Part One: Strategy · How it is understood
A team can list a dozen ways its product is different, and every one is true. A buyer needs the one difference that matters in their situation, and a reason they can repeat.
Ask a team what makes their product different and you get a long list. Faster. Easier. More integrations. Better support. Every rival's list says the same.
A buyer cannot weigh twelve small advantages. They are trying to decide whether to change something that works, and they need a reason they can hold in their head and say to somebody else. One real difference that matters to them does that. A dozen modest ones do not.
Finding it follows an order. Start with the real alternatives, including the spreadsheet and doing nothing. List what your product has that they lack. For each item, ask what it lets a customer achieve: "built on a modern architecture" is a difference, and "quotes go out in ten minutes instead of a day" is a reason. Then ask who cares most about that result. Those people are your customers. The customer follows from the difference, and teams that start by picking a market often end up with the long list. Last, choose the category that makes that result obvious.
Whatever survives has to be something the product can prove, in a demo or a trial, and not only assert.
Consider a scheduling tool for clinics. It could say it is simple, secure and affordable, like the forty others. Or it could say the one thing only it does: when a patient cancels, it offers the slot to the next person waiting, by text, without the receptionist lifting a finger. A clinic manager with empty chairs every afternoon needs to hear nothing else. A clinic that is never full does not care, and was never the customer.
Therefore:
Find the few things your product does that the real alternatives cannot, and what each lets a customer achieve. Lead with the one that matters most to the people who care most, and prove it.
In practice. Write your differences in one column and "so that the customer can..." in the next. Cross out every row a rival, or a spreadsheet, could also claim. If nothing survives, that is the work.
Goes with. The comparison is with WHAT THEY DO TODAY (3). The difference shapes THE KIND OF THING IT IS (9), and it is what you lead with in SAY WHAT IT'S FOR (30).
The steps follow April Dunford, Obviously Awesome (2019).