In my consulting work I am mainly working to help market challengers become better, or tackle more complex and larger contracts by applying best practice approaches. Some of my clients aspire to become leaders in their market. But often they can’t break through the psychological ceiling they put on themselves: behaving like a leader is very different from behaving like a challenger.
As a market challenger, you promote your reactiveness, your flexibility to accommodate client wishes, the ability to respond to tricky out-of-the-normal situations. You show you deliver under the most challenging circumstances.
As a market leader, you promote that you deliver the golden standard, and you promote volume gains that are acquired through standardisation of ways of working or of products.
It is extremely difficult for a challenger that has promoted adaptability and flexibility for years to change behavior and enforce standardisation on its clients. This is a difficult psychological barrier. Only by changing behavior can one become a leader in its market. It takes vision and guts to behave like a market leader when one is still small with a limited market share. But that is what it takes to eventually become a market leader.
