The team benchmarks obsessively against a rival product and loses most deals to teams deciding to keep doing it by hand, which never appears in any competitive analysis
The Competitor With No Website — Volume I, Understanding Humans Before Products · Jobs & Progress · Teardown · Core. The team benchmarks obsessively against a rival product and loses most deals to teams deciding to keep doing it by hand, which never appears in any competitive analysis
01 · Opening
The team benchmarks obsessively against a rival product and loses most deals to teams deciding to keep doing it by hand, which never appears in any competitive analysis
02 · The setup
The competitive matrix has been on the wall for eight months. Fourteen rows, two columns, and the team wins eleven of the rows.
Sam: We beat them on everything that matters. So why is the quarter short?
03 · The setup
Maya pulls the closed-lost reasons rather than the matrix.
Closed-lost reason, last two quarters — Lost to the rival product: 9%; No decision: 58%; Budget or timing: 21%; Other: 12%
04 · The evidence
Maya: Nine percent. We built an eight-month wall chart about nine percent of our losses.
05 · The evidence
Sam: No decision is not a competitor. It is nothing.
Maya: It is fifty-eight percent of something. That is not nothing.
06 · The evidence
Six calls into accounts that went quiet. Every one of them describes the same alternative.
Priya: We kept the spreadsheet. It is awful and two of us know how it works.
07 · The evidence
Maya rebuilds the matrix with the alternative that is actually winning.
Against the spreadsheet, not the rival — Cost: we lose; Setup effort: we lose; Nobody has to be persuaded: we lose; Breaks silently at scale: we win; Survives the person leaving: we win
08 · The evidence
Maya: Eleven of our fourteen rows compare us to a product almost nobody is considering.
Dev: And none of them mention the two people who know the spreadsheet.
09 · The evidence
Competitive analysis selects for competitors that can be analysed. A rival product has a website, a price list and a feature page, so it is easy to build a matrix against. The spreadsheet has none of those and wins most of the deals.
Doing nothing is not an absence of a choice. It has real advantages — it is already paid for, it needs no approval, and somebody already knows how it works — and a matrix that never lists those advantages cannot explain a single loss.
Naming the true alternative changes what gets built. Against the rival you add features. Against the spreadsheet you attack setup effort and the risk of the one person who understands it leaving, which is a completely different roadmap.
10 · The evidence
Sam: So I stop selling against them and start selling against the spreadsheet.
Maya: And we make the first afternoon cheaper than keeping it.
11 · You make the call
The story does not tell you first.
A. Rows where the rival is stronger
B. A column for the customer's current way of working
C. Pricing comparisons against the rival
12 · What happened
The wall chart comes down. The replacement has three columns and the widest one is headed with the thing customers are already doing.
Maya thinks: Eight months of beating someone who was barely in the room.
13 · Complete
Competitive analysis selects for competitors that can be analysed, and the one winning most of your deals cannot. Next: what every element on a screen costs the person reading it.