1 min lesson
Build vs. buy
Work through the cases in "Build vs. buy", pairing each signal with the move that fits.
Step 1 of 2
Build vs. buythe quiet competitor on every large deal
Big engineering orgs sometimes float building their own internal tooling on top of an API. Take it seriously rather than dismissing it.
Cursor ships improvements weekly. An internal team is rebuilding a product that is a moving target.
You get latest-generation models plus purpose-trained ones, negotiated and routed for you, not one API you have to babysit.
Building means owning the editor integration, retrieval, evals and upkeep forever. That is headcount pulled off the actual product.
Never trash-talk a competitor. The senior engineer probably uses one of them and reads the dig as insecurity.
If you don't know a competitor's latest release, say so. Bluffing a comparison against a product the buyer knows better than you ends the credibility instantly.
When asked "why you over Copilot," resist the feature war. Lead with the adoption story: developers chose Cursor on their own and the data shows it. Then place Copilot accurately as the incumbent pluginA Cursor marketplace package that bundles MCP servers and skills (sometimes sub-agents and hooks); one click installs all of it into your Cursor instance. Press Enter for the full definition. and let the architecture difference do the work.
Pills below are the buckets to recite if the panel pushes you to map the field fast.