18 SaaS Competitor Mention Statistics (2026)

When a competitor’s name comes up on a sales call, most reps hear a threat to deflect. The data reads it as a pop quiz the buyer has already graded. By the time the name is spoken, the buyer has usually ranked the field, and outside mature markets how early the seller engages that comparison tracks with whether the deal closes.

Mystery Demo takes your competitors’ sales demos as a buyer, so it can name a rival, including you, on a competitor’s own call and record what comes back: the dismissal, the redirect, the nervous discount. The recordings and the analysis come back on one board.

The call numbers here come from the firms that record and measure sales calls, because that is where they are measured. The buyer numbers come from a 2025 study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, and each figure is footnoted to where it was published. If you only keep a handful of these, keep these:

The Ranking Is Set Before You Pick Up

6sense asked B2B buyers a narrow question: did you put your shortlist in order before you talked to anyone? The answer, and what those buyers did next, is most of the competitive game in a few numbers.

So when a buyer says a rival’s name on your call, they are reading from a list they wrote before you answered the phone. The mention is a status report on a race that is mostly run.

Your job on the call is to find out where you sit on that list, and whether there is still time to move. There is a little: 6sense found sellers shift a buying group’s preference after its selection phase about 20% of the time.²

The buyer also reaches the rep late. In 2025, buyers first contacted a seller 61% of the way through their buying journey, earlier than the roughly 69% of 2023 and 2024 but still most of the way through.²

Early Competitor Talk Wins More, Except in Mature Markets

Gong’s call data shows an enablement team what happens to a deal when competition comes up early, and its chart of close rates shows the split: 32% when competition was discussed early, 21.5% when it never was, and 20.4% when it came up late.⁵ Outside mature markets, the instinct to change the subject when a competitor comes up is backwards. An early mention means the buyer is engaged enough to be comparing seriously, and in these studies the sellers who lean into that comparison close more often.

The 32%-versus-21.5% close-rate split is the cleanest version of the lesson. A deal where the competition is discussed early outperforms a deal where it is politely avoided.

Mature markets are the exception. Gong’s 2018 study, of 24,077 competitive deals, defined them as markets with many competitors, and new markets as those with a few strong ones.⁴ In mature markets, Gong concluded, differentiation is marketing’s job before the buyer arrives, and the rep’s best moment against a rival is the technical evaluation, when the buyer is asking how near-identical products differ.⁴

Bring It Up Late and You Are Already Negotiating

In Gong’s overall data, the same mention that helps early does the opposite when it arrives late, and that is the moment a rep most needs a prepared answer.

A competitor surfacing in pricing or the final evaluation is a different animal from one raised in discovery. Our reading: late, the buyer is usually wielding the rival as a bargaining chip, and the seller is defending rather than leading.

Competitor Talk Is Multiplying

The trend line under everything here is volume, and it means reps need the prepared answer more often: deals carried 57% more competitive mentions on average than in 2022, in Gong’s data published in January 2025.⁶ Buyers are naming rivals more often, and expecting sellers to handle the comparison without blinking.

What Winning Sellers Do When Named

Sellers who win competitive deals and sellers who lose them both hear competitors come up. What separates them is what happens in the conversation next.

In the early stages of competitive deals in new markets, winning sellers covered positioning topics 58% more than the sellers who lost, in Gong’s 2018 study.⁴ In Chorus.ai’s report on 5 million calls from more than 300 companies, won deals mentioned competitors 5 to 6 times in discovery meetings, against 3 times in lost deals.⁷

Both studies point the same way: winners spent more of the early conversation on the comparison and on their own position. The numbers show the pattern, not that it causes wins. The losing pattern is fewer mentions: three in discovery.

The strongest reps we meet as a buyer put the competitor’s name on the table before the buyer does. They ask early what else we are looking at, and then spend the call on that comparison instead of their slides.

The winning pattern is to surface the comparison, name it, and spend real time on positioning while the buyer is still testing the ranking. The same moment works the other way on a competitor’s call: it is when that rival’s reps reveal their playbook: which differentiators they trust, which they fumble, where they reach for a discount.

What Your Rival Says When a Buyer Names You

Every number above comes from someone else’s calls, and none of them says what your closest rival’s rep says when a buyer puts your name next to theirs. We hear how your competitors answer when a buyer says your name.

Chief Mystery Officer

Mystery Demo

We drop a competitor’s name on purpose to see what the rep does with it. The strong ones get curious: they ask what we liked about the other tool, where it fell short, what we are comparing on. The weak ones go stiff, recite three canned differentiators, and pivot back to the slide. Sixty seconds of watching a rep react to a rival’s name tells you more than an hour of their pitch, and where they go stiff is where they know they are soft.

That page is from our public example board, where every company is invented; on a real board, it records the threats each rival showed on its own calls. Across every rival, a competitor messaging comparison sets those pitches side by side, so your reps know which line to expect.

We book the seat. Two names go on the table, yours and theirs, and we bring back the timestamp where your name comes up, the line the rep reaches for, the question they cannot answer cleanly, and the minute the price starts to move. Tell us which rival keeps surfacing in your lost deals, and we will start there.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do buyers decide between competitors before talking to sales?

94% of buyers ranked their shortlist in order of preference before contacting any seller, in 6sense’s 2025 study.¹

Does the first vendor a buyer talks to usually win?

84% of buyers who ranked their shortlist bought from the first vendor they spoke with,¹ against 57% of the few who had not ranked.²

How often do competitors get mentioned on B2B sales calls?

57% more often per deal than in 2022, on average, in Gong’s data.⁶ On won deals, competitors came up 5 to 6 times in discovery, against 3 times on lost deals.⁷

Does mentioning a competitor hurt or help the deal?

49% more likely to close when the buyer mentions a competitor early than when there is no early mention, in Gong’s 2016 data,³ while a mid-to-late mention slightly lowers the odds.³ In mature markets, Gong found competitor talk at any stage except the technical evaluation went with lower win odds.⁴

What are the close rates when a competitor comes up early versus late?

32% when competition was discussed early, 21.5% when it never was, and 20.4% when it came up late, in Gong’s chart of close rates.⁵

Do early competitor mentions help on enterprise deals?

32% higher odds of winning an enterprise deal with an early competitive mention than without any competitor discussion, in Gong’s data.⁶

What do sellers who win competitive deals do differently?

58% more positioning topics were covered by winning sellers than by losing ones in the early stages of competitive deals in new markets, in Gong’s 2018 study.⁴

Should a rep bring up the competition first?

24% higher likelihood of closing: that is what Gong’s 2018 study found for discussing competitors at the start of the cycle in new markets.⁴ In mature markets, the technical evaluation was the one stage where competitor talk helped.⁴

How much sales-call data is behind these findings?

24,077 competitive deals in Gong’s 2018 competitive-selling study,⁴ and 5 million recorded calls in Chorus.ai’s report.⁷

References

1. 6sense: B2B Buyers Are Even Less of a Blank Slate Than We Thought (2025)
2. 6sense: 2025 Buyer Experience Report (2025)
3. Gong Labs: How Competitor Mentions Influence B2B Sales (2016)
4. Gong Labs: How to Master Competitive Selling and Win Every Time (2018)
5. Gong Labs: 55 Sales Tips and Techniques for Better Outcomes (2020)
6. Gong Labs: The Best Sales Insights of 2024 (2025)
7. Speech Technology Magazine: Chorus.ai’s State of Conversation Intelligence (2019)