Chapter 3: The Wedge Strategy

If you engage a fortress head-on, you will lose. The Incumbent has more resources, deeper trenches, and more supplies than you.

If you try to “Lift and Shift” the entire enterprise in one go, you are asking the customer to bet their career on a coin flip. They won’t do it.

The only way to win is the Wedge.

A wedge is a specific, high-value, low-friction entry point. It is sharp enough to pierce the perimeter but small enough to bypass the “immune system” of the Procurement office.

The Innovation Wedge

In the past, we used “price wedges” (we are 20% cheaper). This led to a race to the bottom. Today, we use Innovation Wedges.

You find a problem the Incumbent cannot solve because of their technical debt.

• The Incumbent is great at storing data, but terrible at vector search for AI. That is your wedge.
• The Incumbent has a great firewall, but they can’t secure ephemeral containers. That is your wedge.
• The Incumbent owns the ERP, but their mobile interface is unusable for field workers. That is your wedge.

You do not sell “The Platform.” You sell “The Fix.”

The “Why Now?” Trigger

A Wedge without a Time-Based Trigger is just a suggestion. To drive urgency, search for a recent event that makes the status quo unbearable:

• The Outage: A high-visibility failure of the Incumbent.
• The Bill Shock: A sudden spike in cloud or licensing costs.
• The Audit Failure: A security or compliance gap that was just exposed.

Without a trigger, you are a “nice to have.” With a trigger, you are the “Emergency Exit.”

Reframing: Toil Reclamation

When you pitch the Wedge, do not talk about “features.” Talk about Toil Reclamation.

The Incumbent burns human cycles. It forces developers to manage servers, it forces analysts to clean data manually, it forces security teams to write custom scripts. Your Wedge doesn’t just “do it better”; it gives them their engineers back.

We call this Toil Reclamation.

You can calculate this with a simple Legacy Tax Formula: Reclaimable Velocity = (Total Engineers) × (% Time spent on Maintenance)

“Mr. CIO, you have twenty engineers maintaining this legacy database. That is a high-interest technical debt payment. Each month, it steals 45% of your velocity. If we move just this one workload to our managed service, you reclaim those thousand hours per month for feature delivery.”

You are not selling software. You are selling Engineering Velocity.

The Challenger Choreography

How do you deliver this pitch? We use a six-step choreography designed to build tension.

1. The Context: Prove you know them. “I see you just acquired Competitor X and are likely struggling to merge their data stack.” (See Chapter 2).
2. The Reframe: Introduce the hidden enemy. “The problem isn’t that you need a new database. The problem is that your current database is forcing your best engineers to do janitorial work.”
3. Rational Drowning: Show the cost. “Our data shows that 45% of engineering time in organizations like yours is spent on maintenance, not innovation.”
4. Emotional Impact: Make it personal. “That’s why Sathyan and his team are spending their weekends on manual data cleaning instead of launching the mobile app.”
5. A New Way: The specific solution. “What if you could offload that maintenance without ripping out the core?”
6. The Solution: Your Wedge.

The “Trojan Horse” Effect

Once the Wedge is in, the conversation changes. You are now an approved vendor. You have gone through security review. You might even have a Master Services Agreement (MSA). The Incumbent is still the “primary” provider, but you are inside the walls.

From here, you don’t sell. You catalyze. You make your Wedge so successful, so fast, and so easy to use that other teams start asking for it. “Hey, the mobile team just deployed that new feature in two weeks. How did they do that?” “Oh, they used the new Wedge for the backend.”

This is how displacement happens. Not with a bang, but with a thousand developers choosing the path of least resistance.