We’d been hired to find ways to win more often against Google’s category leading platform. The surprising finding was that buyers were selecting Google’s analytics and reporting product without even seriously considering an alternative.

“We were kind of already hooked in with them (Google) so it made sense to..kind of piggyback off of that for the rest of our analytics.”

“We actually use their APIs like the database and the authentication, and then it was quite easy to find the [analytics] option.”

“Basically, we’re using [analytics product] because we were using Google’s [app development framework] before.”

As we began interviewing buyers, we saw the buying decision in a new way. Not in isolation, but influenced by the decisions that preceded it. Our client’s point solution was being considered only after the Google analytics product had been trialed and specific shortcomings found.

That was the bad news. It likely meant that Google had much greater market share than we’d expected.

The good news? We’d learned how to increase serious consideration of our client’s offering. We’d learned which weaknesses in Google’s platform were motivating actual buyers to sign up with us instead, and could build more persuasive positioning with it.

 

This short post is part of our series called How The Buyer Sees It. We’re revealing the buyer’s perspective on the puzzles that keep our clients up at night.