Anneliese Niebauer

One practice we had to inform competitive positioning strategy and enablement was analysing Closed Lost reasons in deals where we lost to a competitor. Here's an example (sorry some details need to remain high level): * We did a CL analysis and saw we were losing to our competitor for 1 of 3 reasons - a unique feature they had, pricing, and brand awareness/loyalty. * We then partnered with Account Managers and CS to find customers who had used us and the competition. We did customer interviews to get appraisals of each of the areas where we tended to lose deals. We also uncovered reasons why those areas weren't as important to some customers. * Using this (in addition to our other intel), we developed counter-positioning to 'turn our bugs in to features' focused on the three main CL reasons * But we also realised that other assets (like our ROI calc) needed to be adjusted for pricing conversations when this competitor was in the mix.