You Sold the Deal. You Did Not Replace the Incumbent.

The Mistake

You close a customer who already uses a competitor. You count the win, move the logo onto your website, and go back to prospecting.

Six months later the competitor is still installed. Your product is running alongside it on a narrow use case, the renewal you were supposed to kill got signed again, and the customer is not sure what they bought from you.

The mistake is treating the signature as the finish line when you sell against an incumbent. The contract is the start of the work, not the end of it.

Shahar Azulay made it repeatedly at groundcover. "We actually failed a few times at the beginning," he says, "selling the product but not being able to rip out the incumbent."

Why Founders Make It

The metrics reward the close. Bookings land in the month you sign. Displacement lands whenever the customer finds engineering time, which may be two quarters later, and nothing in your reporting is watching it.

You assume shared intent. Shahar's word for this is optimistic: they assumed the incumbent was gone without ever asking. The customer said yes, so you assume they meant the same thing you did.

You do not know you are in a displacement yet. groundcover's early deals were not sold as replacements at all. Customers bought a few specific use cases the eBPF sensor could see that their existing tooling could not. Nobody in those rooms, on either side, was describing it as ripping out Datadog.

How groundcover Learned It

The customers moved first. In 2023, a few early customers in Tel Aviv bought the product and announced they were replacing Datadog with it.

That was not the plan. Customers who had just bought now wanted to know how to get off Datadog. "We suddenly understood that there's a post-sale motion," Shahar says.

Then came the pressure. The customers, in his words, "believe something you haven't believed yet." They expected Datadog to be switched off within two or three months.

Some of those migrations did not land. The failures are what built the process: those scars "were eventually part of how we shape the post-sale motion."

The company changed three things off the back of it: how account executives are compensated, how migration is tracked, and how the sales method is tuned for displacement specifically.

By the beginning of 2026, groundcover was running deliberate pricing strategies to get customers comfortable committing three to six months before their renewal date.

The Fix (If You're Making It Now)

1. Ask the question explicitly before you sign. Not "are you excited", but: what is still running after this goes live, and on what date does it get turned off?
2. Name the renewal date in the deal. Displacement is a race against a contract you did not sign. If you do not know the date, you are not running a displacement, you are running an add-on.
3. Pay for the removal, not the signature. If your AE's commission fully vests at close, nobody owns the part that decides whether the account renews.

The Signal to Watch

Track one number weekly: the percentage of closed displacement accounts where the incumbent is verifiably switched off.

If you cannot answer it for a given account, you do not have a displacement. You have a pilot that a competitor is still being paid for.