share sensitive data. You’ll also hear it called a vendor security questionnaire or a third-party risk questionnaire—because its real purpose is to help the buyer understand the risk of working with you as a third party.
In practice, this usually shows up when:
- Procurement is preparing the contract,
- IT/security is doing vendor onboarding,
- Or the customer wants to verify you can meet their security expectations (and prove it).
The questions typically cover things like access control, MFA, logging, vulnerability management, incident response, backups, data handling, and how you manage your own suppliers. The important point is this: it’s not just “a form.” It’s a decision tool. Buyers use it to decide whether you’re safe enough to onboard—or whether your deal needs extra reviews, remediation, or gets delayed.
You may also see standardized formats. One common example is the SIG questionnaire (Standardized Information Gathering), which is widely used to streamline third-party assessments—especially in more structured procurement environments (which you’ll often run into in the Netherlands).
Why do customers send security questionnaires (the buyer’s risk view)
From the buyer’s perspective, a security questionnaire isn’t bureaucracy for fun — it’s a way to avoid becoming tomorrow’s headline.
When a customer works with a vendor, they’re not just buying a service. They’re often giving that vendor access (to systems, data, integrations, support channels) or relying on them for something business-critical (availability, uptime, processing, storage). That creates third-party risk: the vendor becomes part of the customer’s attack surface.
Most buyers send security questionnaires for a few very practical reasons:
- They need to protect their own customers and data. If your company touches personal data, financial data, or confidential business information, the buyer needs assurance you can handle it safely.
- They want proof, not promises. “We take security seriously” is meaningless without basics like MFA, patching practices, backups, incident response, and access reviews. The questionnaire forces that clarity.
- They need consistency across suppliers. Procurement and security teams deal with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of vendors. A questionnaire standardises how they compare suppliers—especially when the stakes are high.
- They’re trying to reduce operational and reputational risk. A vendor incident can cause downtime, legal exposure, and brand damage for the buyer, even if the problem started outside their walls.
- They’re under pressure too. In the Netherlands, large organisations often have structured procurement and risk processes, and security teams are expected to demonstrate vendor due diligence. Even when a company isn’t “compliance-driven” on paper, they still operate in a market where customers, insurers, auditors, and leadership want to see that vendor risk is being managed.
The key point: security questionnaires are rarely about “perfect security.” They’re about confidence—can the buyer trust that you have a baseline, that you understand your risks, and that you can respond properly if something goes wrong. If you can’t answer clearly (or can’t back it up), buyers don’t just worry about security—they worry about reliability, maturity, and whether working with you will become a long-term headache.
Why SMEs struggle to answer (the real reasons)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most SMEs don’t struggle because they’re careless. They struggle because security questionnaires force you to answer like a mature organisation before you’ve had a chance to build the structure of one.
These are the patterns we see most often—especially in fast-growing SMEs:
- No single source of truth. Policies, configurations, and “how we actually do things” live in different places—or only in someone’s head. So every questionnaire becomes a scavenger hunt.
- No clear owner. Sales wants it done yesterday. IT has the technical pieces. Leadership has to approve risk statements. HR might own onboarding/offboarding. When nobody owns the full picture, answers get delayed or inconsistent.
- You’re forced to answer in binary, but reality is messy. Questionnaires often ask “Yes/No” questions about controls. SMEs live in the real world where the answer is usually “mostly, with exceptions.” Without a clear way to document and justify exceptions, you either look non-compliant or you feel pressured to overstate.
- Evidence is the real bottleneck. It’s easy to say you do access reviews, incident response, patching, backups, and vendor assessments. It’s harder to show proof—logs, screenshots, tickets, policies, meeting notes, or audit trails—without having built that habit.
- Tools create noise, not clarity. Many SMEs have some security tools (EDR, firewall, cloud security settings, scanners). But tools don’t automatically translate into a coherent narrative a buyer trusts: what your risks are, what you’ve prioritized, and what’s being improved next.
