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.