The Competitive Intelligence Questionnaire: Two Halves Every SaaS Team Should Run

A competitive intelligence questionnaire is a fixed set of questions you run in two halves: an internal-harvest half you ask your own sales, support, product, and marketing team, and an external-monitoring half you point at competitor web pages. It is not a consumer survey. The inward-facing half is the one most teams skip.

Grab the template in whichever form you prefer: make your own copy of the questionnaire, or download the PDF version.

The questions worth asking first are not about your competitors at all. They are about the people in your own company who already know things about those competitors that no web page will ever publish, and who have never been asked in a structured way. The external research is real and we will get to it, but it is the perishable half of the job, and it goes stale the moment you finish.

This is a questionnaire built to run this week. Use the two copy-pasteable tables below as your competitive intelligence questionnaire template, each row naming the decision it feeds and the person who owns it, so the answers do not pile up in a doc nobody reads. We run this on our own competitors, the external half every week and the internal half each quarter, so the worked example at the end is a real one from this month, not a hypothetical.

What a competitive intelligence questionnaire is (and the two halves most guides collapse)

A competitive intelligence questionnaire is a standing set of questions you ask to gather, in one place, what your company knows and needs to know about its competitors. The word "questionnaire" trips people up, because it implies a survey you send to strangers. This is not that. Half of these questions you ask your own colleagues, and the other half you ask of competitor web pages.

Almost every ranking guide for this collapses the two halves into one flat, outward-facing list: pricing, funding, headcount, feature matrix, recent blog posts. Useful enough, and then it abandons you at "now go find out." There is no instruction for where to look, no note on which answers rot in a week, and no mention at all of the richer source sitting three desks away. The split between the inside questions and the outside questions is the whole point, and it is the thing the listicles drop.

Both halves run through one gate. A question earns a place on the questionnaire only if it names the decision it feeds and the person who owns that decision. CI practitioners call these Key Intelligence Questions, or KIQs: questions tied to a real decision the business faces, not facts that are merely interesting. If a question does not feed a decision someone owns, it is trivia, and it does not go on the list.

Why your own colleagues are the questionnaire's best source

Your own colleagues are the source worth asking first, ahead of anything on the competitor's website. It is the half almost every competitive-analysis checklist skips, and it is usually the half that explains the deal you just lost. Your reps hear which competitor a prospect almost chose and why, the objection that nearly sank the deal, the promise a rival made in a demo, and none of it gets published anywhere a crawler can read. Buyers lean on people for the same reason: a May 2026 Gartner survey found that 69% of B2B buyers still prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep rather than take the machine's word for it.

This is the funding-headcount-feature-matrix trap. The standard external lists stop at what a competitor publishes about itself and never reach the people in your own building. You can know a competitor raised a Series B, hired forty people, and shipped a fourth pricing tier, and still have no idea why you lost the deal you lost last Tuesday. Your rep on that call knows, and so does the support lead who fielded the migration question. That kind of fact lives in a person's head until a question pulls it out, and it beats anything on the careers page because it already comes attached to a deal that happened.

A team of five to fifty people usually has no dedicated CI analyst and no plan to hire one. That matters less than it looks, because competitive-intelligence teams stay small even at much larger companies. A January 2026 Forrester study of these programs found that most run on five or fewer people, often just one or two, supporting between 500 and 5,000 internal stakeholders. The best competitive intelligence is not a hire. It is a set of questions you already have permission to ask the people you employ.

The internal-harvest questionnaire: questions to ask your sales team

You gather competitive intelligence from your sales team by asking them fixed questions on a cadence, not by waiting for them to volunteer it in Slack. Reps see competitors at the exact moment money is on the line, which is the moment the intelligence is worth most and the moment it is most likely to evaporate if nobody writes it down. The questions below are the sales block of the internal harvest. Read the Decision and Owner columns as part of each row, not as decoration. They are what stop the answers from dying in a Slack thread. At a five-person company, several of these owners are the same person wearing different hats; name the role anyway, so each decision has a home the day you hire for it.

