how do you determine the right messaging in a highly competitive market where everyone has feature parity?

First, messaging shouldn't be so focused on features. It should be about the unique value you provide to your customers.

While features ARE part of that value, they're not the ONLY thing that adds value. This is particularly true in a saturated market with feature parity.

A few additional differentiators that you might consider:

• Integrations with other owned products and/or lots of integrations with industry-leading products that your prospects likely have in their tech stack already

• Ease of onboarding/roll-out/setup, particularly if you're in a space that's known to be more complex

• Benefits like ROI, time savings, accuracy, etc.

If everyone truly has feature parity, there are a few other things to consider:

1. Route to market. Is your product delivered through the channel where the customer can get better/different support? Or, is it product led where the prospect can self-drive the buying process more simply?

2. Speaking of support, perhaps yours is worth mentioning? Case studies and examples are useful to highlight specifics. Maybe your company is small, or personal, or has a great NPS or CSAT score to leverage.

3. Product philosophy. Maybe features have parity, but your approach enables something others don't - like better performance and scalability, or more flexibility into an unknown future?

4. Product architecture. Features may be at parity but if the architecture isn't, maybe there are some limits that buyers need to watch out for - UI flexibility, performance, scalability, future-proofness, and so on.

5. Partnerships. Maybe you're more tightly bundled to an ecosystem of vendors that matter to the prospect, and perhaps you integrate better than others with companies the prospect relies on.