Don’t worry about competition. If you’re thinking that your client has a zero-sum choice between you and a competitor, you’re completely wrong. They’re not forced to make a choice between you and a competitor. They’re forced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something.
If you’re a service business, there’s no competition. There are good fits and bad fits. Competition is completely irrelevant, unless you are selling something in which there’s a limited market.
If you pitch a company and they work with someone else, they didn’t pick the competition over you. They picked the company that they thought could deliver the most value. That isn’t around pricing or feature sets. It’s around intangibles. Someone else’s value is better for that particular company. It doesn’t mean the other company is better than you or that they do something more special than you do. It’s just that the way they expressed their value resonated more with the client. There’s no competition.
Are you presenting the right value to the right customer? If the answer to that is “yes,” there is no competition. If you’re thinking, “Well, this market is way too competitive,” that means you’re externalizing your failure by saying, “It’s the market’s fault that people aren’t hiring me.” It’s not the market’s fault. You’re not presenting your value in the most effective way.