Sales (ask your reps and SDRs)

#	Question	Decision it feeds	Owner
1	Which competitor comes up most often on your calls, and at which deal stage does it surface (early eval, demo, procurement)?	Where to invest competitive content and battlecard depth	Product marketing
2	When we lose a deal to a competitor, what is the single reason the buyer actually gives?	Positioning fixes and the next roadmap bet	Founder / Head of Product
3	What does a competitor promise in a demo that you only hear about after the prospect has seen them?	Demo script and feature-gap messaging	Sales enablement
4	What objection tied to a specific competitor are you least confident answering live?	Battlecard rebuttals and rep training priority	Product marketing
5	Which competitor pricing or packaging detail do prospects raise that we can't confirm ourselves?	Pricing-page monitoring scope; pricing response	Founder / Pricing owner

Question 5 does a quiet second job. It hands you the list of external things worth monitoring, sourced from the people who actually feel the gap. The internal half feeds the external half its scope.

The internal-harvest questionnaire: support, product, and marketing

The harvest does not stop at sales, because three more teams hold intelligence sales never sees. Support and customer success know why people leave and what nearly stopped a switcher from switching. Product knows which competitor move actually changed a deal versus which one just looked scary in a launch tweet. Marketing and the exec team know which competitor you are watching out of pure habit. The remaining blocks of the internal harvest follow.

Support and customer success (ask your CS and support team)

#	Question	Decision it feeds	Owner
6	Which competitor do churned or at-risk customers name when they leave or threaten to, and what pulled them?	Churn-save play and retention roadmap	Customer success lead
7	What competitor weakness do our support tickets reveal that the competitor would never publish (outages, migration pain, missing features)?	Proof points and switch-to-us messaging	Product marketing
8	When a customer migrates to us from a competitor, what was the breaking point and what nearly stopped them?	Onboarding and migration-offer design	Customer success lead

Product (ask your PMs and engineers)

#	Question	Decision it feeds	Owner
9	Which feature requests from prospects or customers explicitly name a competitor as the reason?	Roadmap prioritization	Head of Product
10	Which competitor shipped something in the last quarter that changed how a deal went, and did it actually matter to retention?	Build-vs-ignore call on the next quarter	Head of Product
11	Where does a competitor's architecture or integration give them an advantage we'd have to engineer around, not just market against?	Multi-quarter strategic bet	Founder / Head of Product

Marketing and exec (ask your marketing and leadership)

#	Question	Decision it feeds	Owner
12	What competitor claim do we most often have to correct or contextualize in content or on calls?	Content calendar and FAQ/comparison pages	Content / Product marketing
13	Which competitor are we tracking out of habit that hasn't touched a real deal in two quarters?	Tracking scope (stop watching, free up budget)	Founder / Marketing lead
14	Who is a future or fringe competitor (a substitute, an adjacent tool, a free workaround) nobody has us watching yet?	Early-warning monitoring scope	Founder
15	What is the one competitor move that would force us to change our own roadmap or positioning within a quarter?	Trigger plan; what to monitor most closely	Founder
16	For every answer above: which decision does it feed, who owns that decision, and is this answer tacit (a person's head) or public (a web page a tool can watch)?	Whether the answer belongs in the internal half or the monitored external half	Whoever runs the questionnaire

Question 16 is the hinge between the two halves. As you record each answer, you mark whether it lives in a person's head or on a public page. The tacit answers stay in the internal harvest and get re-asked. The public ones graduate to the external monitoring list, where a tool can watch them so you stop re-typing them by hand. Question 13 is the one most teams never ask and most need to: it is permission to stop watching a competitor that has not shown up in a deal for two quarters, which is the only way the list stays short enough to act on. A few questions sit on the seam between the two halves. Question 14 often starts as a hunch a teammate is sitting on and ends as something public you go and watch, so an answer can move from the internal harvest to the external list once you have it. The sort in Question 16 is what catches that.

A short win-loss subset to run after every competitive deal

The highest-value internal subset is the four questions you ask right after a competitive deal closes, and most teams skip it. By the time a competitive deal reaches your reps, most of the decision is already made: 6sense's 2025 buyer study found that B2B buyers weigh about five vendors, settle on a four-vendor shortlist before they ever contact sales, and buy from that shortlist 95% of the time. The reasons you won or lost were mostly set before you got in the room, and the only way to recover them is to ask the buyer. A deal that just closed is the one moment that reasoning is fresh and recoverable, won or lost, so run this subset every time.

