A recent B2B Institute report revealed that only five percent of prospects are actively looking to buy a new SaaS solution. This means that outbound sales and marketing teams are all chasing the same sliver of the market.
So, how can you efficiently gain a competitive edge and win more new business? By targeting your competitor’s customers.
These potential leads represent a goldmine of opportunity. They already understand the value of a SaaS product like yours and they’ve allocated budget for it. Very likely, they have a challenge or unmet need with their current solution that could open the door for a sales conversation.
Winning these leads requires a strategic, coordinated approach from Sales, Marketing, Product and Pricing. In this playbook from Mainsail Partners, we provide intel and tactics to dominate the competitive market – one strategic conversion at a time.
When should you launch a competitor takeaway campaign?
Before trying to win over customers from your competitors, understand which competitors’ customers would be the best fit.
Consider the competition and ask the following:
- Are they a large, legacy player who hasn’t innovated in a long time?
- In previous competitive deals, has their win rate been lower than or similar to your average?
- Have they had a recent uptick in negative reviews?
- Does the competitor’s product and/or licensing delivery model have cost economics that leave them vulnerable to disruption?
- Do you have any significant features that they don’t?
- Is there a history of their customers leaving their solution, purchasing yours, and staying?
If you answered yes to many of these questions, you’ve identified an ideal competitor to target. If not, you may want to wait until your product and value are strong enough to compete.
Six steps to setting up a successful competitor takeaway campaign
1) Establish a cross-functional team that meets bi-weekly
This group should include Marketing, Sales, Finance/Pricing, and Customer Success, with regular updates pushed to the executive and Product Management teams.
Team responsibilities:
- Marketing: Develop competitor takeaway messaging and track campaign performance.
- Finance: Evaluate impact of takeaway campaign related sales incentives and price discount policies.
- SDR/BDR: Research accounts, identify VIP contacts and create personalized outreach.
- AEs: Shape strategy for account selection and customer/lead relationships.
- Customer Success: Track new customer product requests, lead onboarding, run NPS campaigns.
- RevOps: Create tracking and dashboards across all systems.
No one leader or function should undertake this campaign alone. Your CEO and Marketing and Sales leads should all review campaign insights at key junctures. Enable your Product Managers and CS leaders to provide feedback along the way and map executive support on top of sales opportunity calls.
2) Conduct competitor research
Get to know the competitive pool in which you’re about to go fishing. Create a feature comparison chart that looks at your solution compared to the competition. Work with your Product and Engineering teams to understand how the competitors’ features compare to your existing and future offerings according to your product roadmap.
This analysis should include incumbent competitors’ pricing, which you can derive from a combination of primary and secondary sources including your customers, third-party vendors and product review sites.
3) Create a target list of accounts currently using your competitors’ product
Start by scouring your own database for prior opportunities with accounts that currently use your competitor. Then look at your competitors’ websites and scrape them for logos, testimonials, and case studies. Group your target accounts in a way that resonates with your Sales team and add whatever enriching datapoints you can find (# of employees, annual revenue, industry, etc.) Finally, assign all targets a “customer fit score” for your product.
In this process, don’t get distracted by big names and flashy logos. Instead, think about your product’s strengths and the specific pain points it addresses. Prioritize strong use cases. You want customers who will stick with you, grow their investment over time, and become your most enthusiastic brand advocates.
4) Invest in sales enablement
Empower your sales team with all the customer advocacy ammunition you can muster. Task Marketing with creating:
- Easy-to-reference competitor battle cards
- Dedicated competitor landing pages
- Real customer stories available via webinars, panels and events.
Customer takeaway success stories are gold for a sales team. Any time you can capture a customer from a competitor and get them to tell the story of how the switch transformed their business — that’s priceless! Lean on your Customer Success team to generate these stories by building relationships with executives and sending customer feedback to the Product team.
5) Work with RevOps to develop dedicated campaign tracking
Have RevOps create custom reports and a real-time dashboard that tracks:
- Marketing campaigns: spending, qualified pipeline, opportunities, closed revenue created
- Sales activity: emails, calls, meetings, opportunities
- Sales metrics: qualified pipeline, win rates, average sales cycles, revenue, average sales price
- Customer behavior: product usage, onboarding success, NPS, churn, NRR
6) Build time into your plan for a campaign debrief
By now you’ll have observed that competitor takeaway campaigns require significant team resources, capital and bandwidth. Before diving into another similar campaign, sit down with your leadership team to conduct a post-campaign analysis.
Key post-campaign questions:
- Did we get a positive ROI considering Sales and Marketing costs?
- How did win rates, sales cycles and ACV compare to historical averages?
- How did churn rates and NPS scores compare to our core customer base?
- Were these new customers more difficult to onboard and require more CS resources?
- Is our product offering truly competitive?
- Did we generate any new customer success stories or testimonials?
- Should we consider running additional competitor takeaway campaigns in the future?
How to improve your win rate of competitor takeaways and avoid the most common mistakes
Now that you have a battle plan in place, you’re ready to start selling. Every company’s sales strategy should be customized to consider your profit margins, your team’s available muscle, and how easy it is to lure a customer from a competitor.
Here are some landmines to avoid:
- Don’t kill future growth by offering too much up front. You want customers who will expand as they grow with you.
- Tailor incentives based on customer LTV and keep your eye on the bottom line and cost of goods.
- Don’t drown your Sales and CS teams. Consider onboarding time, support ticket time, and churn reduction before pulling the trigger on a campaign.
And here are some tricks for improving win rates and driving retention:
- Pump up your Sales teams with incentives: Offer SDR spiff sprees and larger commission payouts.
- Lure prospects away with pricing tactics: Offer special promo pricing or licensing flexibility.
- Offer VIP status: Make switching to your product appealing by offering complimentary data migration, dedicated onboarding and training, and workflow customization.
- Invest in customer appreciation: Invite customers to join your Customer Advisory Board, send them swag, and comp their tickets to events.
- Launch competitor-crushing marketing campaigns: Amplify the voices of your happy customers by featuring testimonials on landing pages, sales decks and retargeting ads. Run a focused customer review campaign site push, create case studies and highlight videos, or invite a happy customer to speak at an event.
- Create compelling competitor landing pages: Compare your product to your competitor on your website so you can dominate organic search and provide prospects with helpful information. Include an easy-to-read feature comparison matrix and articulate where your product excels, but be fair to your competitors – prospects will see through fluff analysis.
- Run targeted ABM campaigns: Create a list of target accounts, decision-makers and influencers. Then have Sales run targeted plays based on sale prices, budget and team bandwidth.
Winning the customer battleground
Takeaway campaigns can be incredibly effective, but it’s important to be honest about the amount of strategic thought, research and analysis they require to succeed. Truly — this should be a company-wide effort.
As exciting as competition can be, and as alluring as it is to win, make sure to never lose touch with your own customers and product vision. Continue to deliver value by building a great product and then allow your competitor takeaway campaign to bring that product to an even wider audience. Foster genuine customer relationships with all of your accounts, and watch as your ARR grows.