Want to lose a buyer's trust? Start trash-talking your competition.
One of the most basic rules in sales: Never badmouth the competition.
Yet, ask someone, "How does your product compare with X?" and suddenly you get 10 benchmarks, 15 features, and a whole presentation on why the competition sucks.
Cool. But why should I care? lol
Here's the problem. Just because your product has more features, better benchmarks, or newer technology doesn't mean it's the better choice for every customer.
Differentiation only matters when it matters to the buyer.
Discovery Before Differentiation
Instead of immediately jumping into a competitive pitch, why not start with three simple questions?
- What made you consider both of us? This helps uncover what triggered the evaluation and what the customer is actually trying to accomplish.
- What does X do well, and what's missing? You can acknowledge the competition's strengths while learning where the customer sees gaps.
- What would make switching worth the headache? Because replacing a product isn't just about features. There's cost, time, risk, integrations, and the effort of getting people to adopt something new.
These questions tell you far more about your opportunity than a competitive battlecard ever could on its own.
I'm not saying benchmarks and feature comparisons are useless. They absolutely have their place. But without discovery, you're essentially guessing which differences the customer cares about.
And guessing isn't a great sales strategy.
So, What's Your Moat?
Why do customers choose you? Why do they stay? And how difficult would it be for a competitor to replace you?
To me, those are much more interesting questions than who has the longest feature list.
A strong moat might come from your technology, integrations, network effects, switching costs, or something else that's difficult for competitors to replicate.
But understanding your company's moat and explaining why it matters to a specific buyer are two different things.
Because having 10 features your competitor doesn't have means absolutely nothing if your customer doesn't care about any of them.
Your competitive advantage isn't just what your product can do. It's why that advantage matters to the customer.
And here's what I find interesting:
If your product is truly better for the customer, why do you need to make the competition look worse?
Maybe the better approach is to spend less time proving the competition is bad and more time understanding what the customer actually needs.