I’m going to make a slightly uncomfortable claim.
Nobody buys the best business.
They buy the business they believe is the best choice.
There’s a difference, and I think it’s one that businesses often overlook.
I spend a lot of my time talking to companies that are genuinely brilliant at what they do. They have great people, great products, years of experience, happy customers and an enormous amount of expertise sitting inside the business.
And yet, commercially, they’re sometimes being beaten by competitors they privately believe aren’t as good as them.
You can hear the frustration when they talk about it. How are they winning that work? We’re better than them.
Maybe you are.
But does the customer know that?
That’s the uncomfortable bit.
When you work inside a business, you experience everything that makes it good. You know the people who go above and beyond. You understand the nuances of the product. You’ve seen the difficult customer problem that got solved at 7pm on a Friday. You know exactly why your technology is better, why your service is different and why your team has more experience than the competition.
Your prospective customer doesn’t know any of that.
They know what they can see.
They’ve visited your website. Perhaps someone recommended you. They’ve seen one of your people on LinkedIn. They’ve sat through a pitch or had a conversation with someone from Sales. They might have looked at two or three of your competitors while they were at it.
From that relatively small window into your business, they make a decision.
That’s why I think “we’re better than them” can be one of the most dangerous beliefs in business. Being better only has commercial value if the customer can see, understand and believe the difference.
And that’s where marketing gets much more interesting to me.
I’m less interested in marketing as a way of telling everyone how brilliant a business is. I’m much more interested in whether it makes that business easier to buy.
Those aren’t quite the same thing.
In B2B particularly, buying something can be hard work. The person you’re speaking to is rarely making the decision entirely on their own. They have colleagues to convince, budgets to justify, procurement processes to navigate and, depending on what you sell, a certain amount of personal reputation on the line.
Choosing you might mean putting their neck out.
So when your contact leaves the meeting, the real sales process often continues without you.
They have to explain why they think you’re the right choice. They have to answer questions about the price. They have to explain why you’re different from the incumbent or why the business shouldn’t go with the cheaper option.
In other words, your customer has to become your salesperson.
And you’re not in the room to help them.
I think that changes the way you should look at brand and marketing.
If your proposition needs six slides and a 20-minute explanation to make sense, how much of it survives when someone else repeats it?
Probably not much.
If, on the other hand, the customer understands very quickly what makes you different and why that difference matters, you’ve given them something they can take into the next conversation.
That has genuine commercial value.
It’s also why I think businesses often make a mistake by trying to communicate everything.
We want customers to know about every service, every capability, every accreditation, every feature and every possible reason they should choose us. All of it matters internally, so naturally we assume all of it needs to matter externally.
The result can be a lot of information without much of a message.
One of the hardest questions you can ask a business is: if someone remembers just one thing about you tomorrow, what do you want it to be?
It’s hard because it forces a choice.
But customers are making those choices whether we like it or not. They aren’t walking away from your website remembering your seven key differentiators. They’re forming a much simpler impression.
That business understands my world.
Those people seem to know what they’re doing.
They’re the expensive one, but I can see why.
They seem different.
I trust them.
Or, sometimes, simply: I can’t really tell what makes them different from the others.
That last one should worry us more than it does.
From a commercial perspective, this is why I’ve never really understood the idea of brand being the fluffy end of business.
A good brand should make selling easier.
By the time somebody speaks to your commercial team, ideally they shouldn’t be starting from zero. The prospect has heard of you. They have some sense of what you stand for. They’ve seen something from you that was useful or interesting. They understand roughly where you fit in the market.
Something has already happened before Sales enters the room.
That doesn’t mean marketing closes the deal. It doesn’t replace good salespeople, a competitive product, brilliant service or sensible pricing.
It just means Sales doesn’t have to do all of the work.
And that matters because the best business doesn’t automatically win.
The business with the most experienced team can lose. The better technology can lose. The company that would genuinely provide the best service can lose.
Customers don’t have access to an objective league table that tells them who is actually best.
They make a judgement.
They judge what they see, what they hear, what they understand and what they remember. They judge how confident they feel about the decision and how comfortable they are recommending it to somebody else.
That perception isn’t separate from commercial performance. It influences it.
So perhaps the next time a competitor wins a piece of business and someone around the table says, “But we’re better than them”, we shouldn’t immediately assume the customer got it wrong.
Maybe the more useful question is:
Did we make it obvious?
