How to Win Deals by Targeting Your Competitors' Customers

In today's dynamic market, your product evolves weekly and prospects shift daily. To gain an edge, you can't just focus on attracting new buyers; you must also strategically win over your competitors' customers. This guide details how to build and execute a winning competitive displacement strategy, from deep research and persona building to advanced competitor targeting tactics and compelling messaging that forces a switch.

What is Competitive Displacement and Why Does It Matter?

In a mature market, growth often means taking it from someone else. This is the essence of a competitive displacement strategy: a focused campaign aimed at taking customers away from your competitors to grow your revenue and market share. It's a strategic marketing initiative designed to identify, target, and win over customers currently using a competitor's solution.

Unlike go-to-market motions that educate buyers on the importance of having a solution in the first place, competitive displacement operates on a different premise. It assumes the target account already understands the value and is using a rival product. The conversation changes from "why you need this" to "why you need to make the switch to our solution." The goal is to position your offering as the superior alternative, effectively convincing customers that the pain of staying outweighs the pain of switching.

A successful competitive displacement campaign delivers significant business impact. It directly helps increase revenue, expand market share, enhance brand reputation and equity, and elevate the overall customer experience. It also empowers your sales and customer service teams, arming them with the insights needed to serve up personalized support that clarifies why your company is the better choice.

Laying the Groundwork: Deep Research and Competitor Customer Personas

A winning strategy begins with understanding who you want to win over. Crucially, this process should start by identifying the customers your company wants to acquire, not by fixating on the competitors themselves. Only once you know the ideal profile can you effectively target them where they are.

Conduct In-Depth Buyer Research

Deep buyer research is non-negotiable. You need to understand the specific pain points and motivators of users who have experience with your competitors. The best sources for this information are the buyers themselves.

Conduct win-loss interviews with buyers who have recently evaluated your company and a competitor. These conversations are a goldmine of information about what matters most during the decision-making process. Additionally, interview or survey customers who have already switched from a competitor to your product to understand their journey, their frustrations with the previous solution, and what ultimately tipped the scales in your favor.

Create Detailed Competitor Customer Personas

Once you have this qualitative data, you can build out Competitor Customer Personas. These are not your standard Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs); they are detailed profiles of the ideal customers you are going after, but enriched with specific competitor information. This grounds your strategy in the reality of the user's current experience.

A robust Competitor Customer Persona should include:

   
• Standard Persona Details: Job title, function, professional interests, and core buying motivators.
   
• Competitor-Specific Context: Their challenges with the competitor's product, how they measure success (and where the competitor falls short), and where they "hang out" online and offline to discuss these issues.
   
• Strategic Opportunities: Clear opportunities and messaging ideas that leverage your strengths against the competitor's weaknesses.

How Octave Streamlines Research and Persona Development

Manually gathering this intelligence and codifying it into actionable personas is time-consuming. At Octave, we've built a Generative GTM platform to solve this. Our platform connects to your GTM stack, ingesting customer signals and market data in real-time. You can use our Library feature to define and store rich Competitor Customer Personas, complete with their specific pain points, use cases, and competitor-related challenges. Our AI agents can then be deployed to collect rich intel on every prospect, automating the manual research that slows teams down and allowing you to operationalize your ICP and positioning across your entire GTM motion.

Choosing Your Competitive Strategy: From Sales-Led to Multi-Channel

With your research and personas in place, you can choose the right strategic approach. While there are many ways to execute a campaign, they generally fall into a few key models, with Account-Based Marketing (ABM) emerging as a particularly effective framework for competitive displacement.

The Sales-Led Strategy

A simple yet effective approach is a sales-led strategy. This involves creating a targeted list of companies currently using a competitor's product. From there, you coordinate closely with the sales team to develop the right outreach strategy, armed with the messaging and insights from your Competitor Customer Personas.

The Multi-Channel Approach

A broader, multi-channel approach covers top-of-funnel channels to build awareness and generate inbound interest. This includes running targeted campaigns on platforms like LinkedIn and Google Ads, as well as publishing organic posts. The goal of these assets is often to direct potential customers to a dedicated comparison page or article that clearly lays out your advantages.

The Power of Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for Competitive Displacement

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is an ideal approach for competitive displacement because it is inherently targeted and proactive. A successful ABM displacement campaign is a comprehensive effort that aligns sales and marketing efforts with business objectives, maximizing the chances of converting accounts from competitors. It requires a strong go-to-market plan backed by data to ensure you're going after the right accounts and segmenting them based on where they are in the buying process.

