Go after Goliath
Go after Goliath
How to pick an opponent for your next corporate fight
👋 Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter! Every week, I share cases, personal stories and frameworks for GTM leaders and RevOps.
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When was the last time you picked a fight?
Not just a scuffle at the schoolyard. But an honest-to-goodness fight with a competitor.
In case you’ve missed it, there’s a big fight happening right now in SaaS.
Adam Robinson, CEO at Retention.com, has been taking shots at his competitor 6sense on LinkedIn.
Obviously striking a nerve, 6sense even threatened him with a cease and desist.
While that would scare most of us off (or at least force us to go LinkedIn silent), Adam had the opposite reaction.
In what I think is a brilliant move, he published the cease and desist and gave a digital middle finger back.
Now it’s no longer a founder taking shots at his competitor.
Now it’s a David vs Goliath.
It’s not company vs company.
It’s founder vs bully.
It’s not about 6sense as a product anymore.
It’s about 6sense as the evil corporation.
This has earned Adam a ton of followers and marketing momentum—the kind of attention most founders could only dream of.
If you want to hear more about Adam Robinson vs 6sense, Raul and I talked about it in depth on our podcast.
Now to be clear, I’m not picking sides. This post isn’t about dunking on 6sense, or saying what they should have done differently (I’m sure there are other Marketing experts that can weigh in).
But the act of picking a fight in itself can be super powerful.
A history of SaaS scuffles
SaaS competitors have been publicly going to war for years.
Some silently through ads. Others are more public…
The most famous example that instantly comes to me is Marc Benioff of Salesforce and his campaign against Siebel (and other competitors).
In 2000, Benioff and his team hired a bunch of actors to protest a Siebel user conference that called for “the end of software.”
The fake protesters were covered by fake news crews all afternoon. All that made enough commotion that real news crews soon followed.
He even considered hiring an armored tank before deciding the stunt was a bit much.
But the important point about Benioff’s fights is that they all had one thing in common.
They all were aimed at Goliath. The market leader.
That way, Salesforce could play the visionary or underdog against the established players.
Because who doesn’t like an underdog?
Now, that’s not to say that you need to have tons of money or outlandish guerilla marketing ideas to pull a Benioff.
You can do it on a much smaller scale.
But it all starts with picking your Goliath.
What makes a good enemy?
Naming and calling out an enemy is a well-known marketing play.
The stronger your enemy is, the more you can identify them.
That enemy can be as specific as a person or company (like Adam vs 6sense).
And if there’s no Goliath in your industry? Then go after the status quo.
For Slack it’s email.
For Drift it’s forms.
This can be incredibly powerful because it connects with your audience emotionally (because they know the experience of the status quo).
But it also makes it so much easier to communicate.
Instead of saying “Our mission statement is blah blah blah…”
You can say “We want to kill X because it sucks”.
On the flip side, it’s completely ok if you can’t pinpoint an enemy like this.
I think having a convoluted enemy description is worse than having a crisp purpose and mission statement.
So if you can’t find a super straight to the point enemy, I would advise against this tactic.
Pinpoint your messaging
Let’s say you’ve named your enemy and started to point out what’s wrong with it/them.
What you’re basically doing is you’re delivering your USP. Your twist. Your differentiator.
By creating an enemy statement, within a couple of sentences you can make it very clear in someones head as to why you are different.
Instead of a convoluted narrative about what you do and how you’re different, now you have a crystalized mini-story your audience can retell to someone else.
“Oh, company X? Yeah, they’re a better [competitor/status quo].”
Being able to overcome that threshold and have them say, “I totally get it.”
When Goliath fights back
What makes both of our examples compelling?
Goliath fought back.
Siebel through their own marketing. 6sense through a cease and desist.
And while that may be scary for some founders, there is a bit of power to that statement.
If you manage to make Goliath blink and actively campaign against you, they’re calling out to the market that “this is our competitor, and we have a reason to fight them.”
All that gives David a fighting chance at the end of the day.
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That's a great story. Didn't know about how badass SLFC was. I think there is a difference if your Goliath is a single company or the whole industry. The single company must respond and the fight can be more damaging than the fight against the whole industry. Especially if you can make the competitors irrelevant like blue ocean strategy describes.