How to position against your biggest competitor?

One of the key activities during the product positioning process is identifying your key competitors and then highlighting how your solution’s key capabilities address customer issues better than the competition.  However, many product marketers forget to consider one of the most important competitors in the process (and likely the biggest one) – status quo.

In enterprise software space (that I am more familiar with) If you look at your CRM system, you are likely to find 35 to 45% of your opportunities closed as lost due to ‘no decision’.  This is the scenario where the customer decided not to change their current system (or some combination of manual process, spreadsheets/emails, and system). Your losses to ‘no decision’ are likely to be larger than anyone you compete directly with. You can significantly improve your win-rate if you successfully position against status-quo.

It is important to gain an in-depth understanding about why your prospects would be resistant to change and stay with status-quo.  For example, in the current economic environment, budget may be the reason they provide, however there may be underlying issues that are the real cause.  You need to understand them and position your solution against them. Your win-loss analysis of ‘no decision’ losses will help gain these insights. You can then create positioning and messaging that catches your prospect’s attention and arouses curiosity about getting off the status-quo.  Following are the questions you can dive into, in your win-loss analysis of ‘no decision’ prospects, to help you position your solution better against this ‘competition’:

• What is their current pain?
• What workarounds are in place that could be masking the pain?
• Who would need to be involved for change to happen i.e., to help you position the product at the right level with the right value?
• In what ways might other people, processes or issues be affected by the change and are likely to resist your solution?
• What business objective and future opportunity would they miss if they don’t change?
• Are they missing some KPIs from status quo?
• Is a regulatory or compliance change coming up, that they will need help addressing?
• What is an obstacle creating status-quo (process, legacy software, TCO, culture etc.)

Once you understand the ‘status-quo’ competitor better, you will be able to incorporate them into your product positioning and create the right set of marketing messages for such a ‘competitor’.