Wei-lin: An executive team at a company doing eighty million dollars in revenue—growing thirty-five percent a year—pulls their consultant aside and says the product is impossible to sell. They say there's no distinct value.
Tessa: Wait, eighty million? With an 'M'?
Wei-lin: With an M. And growing. And they think they have nothing special to offer.
Tessa: Okay, that has to be a consumer product then. Like toothpaste or something. Where you can just win on brand vibes. Because in B2B, the buyer has to go to their boss and justify the purchase. You can't just say you 'liked the vibes'.
Wei-lin: That's the thing. This is about B2B. That's what makes the situation so strange. These are big, considered purchases where someone's reputation is on the line. And yet, the company is winning deals, and the execs still think they're losing.
Tessa: So... the facts don't add up. How can you be growing that fast if your product is a dud?
Wei-lin: Exactly. This is from a piece by April Dunford, who's a positioning expert. And she says when a team claims they have 'no differentiation,' one of two things is true. Option A is that they're right—the product genuinely has no edge. And that's a complete disaster. Positioning can't help you; you need to go back and build a better product.
Tessa: Right, marketing can't fix a car with no engine.
Wei-lin: But she says Option B is way more common: The product is differentiated, but the team is blind to it. They have what she calls the 'no differentiation illusion'.
Tessa: So the $80M company is living in Option B.
Wei-lin: Almost certainly. And she lists a few reasons why this happens. One of the big ones is that teams don't actually understand their own customers. A new exec comes in from an adjacent market and assumes the buyers are the same, but they're not. So they miss what this new group values.
Tessa: Or the sales and marketing teams don't understand the product. I've seen that. The product team ships a feature, and the go-to-market side is just like, '...so what does this do?'
Wei-lin: Yes! She says she's been in workshops where the product team is genuinely stunned that marketing has no idea what the key features are actually for. But another reason, which I found really interesting, is that companies compare themselves against ghosts.
Tessa: Ghost competitors?
Wei-lin: Yeah. Companies that you, the vendor, are obsessed with, but that your actual customers have never heard of. You're tracking this startup with an identical feature list, convinced they're better. But if they never show up on a customer's shortlist when they're making a decision, they don't count. They're a ghost that only you can see.
Tessa: That is so true. You get completely wrapped up in your own little world of who you think you're fighting against, and the customer is just comparing you to Excel and maybe one other tool they Googled.
Wei-lin: And the biggest one, she says, is that teams are obsessed with why they lose deals, and they forget to look at why they win.
Tessa: Well, of course you focus on the losses. A big lost deal is painful. You do a whole post-mortem. It's an event. A win is... just hitting the quarterly number.
Wei-lin: But her argument is that you're often losing deals that were a bad fit to begin with. You were never going to win them. And focusing on that loss convinces everyone the product is a loser, when in reality you just chased the wrong customer. She says you need win analysis way more than loss analysis.
Tessa: I hear that, but I just don't think that's realistic. The cultural gravity of losing a massive deal that your CRO had on the forecast... it's just immense. A win is quiet, a loss is a company-wide funeral. You can't just tell people to ignore the funeral.
Wei-lin: Maybe not ignore it, but reframe it. The funeral isn't for your product, it's for your sales process that chased a bad lead. But I take your point, it's... I honestly don't know how you'd shift a culture that's addicted to the drama of a big loss.
Tessa: Right? It's easy to say 'study the wins' from the outside.
Wei-lin: But maybe the key isn't just the wins, but what makes them wins. She has another point about the 'unique combination' of value. You might not be the fastest, and you might not be the cheapest. But you might be the only one that delivers decent speed and decent cost savings in one package. The differentiation is the 'and'.
Tessa: So it's not about being the best at one thing, but being the only one that's good enough at two things people need together.
Wei-lin: Exactly. And you'll only discover that by talking to the people who chose you—the wins. Which brings us back to her main point: you have to deeply understand why your customers choose you over their other options. That's the whole game.
Tessa: So even if it's culturally hard, looking at your wins is the only way out of the illusion.
Wei-lin: It seems so. You have to believe your own results, even when it feels wrong. I'm Wei-Lin.
Tessa: I'm Tessa. This has been the audiclip podcast.