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overhead view of business people sitting around a table showing the competition

Quick tip: Turn the tables on your competitors

When you’re up against stiff competition, how can you make your product’s unique value stand out?

One simple tactic in any problem/solution white paper: Create a table to sum up all the traditional solutions aka competitors.

You can be pretty sure everyone going through your white paper will stop at a table and scan through it.

A good table can replace—or sum up—pages of discussion. It’s easy to absorb and hard to forget.

And you can even repeat the same table:

  • first with all the alternatives or competitors and their drawbacks
  • again with your recommended solution

That way, you can cast lots of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) on all the competing solutions.

Here are two examples where I did that in real-world white papers.

 


Real-life example #1: Document management system

My client was a small business facing name-brand competitors like Microsoft SharePoint and OpenText.

But my client could outdo the big guys when it came to getting a project up and running. And they weren’t afraid to name names.

So in the traditional solutions, I summed up all the competitors in this table.

sample 1 table of competitors showing specs

Looks like it takes about 60 days to set up the platform, costs about $100K, and takes 18 months to populate the database, right?

After introducing my client’s platform, I repeated the same table with their product highlighted in yellow.

(I blocked out the client’s name since this is from a few years ago.)

sample 1 same table of competitors with sponsor highlighted in yellow

Looks like they can do a project for $50,000 less and save 4 to 11 months over the competition. Those eye-popping numbers help my client get noticed.

The final kicker: My client isn’t the source for these numbers.

A prospect did all this research independently, and then shared it with my client when they won the project. Noice.

 


Advanced tip: Use generic characters to show rankings

While the table in the first sample quotes specific times and costs, you can also use more fuzzy qualities like Quality, Reliability, Service, or User Ratings.

And even if you can’t give specifics, you can use generic characters as placeholders. This may sound weird, but I guarantee you have seen this before.

Think about how sources like Yelp sum up restaurant prices:

  • $ = low-cost, fast-food
  • $$ = medium-priced, a mom-and-pop independent
  • $$$ = expensive, a fancy place

Restaurants use the same approach on their own menus:

  • = mildly spicy
  • = medium hot
  • = hot!

Now let’s look at some tables where I used the most suggestive character of all, a question mark (?).

 


Real-life example #2: White paper for windshield replacements

Every windshield now includes built-in cameras for safety features like collision avoidance and lane keeping.

But not every repair shop knows anything about how to calibrate them properly.

If you have a broken windshield, you have three main options for replacing it:

  • do it yourself as a DIYer
  • go to an independent garage or mechanic
  • go to the OEM dealer for your model.

I used this visual table to wrap up the discussion of these three options.

table showing three traditional solutions

See how this table creates FUD by using a question mark (?) in certain cells?

I repeated the same table later, with our recommended solution added at the bottom. Notice how “likely” is far more reassuring than “not likely” or “?”

Clearly, the best solution is to go to a specialty auto glass outlet. They likely have the awareness, resources, tools, training, and experience to do a better job.

In fact, those two tables summed up almost 5 pages of text in the white paper.

The second table alone tells much of that white paper’s story.

Conclusions

Next time you’re drafting a white paper, challenge yourself to turn the tables on the competition with a head-to-head comparison.

Use specifics where you can. And if you can’t, try suggestive characters like $ or ?

This can be a powerful way to make your product emerge as the clear winner.

 


Originally published 4 February 2025. Last updated 15 February 2025.

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About Gordon Graham

Worked on 328 white papers for clients from Silicon Valley to Switzerland, on everything from choosing enterprise software to designing virtual worlds for kids, for clients from tiny startups to 3M, Google, and Verizon. Wrote White Papers for Dummies which earned 60+ 5-star ratings on Amazon. Won 16 awards from the Society for Technical Communication. Named AWAI 2019 Copywriter of the Year.

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