Sales leaders have no shortage of metrics to evaluate pipeline performance: execution, qualification, coverage, competition, conversion, and more.
Two questions deserve a place in those reviews:
What competitive strategy did we use?
What competitive strategy did our competition use?
Without those answers, you're missing critical information needed to understand why an opportunity was won, lost, or stalled.
A sales team can execute well and still lose if it pursues a strategy poorly suited to the competitive situation. That raises another question: Did the team choose the strategy deliberately, or was it simply its default approach?
Most Sellers Are Running a Strategy They Never Chose
Years ago, I took a Target Account Selling class that taught five competitive strategies: Frontal, Defend, Fragment, Flanking, and Delay.
I’ve used and observed these strategies throughout my career. They’re as relevant today as when I first learned them, even as the way companies buy and consume products and services has fundamentally changed.
In my experience, upwards of 80% of competitive sales efforts rely primarily on two strategies.
The first sounds like this:
We’re the best. We have more capabilities, better people, stronger technology, greater experience, and more customers. Here’s why you should choose us.
That’s Frontal.
The second sounds like this:
You don’t want to make that change. The alternative introduces risk. You’ll lose what you’ve already invested. You could create problems you don’t have today.
That’s Defend.
Both have their place. The concern is how often sellers use them automatically, based on what they’ve been taught to say and the information they’ve been given.
The other three strategies deserve equal (if not more) consideration.
Five Strategies. Five Different Ways to Compete.
Frontal — Win Through Superior Strength
Frontal is a direct contest in which you bring superior resources, capabilities, and proof to bear, overwhelming the competition’s ability or willingness to compete effectively.
Consider Microsoft competing against a smaller cloud provider. Its global infrastructure, enterprise relationships, security capabilities, and commercial resources can force a smaller competitor to expend more resources than it can reasonably sustain.
The customer establishes the terms of the competition through the value it places on different requirements and the priority it assigns to each. A Frontal strategy requires you to outperform the competition across the factors that matter most, supported by evidence the customer has experienced or validated.
Misunderstanding what the customer values, how it makes decisions, or what constitutes convincing proof can undermine even the strongest competitive position.
Frontal seeks to overwhelm the competition while earning the customer’s decision.
Defend — Protect the Position You Already Hold
Defend is an incumbent’s strategy when a customer begins seriously considering alternatives and the existing relationship is at risk.
The incumbent relies on established relationships, proven performance, existing investments, operational familiarity, and the risks associated with change.
Before you replace what you have, understand what you may be giving up.
By adopting Defend, you’ve acknowledged that the customer may be prepared to leave. The value you’ve delivered in the past is no longer sufficient to secure its future business.
A successful defense requires understanding what changed, which expectations have gone unmet, and whether the customer still values the existing relationship.
The strongest defenses I’ve seen turn offensive. Pairing Defend with Fragment can elevate an incumbent advantage the customer has overlooked. Pairing it with Flanking can expand the customer’s requirements into areas where the incumbent is particularly strong.
Defend should be a last resort. The strongest incumbent position is one you’ve earned long before a competitor gives the customer a reason to reconsider.
Fragment — Change the Relative Importance of What the Customer Already Wants
Fragment focuses the customer’s attention on requirements where you hold a meaningful competitive advantage.
Consider a customer evaluating ten requirements. You meet most of them, but you substantially outperform the competition on one. Your objective is to demonstrate why that requirement deserves greater weight in the customer’s decision.
Fragment changes the relative importance of what the customer already wants.
The strategy succeeds when the customer recognizes that your advantage addresses something more consequential than it originally believed.
Flanking — Change What the Customer Believes It Needs
Flanking expands the customer’s understanding of its requirements, introducing needs where you hold a meaningful competitive advantage.
During a needs discovery call: “Are you trying to detect threats, or reduce the time and damage between an attack and its resolution?”
The customer may now reconsider the scope of its initiative, introducing requirements that favor your solution and change the competitive landscape.
Flanking changes what the customer believes it needs.
Delay — Change When the Decision Happens
Use delay when your current competitive position is unfavorable, but more time could improve your chances of winning.
You may lack access to key stakeholders, sufficient credibility, critical information, or resources needed to compete effectively.
The strategy involves extending the decision process through additional discovery, evaluations, proofs of concept, or legitimate concerns requiring resolution.
The objective is to use that time to strengthen your competitive position, address the disadvantages preventing you from winning, or, when paired with Defend, repair what’s broken in the customer relationship.
Delay works when additional time gives you a credible path to a stronger competitive position.
Destroy — When the Customer Becomes the Target
Destroy is a variation of Delay I’ve increasingly observed when a competitor recognizes it has little chance of winning and attempts to prevent the customer from choosing another vendor.
The distinction is straightforward:
Delay: I cannot win yet. I need more time.
Destroy: I cannot win, and I don’t want my competitor to win either.
Where Frontal seeks to overwhelm the competition’s ability or willingness to compete, Destroy seeks to exhaust the customer’s resources, patience, or willingness to buy.
This can involve challenging the procurement process, absorbing the budget needed for a competing purchase, or introducing procedural, compliance, or governance obstacles that make proceeding more trouble than the customer believes it’s worth.
The intended outcome is for the customer to abandon the purchase altogether.
Recognizing Destroy requires understanding the customer’s buying process and distinguishing legitimate concerns from deliberate interference. A stalled opportunity alone doesn’t establish intent.
Sellers must recognize and counter Destroy by protecting the customer’s ability to decide before its resources or motivation are exhausted.
Do You Know Where You Stand Against the Competition?
Choosing the right competitive strategy begins with understanding where your company stands against the competition on the factors customers value most.
The Open Water Framework examines those factors, their relative importance, and how your company compares with competing alternatives.
A strategy canvas makes those differences visible. It shows where you lead, where you trail, and where your offering is effectively at parity with the competition.
That understanding directly influences competitive strategy. A strong, customer-validated advantage may support Frontal. A decisive advantage in an undervalued requirement may favor Fragment. An unmet customer need may create an opportunity to Flank.
Understanding your competitive position also helps identify weaknesses competitors may exploit and anticipate the strategies they could use against you. For example, an advantage that supports your Frontal strategy may be undermined by a competitor's Fragment or Flanking strategy.
The right competitive strategy depends on what customers value, where you stand against the competition, and how competitors are likely to challenge that position.
Where Open Water Fits
The Open Water Framework examines what customers value, how they evaluate alternatives, where friction exists, and which market opportunities remain underserved. It connects those findings to a company’s competitive position, revealing where its advantages matter, where customer expectations are unmet, and where its market strategy may need adjustment.
For sellers, that intelligence helps determine which competitive strategies to pursue and anticipate how competitors may respond. For executives, it reveals market patterns that inform positioning, product priorities, and how the organization competes. These insights are particularly valuable because the conditions that determine competitive success often exist long before an opportunity enters the pipeline.
Know Which Battle You’re Fighting
Every competitive opportunity requires a deliberate strategy choice, informed by what the customer values, where you stand against competitors, and how those competitors are likely to respond. The right strategy may combine several approaches, with one taking the lead and others supporting it.
Leadership must ensure its teams have the market and customer intelligence to make those choices. Without that understanding, even strong sales execution can produce disappointing results.
The next time you review your pipeline, ask:
What competitive strategy did we use?
What competitive strategy did our competition use?
And most importantly:
Did we have the intelligence to choose the right one?