What to do When a Competitor Lies

We know their pants are on fire so now what?

Every now and then, I read something written by a marketer (it’s always a marketer) who argues that your product and its features don’t matter because your competitors can (and always will!) copy any feature you develop. Therefore, product capabilities can never really drive true differentiation. Like many bad marketing ideas, I think this type of thinking comes from things that may be true in consumer packaged goods but don’t necessarily hold up when selling something like a database or a security platform.

On the other hand, I could easily argue that a company can very easily copy your marketing and messaging. This happens all the time! When I hear folks complaining about competitors copying their stuff, often, that’s precisely what’s going on. They didn’t really do it - they just said they did. So what do we do when our key differentiator looks like something everyone else does because our competitors are a bunch of lying liars? Read on!

In B2B Tech, it is often VERY hard to copy product features

This is one of those things that folks say that sounds logical, but only if you don’t think about it too hard and have no practical experience in delivering software. It sounds absolutely bonkers to anyone who has ever been closely involved with delivering a tech product. Sure, there might be small capabilities that a dev team could quickly build into an existing product. More significant things take longer because there are architectural considerations (every product has its own starting conditions), making something easy to implement on one system much harder to do on another. Given enough time and resources, functionality can get copied but can rarely be done in the exact same way (therefore - importantly - rarely producing the exact same results). Never mind that by the time you release something, your competitor has moved on to release a dozen more things, leaving you still falling behind.

We do not live in a magical land where everyone sells to everyone.

If this sounds like a bad product strategy, that’s because it is. It assumes we are all building the same thing to meet the same needs of identical customers. We are not. If that were true, every CRM would do everything Salesforce does; there would be hundreds of Snowflakes, Palentirs, and Nvidias. Technical debt would not exist, and technological innovation would be pointless. This whole line of thinking is nonsense.

Why bother copying features when it’s easy to simply say you did?

So why do people believe that’s true? Companies often appear to be doing it when they are not (and sometimes, the marketing team doesn’t understand the difference). Let me explain.

In the real world, the easiest thing for a competitor to do is pretend to have the same capabilities as you have. Occasionally, competitors will outright lie, but more often, it’s an elaborate stretching of the truth. It’s pretty easy for a competitor to say, “Oh sure, we do that too - more or less!” Problem solved - no developer resources required!

Three strategies to combat the lying liars in your market

If your competitors are doing this, it can be incredibly frustrating. In my work, it’s very common for teams to complain that their competitors SAY they do the same thing when they do not. Marketers will tell me they don’t even bother to talk about certain key differentiated capabilities or value they deliver because “Everyone says they do that!!” I would call this “smoking the competitor’s marketing,” and in my mind, it’s the marketing equivalent of product pessimism. We should NEVER fall into this trap. There are always good strategies to combat lying, and your customers will love you for it.

1. Keep your focus on the value to the business (not the feature that may or may not enable that value)

I’ve repeatedly seen a competitor describe a feature in a way that is technically true but, in reality, very different from what other companies have done. As a result, the value that a prospect might assume they will get from that feature ends up being very different between offerings.

Example - the “platform” that isn’t a platform - I recently worked with a company that sold a platform that helped automate the entire lifecycle of a particular process. Their main competitor had similar functionality but had grown through acquisition, and the piece parts were not integrated at all. This competitor also described their solution as a “platform,” and prospects assumed that both companies had the same level of integration across the piece parts. Of course, this was not the case.

Aside - In tech, the word “platform " means something. It means the pieces are integrated, and there is generally some orchestration and shared data across the platform's parts. But let’s be clear—for folks outside of technology, the word often means “a set of tools from a single vendor” or a “suite.” We cannot assume that a customer has the same assumptions about words like “platform” that we do. Therefore, we often have to teach prospects the value of a platform vs a suite of tools.

In this case, the “true” platform vendor switched from simply using the word “platform” to focusing on the value of having shared data across the different parts of the solution. For example, they were much better at reporting and analytics because the data was all in one place. They also focused on how easy it was to set up automation across the platform—something their competitors could not do because the pieces are all separate tools with separate data.

2. Teach your customers the difference between the real truth vs. the stretched truth and why it matters to their business

This is very similar to the point above, with some subtle differences. Sometimes, when a competitor stretches the truth, they will not just say they have the feature you have but also claim to deliver the same value. This one is much easier to fight because you can simply call out the lie directly.

Example - we can do it (but nobody does) - another company I worked with had the distinct advantage of showing a real-time view of a certain data set. For customers, it was essential to know exactly what was happening at the exact moment it was happening. Their competitor also claimed to give customers “real-time insights.” Interestingly, when talking to customers who had switched from the competitor, we learned that while it was technically possible, the integration work involved was so difficult that customers never implemented it. Armed with this information, my client started explicitly calling attention to this in sales calls. They would say, “Other vendors will say they can do this, but if this is important to you, you need to press the vendor on what is involved in making that happen.” It wasn’t long before the competitor stopped making the claim.

3. Bring the receipts (and teach your customers to ask for them)

The first two points are really about educating buyers so that they aren’t tricked by a claim that isn’t all that it seems. One very powerful way to combat a competitor that is stretching the truth is to simply show the proof that you can do what you say you can do and encourage your prospect to ask for proof from the other vendors too.

Example - we are number 1 (our mom said so) - I worked with a client that was the clear leader in a particular market with ten times more active customers than their nearest competitor. A fast-moving challenger entered the space with a very large amount of VC funding behind them. The customers in this space were extremely risk-averse, and unsurprisingly, the competitor was often fighting to prove they were a safe choice. They decided the strategy was to lie about it. Their home page suddenly boasted that they were the “#1 vendor” in the space with “More client deployments than any other vendor.”

My client went on the offensive and started to market the specific number of deployments they had. In their sales deck, they added a slide where the reps would joke that they had more customers in any given industry than the vendors in the market had combined and warned that their competitors “appeared to be quite bad at math.” They also pulled in analyst reports, the number of reviews they had on review sites, the number of customer case studies they had, and a handful of other proof points that made it clear the other guys were lying. Predictably, the competitor’s home page eventually changed, and they stopped attempting to make the claim.

Nothing kills credibility with a prospect faster than getting caught in a lie

Needless to say, customers hate it when vendors lie. If your competitors are doing it, you should consider it a gift and plot out a strategy to shine some sunlight on it and expose this company for the bad actor that they are. Of course, it also goes without saying that if your company happens to be stretching the truth in some highly creative ways, you might want to fix that before a smart competitor finds a way to call you out on it.

Have you had to fight back against dirty liars in your market? How did you do it. Let me know in the comments!

---

This quarter is the first time I have been booked solid with exclusively larger (100M+ annual revenue) tech companies. I’ve been thinking about how best to serve startups in the $15M to $50M revenue range that can’t wait the two to three months it usually takes to get on my calendar and wish my fees weren’t quite so high. If this sounds like you, I am working on an experiment you might want to participate in. Hit reply if you are interested in the details.

I often complain that marketers get caught up on vanity metrics that don’t prove any ability to drive revenue. For example, LinkedIn loves memes. If you post them, you’ll feel great about your engagement, but you might not get hired. Companies don’t hire the meme lord to fix serious business problems. In B2B, we quickly learn that the quality of the folks we engage with matters. When I started this newsletter less than a year ago, I decided it would be a place to explore some reasonably advanced topics in Positioning. That’s not exactly a topic for a mainstream audience. Despite that, this little newsletter has hit 30,000 subscribers. I find that both cool and surprising. Thanks for coming along for the ride - I really appreciate it.

April