Are your customers still unsure of how you’re different from your competitors?
The answer is staring them right in the face: it’s you.
There are countless ways to position against competitors: product features, pricing, service levels, and more. But one of the most unique and underutilized differentiators is your own professional choice to work where you do.
You could have chosen to work for any company in your industry, but you didn’t. You chose this one. That speaks volumes about the value and credibility of your company.
This isn’t just a feel-good talking point. Bain & Company’s B2B Elements of Value research, published in Harvard Business Review, found that individual, personal elements of value, things like confidence in the person you’re buying from and reduced anxiety about the decision, carry real measurable weight in B2B purchases, on top of whatever functional features a product brings to the table.
That’s the mechanism behind using your own career choice to position against competitors. A prospect evaluating vendors on paper is comparing features and pricing. A prospect who hears you explain, specifically and credibly, why you chose to be here is getting a data point the spec sheet can’t provide: a person with more information than they have has already made the decision they’re currently agonizing over.
Most reps only ever position against competitors on the dimensions a data sheet can capture. That’s exactly why almost nobody is doing this well. When every vendor in a deal is citing similar case studies and comparable feature lists, a credible personal reason for being there is one of the only differentiators left that a competitor genuinely can’t copy without lying.
Customers are often looking for reassurance. They want to know why your solution is worth their investment, and more importantly, why they should trust you.
By sharing your career journey, why you chose to work where you do, you give them an inside look at what sets your company apart. This isn’t about boasting; it’s about demonstrating confidence in the value your company brings.
Using your own story to position against competitors works best once a prospect is far enough into the conversation to actually want the reassurance it provides. Leading a first cold call with your personal career story before a prospect has any context for why they should care can come across as self-focused rather than confidence-building. It lands better once they’ve asked, directly or implicitly, why they should choose you over the alternatives they’re evaluating.
How well it works to position against competitors also depends on how it’s delivered. A career story that sounds rehearsed or overused loses the exact credibility it’s meant to build. If you’re leaning on the same three sentences on every call regardless of who’s in front of you, it stops being a genuine data point and starts sounding like a script, which is the opposite of what makes this technique work in the first place.
And in heavily technical or procurement-driven evaluations, where the buying committee has already been instructed to score vendors strictly on specifications, this angle carries less weight with the people actually filling out the scorecard. It still matters to the champion pushing your deal through that process, just not necessarily to everyone reading the comparison spreadsheet.
The general rule: use this to position against competitors once you understand what the prospect is actually weighing you against, and hold it back until you do.
Using a personal story to position against competitors isn’t a replacement for talking about your product, it’s a layer on top of it. The strongest version of a sales conversation still covers features, pricing, and service level clearly. Your personal reason for being there works best as the frame around that comparison, not a substitute for it.
A useful way to sequence it: let the prospect ask the product questions first, answer them clearly and specifically, and then use your own story to answer the question underneath all of them, which is usually some version of “why should I trust what you just told me.” Reps who lead with the personal story before establishing any product credibility risk it landing as a sales tactic instead of a genuine data point. Reps who only ever talk features leave real trust-building value on the table. Doing both, in that order, is how you position against competitors on more dimensions than the ones they’re used to being pitched on.
Instead of solely focusing on product differentiation, try integrating your personal experience into the conversation:
The examples above are a starting point for how you position against competitors in the moment, but they only work if what follows them is specific. “I chose this company because I believe in the mission” is the kind of line every rep at every company could say about every employer, which makes it forgettable the moment it’s said. The version that actually lands names something concrete: a product decision you watched the company make that a competitor wouldn’t have, a customer outcome you saw before you ever worked there, or a specific person or reputation that convinced you.
This is close to the same discipline behind Hoffman’s Why You? Why You Now?® approach inside the Start the Deal™ methodology: a reason has to be specific to be believable, whether you’re explaining why a prospect should buy now or why you decided to sell this in the first place. A generic reason convinces no one. A specific one does the work a whole slide of feature comparisons can’t.
Take ten minutes and actually write yours down before you need it in a live call. The reps who use this well aren’t improvising it in the moment, they’re delivering a true story they’ve already taken the time to sharpen.
A simple structure to work from: what you were evaluating when you chose this company, the specific thing that tipped the decision, and what you’ve seen since that confirmed it. That third piece matters more than people expect. “I chose this company because of X, and eighteen months later I’ve watched us do Y for customers in your exact situation” tells a prospect you’re not just describing an opinion you formed once, you’re describing something you’d still choose today.
Write two or three versions of it, aimed at slightly different situations, a technical buyer, a budget-focused buyer, a skeptical procurement contact, and you’ll have a way to position against competitors that adapts to whoever is actually in the room instead of one generic story delivered the same way every time.
This is ultimately what it means to position against competitors as a person, not just a vendor. When you position yourself as a knowledgeable and credible advocate for your company, you’re doing more than selling a product. You’re selling confidence.
So the next time a customer is comparing you to the competition, remind them: The difference isn’t just in the product. It’s in the people behind it, and that includes you.