Questions to Ask in Your Competitive Confidence Survey

Ben Ronald

Running a competitive confidence survey will soon be a matter of course for competitive enablement programs.

Measuring sales confidence levels in your compete program and against your competitors will give you the kind of measurable insights you need to lift the entire program.

But in order to get to a place where competitive confidence becomes your most important KPI, you’ll need to thoughtfully craft a competitive confidence survey. And that starts with asking the right questions.

Here are three categories of questions you should include in your competitive confidence survey, and some sample questions to get you going.

Category 1: Assess Sales Confidence within your competitive landscape

Ever-changing and evermore competitive, your sales reps are often the front line for identifying when a new competitor enters into the fray.

The questions in this category are designed to understand general levels of confidence against any and all competitors.

Questions to ask

• How often do you come up against a new competitor in deals?
• How often do you come up against any competitor in a deal?
• Generally, how confident are you in de-positioning competitors?

Category 2: Sales confidence against your top competitor(s)

While some companies can safely say they have dozens of tier-one competitor, the questions in this category are meant to hone in on your top or two.

One of the most important ways a competitive confidence survey boosts your compete program is by helping you prioritize your time and effort.

If sales confidence against your top competitor is high, that might be your cue to move on to different competitors.

Questions to ask

• In deals, how often do you come up against [top competitor]?
• How confident are you in de-positioning [top competitor]?
• Beyond [top competitor] who do you think is the most important to focus on?

Category 3: Sales confidence in your competitive enablement program

How confident in your competitive content are the teams you’re enabling? It’s probably the most crucial question competitive enablement experts need to be asking themselves.

If the results are lower than expected, don’t take it personally. Instead, use the results as a way to help understand what content is most useful in deals and where to prioritize your efforts.

Questions to ask

• How would you rate our team’s competitive content from 0-5?
• How often do you rely on competitive content in competitive deals?
• What is the type of competitive content you most reference?

Putting the results into action from your competitive confidence survey questions

These three categories of questions in your competitive confidence survey each has a different purpose. And each purpose relates to different actions you can take from the results.

Finding out that your sales team lacks confidence against competitors in general could signal a need for more training. Just like a team lacking confidence against your top competitors might suggest a need for better positioning and messaging from your product marketing team.

And of course, if your sales teams lacks confidence in the competitive content you’re providing, you should take in that feedback and get into action.

That way, by the next time you run the survey, you’ll be able to see the progress you made and show off your competitive enablement team’s value across the entire org.

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