# Legacy _Reposition from what's true today, not what the roadmap promises._ --- You've taken over a B2B software product that was the category leader five years ago. A cloud-native competitor launched three years back with modern UX, faster implementation, and better APIs. They're winning seventy percent of new deals. Your win rate has dropped from sixty to twenty-five percent in two years. Your installed base is still large: six hundred customers, roughly sixty percent of the market. Annual churn runs at three or four percent. The product works, the customers aren't leaving, but every new deal is a fight you're losing. The board wants a repositioning plan. --- Your instinct is to go head-to-head. They claim innovation, you claim reliability. They claim speed, you claim depth. The product team builds a comparison matrix showing you win on seven of twelve criteria. Marketing drafts messaging about the "trusted enterprise choice." The sales deck gets a redesign. The market doesn't see the matrix. The market sees a company that was the leader, got disrupted, and is now explaining why it's still relevant. Your messaging sounds like a defensive version of their story. Buyers who left two years ago hear "we've caught up" and think "so they were behind." Prospects who know you only through the competitor's displacement narrative hear "trusted enterprise choice" and read "the legacy option." Six months in, win rates haven't moved. Internally, nobody can describe the positioning in one sentence. One rep sells reliability, another sells the roadmap, and the prospect hears two different companies. Head-to-head positioning plays on ground the competitor chose, and they've had three years to build proof points on that ground. You arrived with a slide deck. --- What's actually true today that a sceptical buyer would believe? Six hundred customers, many with eight to fifteen years of data in your system. Regulatory submission histories, custom workflows, integration layers built over years of use. For an enterprise buyer considering a switch, that's a £200k migration project that takes six months and risks breaking processes the business depends on daily. Your product is so deeply embedded in how customers operate that removing it costs more than the competitor's entire contract. Nobody's choosing it for the interface. But the competitor can't claim that depth, because they haven't been around long enough to accumulate the [[Switching costs|switching cost]] your product built over a decade. You go to market as the embedded operating system that your customers' most complex workflows already depend on. A sceptical buyer who remembers the old reputation would believe it, because it's obviously true. It's also a [[Real choices|real choice]]: it forecloses "we're the modern option" and accepts "we're the deep one." You can't claim both without sounding like the comparison matrix nobody believed. --- A year later. You stopped reporting the overall new-business win rate because it was measuring the wrong fight. Renewal rates in the enterprise segment run at ninety-seven percent. Three customers who evaluated the competitor and stayed have published case studies, and the reasons are specific: migration risk on regulatory submissions, workflow depth that took years to configure, integration layers that nothing else replicates. New-business wins are smaller but the profile has changed. You're closing prospects whose operations look like your best customers': complex, regulated, deeply integrated. Win rates in that segment are back above fifty percent. The segment is narrower than the market the board originally wanted, and revenue growth reflects it. It's also defensible. --- A year ago, the board wanted a plan to compete with the company that displaced you. The plan that worked was to stop competing with them entirely. ---