Right Competitor, Wrong Amount of Attention
Your team is probably naming the right competitor.
Most of the time, when a name shows up repeatedly in your CRM, it’s because buyers really are weighing that vendor against you. Reps hear real signal, and that signal usually points somewhere real. The failure mode I see more often is the wrong amount of attention attached to a name that’s basically correct, and in rarer cases, an internal story that pushes that gap much further than it should go.
One of the most instructive projects I’ve run showed me how far that gap can stretch. A client’s top competitor got acquired by a major SaaS platform. The internal reaction was swift: this was now an existential threat backed by a giant’s resources and distribution. The messaging pivoted hard, enablement got rebuilt around the new threat, and reps walked into every competitive deal primed to fight a bigger, better-funded version of a vendor they’d competed against for years.
The shift wasn’t subtle. Sales kickoff content got revised within weeks of the announcement. The battlecard grew a new section dedicated entirely to the acquired competitor’s expanded resources and go-to-market reach. Reps were coached to raise the acquisition proactively, framing it as a reason for buyers to move fast before pricing or product changed. Every piece of that response made sense on its own. Together, it pointed the entire organization’s attention at a single, newly dangerous name, well past what the actual data supported.
Over the next six months, my client lost deal after deal. Every loss seemed to confirm the fear they’d built the narrative around. Sales leadership pointed to the acquisition in board updates. The CI team kept refining the battlecard against the acquired competitor, adding new objection handling, new comparison points, new reasons the acquisition made this vendor more dangerous than before.
They brought me in to figure out what they could do differently.
The research told a more complicated story than “wrong competitor.” Buyers in the lost deals had, in fact, often mentioned the acquired competitor somewhere in their evaluation, which is exactly why the CRM data seemed to confirm the fear. But when I asked buyers directly which vendor they’d actually chosen and why, a different pattern emerged: a substantial share of those deals had gone to the vendor that had been my client’s real number one competitor before the acquisition ever happened, a vendor that hadn’t changed, hadn’t pivoted, and was quietly capitalizing on six months of attention pointed somewhere else.
The acquired competitor was a real, if smaller, factor in some of those losses, genuinely worth some attention in the battlecard, just nowhere near the amount it had ended up receiving. What had gone wrong was the weighting: an entire organization’s attention, budget, and battlecard real estate had shifted toward one name based on a single dramatic event, far out of proportion to how often that name actually decided a deal.
Here’s how the drift happened. Buyers mentioned the acquired competitor early and often, because it was the vendor generating headlines and the one buyers had heard of. Reps heard the name repeatedly, connected it to losses because the connection was the easiest explanation available, and the internal narrative compounded with every deal tagged that way. Meanwhile, the quieter competitor kept winning on fundamentals: faster follow-up, a demo tightly scoped to what a given buyer actually cared about, a sales process that didn’t ask buyers to sit through a pitch built for someone else’s use case. None of that generates CRM chatter. All of it shows up in a buyer interview, once someone actually asks.
Correcting course didn’t mean discarding the acquired competitor’s battlecard section. It meant rebalancing it, scaling the attention back to match what buyers were actually confirming, and redirecting some of that enablement energy toward the competitor quietly doing the real damage. That’s a less dramatic fix than “we were fighting a ghost,” and it’s also the more common one. Most teams I work with don’t discover they’ve named the wrong competitor. They discover their weighting is off by a wide margin, that the tactics in the battlecard have gone stale even though the name at the top is correct, or, occasionally, that a single narrative-driving event pushed the whole system further out of balance than anyone noticed while it was happening.
None of this required declaring the CI team’s prior work wrong. The acquired competitor genuinely had gotten more dangerous, the acquisition genuinely was worth addressing, and some of the enablement built around it genuinely helped in the deals where it actually applied. The correction wasn’t “stop paying attention to this competitor.” It was “stop letting one event decide, for six months running, how much of your total attention this one name gets relative to everything else actually happening in your pipeline.”
The question worth asking isn’t just whether the competitor in your CRM is the right one, but whether the weight you’re giving it, and the way you’re competing against it, still match what your buyers are actually telling you.