- The questionnaire arrives at the worst time. It hits right when the deal is moving fast. Suddenly, your team is torn between delivering for existing customers and providing security for a new one, under a deadline.
That’s why questionnaires feel so painful: they don’t just test your security controls. They test your operational maturity and your ability to explain it clearly. And if you can’t, buyers don’t only assume “security risk”—they assume “delivery risk,” too.
What these questionnaires usually ask (so you can prepare)
Most vendor security questionnaires focus on the same core themes. Buyers want to know you can protect access, data, and continuity:
- Access & identity: MFA, privileged access, joiners/movers/leavers
- Asset inventory: what systems you run and who owns them
- Vulnerability & patching: how you find and fix risks
- Logging & monitoring: what you collect, how long you retain, who reviews
- Incident response & recovery: IR plan, backup/restore, testing
- Data protection: encryption, retention, deletion
- Secure development (SaaS): code review, CI/CD security, change control
- Third-party risk: how you assess your own suppliers
- The issue is rarely one of missing control. The real blocker is not having a clear baseline and consistent evidence, so every questionnaire becomes a last-minute scramble.
The hidden cost: how questionnaires slow—or quietly kill—deals (especially in the Netherlands)
Security questionnaires don’t just add admin work. They introduce uncertainty at the exact moment a Dutch buyer is deciding whether you’re a safe supplier to onboard.
And in the Netherlands, that decision process is often structured and process-driven. Procurement and risk teams don’t “go with a good feeling.” If your answers are slow, vague, or inconsistent, you don’t look like a promising vendor—you look like a risk that creates meetings.
Here’s what it really costs SMEs:
Your deal gets pushed into a slower lane
You might be ready to sign, but the buyer’s process shifts from “commercial” to “risk review.” That usually means:
- Extra stakeholders (procurement, security, legal, sometimes IT operations)
- Longer lead time
- More “we’ll get back to you” gaps
The deal doesn’t look dead. It just stops moving at the speed you expected.
You lose trust through small signals
Dutch buyers pay attention to operational discipline. So the signal isn’t only what you answer—it’s how you answer:
- Answers arrive late → “They don’t have this under control.”
- “We think…” / “should be…” → uncertainty
- No evidence / no owner → immaturity
Even if your actual security is decent, the presentation of it makes them doubt.
Your team burns time in chaos mode
You pull in IT, Ops, sometimes HR, sometimes dev, then:
- Everyone answers from their own perspective
- You chase screenshots, logs, policy docs
- You rewrite the same explanations every time a new buyer asks
That’s not “one questionnaire.” It becomes a recurring tax on your team.
The buyer starts controlling the terms (and the timeline)
Once the buyer feels risk, they start adding conditions:
- Security addendums
- Tighter SLA/incident notification clauses
- Audit rights
- Extra checks before go-live
That directly impacts:
- Negotiation complexity
- Delivery scope
- And your ability to close cleanly
The silent killer: you get deprioritized
In many cases, you won’t get a clear “no.” You’ll just become the vendor that requires “too much work” to onboard. The buyer picks the alternative that feels safer and faster—even if it’s not better.
Because from their side, being wrong about a vendor isn’t a small mistake. It can result in incidents, downtime, regulatory exposure, and reputational damage.
If this sounds familiar, the fix isn’t “writing better answers.” The fix is having a baseline—a single source of truth with clear ownership and evidence—,so questionnaires stop being a scramble and start being a repeatable, confident response.
The practical fix: baseline first, then answers become easy
If security questionnaires keep slowing your deals, the solution isn’t to “get better at filling in forms.” The real problem is that you’re answering from memory and scattered documents—so every new customer triggers the same scramble.
What you actually need is a baseline: a single, defensible view of your security posture that you can reuse across customers.
What a proper baseline gives you (and why buyers trust it)
A baseline helps you answer the questions that matter most—consistently:
- A clear snapshot of where you stand today (not just tool screenshots).
