Your Competitor's Email Is Your Best Ad

I was on a live coaching call with a guy who runs business development for a Sizable SaaS company. Sharp dude. Comes prepared. He's using Salesloft for his outbound sequences, and he's not totally happy with it - says the language the platform pushes sounds off, sounds dated, sounds like it wasn't written by a human.

So I asked him to pull up an actual email from a Salesloft sequence. The one his reps were sending to prospects. And then I read it out loud.

First line: "Looks like you might have had a hand in performance of the indirect channel."

Then a paragraph about running rewards and loyalty programs for leading enterprises. Then a big image jammed in the middle of the email.

His response, immediately, without me saying a word: "This is trash, bro."

That's it. That's the whole positioning move.

I didn't write a comparison article. I didn't make a slide deck. I didn't say "here's why we're better." I just read a competitor's email out loud, and the prospect - in this case, a guy who was already a user and had already bought in - reached the conclusion himself. Unprompted. In real time.

That moment is worth more than a thousand words of marketing copy. And most founders and sales reps will never do it because they're too busy crafting elaborate positioning statements about themselves instead of letting their competitor's worst output speak for itself.

Why Competitive Positioning Usually Fails

Most people approach competitive positioning the same way. They build a comparison page - you've seen them - with a nice table and checkmarks showing that their product has everything the competitor has, plus three extra features. Or they write case studies about switching costs. Or they train their reps to say things like "unlike Salesloft, we..."

The problem with all of this is the same: it's your opinion. You're the one with an agenda. You're the one who benefits if the prospect agrees with you. And because the prospect knows that, they apply a discount. They hear "we're better than X" and they think, "well of course you'd say that."

The moment you make a claim, you've handed the prospect a reason to be skeptical of it.

But what happens when you don't make a claim? What happens when you just show them the competitor's actual output and let them react?

Now there's no agenda. The competitor wrote that email. You didn't editorialize it. You just read it. And the prospect's gut reaction - whatever it is - is their own conclusion, formed independently. That's ten times more powerful than anything you could have said, because they own the thought. It came from inside their head.

The Seven-Second Positioning Move

What happened on that call took maybe seven seconds.

I read one line: "Looks like you might have had a hand in performance of the indirect channel."

That's it. I didn't add commentary. I didn't say "see how confusing that is?" I just read the line, stopped, and let the silence sit there.

The guy I was coaching said it was trash before I could get to the next sentence.

That one moment did more to differentiate our approach - clear, human, direct email copy - than any competitive analysis could. Because he felt it. He experienced the bad email. He didn't read about it in a blog post. He heard it out loud and reacted viscerally.

This is the part most people miss. The reading out loud is not incidental. It's the mechanism. When you read something out loud, you force engagement. You force the listener to process every word in sequence, at your pace. There's nowhere to skim, no way to mentally check out. The badness of a bad sentence becomes impossible to overlook.

Try it with your own emails sometime. Grab your last cold email and read it out loud to yourself. Notice which sentences make you wince. Those are the sentences your prospects are wincing at when they read them silently. The difference is that when they wince, they close the tab. When you read it out loud together, you get to have a conversation about it.

Salesloft Is at Hundreds of Millions in ARR

Here's the part of this story that I keep thinking about.

Salesloft is not some scrappy startup with bad marketing. They're a massive company. They've been a leader in the Forrester Wave for sales engagement, they have thousands of enterprise customers, they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars. They're doing somewhere in the range of hundreds of millions in annual recurring revenue.

And their email templates - the actual sequences their platform pushes out to reps - open with: "Looks like you might have had a hand in performance of the indirect channel."

Nobody knows what that means. It sounds like a sentence generated by a robot that read too many LinkedIn bios. It's so far inside its own jargon that it forgot to communicate with an actual human being.

But this is exactly why the move works: large companies get sloppy. Their templates get written by committee. They go through twelve rounds of brand approval. The edge gets sanded off. What's left is technically inoffensive but completely forgettable - or in this case, actively confusing.

Your competitor's weakness isn't usually their pricing or their features. It's their copy. It's the actual language they're sending to your shared prospects, day after day, in automated sequences where nobody checked whether it sounds like something a human being would actually say.

That's your opening. And the way to use it isn't to write a white paper about it. It's to find the email, read it out loud, and shut up.

How to Run This Play

This is not complicated. It's one of the most executable competitive tactics I know, and almost nobody does it.

Step one: Get the email. Sign up for your competitor's product, or their newsletter, or their free trial. Go through their onboarding sequence. Screenshot the cold emails their reps send you when you fill out a demo form. Use LinkedIn to find someone on their sales team and see what kind of outreach they send. You can also find their outreach at scale - if you know who their reps are targeting, tools like ScraperCity's B2B database can help you pull lists of companies in your space and cross-reference the kind of messaging patterns that emerge in your market.

However you get it - get it. You want the real thing. A real subject line, a real opening line, a real CTA. Not their marketing website. Not their G2 reviews. The actual email their sales team sends.

Step two: Don't editorialize. This is where most people screw it up. They want to add context. They want to say "see, notice how generic this is?" before they even read it. Don't. Read the email straight, without commentary. Let the words land on their own. If the email is bad - and most are - the prospect will tell you. You don't need to push them toward the conclusion.