The first step in an ABM approach is segmenting target accounts. This can be done by layering intent data sources to hone in on accounts that fit your target profile. You can identify accounts using a competitive solution through technology installs, uncover accounts researching a specific pain point through trending topics, or pull out accounts specifically engaging with competitor brands. By analyzing intent and engagement data, you can segment accounts into high, moderate, and low intent, which helps determine their readiness to switch.

Building Your ABM Displacement Campaign with Octave

Octave's platform is designed to run ABM and hyper-segmented campaigns that scale. After you define your target segments and personas in your Library, you can use our Prospector agent to surface high-value contacts at those specific companies. Our agentic workflows can then automate personalized outreach, ensuring that you can find and engage your best buyers with messaging that is perfectly tailored to their context and competitive situation.

Crafting Messaging That Forces a Switch

Your strategy is only as good as the messaging that powers it. In a competitive displacement campaign, your content and messaging must motivate buyers to engage with your brand as a serious contender. It's not about you; it's about them and their problems.

Principles of Effective Competitive Messaging

When building competitive messaging, a few core principles will guide you to success:

   
• Keep it Simple: Your message must be clear and quick to understand. Use the "billboard test": can someone understand your core value proposition while driving past a billboard?
   
• Speak Their Language: Use the terminology and address the pain points you uncovered in your research. This shows you truly understand their needs better than the competition.
   
• Focus on Their Problems, Not Yourself: Don't be self-centered. Your messaging should revolve around solving the customer's problems, not listing your features.
   
• Solve, Don't Sell: Emphasize how your product will make their life easier or better. The goal is to be seen as a solution provider, not just another vendor.

Practical Examples for Sales and Marketing

These principles can be applied across different formats. For marketing messaging, use heavy visuals to contrast your product with a competitor's, and leverage testimonials for powerful social proof. For a sales email template designed to entice a competitor's customer, consider a structure that:

   
1. Acknowledges the competitor: Show you've done your research.
   
2. Compliments them: Start on a positive, respectful note.
   
3. Asks if they are happy: Gently probe for dissatisfaction.
   
4. Highlights the competitor's shortcomings: Touch on a known pain point.
   
5. Opens the dialogue with a question: Encourage a response.

Generative GTM: Your Messaging Brain with Octave

Crafting this level of personalized, context-aware messaging at scale is the primary challenge of modern GTM. Octave acts as your GTM brain, creating a single source of truth for what works. Our platform helps you build a living Library of high-impact messaging, and our Playbooks allow you to create hyper-personalized messaging for every competitor, niche, persona, and segment you target. This ensures that whether you're sending a one-off email or launching a broad campaign, you can automate high-conversion outbound with messaging that is always on point.

Activating Your Strategy: Advanced Competitor Targeting Tactics

Once your strategy and messaging are defined, it's time for activation. A variety of digital advertising platforms offer powerful tools for competitor targeting, allowing you to place your message directly in front of a competitor's audience.

Search and Social Media Advertising

Outbound marketing tactics like search and social media advertising are highly effective for brand awareness, lead generation, and customer acquisition. The key is data-driven targeting.

Google Ads: Custom Audiences

In Google Ads, the custom audience feature is a powerful tool for competitive campaigns. You have two primary options:

   
• Targeting by Search Terms: You can create an audience of "People who searched for any of these terms on Google." By inputting your competitors' brand names and product terms, you can set your Video and Discovery campaigns to appear before users who have actively researched your rivals. This targeting applies to Google properties like YouTube and Google.com.
   
• Targeting by URLs: You can also create a custom audience of "People who browse websites similar to" a list of competitor URLs. This method is not as exact as search term targeting and doesn't target users who visited the specific URLs. Instead, it tells Google to find users who exhibit similar browsing behavior, making it a great top-of-funnel strategy to introduce your brand.

YouTube: Placement and Search Targeting

As the world's second-largest search engine, YouTube is a critical channel for competitor targeting.

   
• Placement Targeting: This tactic allows you to advertise directly on your competitors' own YouTube videos or even their entire channel. By reviewing placement reports, you can see the awareness, views, and conversions generated from these highly specific placements.
   
• Search Targeting: You can also target just the YouTube search results page with in-feed video ads. By using keyword targeting and removing broader audience-based targeting, your ads can appear at the top of the search results when a user looks for your competitor. While the volume is lower, the results are often more specific, leading to higher view rates.

