Why Startups Should Go After Their Competitors’ Customers

I just finished an interesting conversation with a CEO at a security software company and he told me something that made me think about the underlying strategy. He said a well known startup in the email space that was acquired by a large public company started off with one part of their sales and marketing effort focused on selling into accounts that were using their competitors product. At the face of it, it might seem strange and unnecessary. But if you think further it can be a very good strategy for some businesses:

• Targeting your competitors’ customer defines the target market for you very easily. You know that the customers have a need, suffer a pain point and are using something. You, obviously, have to show something to differentiate from your competitor, but this strategy solves an important issue of finding target accounts who have a pain point. 
• If you can sell into your competitors’ customers it helps you to validate your product and build confidence in its ability to address well defined requirements of customers who are already using another solution and have their requirements clearly identified. It helps you to whet your product and sales pitch very well. 
• If your customer has a large customer list, then focusing on those customers may be a good for your startup to go out and get some quick wins without having a heavy duty list building, lead generation, lead qualification and appointment setting process. You can go straight to the decision makers and pitch. They already know what you are trying to sell them. 

How to go after your competitors’ customer is a topic for another post that I will cover soon, but dwell on this and see if this is applicable to your startup. 

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