Most growth plans are a list of ways to be better than the incumbent. That keeps you on its ground, where its strengths decide the outcome. The alternative is to find the one move it cannot afford to make, and put your weight exactly there.
The model came out of reading how asymmetric contests actually resolve, and it has one unusual property: it ends with the buyer rather than the competitor. That last move is where most challengers lose, and it is the one nobody writes about.
Before M1: name what you are up against
The incumbent is whatever your buyer does today instead of buying you. Sometimes that's the market leader. More often it's a spreadsheet, a team, an outsourcer, or a decision not to decide.
Three questions tell you whether the seven moves apply, and where to aim them. Answer them for one target segment, as patterns that recur across its buyers, with your recent deals as the evidence.
Does the incumbent earn money from what you replace?
YesA market leader billing per seat. An outsourcer billing per FTE.
NoA spreadsheet. The forecasting built into a CRM the customer already pays for.
Is there a role at your buyers that loses control, status or credibility if it changes?
YesThe controller whose spreadsheet makes them the only person who knows the real numbers. The executive who signed the outsourcing deal.
NoA cost spread across every budget holder and owned by nobody.
Is there a role at your buyers that gains enough from the change, and has the authority to drive it?
YesA CFO who wants the spreadsheet gone after a missed renewal, with the budget to act.
NoEveryone agrees it's a problem. Nobody has the reason or the budget to act.
Stop here.
Nobody will fight to keep things as they are, and no role gains enough to change them, so the seven moves have nothing to grip. The segment isn’t ready. Watch for the trigger that changes it, or move to a segment that is.
The third question matters whatever the first two say. If a role blocks the change, it tells you who can overrule them. If nobody blocks it, it tells you who will drive it, because free and familiar still holds: the work then moves straight to M7, a willing buyer who still has to decide. If nobody blocks and no role can drive it either, the segment isn’t ready. Any yes on the first two, and all seven moves apply; your answers also decide where three of them aim. And if your deals give different answers to the same question, you are looking at two segments, not one: split them and ask the questions for each.
The seven moves
The fortress
Map the incumbent's strength precisely, then leave it alone. Everything that follows depends on knowing exactly what you are not going to attack.
The dependency
Find what the incumbent's position now rests on. A pricing unit, a partner ecosystem, one person's knowledge. Something holds it up, and it was put in place years ago.
The fragility
Locate where that dependency is exposed. The question is not whether the incumbent is strong, but whether the thing holding it up is still safe.
The motivation
Work out who has more at stake. The side with more to lose fights harder, and that settles contests more often than the product does.
The economics
Choose ground where every defensive move costs the incumbent more than it costs you. A discount that sets a precedent across their base is not the same as your discount on one deal.
The fork
Force the choice they cannot afford to make. A real fork has no cheap answer: responding damages them, and so does standing still.
The customer
Confirm the buyer will actually move. Six moves can be right and the deal still will not close, because inertia defeats more challengers than competitors do.
Run in order. The sequence is the strategy, and the last move is the one that decides whether any of it mattered.
Why it ends at the customer
A challenger can expose the incumbent's dependency, find the fragility, and build an offer the incumbent cannot match without damaging itself. All of that is competitive strategy, and all of it can be right while the deal still does not close.
What stops it is rarely the competitor. It is a buyer with no line in the budget for what you sell, a sponsor whose personal downside is larger than their upside, and a procurement process built to compare things that look like the last thing they bought. The pieces below are each a version of that problem.
The 7M Model: before M1 · PDF, 4 pages. The three questions as a visual, made for reading on a phone.
Which of the seven is your strategy actually stuck on?
Most teams assume the problem is the competitor. More often it is the last move, and the evidence for that is already sitting in your own closed-deal data. A short call tells us both whether a 7M session fits.
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