How to Answer an Enterprise ESG Questionnaire in Five Business Days

An enterprise buyer sends over a 90-question ESG questionnaire on Monday morning. It is due Friday at close of business. Nobody on your team has done one of these before. This is where the deal gets won or lost, and the timeline is not negotiable.

Here is the five-day plan that gets you to a submittable response without inventing data or missing the deadline.

What does an enterprise ESG questionnaire actually ask?

Most enterprise supplier questionnaires cluster into six sections. Knowing the shape lets you divide the work.

• Governance and policy. Board oversight, sustainability policies, code of conduct. Roughly 15 to 20% of questions.
• Environmental performance. Scope 1, 2, 3 emissions, energy use, water, waste. Roughly 30 to 40%.
• Social and labor. DEI, human rights, supply chain labor. Roughly 20 to 25%.
• Product and operations. Certifications, product footprint, packaging. Roughly 10 to 15%.
• Reporting and disclosure. CDP, SBTi, CSRD, TCFD alignment. Roughly 5 to 10%.
• Targets and progress. Reduction commitments and status. Roughly 5%.

The environmental section is where the numbers live and where most first-time responders get stuck. Everything else is policy language and can be assembled from documents you already have.

What is the day-one triage rule?

Read every question. Assign each one a bucket. No exceptions.

Do not start writing yet. Do the triage first. It takes two hours and it prevents you from spending eight hours on a policy question when you should be pulling emissions data.

What do you do on day one and day two?

Days one and two are for data extraction and policy assembly, in parallel.

• Emissions data track. Pull a year of transactions from your ERP. Extract cloud provider emissions reports. Pull travel platform data. If you have any prior footprint work, dust it off. This gives you numbers for Scope 1, 2, and at minimum a spend-based Scope 3 estimate.
• Policy track. Locate your code of conduct, supplier code of conduct, DEI policy, whistleblower policy, and any environmental policy. If they exist, link to them. If they do not exist for something the questionnaire asks about, draft a one-page version now using your general counsel or an outside template.

By end of day two you should have (1) a working footprint number in tCO2e for Scope 1, 2, and a spend-based Scope 3, and (2) a folder of every policy document referenced in the questionnaire.

What do you do on day three and day four?

Days three and four are for answering. Work through the questionnaire in this order.

1. Yes/no with explanation questions first. These are the fastest and clear the deck. Two hours.
2. Policy questions second. Paste or link. Where a policy does not exist, use the roadmap language: "This is not currently documented as a formal policy. We follow the underlying practice in [X], and are formalizing the policy by [date]." Three hours.
3. Number questions third. Fill in the emissions data, energy use, water if tracked, waste if tracked. Where data does not exist, use spend-based estimates with method disclosure. Four hours.
4. Roadmap questions last. These are usually the "do you have SBTi targets, when will you disclose to CDP" questions. Write them once you know what your actual data situation looks like. Two hours.

By end of day four, every question has an answer. Some answers are "not yet, target Q3 2027." That is fine.

What are the four things you should never do?

Five business days is tight. It is not tight enough to justify these mistakes.

• Do not invent a number. If your Scope 3 estimate is a wild guess, it will show up under assurance and it will destroy the relationship. Say "spend-based estimate, USEEIO factors, plus or minus 30%" instead.
• Do not copy a policy you do not follow. Buyers cross-check against subsequent audits. A code of conduct on paper that nobody enforces is worse than not having one.
• Do not answer "yes" to a certification you do not have. ISO 14001, SBTi validation, and CDP scores are all verifiable in seconds. Overclaiming here is a fast disqualification.
• Do not miss the deadline chasing perfection. A 90% complete, defensible response by Friday beats a 100% response by Tuesday. Submit on time.

Enterprise procurement teams see hundreds of these. They can smell fabrication from the first inconsistency.

How do you handle the emissions questions if you have never measured?

You still answer, and you do it defensibly. The path is:

• Scope 1. Fuel volumes from your utility bills and any company vehicles. This is a two-hour calculation. Multiply gallons of natural gas or gasoline by the DEFRA or EPA factor for that fuel.
• Scope 2. kWh from utility bills times the grid emission factor for your region (eGRID for US, IEA for global). This is a one-hour calculation once bills are in hand.
• Scope 3. Spend-based first pass. Sum your annual operating spend by GL account category, apply USEEIO or DEFRA factors per dollar, sum by Scope 3 category. Not perfect. Defensible.

The total should have a unit, a method, and a stated uncertainty range. That is enough for a first questionnaire response.

What does day five look like?

Day five is for review, formatting, and submission. Split the day into three blocks.

• Morning: internal review. CFO, general counsel, and whoever will own the customer relationship read every answer. Their job is to flag anything that would be embarrassing to defend on a call.
• Midday: consistency pass. Check that dollar figures, employee counts, tCO2e numbers, and target dates match across sections. Questionnaires often ask the same underlying question three ways, and inconsistency is what gets flagged.
• Afternoon: format and submit. Follow the buyer's submission format exactly. If they want a PDF, no Word doc. If they want a portal upload, use the portal.

Submit before end of day. Send a short cover email with a name and calendar link in case procurement has follow-up questions.

The mistake to avoid

Treating the questionnaire as a research project rather than a delivery deadline is the failure pattern. Buyers do not expect a mid-market supplier to have Fortune 500 sustainability infrastructure in year one. They expect a defensible, consistent, on-time response that shows you know what you do and do not measure. Overclaiming loses deals faster than admitting a gap with a roadmap. The winning posture is precise about the present, honest about the gaps, and specific about the timeline.