in our case 53% of our July customers were already paying Clay, a $100M+ competitor and Here's how we take them off
(nothing groundbreaking but mostly the stuff that took us 2 years to actually do consistently)
Calling yourself the alternative to a giant is supposed to be weak branding. It's the riskiest thing we did, on purpose, because the buyer isn't learning a category, they have 3-4 tabs open evaluating daily, one bad week and they turn on you.
everyone who stayed picked us with a real comparison in hand and referrals are now our #1 revenue source.
what works, if you do it right (none of it works unless people enjoy your product, every tactic gets you 1 inch closer but the product has to hold them there)
(1) Go deep into what your competitor lacks (reddit, review sites, wherever people complain) fix it, ship it, then run a campaign around exactly that.
(2) Never chase the 0 star crowd, look for 3 star, they still use it daily and they can pay for something better.
(3) Look for job changes, repeat commenters on their posts (not just followers), their community if they have one, all public, all findable in a few minutes.
(4) Run the migration yourself, don't hand it to the customer, switching is harder than buying fresh, so that work is yours.
(5) After onboarding, never let support reply slower than sales did. That gap is what they tell people about.
(6) Track their pricing and packaging changes, sooner or later they do something their customers get tired of.
what didn't work, since someone will ask
leading with just price (whoever moves for a discount moves again for the next one), saying their name first on a call (sounds like you sell against a company instead of for a customer, let them raise it) and once announcing a fix before we built it, that one nearly cost us the advantage a small team has.
nobody can steal a happy customer, they just find one who's tired, someone once explained this to me with a girlfriend instead of a SaaS contract and he was right and single.
happy to go deeper on any of these in the comments or DM