Competitor research survey template

Competitor Research Survey Template

Most competitive intelligence never gets closer to a customer than a competitor’s website. The release notes get read, the pricing page gets screenshotted, the changelog gets watched — and all of it is public, polished, and increasingly written for investors rather than buyers. What it cannot tell you is the only thing that decides markets: why anyone chooses. That knowledge lives in an unglamorous place — the heads of the people who stood between your brand and someone else’s and picked.

This competitor research survey template turns that population into your intelligence function: new customers asked why they chose you, churned ones why they left, prospects what almost swayed them. Systematically, repeatedly, and in their own words.

Win/Loss at Scale

The backbone of competitive research is the win/loss pair, asked close to the decision:

• The consideration question. What else did you look at before choosing us? Asked unaided first — an open prompt on a long text field — it reveals which names actually occupy your competitive set in buyers’ minds, which is frequently not the set your slide deck assumes.
• The decision question. What tipped it? The stated reason for the win — price, a specific feature, trust in the brand, the sales experience — captured as a multiple choice for the pattern plus an optional line for the nuance.

Timing decides everything. Ask within days of the decision while the deliberation is recallable, not at the annual survey where wins and losses blur into satisfaction scores.

Asking Without Leading

Competitive questions corrupt more easily than any others, because the temptation to fish is structural. The defenses:

• Unaided before aided. Never show a named list of alternatives before asking what respondents considered — the list plants the set. Let them volunteer names first; only then offer a structured follow-up naming the actual contenders.
• Neutral framing throughout. Ask how pricing compares, never why our pricing is better value. Respondents absorb the survey’s assumptions and return them as findings — every leading question manufactures the answer it asked for.
• Symmetry in attribute questions. When rating brands, every brand gets the same attributes, the same scale, the same order — otherwise you are measuring the question design, not the market.

Where you personalize the aided list — naming the alternatives a given customer actually considered — recall information carries their earlier answer forward, so the follow-up reads as a conversation rather than a script.

Perception Mapping

Beyond the decision sits the standing question of position in the mind. A compact perception block does the work:

• Three to five attributes that matter in your market — ease of use, price-to-value, depth of features, trust, support — each rated for your brand and, on a second pass, the main alternative, on consistent rating questions.
• The gap between the two columns is the finding: where you are genuinely stronger, where you merely believe you are, and where the market has no view at all.
• One open field for the single word they would use to describe each brand — single words from buyers are the cheapest brand-tracking data that exists.

Pricing and Feature Signals

Two sections convert competitive feel into signal:

• Price perception. Where did our pricing sit against the alternatives you saw — materially higher, similar, materially lower — and did it help or hurt the case? Competitive pricing research from actual buyers beats both your own intuition and their website’s sticker.
• The feature that flipped it. Asked of wins and losses alike, this produces the competitive roadmap view: which specific capabilities decide deals in your category, ranked by how often they appear in deciding narratives.

Churn as the Best Classroom

Departing customers are the most generous competitive intelligence source you will ever have — they are leaving for a reason and often willing to state it plainly. The cancellation flow should carry the same instrument: where are they going, what was the deciding gap, what would have kept them. Over a quarter, these departures form the most honest product gap analysis available, and they cross-check beautifully against what new customers say won them over.

Route new responses to whoever owns the insight through self notifications, and mark each submission with customer status via hidden fields so wins, losses, and churn stay separable in the response archive. This template sits inside the market research sub-category, and pairs naturally with the voice-of-the-customer program.

Frequently Asked Questions