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competitive-strategy

3 pieces on this thread.

Competitive Strategy · August 15, 2026 · 10 min read

How to sell against the status quo when you're already the better product

The status quo wins deals it has no business winning. Samuelson and Zeckhauser measured the effect in 1988 and found that an incumbent beats an equally preferred challenger 59 to 41, purely on being the default. In B2B SaaS that default is usually a spreadsheet, a manual process, or a script somebody wrote two years ago, and it carries a price of zero because nobody has ever totaled it. The fix is a second ledger sitting next to your pricing. The total cost of staying puts a monthly number on the buyer's current workaround across four lines. Time drain, error and rework, opportunity cost, and risk exposure. Filled in by the buyer, not by you.

competitive-strategystatus-quo-biasb2b-saassales-enablementswitching-costspositioning

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 · March 14, 2026 · 7 min read

How to position your startup against much bigger competitors (and win)

An incumbent's size is a stack of commitments already made to their largest customers, and those commitments are load-bearing. Which means there are true things a smaller company can say that they can't say back. Three of those structural claims are available to almost anyone. Own the customer their model can't keep, turn their scale into the cost a buyer pays for it, and name a problem their category has no word for.

positioningcompetitive-strategygtmsaas-growth