Sergio Iacobucci
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Updated
The alternative your buyer is most likely to pick instead of you probably isn’t on your competitor slide. It’s usually the way they already do the job.
This guide covers how to find your real competitive alternatives, how to position against each one and where it all fits in a positioning workshop.
What is competitive positioning?
Competitive positioning is how you make your product the obvious choice against whatever a buyer would do if you didn’t exist. In business software, April Dunford writes in Obviously Awesome, the most common alternative is a mix of spreadsheets, documents and manual work, not the rival on your competitor slide. Get the alternative right and you know the yardstick buyers will measure you against, and every later step is built on it: what you can do that the alternatives can’t, why that matters and who cares most.
Who are you really up against?
Dunford splits the alternatives into two groups. The status quo is what the customer does today to solve the problem: manual work, a spreadsheet, something built in-house or a legacy system nobody would buy now. Direct competitors are what they’d put on a shortlist once they decide to look beyond that.
The second list is waaay more fun to build: logos, feature grids, a battlecard each. The first list is easy to forget, yet a buyer can always choose to change nothing. (If you’re reading this with a battlecard open in another tab: no judgement. Keep it open.)
Her rule for the second list: a company that looks like you and markets like you but has never turned up in one of your actual deals is not a competitor. And when product, marketing, sales and the founder disagree about who you compete with (they often do, she says), the answer lives in your deals. Not in ChatGPT, either: in the 2026 edition of the book she says AI and search can’t answer this with any accuracy, because who could compete with you and who actually shows up in your deals are usually very different companies.
What this looks like in real sales calls
When we analysed one client’s recorded sales calls, the status quo came up in every single one: whatever the buyer already used to get the job done. That was the bar every demo had to clear.
But it wasn’t what killed the deals that were lost.
Named rivals came up far less often and one stood out as the serious threat. A buyer who had seen both products told the rep they looked almost the same. In one of the lost deals, the buyer said that if two tools do much the same job, it would come down to price. The client had also arrived late, to a buyer who was already leaning towards the rival. The other loss had nothing to do with competition at all: the buyer was shown far more product than they needed. Different problem, same lost deal.
You need both lists. The status quo tells you what “better” has to mean. The lookalike rival tells you where you’ll lose on price if a buyer can’t feel the difference.
How do you find your real competitive alternatives?
Ask your reps, deal by deal. What was the buyer using before and what else was on the shortlist? Dunford’s point: if you sell through a sales team, the rep knows the alternatives better than anyone.
Check it against the calls. A rep’s summary in the pipeline review is not the same as what the buyer said, so listen to the recording too.
Ask buyers Dunford’s question directly. “What would you have done if we didn’t exist?” Ask the ones who didn’t buy as well.
Group what you find into approaches. Dunford again: you compete with approaches to getting the job done, not with individual companies.
Then drop the one-offs. Her test: if a rival came up in one or two deals, do you really expect to see them again?
Where this fits in a positioning workshop
Finding the real competitive alternatives is a big part of a positioning workshop. It’s step 2 in our guide to running one, and everything after it gets measured against that list.
The workshop works through five questions, in this order:
How do you find the real competitive alternatives?
What can you do that they can’t?
Do buyers actually care?
Who cares most?
Which market category do you claim?
The competitive part starts before anyone walks into the room. Everyone answers “What do we actually compete with?” in writing, alone, with no comparing notes. The gaps between their answers are half the value of the morning. On the day, the team maps the three to five real alternatives, including doing nothing, with the internal view and the buyer evidence side by side. Then it groups them into approaches.
One ground rule does a lot of the work: a competitor only counts if it has turned up in a real deal.
How do you position against each alternative?
Take each approach in turn and list what you can do that it can’t. Start with the status quo, because every buyer has it. If an alternative can do something too, it isn’t a difference, however proud of it the product team is (and they will be).
What’s left is your answer to “why not just carry on as we are?” and to “why not the other one?” They are different answers, and your reps need both in a sentence each.
Then check the copy. Put your main rival’s name in front of your headline claim. If it still reads true, your website and deck aren’t carrying the difference yet, even if the product has one.
Why it can’t wait for the next evaluation
Forrester found that 92% of B2B buyers start with at least one vendor in mind and 41% already have a single preferred vendor before a formal evaluation begins (2024 Buyers’ Journey Survey, reported by Digital Commerce 360, July 2025). So the work on this page has to be done before the buyer calls. By the demo, it’s mostly too late.
Questions worth asking your team this week
In our last ten deals, what was the buyer doing before they spoke to us?
Which rival have we lost to this year and how many times? Name them.
Which of our headline claims still reads true with a rival’s name in front of it?
If sales, marketing and the founder answer differently, that’s what the workshop is for. How to run a B2B SaaS positioning workshop walks through the whole day and How to position a B2B SaaS business covers why it matters. If you’d rather have someone run it with you, the workshop is the core of how we build your messaging.
