This article will guide you step by step to create a Prospect survey about Competitor Alternatives. With Specific, you can build this survey in seconds—just generate and launch.
Steps to create a survey for Prospects about competitor alternatives
If you want to save time, just generate a survey with Specific. You’ll get a ready-to-go, expert-grade survey instantly.
Tell what survey you want.
Done.
You honestly don’t even need to read further. AI does the heavy lifting—building surveys with expert logic and automatically probing respondents for deeper insights. You’ll get smart follow-ups for actionable feedback, automatically.
Why running a prospect survey on competitor alternatives matters
Let’s face it: talking to prospects about competitor alternatives is something too many teams avoid or delay. But if you’re not running these surveys, you’re missing out on key strategic advantages:
Spotting switching intent and drive factors: Prospects can tell you why they’re thinking about switching, and what competitor features they value most.
Understanding objections before they become deal-breakers: If you know what alternatives appeal to your prospects, you can adjust your messaging, offer, or even product itself.
Refining positioning and pricing: Real-life data beats assumptions. What you learn can help you position smarter, not just harder.
Let’s anchor the power of these surveys with a killer fact: companies using AI to generate and analyze surveys are seeing completion rates of 70-90%, while old-school forms struggle with just 10-30% [1]. That’s a massive leap in engagement and potential insight. The importance of regular prospect recognition surveys and feedback loops isn’t just about data collection—it’s about not losing touch with the real market pulse.
What makes a good survey about competitor alternatives?
Building a good prospect survey around competitor alternatives comes down to two things: clarity and genuine engagement.
Ask clear, unbiased questions. Don’t skew the conversation in your favor—let prospects share what really matters to them.
Keep it conversational. When language feels human, people open up and give you deeper, more honest responses.
Bad practices | Good practices |
Leading or loaded questions | Neutral, open-ended wording |
Overly formal, robotic language | Conversational, friendly tone |
No follow-up questions | Adaptive, conversational follow-up |
The best surveys get both a high number of responses and high quality responses. That’s your benchmark: if you’re getting lots of vague, single-word replies, something’s off. Quantity and quality need to be high for meaningful insight.
Question types and examples for prospect survey about competitor alternatives
Let’s talk real survey design. The question types you choose shape what you’ll learn from your prospects. Here’s what matters:
Open-ended questions draw out rich, detailed responses and are perfect when you want stories, reasoning, or context. Use them when you don’t want to limit answers, and to discover unknown objections or desires. Some examples:
Which competitor products have you considered alongside ours, and why?
What features do you feel are missing in our product that you’ve found elsewhere?
Single-select multiple-choice questions make it easy for respondents to answer, speed up completion, and help you quantify trends. These work well for established categories or when you want to segment responses. For example:
Which of these competitor products have you used or considered?
Competitor A
Competitor B
Competitor C
Other (please specify)
NPS (Net Promoter Score) question helps you benchmark brand sentiment and likelihood to recommend—even as a prospect. Great when you want to quantify satisfaction or brand preference, and easy to automate. If you want to try customizing an NPS survey for this exact case, you can generate an NPS survey now.
On a scale of 0–10, how likely are you to recommend our solution over competitor alternatives to others in your field?
Followup questions to uncover "the why" make a huge difference. If someone answers “Competitor B,” don’t stop there—ask what features stood out, what frustrations they’ve experienced, or what would tip the scales. That way you get the context that turns data into insight. For example:
What was the main reason you preferred Competitor B over other options?
If you want more inspiration or to deep dive into the best prospect survey questions for competitor alternatives, explore top example questions and expert advice here.
What is a conversational survey?
Conversational surveys don’t feel like forms—they feel like a chat. Instead of presenting all questions in a static list, each question is asked, answered, and then the next is intelligently chosen—sometimes even adapting on the fly. This is where an AI survey builder like Specific really shines. AI-driven survey generators do all the structuring, logic, and tone-matching for you.
Manual survey | AI-generated survey |
Time-consuming setup | Done in seconds |
Rigid, no follow-ups | Adapts with smart follow-ups |
Boring, impersonal tone | Conversational, engaging style |
Why use AI for prospect surveys? In short, you get more engagement, deeper responses, and far less work on your plate. Specific’s AI survey generator takes what used to be hours of work and condenses it into a seamless, two-step process (prompt and done)—delivering AI survey examples that feel personal and human. The conversational experience means completion rates soar, as people barely register that they’re taking a “survey” at all. And with a best-in-class user experience, both you and your respondents win. Want to learn more about how to create a fully conversational survey? We’ve covered every step for you.
The power of follow-up questions
The secret weapon of conversational surveys is the automatic AI followup question. If you’ve tried sending surveys before, you know unclear answers kill your insights. With Specific’s AI, every reply can trigger a smart follow-up based on context—so you get the full story in real time (learn more about our automated followup questions feature).
Prospect: “I chose Competitor C because of price.”
AI follow-up: “Can you tell me more about what pricing options mattered most to you, or any specific features that influenced your decision?”
How many followups to ask? Usually, 2–3 are enough. The sweet spot is letting the AI keep asking until you get the core information—then move on to the next question. Specific lets you customize this, so you aren’t overwhelming people with endless probing.
This makes it a conversational survey—it’s a true back-and-forth, like an expert running qualitative interviews, but automated.
AI survey analysis is a breeze, even with tons of messy open text. You can chat with AI about your survey data using our analysis tools, making it ridiculously easy to spot trends, discover pain points, or even export summaries for your team. (If you want a full walkthrough on how to analyze responses, we wrote this guide on survey response analysis.)
Automated followup questions are a new paradigm—give them a try and see just how deep your feedback can go.
See this competitor alternatives survey example now
Ready to uncover what really drives your prospects’ decisions? Jump in, create your own survey, and get high-quality, actionable insights faster than you thought possible with AI-powered conversations.