Win-loss subset (run after every competitive deal, won or lost)

#	Question	Decision it feeds
W1	Which competitor(s) did the buyer seriously evaluate, and which did we not even know was in the deal?	Tracking scope; rep underreporting
W2	What was the single deciding factor, in the buyer's own words?	Positioning and roadmap
W3	What did the competitor say about us, and was any of it true or newly true?	Rebuttals; product fixes
W4	If we lost, what would have had to be different for us to win, and was it price, product, or proof?	The next quarter's biggest bet

Reps underreport the competitors they lose to, so your CRM shows fewer competitive deals than you actually run. The win-loss subset is how you recover what the pipeline drops. W1 alone earns its place: it is the only question that tells you which competitors you are not tracking but should be, sourced from a buyer who has no reason to flatter your coverage.

The external-monitoring questionnaire: where each answer lives and how fast it goes stale

The outward half is real, and it is perishable, so every question on it names where the answer lives and how fast it decays. This is the part the standard listicles get partly right and then leave you stranded on, because they tell you what to find and never where it sits or when it expires. The table below fixes both: the middle column is where you point a browser or a tool, and the right column is the half-life, how long the answer stays true before it quietly stops being true.

Part 2: the external-monitoring questionnaire

#	Question	Where the answer lives	How fast it goes stale
E1	What does the competitor charge now, including tiers, add-ons, and removed plans?	Pricing page	Weeks to months (changes quietly)
E2	What is the competitor's core homepage message and who are they selling to now?	Homepage / messaging	Weeks to months
E3	What roles is the competitor hiring, and in which function (a leading indicator of where they're investing)?	Job listings / careers page	Weeks
E4	What new product, feature, or page did the competitor just ship?	New pages / product pages / changelog	Days to weeks
E5	What is the competitor publishing, and what themes are they leaning into?	Blog / press posts	Weeks
E6	Which customers or logos did the competitor just add or lose?	Case studies / logo wall	Months
E7	What metrics or proof claims is the competitor making ("2x faster", "10,000 teams")?	Homepage / case studies / metrics claimed	Months
E8	What is the competitor saying on social, and what are they amplifying?	LinkedIn / X posts	Days
E9	What is the competitor saying in video (demos, webinars, launches)?	YouTube	Weeks to months
E10	What events is the competitor sponsoring, speaking at, or hosting?	Events page	Months
E11	What are customers saying in public reviews, and is sentiment moving?	Review sites	Weeks to months
E12	Who are the competitor's named leaders, and have any just joined or left?	About / team page / press	Months
E13	What partnerships, integrations, or M&A did the competitor just announce?	Press posts / integrations page	Months

The "where the answer lives" column is not abstract. It maps almost one-to-one onto the data types an automated competitor-monitoring tool already watches: pricing, messaging, job listings, new pages, blog and press posts, case studies, logos, metrics claimed, social, video, events, reviews, and leadership. That mapping matters later, when the question becomes who re-checks thirteen pages across every competitor every week. E3, the hiring row, is worth lingering on. Job listings are one of the earliest leading indicators a competitor gives you, which is why we wrote a whole post on reading them, and why E3 is the row we run start to finish in the worked example at the end of this post.

Tag every answer with the decision it feeds and who owns it

The decision gate is built into this questionnaire as a column, so running it and enforcing it are the same action. If a question you want to add cannot name the decision it feeds and the person who owns it, it goes in the bin. This is the same principle behind why a CI tool should hand you signals and not playbooks: the decision is yours to own, and the questionnaire makes sure every fact you collect points at one.

What the questionnaire can't catch: the answers decay the day you finish it

A filled-in questionnaire is a snapshot, and the external answers in it start expiring the day you finish. The freshness column in Part 2 is the central problem with treating a questionnaire as a one-time exercise. We watch competitor pages every day, and pricing, messaging, and hiring tend to move within a week or two of the last change, quietly and with no announcement. Nobody checking by hand catches all of it, which is why even teams with budget and headcount fall behind on the external half. The freshness column exists to tell you which answers you can write down once and which ones you cannot.

So here is the concession, and it cuts against our own interest as a monitoring product to make it. The half of this questionnaire that decays fastest is the half a tool can help with, the external pages. The half that matters most, the internal harvest, is human and tacit, and a tool does nothing for it. No software watches your reps' calls and tells you why you lost a deal in the buyer's own words. No crawler reads your support queue and surfaces the migration pain a competitor would never publish. That half you run with your own people, with the questions above, on a calendar. If anyone sells you a tool that claims to automate the valuable half, they are selling you the cheap half with a markup.

