Strategy · April 2, 2026 · 9 min read
How to win a competitive deal when you're not the market leader
Every competitive deal is scored on a list nobody wrote for this buyer. It gets inherited from the last evaluation, or set by the incumbent on an early call, and it favors the market leader by design. Call it the inherited scorecard. Scoring higher on it is the losing game. The way through is to add a line where the buyer's real problem lives and our answer is genuinely better, then plant questions we can answer, choosing references that match the situation, sequencing the demo around what's hard to show, and naming the switching cost before they do.