"Do nothing" is always your top competitor

I’ve been thinking about buying a new car recently. I’ve browsed a couple websites, done my research on Consumer Reports, looked at the model comparisons on a couple auto brand websites.

Chances are, though, I’m not going to buy a new car. At leasts not for a couple more years. I’m going to do nothing. My current car still gets me from point A to point B reliably. Even if it suddenly stopped being able to do so, I might still do nothing — it’s feasible to bike and bus most places where I live, and I know plenty of people who are carfree.

Whether we’re talking about consumer decisions like buying a new car or business purchases like a new container security solution, the biggest challenge isn’t making your prospect choose you over a competitor, it’s inspiring your prospect to take action at all.

Doing nothing is always the safest route. Let’s say a prospect has a deployment process that is clearly slow, cumbersome and error-prone. They could easily rationalize this as ‘it works for us’ and continue doing nothing. This is not ridiculous at all: They understand very well the problems with the system, but they also know how to compensate. Your new solution might promise to solve all those problems, but in the back of their minds they are wondering what new problems it might create. They want to stick with the devil they know.

When you’re positioning your product, the ‘do nothing’ competitor is probably the most important one to consider. This means:

• Understanding what people in your target market are doing now to solve the problem your product addresses

• Understand the value you provide compared to the current status quo, not compared to other products on the market

Position your product compared to the status quo, the competitors that your prospects are most likely comparing you to. Don’t worry that your prospects will go with a competitor. Worry that they will keep having the one DevOps gal write custom YAML .