Ever notice how entire industries end up looking like carbon copies of each other?
- “We need chat support because Competitor X has it!”
- “Our homepage should look just like Industry Leader Y’s!”
- “Their sales deck has 47 slides, so ours needs 50!”
This, my friends, is the path to commodity hell.
Let me introduce you to one of my favorite strategies: Reverse Benchmarking.
Instead of obsessing over what your competition does well, find what they suck at and DOUBLE DOWN on doing that thing exceptionally.
Example: I once competed against a tech company with amazing product features but terrible customer service. While everyone else scrambled to match their product capabilities, we built a high-touch service model that made customers feel like royalty.
We didn’t win every deal, but we carved out a profitable niche by being the “anti-them.”
The beautiful part? When you reverse benchmark, you:
- Stand out immediately
- Avoid feature wars
- Attack their blind spot
- Solve actual customer pain
Plus, it’s WAY easier to convince prospects by saying “Yeah, Competitor X is good at Y, but they’re terrible at Z, which we’ve perfected specifically for people like you.”
This isn’t about being contrarian for its own sake. It’s about finding the neglected corners of customer experience where you can plant your flag.
So next time you’re in a competitive review, stop asking “How do we copy them?” and start asking “What do they consistently get wrong that customers actually care about?”
That’s where your blue ocean is waiting.
