Most founders hear advice about finding a “common enemy” in sales and immediately think about picking a rival company. That is the easiest move, but also the weakest one. The most effective common enemies in real sales conversations are almost never competitors. They are the chaos, waste, and risk that your buyer already wrestles with every week. When you name that enemy clearly and accurately, the prospect stops seeing you as a vendor across the table and starts seeing you as someone sitting on their side, looking at the problem together.
The right enemy turns a pitch into a joint mission. The wrong enemy turns it into a debate. So the question is not “Which rival should we attack” but “What is the lived experience my buyer secretly hates, that my product actually helps remove.” When you answer that honestly, your sales story becomes much sharper.
Consider a revenue operations platform selling into mid market SaaS companies. The lazy enemy is “legacy tools” or “slow CRMs”. That language is bland, and nobody moves budget for it. The real enemy inside those teams is spreadsheet chaos. Deals live in multiple versions of the truth. Forecasts are rebuilt every Sunday night. Managers spend more time arguing about numbers than coaching their people. A strong sales conversation leans directly into that reality. A rep might say, “Most growth teams I work with are not struggling because they lack a CRM. They are losing deals because every forecast cycle turns into spreadsheet archaeology. Half your time is spent arguing with the sheet instead of fixing the pipeline. Does that feel close to what is happening on your side.” The slide in the deck does not shout that your product is better. It frames the situation as “Your enemy is spreadsheet forecasts that nobody trusts.” Once the buyer nods to that description, your platform is no longer a bundle of features. It becomes the most direct weapon they can use against the chaos that drains their energy.
The same pattern appears in security sales. Many security teams already own a stack of tools that generate more alerts than any human can process. The lazy story here is “we reduce false positives.” The sharper move is to name the shared enemy: alert fatigue and the culture of compliance theater that grows around it. An experienced enterprise seller might begin a meeting like this: “You already have more security tools than anyone can meaningfully monitor. Your team drowns in alerts, silences half of them, and then spends the board meeting discussing dashboards that everyone pretends to believe. The enemy is not the next zero day. It is the alert fatigue that guarantees nobody sees the real one in time.” When the proposal calls out “Ending the alert fatigue that guarantees you miss real threats” as the central promise, the conversation shifts. Procurement can push on price, but the security lead and the seller keep returning to the same shared concern. If you strip away too much from the configuration, you return to the world of manual triage and noise. The common enemy keeps the decision focused on risk, not just line items.
The idea works just as well for services. Imagine a leadership training firm working with fast growing tech companies. Founders usually know they have “people issues,” but that phrase is too vague to trigger action. A better enemy to name is accidental managers. These are high performers who were promoted because of their individual output and then left alone to manage teams without training, structure, or feedback skills. In a first conversation with a COO, the firm might say, “You do not have a talent problem. You have a layer of accidental managers who were promoted for output and then left to improvise leadership on live teams. The real enemy is not disengaged staff. It is the invisible management tax that shows up in churn, missed handoffs, and slack threads that never die.” Once that picture lands, the proposal line “From accidental managers to deliberate leaders in six months” feels concrete. The buyer and seller are no longer talking about workshops as a generic perk. They are aligning around the goal of eliminating accidental management as a category inside the company.
Even marketing agencies benefit from this framing. If you run a growth agency and position yourself as a vendor that sells tasks, you invite constant comparison and price pressure. A more powerful angle is to name something founders already dislike but rarely label: random acts of marketing. These are campaigns launched because someone at the top had a new idea, with no clear connection to revenue and no discipline around measurement. In a pitch to a Series B founder, you might say, “You are not short of marketing ideas. You are drowning in them. Every month you try three new plays, retire two old ones, and nobody can tell you what actually moved pipeline. The enemy I care about killing is random acts of marketing. Until that is gone, any new channel is just another experiment that will get abandoned when the next idea arrives.” You then show how your work introduces quarterly themes, fixed measurement windows, clear rules for killing or scaling campaigns, and a consistent handoff to sales. When the founder pushes for “just some quick ads” as a test, you can stay firm without sounding difficult. You are refusing to feed the enemy you both agreed on. You will only launch work that is tied to a metric, a defined test period, and a decision date. The common enemy gives you permission to protect the client from their own bad habits.
Workflow and collaboration tools face a similar opportunity. In many startups, work moves forward because a small group of “heroes” quietly holds the company together. They stay online late, know every undocumented shortcut, and fix every crisis. On the surface, this looks like commitment. Underneath, it is a fragile system. If you sell workflow tools, your enemy is not generic “inefficient communication.” Your enemy is hero culture itself, the pattern that hides broken processes behind a few exhausted top performers. A candid conversation with a founder might sound like this: “Right now your company runs on hero culture. A small group of people knows every workaround and every back channel. As long as they stay, things mostly work. The moment one burns out or leaves, everything slows down. That is the enemy I want us to eliminate together.” The product story then shows how you capture the real flow of work, make it visible, and turn it into repeatable systems that do not depend on any single person. When a buyer hesitates about the effort of rollout, you pull the discussion back to the choice they face. They can go through a few weeks of discomfort to document and redesign the workflow, or they can continue paying the hidden cost of hero culture with their best people’s time and energy.
Across all of these examples, effective common enemies share a set of traits. They are specific and visible in the buyer’s week, not abstract slogans. They are larger than any one feature, yet closely aligned with what your product or service can actually change. They name something the buyer already complains about internally, sometimes in much harsher language than you would ever put on a slide. When you pick the right enemy, the buyer feels recognised rather than pitched. They think, “That is exactly what we keep talking about behind closed doors.”
There is an important responsibility that comes with this move. A common enemy is not a convenient scapegoat that exists just to make your marketing sound dramatic. It is a problem you are implicitly promising to reduce if the buyer chooses you. That promise needs structure. You should be able to define what success looks like, how long it will take to see change, and how you will measure progress. Without that, the common enemy is just a clever phrase and your credibility will suffer.
If you are a founder or sales leader, the work starts with listening rather than copywriting. Sit in on the internal meetings your buyers hold. Pay attention to the phrases that keep repeating. Read the slack threads, internal memos, and complaints that never make it into formal documents. Write down the shorthand labels they use for their frustrations: spreadsheet chaos, alert fatigue, accidental managers, random acts of marketing, hero culture, and many others. Then choose the one that sits at the center of the value you really deliver. Align your discovery questions, your deck, your talk track, and your case studies around that central enemy.
When a prospect hears you name their real enemy with that level of clarity, most of the heavy lifting in the sale is already done. The remaining stages still matter. Price will still be discussed, procurement will still follow its process, and stakeholders will still need to be brought into alignment. The difference is that the core question has shifted. The buyer is no longer asking “Do we like this tool.” They are asking “Are we serious about finally killing this thing that is holding us back.” At that point, you are no longer an interchangeable vendor. You are a partner in a battle they already know they need to fight, and that changes everything about how the sales conversation unfolds.
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