Free · 11 parts · about an hour
Are you losing to your competitor — or just watching them?
Eleven parts and a page you fill in — so you can stop guessing whether they’re actually taking your deals.
You can see everything they publish and almost nothing about whether any of it works. Their website, their ads, their hiring, their LinkedIn energy. Not their pipeline, their close rate, their churn, or their runway.
So the problem was never really the competitor. It’s that you’re comparing your internals to their externals and calling the result a strategy.
Part 1 takes ten minutes and settles more than the other ten combined. I’d far rather you did that and stopped than opened this, felt the length, and closed it.
Twenty-five years leading marketing, and this conversation several times a year. I built this out of the version where the founder can describe a competitor fluently and can’t say how many deals they’ve lost to them.
Microsoft · LVMH · Sephora · American Airlines · John Deere
33 pages · 11 parts · 108 fillable fields
Fillable PDF · or print it and use a pen
Thirty-three pages · 108 fillable fields · nobody sees it but you
Where should I send it?
Free, and there’s no call in it. You get the workbook straight away, then four short emails over the next nine days — one idea each. Unsubscribe from any of them and the workbook is still yours. Privacy.
What’s actually in it
It isn’t a PDF you print and write on — though you can. It’s a fillable workbook: 108 real fields you type into, save, and keep.
Who do you actually lose to
Ten minutes with your own closed-lost data, sorted into four buckets. The only part that asks you to go and look something up — and the one that most often settles the whole question.
The copying trap
Why matching a competitor’s marketing fails even when you execute it perfectly, and what it actually costs — which is quarters, not budget.
Your best-fit customer, in one sentence
The sentence that has to survive being read out loud, checked against your last ten best customers, and rewritten when it doesn’t.
Where you could be first
The part people email me about afterwards. Four forms of uncontested space at your size — and a fifth that costs nothing but a decision.
What the comparison has already cost
Ninety seconds of back-of-envelope arithmetic nobody itemises. Most people find the first number uncomfortable and the second one unbearable.
Your verdict
One page, everything assembled, built to be detached and handed to whoever else has to sign off. Bring this page and it’s the entire agenda.
Who this is for
It’ll be worth your hour if
- You can describe a competitor in detail and couldn’t say, right now, how many deals you’ve lost to them.
- Something they did recently turned into a directive by Thursday.
- You’re founder-led, roughly $1M–$30M, and the marketing budget is yours to point.
- You can answer questions about your own company honestly when nobody’s watching.
Save your hour if
- You already know exactly which competitor takes your deals and how often. You don’t need a diagnostic, you need positioning work.
- You want a battlecard or a feature matrix. This isn’t competitive intelligence and it won’t pretend to be.
- You’re pre-revenue. Most of these questions need a closed-lost list to answer.
The comparison is real. The evidence usually isn’t.
You saw the post. Or the new site, or the podcast they launched, or the booth that was twice the size of yours. And something went tight.
Before you spend a quarter on it, one question is worth thirty seconds: do you actually know they’re beating you, or does it just feel that way?
Most founders can’t answer that, and it isn’t carelessness. The information genuinely isn’t available to you.
Everything you can see is a decision to spend money. None of it is evidence the money worked.
In 1954 Leon Festinger published the core finding of social comparison theory: when objective, non-social measures are unavailable, people evaluate themselves by comparing themselves to others. The comparison isn’t ego. It’s what a mind reaches for when the dashboard is blank.
Which flips the fix. The problem isn’t that you don’t know enough about them. It’s that you don’t know enough about you.
When your gut is right — and when it’s the problem
Founder instinct is frequently the best asset in the building. It’s reliable when it’s compressed pattern recognition: hundreds of customer conversations, sales calls you sat in, years of watching what makes this buyer move. That instinct is data. It’s just stored somewhere you can’t export from.
It’s unreliable in one specific circumstance — when it’s reacting to something you saw rather than something you know. And a competitor’s marketing is, definitionally, something you saw.
Then the trap: you copy, and inherit their customer
Their channel mix, their message, their proof points, their price framing all encode a decision about who they’re for. Copy the tactic and you inherit the aim — you’ve adopted their target market without ever deciding to.
Michael Porter named the structural version in 1996: “the more benchmarking companies do, the more they look alike.” He wasn’t saying imitation fails because you’ll execute it badly. He was saying it fails even when you execute it perfectly.
“Competition becomes a series of races down identical paths that no one can win.”
That’s the real cost of copying. Not the wasted budget. The quarters.
So: are you actually losing?
That’s an answerable question, and answering it takes about an hour with a pen. By the end you’ll have:
- 01 A written, honest answer — from your own closed-lost data, not your memory
- 02 The name of who you really lose to. In most B2B categories at this stage it’s “no decision,” and that changes what you do on Monday
- 03 A one-sentence definition of your best-fit customer that survives being read out loud
- 04 A sentence naming where you could be first — and the one thing that would stop them following you there
- 05 A number for what this comparison has already cost, in dollars and in quarters
- 06 One decision you’re committing to before Monday
In twenty-five years I have never met a founder who was clear about where they could be first and anxious about a competitor. It’s always one or the other.
Fair warning, so it isn’t a surprise: a few of these questions land harder than a marketing exercise seems to warrant. The competitor ache is rarely only about the competitor. Underneath it is usually a question about whether you’ve chosen what this company is for.
You don’t have to go there. The people who do tend to spend a lot less money.
I run a fractional CMO practice, so I have a stake in what you conclude. I’ve written it the way I’d have wanted it written for me — which means it points somewhere other than me more than once, including a Part 1 outcome where the honest answer is that nothing here needs fixing and you should go back to work.
Send me the workbook
Free. Four short emails over nine days, then it stops. Privacy.