A technique from Dunford's Five-Part Positioning Framework for identifying what a customer would do without your product, by separating status-quo alternatives (habits, spreadsheets, legacy manual processes, incumbent tools people default to) from the actual shortlist of competitors a buyer is comparing you against.
Practically: ask customers and sales directly, 'if we didn't exist, what would you do?' The answer usually splits into two buckets — keep doing what we already do (status quo) or evaluate one of N named alternatives (shortlist). Position against whichever the customer is actually weighing, not every theoretical competitor that could exist.
This directly informs How Far Ahead to Position (Current vs. Anticipated Competitors): since the shortlist is defined by what customers compare you to today, positioning should track the real, current shortlist rather than anticipated future entrants (e.g., don't message against vibe-coding tools until customers are actually putting them on the shortlist).
Naming a competitor or alternative the customer hasn't yet considered is a tactical mistake, not just a matter of confidence — it can prompt the buyer to go research that alternative and stall the deal: "Whoa, whoa, vibe coding? I wasn't even looking at that. Stop. Oh, I got to go research that." Map alternatives to the customer's actual, current shortlist rather than every capability adjacent to the deal; compare against Internal Competitor-Definition Divergence Across Functions, where sales' short-list view is itself shown to be an incomplete picture of the competitive field.