It’s so important to stay the course when things like this happen - I’ve seen companies waste time that could be spent doubling down on strengths, instead thinking about how to keep potential threats at bay i.e. filtering through webinar reg lists to remove competitors instead of preparing for the webinar. Every ounce of time that you spend reacting to competitors who are copying you, is time that you aren’t spending making your business/brand/whatever stronger. You already have the upper hand, you’re getting copied for a reason. What did they copy? Just an idea but… what would happen if you double down on that. Use your advantage to make that thing even better. If it’s a feature, or a webinar strategy, or the format of your case studies…you have the advantage of having come up with it yourself. You know what’s working and what isn’t. Your copy gets stolen from the website? Go back to your notes from Gong calls and think about how the rest of the site can be infused with your novel insight. Don’t hide your secret sauce from prospects Sometimes the secret sauce is a product functionality. Sometimes it’s a GTM strength. The GTM strengths are often shared with prospects by their very nature. A podcast, an email newsletter, a case study collection, etc. From a product perspective, it’s a little less clear how to best shout it from the rooftops, but I honestly think it’s still better to not hide. The last two companies I worked with both had legitimate features stolen by competitors (one was previously a partner, the other was previously a customer). It’s messy, and emotional and scary when a company close to you does something like this. One company carried on with their work. They thought deeply about how they would differentiate against this newest competitor, and kept on winning. They had a huge head start on the feature, and they weren’t going to let an ankle biter scare them. The other reacted by trying to hide their “proprietary technology” from everyone (including prospects and customers). When you hide your product sauce, the following happens: A prospect asks a question on a call about how the software works, and the salesperson says it’s proprietary, and can’t really explain how it works. People want to know how things work, because it helps them figure out if they trust that process. If it’s hard for a champion to explain why they’re advocating for your software over another option because they don’t understand your differentiators, it's gone too far. |
