How does a smaller company win in a crowded marketplace?
You can’t compete on budget—so you have to find another angle.
Yariv Drori answered this question at B2B Forum in 2025, and it’s a lesson every marketer should hear.
Get Yariv’s answer in the video or read the transcript below.
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If I asked you all to name an auto insurance company—off the top of your mind, without thinking too much—there are probably four companies that are all swimming inside your heads.
It’s Geico. It’s Allstate. It’s Progressive. And it’s, maybe, Liberty Mutual.
There are hundreds of auto insurance companies out there, but those companies are there because they’re constantly in front of you when you’re not in-market.
I’m using auto insurance because everyone’s familiar.
And the buying cycle of auto insurance is similar to B2B.
In your lifetime, you’re maybe going to change your auto insurance, I don’t know, five, six times?
You’re going to stay with the same company.
Their cost of acquisition is astronomical!
But they know that if they don’t sit in front of you all the time, [they] are not top-of-mind when the customer is walking into the market.
And if you’re not top of mind, your chance of winning is very, very small.
The things that influence the decisions when it comes to buying, when somebody is actually ready to buy, the number one reason is market share.
If you’re all in different industries and you all have competitors, the market share and the awareness of the customer to the vendors that have the solutions is by far the biggest influencer to whether they’re going to buy from you or not.
Just get your head around this.
And it’s very difficult to move that needle.
If you’re in a CRM business, good luck because most of the business is going to go to Salesforce even if they don’t even try.
And that’s because, “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM.”
And that’s the rule in B2B.
You’re going to make the choice the safest.
You’re going to make the choice that is like, “oh, everyone else is doing this.”
But how do you get into the mind of a person when it comes time for them to actually make a decision?
This is the one thing that it’s very difficult to measure because the window of influence is so huge.
You don’t have cookie windows that go five years.
You’re lucky if you have a week!
The best thing you can do is: look at your budget, look at where your audiences are, and persistently deliver a message that is a high-level message.
This is where most of the impact of what, if you’re even going to be on a roster is going to come from.
And that is so difficult to justify when you talk about budgets. Is all this activity…
You’re producing content. You’re putting stuff out there. You’re hoping that when somebody is searching for a solution like yours, they’re going to find it.
Yes, and they will find you when they’re finally making this research.
But if they don’t know anything about you at that point?
You have no chance of winning.
Ask yourself that question.
You’re all buying stuff, you’re not just selling it.
Think about it. Who is your CRM?
Who is the company that you choose to buy when you have to select a vendor?
You’re picking the ones that are the safe ones. You’re picking the ones that you know of when you walked into that consideration window.
So unless you invest your efforts…
And I’m just talking about how to get into the roster, let alone
get picked.
It’s just that your chances of actually converting somebody who doesn’t know about you when they get to this day-one consideration…
Really, really hard.
And with that said, your market share, if you’re in a category where your competitors are much bigger than you, and they’re dominating the market, they also have a lot more money to stay in front of those customers and drown you.
So how do you win in that game if you are the small guy?
Well, that’s classic marketing, right?
How do you get into the roster?
My favorite is audacity.
You can do things that the big guys can’t do and you can afford to be audacious about it.
If I was a pizzeria and I needed to go out there and compete with Pizza Hut and I’m new and I try to break into a market, I would try to corner a specific area in that giant spectrum of customers and win that category first.
Whatever kind of pizza that is, you have to be audacious.
Put pizza with weed on it! It’s a pizza for junkies.
Dominoes can’t afford to do this.
But the small guys can.
The small guys can afford to be audacious.
They cannot afford to have the same reach as the big guys.
So by all means, to be memorable, to somebody to actually recognize you, when they come to make a decision, you have to somehow try to narrow the category.
If you’re a CRM company, don’t compete with Salesforce on the entire spectrum.
Find people who need CRM in a very specific category. Do a CRM for healthcare only, or for trucking only, or something like this.
And now you have an advantage in a very narrow category that will allow you to win.
Published April 23, 2026
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