- A prioritized list of gaps based on business risk, not a flat checklist.
- Documented evidence and validated exceptions, so your answers don’t sound vague or “optimistic.”
- Clear ownership (who is responsible for what), so replies don’t bounce between IT, ops, and leadership.
- The foundation for a reusable “answer pack”—so the next questionnaire takes hours, not weeks.
Sunbytes CyberCheck: your baseline, your roadmap, your momentum back
This is exactly why we built Sunbytes CyberCheck: a human-led baseline assessment that turns uncertainty into a clear plan—so security questionnaires stop slowing down deals.
With Sunbytes CyberCheck, you get:
- A clear baseline of your current security posture
- A risk-prioritized roadmap (what to fix first, and why)
- A management-friendly summary + workshop to align stakeholders
- Practical documentation and guidance that make vendor questionnaires far easier to answer
CyberCheck is built on a prioritised set of security controls aligned with industry best practices—but the outcome is simple: clarity and action, not compliance theatre.
Once you have that baseline, your customer conversations change. Instead of scrambling, you can say: “Here’s where we are today, here’s what we’ve prioritised, and here’s the roadmap we’re executing.”
And that’s the kind of answer Dutch buyers reward—because it signals maturity, ownership, and reliability.
If you’d like, we can begin with a short readiness call to confirm fit and scope, then deliver your baseline and roadmap within a few weeks.
Where scanning, pen-testing, and SOC fit
Once you have a baseline, it becomes much easienohatr to choose the right security work—without guessing.
- Vulnerability scanning is great for broad coverage. It helps you catch common issues across lots of systems, but on its own it doesn’t tell you what’s most important to fix first.
- Pen-testing is great when something is high-risk and specific—like a public-facing app, an API, or a critical workflow. It goes deep, but it’s not designed to give you an overall roadmap.
- SOC / managed security is great when you’re big enough to need 24/7 monitoring and response. But if you don’t have priorities yet, it can quickly turn into “lots of alerts, little clarity.”
The point is: these aren’t “either/or.” They’re tools. Sunbytes CyberCheck helps you get clear on where you stand first—so you can add scanning, pen-testing or monitoring in the right order, and explain your plan confidently when customers ask.
About Sunbytes
Transform – Secure – Accelerate
In the Netherlands, security questionnaires are often part of vendor onboarding—not because buyers want to slow you down, but because they need to manage third-party risk. Sunbytes helps SMEs move through that process with less friction by turning security into something clear, structured, and defensible.
Sunbytes CyberCheck is part of our Cybersecurity Services pillar: Secure by Design. It gives growing businesses a practical baseline and a prioritised roadmap—so you can answer questionnaires faster, reduce back-and-forth, and keep deals moving.
A few facts about Sunbytes
- An FD Gazellen Award winner
- 12+ years of delivery experience
- 300+ projects delivered across a wide range of industries
- Experience supporting organisations working toward requirements such as ISO 27001 and HIPAA
How our other pillars strengthen CyberCheck
- Business Transformation: We understand how platforms are built and delivered—so we turn security priorities into changes your team can actually implement.
- Accelerate Workforce Solutions: If capacity is the blocker, we can support execution with the right people—so the roadmap doesn’t sit on a backlog.
FAQs
You can, but that’s how you end up doing the same scramble over and over again—different people, different answers, no evidence, and more follow-up from the buyer. A baseline turns questionnaires into a repeatable process instead of a recurring emergency.
Scanning helps, but it won’t give you the full picture buyers care about: ownership, process, and proof. You’ll still get stuck on questions about incident response, access reviews, backup testing, supplier risk, and how exceptions are handled.
That’s normal. Buyers don’t expect perfection—they expect clarity. What matters is that you can explain the exception, the risk, and what you’re doing about it. With a baseline and roadmap, you can answer honestly without looking unprepared.
Let’s get started with Sunbytes
Let us know your requirements for the team and we will get back to you right away.
