SaaS Sales — Why you shouldn’t compare your product to competitors

— This article reflects my personal opinion and my experience of 20+ years in software, marketing and sales. If you are a founder, growth manager, sales engineer or marketer and you are selling to an expert audience with a rather high-touch product: this article is for you.

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash

The early days of your product journey are over, you have happy customers and your company is growing. GREAT! But, sooner or later you come across one of your competitors and your future dream customer asks you: “Hey, what can you do better than them?”

Of course you did your homework. You are well aware of your products USPs and you have very detailed information about all of your competitors’ products and offerings. In addition, your marketing department prepared shiny feature comparisons and you also trained your sales reps to tell everybody what’s so special and beneficial about your product. You have everything in place; it’s all been communicated… your dream customer is ready to close. Then, one last question comes in: “So we talked to your competitor and they said that their solution is even better than yours. They can compete in every single aspect but also have more experience. “

This ends up in mistrust and dramatically slows down the whole process.

This is usually how it goes if tech companies, compare themselves with competing products or offerings. This ends up in mistrust of your future customer and dramatically slows down the whole process towards a final decision. If you take a closer look at industry leading companies you will rarely find someone who is publicly comparing to anyone anymore. It’s as simple as that. Don’t compare yourself to anyone. Especially if you are offering your products and services to an expert audience and you have a rather complex product.

Instead, tell your customers how you can help them and what’s so special about your approach. Find your champion within your dream customers organization. Deep-dive into the problem of your customer and understand it. Ask questions that others don’t. Become an expert of your customers problem, then clarify to them how your solution is going to be the perfect fit to their problem and what that means in numbers ($$$). Give them a plan to success and show them clearly what could happen if the problem is not solved at all.

It’s as simple as that. Don’t compare yourself to anyone.

In short:

1. Show how you can help
2. Find your champion
3. Understand the problem in every detail
4. Clarify why your approach is best
5. Show the (financial) impact
6. Give them a plan to succeed with you

Becoming the information leader in a competing situation is the key to success and the best tactic to avoid competitor comparisons from the beginning. Still, there is a high probability that your dream customer still has a need to compare all vendor offerings:

1. Their internal policies require to request different proposals from vendors
2. The publicly available marketing collateral is insufficient and they need help to gather the information
3. They have internal ‘politics’ going on and your contact person is reducing the risk of a bad selection or, even worse …
4. … You stepped into a proforma RFP *ughhh*

Regardless of the reason, you still shouldn’t compare yourself to your competition. It is absolutely crucial that your sales team has found the champion (the one person who has the definite will to push you into the organization) within the targeted customer account and that your champion is 100% on board. She/He is the one who will do the competitor comparison internally because these champions are highly motivated to move forward with the solution that most likely solves the problem at the lowest possible cost and at the highest possible efficiency (and yeah, they do have their own careers in mind so give them credit!). Your job is educating the champions so that they really feel what’s different.

A tactical perspective: you should ask yourself what is the best timing to provide information to your champion. Usually being helpful from the very beginning is an advantage for you because you build trust and authority right away. You might consider providing a RFP template that puts you in pole position but be careful to not do the actual interpretation and decision making. Better say something like, “sorry, but we don’t compare to others. The interpretation and the final decision needs to be completed by you. We will of course provide you with everything you need!”

And that’s it: By becoming the information leader, by saying no to comparisons actively and by educating the champion about your approach, you have done everything you can.

Fingers crossed [for you] 🤞

— about the author

Florian is Co-Founder and CEO at Bilendo. We know that most companies have problems managing their receivables efficiently. With our cloud-based A/R-Automation we help those companies save resources, collect payments faster and increase the companies scalability so that they can protect their profit and build a growing business. Florian is a software-developer, has a diploma degree in business administration & economics and works in area of software and tech-products for over 20 years.