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Featured · Competitive Strategy · August 8, 2026 · 8 min read

What to say when a prospect calls you "just like [competitor], but worse"

When a prospect says you're just like a competitor but worse, the winning move isn't a better rebuttal. Arguing the comparison ratifies it. Whatever gets named first in a judgment anchors everything after it, so every counterpoint ends up scored on the competitor's rows and phrased in the competitor's vocabulary. Winning that exchange still loses the frame. "Worse" is also rarely about features. It usually stands in for risk, an existing budget line, or a half-remembered opinion from someone's boss. The reset has three moves. Name the comparison out loud, refuse to argue it explicitly, then change what's being compared and hand the prospect a question on the new axis. If you can't state your axis in one sentence without opening a document, the problem is positioning, not objection handling.

competitive-positioningobjection-handlingsales-enablementb2b-saasmessaging

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Positioning · August 2, 2026 · 10 min read

Can AI do your SaaS positioning? What it still can't decide

AI writes positioning language well. What it can't do is make a positioning decision, and positioning is almost entirely decisions. A model returns the center of what it was trained on, which is exactly where every competitor already lives. Research presented at NeurIPS in 2025 found that different models from different labs converge on strikingly similar output, so this isn't a prompting problem with a prompting fix. Run any AI-drafted statement through four checks. Who you're willing to lose, what trade-off you're taking, which claim survives a competitor's challenge, and what you deliberately left out. An averaged draft goes quiet on all four. That silence is the finding.

positioningaib2b-saasmessagingdifferentiationsaas-gtm

Positioning · July 25, 2026 · 7 min read

Why every SaaS homepage in your category sounds the same

We all sound the same because copying the category leader feels safe, and safe is what makes a page invisible. The Catalog Cut takes ninety seconds. Open the five homepages a buyer would shortlist you against, then strike every sentence that could run unchanged on any of theirs. What survives is your positioning. If nothing survives, you have a catalog entry.

positioningsaashomepagemessagingdifferentiationb2b-saas

Positioning · July 18, 2026 · 7 min read

Why isn't your positioning showing up on sales calls?

Positioning made the parts. Messaging arranged them by audience. Almost nobody builds the third layer, the exact sentence a rep says out loud in the first sixty seconds of a call. We call that missing step the assembly gap. It explains why a messaging house everyone applauded never reaches the room where deals get won, and why reps fall back on the feature list the moment a call gets tense. Closing it is a smaller, quieter job than the one we already paid for.

positioningmessagingsales-enablementb2b-saasmessaging-houseassembly-gap

Competitive Strategy · July 4, 2026 · 7 min read

The deal didn't go to a competitor. It went to nothing.

Most deals marked 'lost to a competitor' were never in a competitive fight. In a study of more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations, [Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna found](https://hbr.org/2022/06/stop-losing-sales-to-customer-indecision) that 40 to 60 percent of B2B deals end lost to buyers who expressed intent and then never acted. Their 2022 study still describes the room accurately, because it maps how people behave under a decision they're afraid to get wrong. Call those phantom losses. The real competitor is the buyer's own inertia, and a sharper feature comparison does nothing to it. What moves a frozen buyer is clarity about what changes, confidence it works for a company like theirs, and cover to defend the choice in a room we're not in. Here's how to sort phantom losses from real ones, and how to fix the message before the next deal fades.

positioningcompetitive-strategyb2b-saasbuying-committeewin-loss-analysissales-enablement

Positioning · July 1, 2026 · 7 min read

Your positioning is getting summarized by AI before buyers reach you

A model reads your positioning before any buyer does, then hands the buyer one sentence about you. Vague, category-level messaging averages into noise that sounds like every competitor. Keywords and schema don't fix it, because the problem is clarity. Run the compression test. Paste everything you've said about yourself into a model, ask for one sentence, and read what survived.

positioningai-searchllmb2b-saasmessagingaeo

Positioning · June 28, 2026 · 7 min read

Your GTM agency can't make this decision. Only you can.

Flat pipeline next to good agency work usually means the decision underneath was never made. Agencies execute decisions that already exist. They can't decide who we sell to, who we refuse, and what problem we actually solve. That's the Positioning Ownership Line. Everything on the execution side is available for rent. Nothing on the ownership side is. Make the call on one page, validated against deals we actually won, before renewing another retainer.

positioninggtm-strategyicpfounder-led-salesb2b-saasagencies

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