How Do You Position a Startup Against Competitors?

A competitor grid is built from the vendors you watch, not from the options your buyer is weighing. It misleads structurally: you chose the rows, so a grid built from your five strongest features always shows you winning, and everyone in the room knows it. Worse, the grid has no column for the option that beats you most often, because the status quo has no logo, no booth and no pricing page.

According to Challenger, between 40 and 60 percent of the deals you lose are not lost to a competitor; they are lost to indecision. Read that next to your deck. If half your losses go to a buyer who decided to keep doing what they were already doing, then half your competitive argument is pointed at the wrong opponent.

There is a second cost, and it shows up in the room you are not in. A grid teaches your champion the wrong defence: when procurement asks why you and not the other one, the champion has feature rows to recite, and feature rows are what I keep seeing procurement discount first.

So the alternative your buyer is privately weighing never comes up. It never gets beaten either.

Positioning has a fixed order, and your product is not first. The sequence is competitive alternatives, then your unique attributes, then the value those attributes deliver, then who cares a lot about that value, and only then the market category that makes all of it obvious. April Dunford set it out in Obviously Awesome (2019), and the argument sounds obvious until you notice how few companies follow it: almost every positioning exercise in a startup starts at link five and works backwards.

Which of your attributes count as unique depends entirely on what the buyer would otherwise do. Against a legacy system nobody wants to touch, your integration story matters and your interface barely registers. Against a spreadsheet, the opposite, and features your team apologises for turn out to be why you win. Who cares a lot depends on which value survived, and that description has to be tight enough to build a prospect list from.

Start at the product and you assume competitors your buyer has never evaluated. Start at the category and you inherit a shelf the incumbent built. Among the signs of weak positioning the book names, three are worth putting next to your own pipeline: long sales cycles, deals you should win and lose, and price pressure. All three read as sales problems on a dashboard, and all three are usually one unresolved comparison showing up two quarters later.

Something else about those five companies. None of them had anyone running marketing, which is the normal condition at this stage and not a failure of discipline. It does mean the chain never gets built: the only person who could build it is the person selling, and that person is in a call. B2B positioning does not fail in startups because founders are careless. It fails because the work has no owner and no deadline, so the category gets decided by whoever writes the next page.

Link 1 · Competitive alternatives

“What would you and your team actually do next month without us?”

Skip it and every later link gets measured against the wrong comparison.

Link 2 · Unique attributes

“Which of these survive once the real alternative is named?”

Start here and you defend features against vendors your buyer never considered.

Link 3 · Value

“What does that attribute buy, in a goal the buyer already has?”

Start here and you write benefits no function in the committee owns.

Link 4 · Who cares a lot

“Could you build the prospect list from this description alone?”

Start here and the segment is a wish instead of a list.

5

Link five is the market category, and it is where almost every founder begins. Begin there and you inherit the incumbent's shelf: its evaluation criteria, its vocabulary, and the price your buyer expects before the first call. The chain runs one way only.

The first link is the one you can get this week, from your customers, in their own words. I published that hour as its own exercise: what your best customers would do if you did not exist, with the two questions to ask and how to group the answers. Everything below assumes you have that column of sentences in hand.

The category is the last decision, not the first, and you pick the one that puts your strengths in the middle of the shelf. Concretely: take the alternatives, attributes, value and segment you just settled, then ask of each candidate category whether your strengths sit at the centre of that shelf or at its edge. A category is not a label. It is a set of assumptions you inherit, including the budget line it comes out of and the number your buyer has in mind before you speak.

The decision has a second half that founders skip: you are also choosing whether to win inside a category the market already understands, or to define a new one and teach it. Defining one costs far more time and money, because every buyer has to learn the words before they can evaluate you: a multi year investment rather than a tagline.

Two tests tell you quickly. Could you explain your price inside this category without an argument. And do the words your customers used in link one belong on this shelf.

If your customers describe you as a better way to plan something and your site asks to be judged as infrastructure, you have chosen a shelf where your own evidence does not count.