Step three: Ask one question. After you read it, ask: "What do you make of that?" Or just: "Yeah?" Something that gives them room to react without leading them anywhere. The silence is the work. The silence is where they form the opinion that's going to stick with them long after your call is over.

Step four: Only then, show them yours. Once they've had a reaction - and they will - you can pull up your own email. Read yours out loud too. Now the contrast is built into the experience. They're not comparing two text blocks on a feature comparison page. They're comparing two emotional experiences they just had, back to back. That's not intellectual. That's visceral. Visceral wins.

This Works in Sales Calls, Demos, and Cold Email Itself

The play I described above is most powerful in a live conversation - a demo, a discovery call, a coaching session. But the underlying principle applies everywhere.

In a cold email, you can reference the language your prospects are already seeing from your competitors. Not by quoting it verbatim, but by naming the pattern. Something like: "Every vendor in this space is sending you some version of 'I'd love to connect and learn more about your goals.' We're not doing that. Here's what we're actually doing instead: [one specific thing]." You've just made them picture the generic email - which they've definitely received - and then immediately contrasted it with your approach. Same principle. Different format.

In a demo, you can literally open with the competitor's interface and show one workflow that's clunky. Don't spend ten minutes on it. Show it, ask what they think, move on. The point isn't to trash-talk your competitor. The point is to let the prospect have a direct sensory experience with the problem your product solves.

The format changes. The mechanism is the same: stop describing why you're different. Show the thing that proves it and let them react.

The Bigger Lesson Here

I've been doing outbound sales since before it was a category. I've written thousands of cold emails - for my own companies, for clients, for the people I coach. I've sent campaigns for agencies, SaaS companies, recruiting firms, consultants. I wrote the book on it, literally - The Cold Email Manifesto.

And one thing I've learned, over and over, is that the most powerful persuasion is the kind the prospect generates themselves.

If I tell you our cold email approach is better than what you're doing now, you have every reason to doubt me. I'm selling something. Of course I'd say that.

But if you read your current approach out loud and you wince - that's data from inside your own head. That's not something I planted. That's something I revealed. And what gets revealed in that moment is worth more than any argument I could make.

That's why "this is trash, bro" - a guy reacting to his own tool's email in real time - is a more powerful competitive statement than any comparison page I could build. I didn't say it. He did. Because the email earned the reaction.

Your competitor's worst output is your best ad. Go find it. Read it out loud. Shut up. Let it work.

What This Means for Your Outbound System

If you're running cold outreach, there are a few places this principle should immediately change what you do.

Audit your own emails first. Before you use this move on a competitor, use it on yourself. Take your current sequence and read every email out loud, slowly, to another person. Notice where they look confused. Notice where they glaze over. Those are your problem sentences. Fix those before you do anything else. I have a set of cold email scripts you can benchmark against - use them to see how your current copy stacks up.

Know who your shared prospects are. The competitive read-aloud move only works if you know your prospect is also being contacted by your competitor. If you're going after the same lists, you need to know what's already hitting their inbox. Tools like ScraperCity's Apollo scraper or email finder can help you build precise lists of the right contacts so you're not spraying into the void. The more specific your list, the more likely you're hitting someone who is also being targeted by your competitor's automated sequences - and who will immediately recognize the contrast.

Build the contrast into your opening line. You don't always get a live call. Sometimes you're in email-only mode. In that case, the way to use this principle is to reference the pattern without quoting directly. Name the style of email they're getting - the corporate fluff, the vague "love to connect" language, the six-paragraph pitch - and then immediately do something different. Don't describe what you're going to do. Just do it. The contrast lands without you having to explain it.

Use it in discovery, not just demos. If you're running discovery calls, you're already trying to understand your prospect's current situation. Ask them what outreach they're getting from other vendors. Ask what their inbox looks like. Get them talking about the bad emails they're ignoring. Then, when you show them yours, the contrast is fresh in their mind. Check out the Discovery Call Framework if you want a structure for how to run those conversations without turning them into a pitch fest.

One More Thing About That Email

After the guy I was coaching said what he said about the email, I took a quick look at it and gave him my honest read: the first sentence was the problem, and the big image embedded in the middle wasn't helping either. Cut those two things, and the email is actually decent. The bones were there. The instincts weren't wrong. But those two elements were tanking it.

That's the other thing about reading competitor emails out loud - you start to develop a calibrated eye for what's wrong and what's fixable. Most bad emails aren't bad because of some fundamental strategic failure. They're bad because of one or two specific lines that should've been cut. A weak opening. A generic value prop. An image that breaks the conversational feel.

You start to see those patterns everywhere once you train yourself to read emails out loud and pay attention to where the energy drops. And once you see it in your competitor's emails, you'll never stop seeing it in your own.

That's the skill. Not writing perfect emails from scratch. Hearing the moment something goes wrong and cutting it before it hits a prospect's inbox.

Start there. Find your competitor's worst email. Read it out loud. Listen to the reaction. Then build outward from that.

If you want to go deeper on building the kind of outbound system where your emails are the obvious best thing hitting your prospect's inbox - not just better than the generic stuff, but actually sharp and specific - take a look at the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint or come work with us directly at Galadon Gold. That's where we get into the mechanics of this stuff with real people, in real time - exactly like the call that produced this post.