The competitor on your slide isn’t the one you lost to

Most competitor analysis maps the firms you already know. Buyers build their shortlist differently, and the option that beats you most often isn't a firm at all.

By Steve 5 min read
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Ask a management team to name their competitors and you will usually get a clean list: three or four firms of similar size, similar service mix, similar geography. Ask the same firm’s last ten lost deals what they chose instead, and the answers rarely line up. Some went to a named rival. But a substantial share did something else: kept the work in-house, patched the existing system for another year, gave the job to a generalist they already used, or simply postponed. The competitor set the business analyses and the…

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