A short talk by Jason M. Lemkin (YouTube, July 21, 2024) about how to position against competitors by reframing their advantages as disadvantages. The speaker gives a tactical example from Brex’s sales experience vs. competitor Divi: Divi had a sophisticated budgeting feature that Brex lacked at the time, and Lemkin describes how Brex positioned that feature as undesirable to customers.
And then the second thing that comes to mind in this specific category is when we would highlight some of these differences, we would do so in a way that actually takes what the competitor thought were their advantages and puts them on the back foot that this is actually a disadvantage. I'll give one tactical example that I think helps highlight the point. When we were selling at Brex, we were competing with a company called Divi. In the early days, Divi was our primary competitor. And Divi had this really sophisticated budgeting product that was a feature that we were actually working on, hadn't yet released, and if it was like a feature Bake off, they would have checked this box. We wouldn't have had it. And the way that we positioned this was, look, you actually don't want this feature.
