If your business is smaller than your customers, there is a relatively good chance that you are actuallyin competition with them. Essentially, the services that you provide your customers are services that they may very well be able to provide for themselves. In other words, your sales pitch often revolves around "we can do it better than you, and for cheaper." As Dharmesh Shah writes at WebProNews:

What I mean by "competing with customers" is when the customer has the option of "doing it themselves". This is very common in niche sectors of the enterprise software industry. One example would be my first startup, where I sold pretty high-end software to very big customers. When I first started the company, my primary competition was not other startups nor was it other big software companies (liken an Oracle or an SAP). My real competition was the customers themselves. In the enterprise software business, your prospective customers more than likely have more development resources than you do. They have hundreds of programmers (perhaps even more), lots of infrastructure support and fairly large IT budget overall. The decision they are often making is not "should we buy this software from Company A or Company B", their decision is often: "Do we buy this from Company A or do we build it ourselves?".

Of course, Dharmesh Shah goes on to demonstrate how even though your client might understand this, a good sales strategy can illustrate how no conflict of interest exists. This is often where the sales pitch comes in. Consequently, he suggests that your sales force (maybe you?) employ the following strategies:

1. Accept That They Can Do It
2. The Core Competency Argument
3. The Heroes and Legends Argument
4. The Risk / Reward Argument

For more detail, of course, you should read the Complete Article