Mid-call, the prospect says it: "We're also talking to someone else." Your stomach drops a little, because the honest answer, if you said it out loud, is roughly "we're pretty similar, just... us." So you default to price, or to service, or to being a bit more flexible on the deadline — and the conversation quietly turns into a comparison you didn't need to be having.

If you've felt your competitors closing in and haven't got a crisp, confident answer for why a customer should choose you specifically, that gap shows up exactly here — live, under pressure, in the room that decides the deal.

When a prospect raises a competitor, most owners reach for price or service as the fallback, because they haven't written down anything sharper. That's the real enemy here — not the competitor, but the absence of a line you can say without thinking. Price is the easiest thing to compete on and the worst thing to compete on, because it's the one lever every competitor can also pull.

A talent agency I worked with built their whole positioning around one sentence: "We represent New Zealand's finest talent." Say that to a stranger and they instantly get what the agency stands for — no follow-up question needed. That's what I call the elevator test. Most SME owners have never written their version of that sentence down, so in the room, under pressure, they improvise, and improvising under pressure sounds exactly like every other business the prospect has spoken to this month.

Built on Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson's Challenger Sale research: the sellers who win aren't the most agreeable ones, they're the ones who teach the customer something true about their own problem the customer hadn't considered, tailor it precisely to that customer's situation, and take control of the conversation instead of reactively defending against "why you, not them."

"Kevin assists businesses to understand their 'Secret Sauce' and implements a strategy to grow the company's brand and in turn, business opportunities. His guidance and strategic advice is always well thought through and gets fantastic outcomes."

— Gareth Bayliss, Sales Manager, The Icehouse

Writing the sentence feels like a marketing exercise, so it gets left for "when there's time," and there's never time. Meanwhile every live sales call is quietly deciding the business's margin, one improvised answer at a time. The sentence takes an afternoon. The improvising costs you every deal where a competitor simply had the clearer line.

This isn't for you if you're genuinely selling a commodity where price is the only variable that matters to the buyer. If there's any real difference in what you deliver, this is for you — you just haven't said it out loud yet.

You don't need a bigger marketing budget to win that moment. You need one sentence, rehearsed, before the next call — and that's something you can have ready by tomorrow.

The business owners who keep improvising this answer will be having the same conversation this time next year. The ones who write the sentence won't.