Have We Become Too Good at Competing to Innovate?

On why B2B technology is starting to look, sound and behave the same, and what our obsession with short-term growth might have to do with it.

If you’re in B2B marketing, you’ve probably seen the LinkedIn posts, debates and memes about how every SaaS website looks the same. Swap the logos, change a few colours, and half the industry could apparently be selling the same product.

It’s become a running joke, although I’m beginning to think there’s a bigger problem behind it.

Rory Woodbridge recently questioned whether marketing’s obsession with channel performance and measurable returns has distracted us from building brands and creating meaningful customer value. Anthony Pierri, meanwhile, has repeatedly highlighted how B2B software companies struggle to explain what makes their products different.

Both raise important questions about marketing. But what if the similarity we’re seeing in B2B marketing is partly a reflection of how we’ve started building and growing technology businesses?

Look beyond the websites and you’ll notice similarities in the products, customers and growth strategies. We’re studying the same competitors, responding to similar feature requests and pursuing customers who already have budgets allocated to existing solutions.

We’ve become exceptionally good at identifying where money is being spent and calculating how much of it we might capture. But are we spending the same amount of time understanding the problems nobody has adequately solved?

Are we letting competitors define the problems we solve?

Take the conversation intelligence market. Gong helped popularise a way for sales organisations to understand customer conversations, and today several companies compete with overlapping capabilities.

If you were building another product in this space, you’d naturally study Gong’s customers, identify frustrations and look for opportunities to offer something better.

But ask a Gong customer what Gong doesn’t do well, and you’ll probably hear about pricing, integrations or missing features. Useful insights, certainly, but they’re shaped by the product the customer already knows.

What if you started with the underlying problem instead?

Perhaps sales teams struggle to retain customer knowledge, repeat mistakes or spend too much time preparing for conversations. You might discover opportunities to improve knowledge sharing or sales preparation without making call recording central to the solution.

You might still conclude that conversation intelligence is the best approach. But at least you’d have explored the problem without assuming the existing product category has already defined the answer.

When we define an opportunity through a competitor’s product, we risk competing within the boundaries of someone else’s thinking.

When did becoming an alternative become the ambition?

A simpler Salesforce. A more affordable Adobe. A better Jira. An AI-powered version of something that already exists.

There’s genuine value in making existing technology better, cheaper or more accessible. But I wonder whether we’ve become so comfortable improving what’s already there that we’re spending less time questioning what else could exist.

Even in AI, where remarkable innovation is happening, we’re seeing one company’s differentiator quickly become another company’s roadmap priority.

Competition has always involved imitation and improvement. But when everyone studies the same competitors, pursues the same customers and responds to similar feature gaps, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when products start resembling one another.

Are we measuring more and questioning less?

I suspect much of this comes down to how we evaluate investment.

Imagine two proposals in a leadership meeting.

One is a feature that could help sales close £500,000 in competitive deals over the next two quarters. The other is research into an underserved customer group that might reveal an entirely new market opportunity.

The first has named accounts and a reasonably predictable return. The second has potential, but no reliable revenue forecast.

Which gets funded?

In 2020, McKinsey and FCLTGlobal surveyed 481 executives on corporate short-termism. Some 70% said they believed their CEO would sacrifice long-term growth to meet short-term financial goals.

It’s easy to see how this plays out in technology businesses. We approve the competitive feature, postpone customer research and deprioritise the unfamiliar market.

Each decision makes commercial sense. But repeat them over several quarters, and we become very good at responding to the market we already know while investing less in discovering what might come next.

Marketing is caught in the same pattern.

We’ve worked hard to become commercially accountable, measured on revenue rather than activity. And rightly so. But have we become so obsessed with demonstrating efficiency that we’re losing sight of what else marketing should help a business understand?

Pipeline, conversion rates, acquisition costs, campaign ROI. We can measure almost everything, yet more data doesn’t necessarily mean better understanding.

Knowing that a campaign converted at 3% tells us very little about why the other 97% didn’t respond, or whether we’re even solving a problem they care about.

And when every investment needs a measurable return, targeting customers who already buy competing products becomes easier to justify than researching people who don’t currently buy anything in our category.

That research might uncover a substantial opportunity, or simply challenge assumptions we were rather comfortable believing.

How do you put that into a quarterly ROI calculation?

We risk becoming very efficient at executing a strategy without spending enough time questioning whether it’s the right one.

And product marketing isn’t exempt

As PMMs, we spend considerable time on competitive intelligence, battlecards, positioning and helping sales explain why customers should choose us.

I’ve done plenty of it myself. It’s important work.

But if our research focuses primarily on competitors’ customers, we’re understanding purchase decisions within an existing category. If competitive intelligence becomes a list of features to match, we’re allowing competitors to influence our roadmap.

And if positioning happens after those decisions have been made, we’re left trying to differentiate products that weren’t necessarily built around a distinctive understanding of the market.

Which brings us back to those identical SaaS websites.

Perhaps some of the similarity comes from unimaginative copy and design. But perhaps we’re also being asked to differentiate products that became similar long before marketing got involved.

And I don’t think another positioning workshop is going to solve that.

So where do we go from here?

I’m not suggesting we abandon commercial accountability or stop learning from competitors. Businesses need to make money, and improving existing products can create enormous customer value.

But we need to make room for two kinds of growth: capturing opportunities we already understand and discovering opportunities we haven’t yet recognised.

For PMMs, there’s a practical place to start. The next time we bring competitive intelligence or customer research into a product strategy discussion, we should also bring evidence of a customer problem that isn’t adequately addressed by the existing category.

And ask a simple question: If we weren’t looking at our competitors’ products, would we still choose to build this?

That won’t replace the need for commercial evidence or a credible business case. But it might help us challenge a few assumptions before they become roadmap decisions.

Ultimately, leadership has to make room for that thinking. Not every valuable investment can be justified against next quarter’s revenue, and not every promising market will come with an established category and a list of competitors to benchmark against.

We’ve become exceptionally good at competing for existing demand. I think we need to become equally serious about understanding where new demand might come from.

Because if we keep building products around the same competitors, customers and commercial opportunities, we shouldn’t be surprised when we eventually run out of meaningful ways to differentiate them.

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