I think we're witnessing a new phenomenon in B2B software sales. I don't know whether to call it Artificial Due Diligence, the RFPocalypse, or Prompt-and-Dump Syndrome...
Prospects are using ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools to generate incredibly detailed questionnaires to evaluate software vendors.
80 questions. 40 follow-ups. Comparison matrices. Scoring rubrics. More follow-ups.
And I get it!
AI is giving buyers the ability to make more informed purchasing decisions. That's a good thing. It helps them ask questions they might not have thought to ask and compare vendors more systematically.
However, this used to be an enterprise sales problem. If you're negotiating a $500,000 software contract, an 80-question vendor evaluation makes perfect sense.
But we're now seeing enterprise-level due diligence trickle down to much smaller deals. AI has democratized the ability to create these elaborate evaluations, regardless of the size or complexity of the purchase. The amount of due diligence no longer seems proportional to the size of the deal.
It takes AI about 30 seconds to generate 80 questions. It can take our sales team a lot longer to answer them.
"Why not just have your sales team use AI to answer them?" you ask.
Well, because many require a fair amount of human judgment, and others fall squarely into the "none of your beeswax" category. And some of these questions are getting REALLY specific.
"What is your disaster recovery strategy?" Fair question.
"How many times per day does your engineering team brush their teeth on Tuesdays, and how does that correlate with deployment frequency?"
Okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but we are seeing questions that have little relevance to the actual buying decision, questions that no vendor would reasonably answer, and questions that generate three more questions for every answer.
I'm curious. Are other B2B SaaS companies seeing this too? How are your sales teams handling AI-generated questionnaires? Are you answering everything, pushing back, or finding a middle ground?