# Edges *Win where the incumbent isn't looking.* --- You're competing against the market leader for mid-market deals in your vertical. Your product has caught up on most of the feature gaps, your team is sharp, and your pricing undercuts them by 20%. You should be winning more. You're not. Your win rate across all competitive deals last quarter was 12%. Eighty-eight out of every hundred prospects who evaluated both products chose them. You've tried repositioning the pitch, leading with ROI instead of features. Win rate: 12%. You've offered steeper discounts on multi-year contracts. Win rate: 13%. You've compressed the sales cycle with faster demos and same-week proposals. Win rate: 11%. Nothing moves. --- Your VP of Sales pulls the data differently. Instead of looking at all competitive deals together, she segments by customer profile: size, sub-vertical, contract type, who initiated the evaluation. Most segments look the same. Eight to fifteen percent win rates, clustered around the average. But one segment jumps: mid-market healthcare staffing companies with 200-500 employees, running a competitor implementation that's more than three years old. Your win rate there is 43%. Forty-three percent against a competitor you beat 12% of the time everywhere else. That's not noise. You won seven of the last sixteen deals in that segment. The average deal size was slightly smaller than your overall pipeline average (£35k versus £42k), but seven wins is seven wins, and the sales cycle was eleven days shorter. --- So what's different about those buyers? They sit on the competitor's edge. The competitor's product was built for large enterprise staffing firms, 2,000 employees and up, with dedicated IT teams and complex multi-entity structures. Their sales motion, implementation playbook, and customer success model all optimise for that profile. The mid-market healthcare segment gets served, but with a product that's heavier than they need, by a team that treats them as small accounts, on a roadmap that prioritises problems they don't have. They're adequately served. They're not delighted. Their [[Switching costs]] are real (any migration is painful), but the switching costs are lower than they'd be for the competitor's core customers because these firms haven't built as many integrations, haven't customised as deeply, and haven't embedded the product as thoroughly into their operations. When your team shows up with a product that fits their actual scale, a sales process that treats a £35k deal as worth winning, and a roadmap that addresses healthcare staffing workflows specifically, you're not competing on the competitor's terms. You're competing on yours. --- Now look at your own customer base. Your happiest customers (highest NPS, longest retention, most likely to give references) share a pattern: mid-market firms in regulated industries, 150-800 employees, where the buyer is an operations leader rather than a CIO. They chose you because your product was simpler to implement, your team was responsive, and you solved their specific workflow problems without the overhead of an enterprise platform. The competitor's edge customers look like your best customers. That's the overlap, and it's where you should be spending almost all of your competitive energy. --- Every competitor has a centre and an edge. The centre is the customer they built for, the one their case studies feature, the one their product roadmap serves first. The edge is everyone else they've accumulated along the way: customers who are slightly wrong for the sales motion, slightly underserved by the product, slightly neglected by the success team. Attacking the centre is a fair fight at best. Their product fits, their relationships are deep, their proof points are overwhelming. You're asking a buyer to leave a product that was designed for them and take a risk on one that wasn't. Attacking the edge is an unfair fight in your favour. You're asking a buyer to leave a product that was designed for someone else and move to one that fits them better. --- A subtle problem sits inside this. You're getting feedback from four directions, and most of it points you toward the centre, not the edge. Existing customers tell you what to build to keep them. That's retention signal, and it matters, but it reflects the base you have, which might be a legacy artefact of whoever found you first. Churned customers tell you what broke, useful for stopping bleeding but rarely a guide to where you can grow. Lost deals tell you why prospects chose the competitor, and if you lost those deals on the competitor's home turf, the feedback amounts to "they're better at being them." True, but not actionable. The feedback that matters for growth comes from the edge segment specifically. What do those 43%-win-rate prospects need? What convinced the seven who signed? What held back the nine who didn't? That's the signal worth weighting. Retention feedback for retention, edge feedback for growth. Mixing them together averages away the only insight that's useful. --- This is [[Verticals|depth before breadth]] applied to competitive targeting. You have a segment where you win 43% of the time and a segment where you win 12%. The instinct is to keep fighting everywhere and hope the average improves. The discipline is to concentrate on the 43% pocket, win it decisively, and let the rest go quiet for now. Twelve calls to edge-segment prospects, a handful of pilots, and four or five early wins. Those wins become your case studies, your conference speakers, your reference calls. They're proof that you can displace the incumbent, on ground that favours you. Each win makes the next one easier. Concentrated feedback from similar buyers sharpens the product. The sales team, having seen the pattern, anticipates objections before they surface. And your marketing narrows to the logos and stories that resonate with exactly the prospects you're targeting. The edge expands. Adjacent segments (mid-market staffing in social care, or healthcare firms with 500-1,000 employees) start to notice. Your proof points are close enough to be credible. Win rates in those adjacent segments climb from 12% toward 25%, then 30%. What was once the competitor's territory starts to feel like contested ground, then like yours. You don't beat a market leader by attacking their centre. You win their edges until the centre is surrounded. ---