SugarCRM gets ahead of the competiton with supersonic security responses

We won the deal because they had faith in our security posture - and that trust came from our ability to answer all the questions. We were the only company that took the time to fully respond to every security question.

Shana Sweeney

Executive Leader at SugarCRM

15

of top 25 enterprise customers won using AutoRFP.ai

90%

of initial response work automated, dramatically reducing SME time

Shana Sweeney

Executive Leader at SugarCRM

15

of top 25 enterprise customers won using AutoRFP.ai

90%

of initial response work automated, dramatically reducing SME time

Industry

Technology

Location

Global

Employees

500+

Challenge

Trying to survive surges of difficult security questionnaires while providing fast, quality responses with a lean team.

Solution

Deployed AutoRFP.ai in 2 weeks to provide instant responses with AI and maintain standards at scale.

Results

Dramatic efficiency gains enabled a lean team to secure major enterprise deals while saving hundreds of other team member hours.

The Story

The Challenge

SugarCRM faced a tidal wave of security questionnaires, some with 2,000 questions. Each RFP needing ~12-18 questions routed to their SMEs (Subject Matter Experts).

These hard technical questions would steal upto 20+ minutes each of valuable engineering and security team time to answer.

The challenge was acute as responses needed translation from technical engineering language into customer-friendly terms, creating back-and-forth between teams.

With security questionnaires growing in both number and size, SugarCRM required something that could scale without expanding their team size.

A lot of the security questionnaires we get can contain 500 - 2,000 questions. These were sometimes taking several hours to complete. There were always 15 - 20 questions that required our Subject Matter Experts, using up their valuable time.

Shana Sweeney

Executive Leader at SugarCRM

The Solution

SugarCRM implemented AutoRFP.ai to transform their response process, focusing on automating their security questionnaire workflow. The AI RFP software's intelligent pattern recognition could identify similar questions asked in different ways, dramatically reducing the need to involve SMEs for repetitive inquiries.

The platform centralized their response management, enabling the company to handle their entire global RFP process with remarkable efficiency - just one part-time RFP specialist and a quarter of a security specialist's time, totaling approximately one FTE. This efficient approach allowed their technical experts to focus on their core responsibilities while maintaining high-quality, consistent responses.

The Results

The impact was transformative. SugarCRM won 60% of their top 25 customers through RFPs managed with AutoRFP.ai. In one notable win, they were the only vendor among five competitors to 100% complete a 2,000-question security questionnaire, directly leading to winning a $2M+ ARR customer. The platform enabled them to handle this volume while maintaining a remarkably lean team structure - managing all global RFP responses with just one FTE split across two roles.

The automation reduced SME involvement from 12-18 questions per RFP (each taking 20+ minutes) to only occasional specialized queries, saving hundreds of hours of valuable engineering time. Most importantly, this efficiency didn't compromise quality - in fact, it enhanced it, with AutoRFP.ai handling 90% of the initial response work and enabling the team to focus on customization and quality assurance.