The short answer is: yes, 100%.
Unless you are 1) truly bringing new-to-the-world products to market or 2) already the clear, undisputed market leader in an established category, it's essential to pick your head up and pay attention to how competitors message themselves.
Putting yourself in the shoes of buyers, a lot of B2B vendor messaging tends to sound the same. Too many value propositions are watered down to the point of becoming too generic ("grow revenue", "reduce costs", "minimize risk") or so vague that they erode credibility, curiosity and persuasion. The result is that buyers tune out, are unable to differentiate your product from competitive offerings, and resort to making purchase decisions based on things like primacy bias or price alone. If you're marketing a premium product or are a challenger in your category, that's not a recipe for success.
My teams take great care to ensure that our strategic narrative and the messaging we're activating in market sounds different from how competitors talk. Some examples of where to put this to practice:
-
Framing the customer problem in a different way. This may entail identifying a fundamentally different customer problem than what your competitors target. Or employing challenger sale techniques to reframe the problem in the minds of your buyer and show how there's actually this other thing they may not have thought of which is fundamentally the real issue, and they've been focused on symptoms vs. root causes. That reframe, if done well, can be a powerful way to stand out from the crowd, earn credibility, and get customers to buy in to your vision. Importantly, I prefer not to put prospects on the defensive, make assumptions, or sound patronizing when framing customer problems. Subtle tone choices like "our customers typically tell us that it's hard to..." instead of "you're dealing with this problem" help your sales teams show up as a partner in customer conversations.
-
Spending time de-positioning the status quo and establishing why traditional approaches to solving the problem (i.e. incumbent or competitive products) fall short. I've spent a lot of my career marketing challenger products in new, emerging or existing categories, where it's really important to unsettle buyers and make them realize that there's a better way.
-
Describing the promised land or desired outcome differently. Typically, what I've found works here is to avoid being too reductive in how you describe desired outcomes. This could be my own bias having spent much of my career marketing technical products to technical users. But unless I'm building messaging for the C-suite, I like to create messaging that comes in at a lower altitude, zeroing in on a more specific, tangible value proposition which in turn pays off higher-level outcomes like "growing your business", "improving digital customer experiences", "cutting costs", "stopping breaches", "resolving incidents faster", etc. As an example working at an observability company, we talk (publicly, I might add) about "minimizing toil and guesswork" from troubleshooting and "spending less time in war rooms" as a more specific, visceral way of saying "reduce mean time to resolution" (the latter of which is something EVERY vendor building software for IT Operations or Engineering buyers talks about).
-
Ensuring that your competitive positioning or answer to "why us?" is defensible, with product evidence and customer proof to back it up. The rule of 3 is a powerful thing. I often find it works best to have one main unique selling proposition which is the single big, grand reason why a customer should choose you over the competition. Then we back that up with 3 outcome-oriented differentiation statements which show how we pay that off. For each of those differentiation statements, it's useful to include punchy messaging on key product capabilities that are unique or comparatively better than competition at achieving the outcome, as well as relevant and specific customer stories. Those customer stories should be specific, focus on use cases, and show how your product enables them.
Remember that the best product doesn't always win on its own and become category queen or king. Clear positioning and compelling, credible messaging can level the playing field and help you successfully compete.
