The Competitive Alternatives Playbook

Most teams define competition by listing rival products. But the real threat is what your buyer is already doing: their current workaround, process, or vendor. If your messaging doesn’t account for that, you’re not competing where the decision actually happens.

[the Playbook] By Nick McLain | njmclain.com

Most Messaging Misses the Real Competition

Teams often build their positioning around feature matrices and known rivals. But this ignores the truth of how buying decisions happen. Prospects rarely compare you to your ideal competitor. They compare you to what they’re already doing. That might be a spreadsheet, a workaround, a habit, or a default vendor. In practice, the most common loss reason is not "we chose a competitor," it is "we did nothing."

The result is messaging that over-educates, under-convinces, and fails to create urgency. If you're not framing your pitch against the customer's real current behavior, you're likely getting out-positioned without knowing it.

The Competitive Alternatives Framework

This framework helps you anchor your messaging and GTM strategy around how buyers actually behave. Use it to reframe your narrative around switching behavior, not feature wins.

1. Default Path: What the buyer is currently doing (or not doing) to handle the problem.
2. Legacy Solution: The entrenched, outdated tool or vendor that still feels “good enough.”
3. Perceived Risk: What switching feels like to the buyer. This includes political, operational, and personal concerns.
4. Real Competitor: The vendor you’re most often compared to in serious evaluations.
5. Internal Champion’s Stakes: What the buyer personally stands to gain or lose by choosing you.

How to Use the Framework

Step 1: Map Competitive Alternatives from the Buyer’s Point of View

Run customer discovery or deal reviews and capture what prospects were actually doing before talking to you. Ask:

• “How were you solving this before?”
• “What’s still working about that approach?”
• “What concerns did you have about switching?”
• “Who else did you consider and why?”

Summarize these into a simple table with the five alternatives. Include emotional language and practical constraints.

Step 2: Write Contrast-First Messaging

Use the framework to reverse-engineer your messaging. For each buyer type or segment:

• Lead with the Default Path. “Most teams still rely on X...”
• Name the friction in Legacy Solutions. “The problem is, [legacy tool] was never designed for...”
• Normalize the fear. “Switching feels risky. That’s why we built [feature] to make migration easy.”
• Deprioritize the competitor. “Unlike [competitor], we solve for [key difference].”
• Align with the champion’s win. “If this works, you get [clear, visible outcome].”

Step 3: Arm Sales with Switching Playbooks

Sales enablement should reflect this model, not just product features. Build assets that help reps:

• Spot the real alternative in a deal, especially “do nothing.”
• Tell a before-and-after story based on real switching behavior.
• Use the customer’s language to frame the cost of inaction.

The goal is simple. Make the buyer feel like not switching is the risky move.

Positioning is a Comparison Game

The Competitive Alternatives Framework reframes your narrative around what matters most: buyer context. If you skip that step, you’ll be building a product story no one is asking to hear. When you position against what is real, not just what is ideal, you earn the right to reframe the decision itself.

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