Most companies at this stage have not chosen at all. In the five companies I reviewed, the count of live categories ran from three to four each, depending on whether you read the website, the accelerator page, the LinkedIn tagline or the press. Nobody decided that. It accumulated, one page at a time, written by whoever had the deadline.

Multiple categories are not untidy branding. They make a committee hear several companies at once, and a committee hearing several companies has nothing to agree on. A single category lets risk, finance and IT each take the part they are accountable for out of one story rather than six. That is also why materials for each stakeholder in a buying committee are a distribution problem downstream of this decision, never a substitute for it. What you then build on top of the category is a separate question I covered in the best way to market a B2B startup.

Five customers, one sentence, three questions: that is the test, and it takes an afternoon. Write your positioning as one sentence a human would say out loud, read it to five customers who bought quickly and defend you internally, and ask what they would compare it against, what they would call it, and who in their organisation would push back. You are not asking whether they like it. You are checking whether the sentence survives being repeated by someone who does not work for you.

Ask the three in this order, and write the answers verbatim.

"If you were telling a peer about us, what would you say we are? Not what we do, what we are."

"Reading this sentence, what would you put next to us to decide?"

"Who in your organisation would object to this, and what would they be protecting?"

The first question tells you which shelf you are actually on. The second tells you whether the comparison you chose is the comparison they make. The third gives you the veto you have not answered yet, which in my experience is what quietly decides the quarter.

The customer is the arbiter of the paraphrase, not you. If three people describe you in words you would not have chosen, that is the finding, and arguing with it privately is how a founder spends a year defending a sentence the market never repeated.

If you do not have five best fit customers yet, use the ones you have. Two or three interviews are enough to disqualify a sentence and never enough to confirm one, so treat every answer as provisional and keep the positioning deliberately loose: the alternative named, the value stated plainly, the segment wider than you suspect it should be. Narrow it when a pattern repeats across customers you did not pick for the same reason, never on one enthusiastic answer.

Three failure signals, in order of how much they cost. They paraphrase your sentence into a different category: your category is not yet legible. They name a comparison you did not expect: your link one was guessed rather than gathered. The objection comes from a function you have no answer for: your value argument is built for your champion alone.

A pass is unglamorous. Four of five repeat the sentence in roughly your words, name a comparison you planned for, and raise an objection you have a documented answer to.

A sentence that survives five of those conversations is worth having. It is also one thread of four, and it is the first: one story, portable enough to be repeated by people who do not work for you. Whether it ever earns anything depends on the other three. The value has to be restatable by a finance lead who was never in your meeting; every stakeholder with a veto needs material written for them rather than forwarded to them. And the pipeline has to keep moving in the weeks you are not on a single call.

That is where I keep seeing the chain give way. The sentence is right, the deck still argues features, nobody has written a page for procurement, and the pipeline stalls when the founder travels. Four separate threads, and the loose one is rarely the one you would guess.

The go to market I install in companies is not new work. I have done it for twenty years, four of them as CMO at HEMAV Technology for Xavier Silva, its CEO, where I did everything the sprint includes and more. What is new is only the offer: the same work as a ten week format at a fixed price, because I work independently now. A chief executive who watched that capability hold for four years is stronger proof than a ten week engagement could give, and the format carries less risk for the same reason: the person with the twenty years is on board for all ten weeks, applying what he knows. "First, you helped us define the value proposition so that it was far simpler, clearer and easier to communicate," said Xavier Silva, CEO of HEMAV Technology, where I was CMO for four years, in the full interview.

The five customer test tells you whether one sentence holds. Building the chain underneath it is the other work: the alternative named, the attributes that survive it, the value, the category, then the story each function hears. That is the work I do, positioning and go to market for B2B founders selling to buying committees, from seed to Series A, built in ten weeks as a project, not rented by the month. The method is called The Loom, a method that weaves a company's whole go to market into one story a buying committee can follow and buy.

If you would rather locate the weak link than defend the wrong sentence for a quarter, book a call. Fifteen minutes, and you leave knowing which link of your chain breaks first.

Sources: Challenger. Obviously Awesome, 2019.