How often to re-run it, and the cheapest way to keep the external half current

You run the internal half quarterly, you run the win-loss subset after every competitive deal, and you watch the external half continuously, because each part decays at a different rate. The internal harvest ties to your team's decision and review cycle, so quarterly is the natural beat. The external half moves in weeks and days, which no quarterly re-typing can track. The cadence table below sorts every question into the rhythm that matches how fast its answer rots.

Cadence table

Cadence	What sits here	Why
One-time / yearly	Founding story, core positioning, who the leaders are	Rarely changes; check once, revisit yearly
Quarterly	Internal-harvest questions; win-loss themes; tracking scope	Tied to your team's decisions and review cycle
Continuous	Pricing, homepage messaging, job listings, new pages, social	Moves within weeks; re-typing a questionnaire can't keep up, so this is the half a monitoring tool keeps current

The continuous row is where a tool earns its keep, and only there. After you fill the external questionnaire in once, an automated competitor-monitoring tool is the cheapest way to keep the fast-decaying rows current without a human re-checking thirteen pages per competitor every week. Done by hand, the cost of keeping it current is mostly the checks you quietly stop running by week three, which is the whole case for why the external half should not stay manual. Meertrack runs this for $19 per competitor per month, single plan, no contract, with a 14-day free trial on up to three competitors if you want to watch the cadence before you pay. That is the real cost of automating the perishable side. The internal harvest stays free, because it is your own people answering questions on a quarterly cadence.

Run the whole thing this week: a worked example on one real competitor

You run the whole questionnaire in a week by working both tables on one competitor at a time. Here are both halves run start to finish on a single competitor, drawn from a real signal we caught this month. We track our own competitors with Meertrack every day, which is the only reason we can show you this one with a date on it.

On 10 June 2026, one competitor we monitor posted more than a dozen new roles in a single day. Almost all were go-to-market and delivery roles, account executives, engagement managers, and the engineers who staff client work, and almost all sat in four European cities the company had never hired in before: Paris, Milan, Madrid, and Munich (one lone role was in the US). Read as a stack of separate facts on a careers page, that is noise, the kind of thing the funding-headcount listicle would log as "hiring a dozen people" and move on from. Read as one signal, it is unambiguous: a company that stands up sales and delivery roles across four European cities on the same day is building out a European operation.

That is the external half, question E3, working exactly as the freshness column promises. Job listings move within weeks and they leak intent before any press release does. Meertrack flagged it the same day, straight off the careers page, under the job-listings data type. No human was re-checking that page; the tool was watching it so a person did not have to.

Now the gate. The decision this signal feeds is not "noted." If you sell in Europe, a competitor just entered your market, and that is a territory and positioning call that belongs to a founder or a head of sales this quarter, not a fact that sits in a digest. Then the internal half closes the loop: you take that signal back to the sales questionnaire and ask question 1 and question 14. Has this competitor started showing up on European calls yet? Is there an adjacent region we should be watching that nobody has us tracking? The external tool caught the leading indicator. Your own people are how you find out whether it has reached your deals yet. The monitoring surfaced the move; the internal harvest is how you decide what it means for you.

The questionnaire is step one, and it is free: you can run both tables this week with the people you already employ and a browser, then re-run the internal half each quarter. Continuous monitoring is the paid step two, and it covers only the perishable external half. Meertrack is one side of a sub-$100-per-month CI stack whose other half is free and human and runs on the internal questionnaire. The questionnaire's output is exactly what feeds a good battlecard, though Meertrack itself is not a win-loss or battlecard tool. We watch the thirteen external rows that go stale on their own clock, and your team keeps the internal harvest, with the questions above.

A few questions this raises

What are Key Intelligence Questions (KIQs)? KIQs are the specific questions your business needs answered to make a real decision, as opposed to facts that are merely interesting. Every row in both tables above is a KIQ, because each one names the decision it feeds. A fact with no decision attached is not a KIQ; it is trivia, and it does not belong on the questionnaire.

How do you create competitive intelligence survey questions? Start from the decision, not the competitor. For each question, name the choice it feeds and the person who owns that choice, then mark whether the answer lives in a colleague's head (internal harvest) or on a public page (external monitoring). If you cannot name a decision and an owner, drop the question. The two tables above are a ready-made starting set you can run as-is.

How often should you run a competitive intelligence questionnaire? Run the internal half quarterly, the win-loss subset after every competitive deal, and watch the external half continuously. The cadence table above sorts each question by how fast its answer goes stale.

Grab the template in whichever form you prefer: make your own copy of the questionnaire, or download the PDF version.