Position against a competitor
Competitive positioning is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
Competitive positioning is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
Competitive positioning works when you concede what is true first: naming what a competitor does well buys credibility for everything after it, and the buyer already knows anyway.
| name | competitor-positioning |
|---|---|
| description | How we talk about each competitor, what we claim, and what we never claim. Use when a competitor comes up in a call, email, proposal or comparison page. |
| allowed-tools | none — this skill adds judgement, not reach |
| compatibility | Zealos, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any client that reads SKILL.md |
| license | Free to use and edit |
--- name: competitor-positioning description: How we talk about each competitor, what we claim, and what we never claim. Use when a competitor comes up in a call, email, proposal or comparison page. --- # Competitor positioning ## Standing rules - **Never disparage.** It reads as insecurity and the buyer often chose them before, or knows someone who works there. - **Compare on a dimension the buyer already raised.** Introducing a new axis to win on looks like changing the subject, because it is. - **Concede what is true.** "They are better at X" buys credibility for everything after it, and the buyer already knows. - **Never claim a competitor cannot do something** unless you have verified it this quarter. Feature claims decay fast and being wrong once ends the deal. ## The shape of a good answer 1. Acknowledge specifically — name what they do well. 2. Draw the real distinction, in terms of the buyer's stated criteria. 3. Hand back a question: "which of those matters most for you?" ## Do-nothing and build-it-yourself The two most common competitors, and the two most often ignored. - **Do nothing** wins when the pain is real but survivable. Beat it with the cost of another six months, in their numbers. - **Build it internally** wins on the first estimate and loses on the second. Ask what it will cost to maintain in year two, and who owns it when that engineer leaves. ## Never say "Cheaper" as the lead. "They're legacy." Anything about a competitor's funding, layoffs or churn. Anything you would not say with them in the room.
The competitor question stops being the moment the call wobbles, because the answer is written down and you are not improvising under pressure.
Positioning stays consistent across the team without a quarterly enablement session, and updates propagate the moment you edit the skill.
You stop saying things about competitors on calls that you would not put in writing, which is a risk that grows with every new rep.
Doing nothing, followed by building it internally. Both win more often than any vendor, and most positioning documents ignore them entirely.
Never. It reads as insecurity, and the buyer may have chosen them before or know someone who works there.
Not on the first estimate, which always favours building. Ask what it costs to maintain in year two and who owns it when that engineer leaves.
Post-call automation turns a recorded conversation into the three things that outlive it: the commitments each side made, the fields that changed, and the follow-up that has to go out today.
/call-recap-formatA pre-call brief is worth writing only if it changes what you ask: who is in the room, what they are measured on, what happened last time, and the one question you cannot afford to leave without answering.
/discovery-questionsAn AI SDR agent is only as good as the definition of a good customer it is working from, which is why the fit criteria belong in a written skill rather than buried in a prompt nobody can find.
/our-icpAI email triage is worth having only when it sorts by consequence rather than by recency: what blocks a deal, what someone is waiting on you for, and what can be read at the end of the week.
/email-rulesCRM data hygiene survives AI only if one rule is written down first: a field left blank is a known unknown, while a field filled in by inference is an unknown unknown that will be reported on as fact.
/crm-field-conventionsAccount research earns its time only when it changes the first sentence you write, which means looking for what recently changed rather than assembling a profile anyone could have found.
/our-icp