Three Principles That Helped Us Beat Competitors

Once your company proves successful, it can be tempting to keep watching the same direct competitors you’ve always cared about.

I’ve been there a few times. It didn’t end well.

I recall how obsessed some of my bosses were with our “classic” competitors.

We wasted much energy on useless competitive analyses.

Other leaders had a much better approach to competition. They helped us craft a balanced view between solving our customers‘ problems and building a strong competitive positioning.

Once I started to lead product and business teams, I made a point to enable such a view and save my team’s sanity.

Here are the three principles I focused on:

Knowing our position in the competitive landscape

Your lens should differ whether you are the disruptor or the disruptee. Disruptors will stand a more substantial chance by targeting specific customer segments others overlook.

That’s how we entered new markets. At first, our offering was inferior, but it formed a more adapted alternative. Eventually, we moved upmarket, keeping our tailored, competitive advantage and now directly challenging established companies on mainstream offerings.

But what if you are the potential disruptee? Watch for those insidious players hiding in adjacent categories and remember what happened to Blockbusters:

Blockbusters did not see the disruptor (i.e., Netflix) coming. Netflix didn’t initially go after Blockbuster’s core customers – those who wanted the latest releases. They only appealed to customers bothered by the inconvenience of getting to a physical store and late return fees. Then, Netflix moved mainstream, delivering the newest releases and excelling at digital delivery. No one needed BlockBusters anymore.

Doing Competitive Analysis the Right Way

Studying alternatives to your solutions is valuable if you keep a few rules in mind. There’s no need to go through lengthy feature-to-feature comparisons. Instead, I’ve learned to focus on understanding “why” my competition was progressing or failing. 

And guess what? The best source to understand the “why” was to ask customers directly. We learned the most from open-ended probing questions asked to the decision-makers at our key customers for our win-loss analyses.

The other essential dimension of any good competitive analysis is to focus on where the puck is going. Instead of focusing on current offerings, we tried to gather key facts on our competitors and built “What if” scenarios. We even did some roleplays, putting ourselves in these competitors’ shoes and assessing each situation’s risk.

Keeping our customers first

No matter how hard we tried not to, I still feel we spent too much time analyzing our competition. 

But in the end, nothing can rival the obsession with solving your customers’ problems. Staying focused on your customers and truly understanding them is the only way your business will progress. 

We’ve had the most success when our product teams lived and breathed this customer focus. We were able to equip our sales teams with the right tools to address customers’ biggest problems instead of obsessing over displacing specific competitors. 

Our passion for solving our customers’ most significant problems made a huge difference. In some cases, it did not prevent us from being disrupted (we all get disrupted eventually). But, the foundation and agility we built helped us pivot when needed.