Targeting on Social and Q&A Platforms

Other platforms offer unique ways to find and engage competitor audiences:

     Platform    Targeting Method    Description        Quora    Question, Topic, and Interest Targeting    The most specific method is targeting individual questions (e.g., "Is [Competitor Product] worth the price?"). For broader reach, you can target Topics (all questions under a category, which can include competitor brands) or Interests (users who have recently interacted with a Topic).        LinkedIn    Member Group Targeting    Find and target users who participate in active discussions about a competitor's product or industry in LinkedIn Groups. This is a great way to find a highly relevant and engaged audience.        Twitter (X)    Follower Look-alikes    While you can't target a competitor's followers directly, you can target users who are similar to them. Twitter determines this based on signals like what they retweet, click, and tweet, allowing you to leverage your competitor's brand recognition to reach a relevant audience.        Reddit    Community (Subreddit) Targeting    You can target users in specific Subreddits dedicated to an industry or even a competitor's product. However, this requires careful research. Reddit users often dislike overt advertising, so your ad's tone must match the community's culture to be effective.  

The Power of Retargeting

Retargeting is an essential, cost-effective way to stay in front of your competitor's audience. After a user visits your site from one of your competitor campaigns, you can continue to engage them across a vast majority of paid media platforms. The key is diligent use of UTM parameters in your ad URLs. By using consistent naming conventions for your competitor campaigns, you can combine all these site visits into a single, larger retargeting audience and nurture them toward conversion.

Orchestrating Multi-Channel Campaigns with Octave

Managing these disparate campaigns can quickly become complex. Octave helps you orchestrate your efforts by creating a central GTM brain. By defining Playbooks for each competitor campaign, you ensure your messaging remains consistent and powerful across every channel. Our agents can then help you qualify and prioritize the right buyers as they come in from these various sources, creating a seamless and intelligent GTM motion.

Removing Friction: How to Overcome Switching Objections

Even with the best targeting and messaging, customers may hesitate to switch due to perceived costs, effort, or being locked into a contract. Your job is to make the decision to switch irresistible by proactively addressing these objections.

Offer an Irresistible Incentive

Develop a buyout strategy to address common objections about switching providers. This can take several forms:

   
• Contract Buyouts: For customers locked into a contract, offering free or reduced pricing for a limited period can offset their current commitment and make switching financially viable.
   
• Complimentary Training: To address concerns about learning a new tool, provide complimentary training sessions to ensure a smooth transition and rapid adoption of your product.
   
• Free Migration Support: If you have a technical product, the hurdle of data migration can be significant. Offering free migration or implementation services removes a major barrier to entry.

The Final Loop: Test, Measure, and Evolve

A competitive displacement campaign is not a "set it and forget it" initiative. The market is constantly changing, and your strategy must be prepared to evolve. Continuous testing, measurement, and refinement are critical for long-term success.

Key Metrics for Competitive Displacement

Measuring success goes beyond simple win or loss numbers. To get strategic insights, you need to track metrics that tell a deeper story:

   
• Win Rate: This is a foundational metric, but it's more powerful when you drill down into the Competitive Win Rate—the number of deals you've won against specific competitors.
   
• Competitive Content Engagement: Track which pieces of comparison content are driving the best engagement with target accounts. This helps you understand what messaging resonates most.
   
• Competitive Deal Support Requests: These requests from your sales team are leading indicators of where they need help and what objections they're facing in the field. Tracking them can help you optimize enablement materials and battlecards.

Creating a Feedback Loop for Continuous Improvement

Your metrics should feed a cycle of rapid evolution. Be prepared to test and measure your strategies quickly and make tweaks based on what is or isn't working. This involves continuous competitor research and constant analysis of intent and technographic data to stay ahead. Close cross-collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success is vital to ensure your campaigns benefit from proactive optimization and real-time insights from the front lines.

Real-Time Optimization with Octave

This is where Octave provides a true real-time edge. Our platform connects to your GTM stack, learning from every customer and market signal to continuously optimize your outbound motion. Instead of waiting for quarterly reports, you can respond to competitive pressure in real-time. Octave helps you see what's working now and automatically updates your messaging and playbooks, allowing you to align your GTM team around what works and scale your wins faster.

Stop Guessing, Start Winning with a Generative GTM

Winning deals from competitors requires more than just aggressive sales tactics; it demands a strategic, data-driven, and adaptable approach. From deep persona research and multi-channel competitor targeting to irresistible offers and continuous optimization, every step must be executed with precision.

Your market evolves in real-time. Your approach should too. Stop relying on static playbooks and tribal knowledge. It's time to equip your team with a GTM brain that grounds every interaction in your core strategy and learns from live market signals. That's the power of a Generative GTM.

Stop winging it. Give your team the GTM messaging brain they need to win. Try Octave today.