Why ‘We’re Different Because of Our People’ Doesn’t Differentiate You — And What Actually Does
HP DemandSignals™ | Highly Persuasive
In 2018, a global management consultancy commissioned independent research into how procurement teams perceived the major firms in their competitive set.
Their findings made internal waves quickly.
When procurement directors were asked to describe what made each firm different, they could articulate clear distinctions for two of the five firms assessed.
For the other three, the most common response was a variation of the same phrase: “Their people are excellent.”
Excellent people. A claim every firm could make. A claim every firm did make. A claim that, repeated by every competitor, conveyed precisely nothing about any of them.
The research also found that the two firms that were clearly differentiated in procurement’s mind commanded average fees 22% higher than the three that weren’t.
The fee premium didn’t correlate with client satisfaction scores, which were broadly similar across all five. It correlated with whether the buyer could name a specific reason to choose one firm over another before the engagement began.
This finding plays out across almost every B2B professional services category. “Our people” is the default differentiator — deployed, in near-identical language, by engineering consultancies, accounting firms, logistics providers, strategy advisories, and technology implementers around the world. It feels true because it usually is true. And it achieves nothing commercially, because it is equally true of every credible competitor.
Why People Differentiators Don’t Differentiate
The honest reason companies reach for people as their differentiator is that people are the thing they’re most proud of and most confident about. The firm has excellent practitioners. The relationships are genuine. The work quality is high. These things are real and they matter.
The problem is structural, not factual. Differentiation requires asymmetry — a claim that is true of you and demonstrably less true of your competitors. “Our people are excellent” is symmetrical. Every serious competitor believes it equally, and buyers have no reliable external mechanism to evaluate which firm’s people are actually more excellent before the engagement begins. The claim floats unanchored, producing a vague sense of competence without a reason to choose.
Consider the contrast. Hilti’s market repositioning in the construction sector didn’t involve any change to the quality of its people. It changed the framing of what its people delivered — from tool suppliers to fleet management partners. The mechanism behind their pricing power wasn’t the quality of their workforce. It was the specific territory that workforce occupied in the buyer’s mind. Same people. Different commercial architecture. Dramatically different fee conversations.
The empty differentiator problem describes exactly this dynamic: claims that are accurate in themselves but carry no differentiating information because every competitor can make an equivalent claim with equivalent credibility. It’s also why the B2B brand strategy process that produces real differentiation starts from competitive audit, not self-description.
What Buyers Actually Use to Choose Between Similar Companies
When buyers are selecting between companies that all appear broadly competent — the standard competitive shortlist — the differentiating information they use is rarely what suppliers think it is. CEB’s research into enterprise purchasing found three factors that most consistently drove final selection when capability was held roughly constant:
Insight that changed the buyer’s view of their own situation. Companies that demonstrated they understood the buyer’s problem better than the buyer did — that could name a dimension of the situation the buyer hadn’t fully articulated — created a qualitatively different kind of credibility. Not “we have excellent people who have done this before” but “we’ve noticed that companies in your position typically have this specific secondary problem that they don’t initially identify, and here’s what it costs them.” That level of diagnostic precision implies deep expertise in ways that credential lists cannot.
Proof specific to the buyer’s fear. As discussed in how buyers evaluate risk in high-stakes decisions, the primary concern in complex procurement is often not capability but risk — specifically, the risk of having made a defensible recommendation that produces a disappointing result. Proof that speaks to that specific risk — evidence of how the company performed when something went wrong, or how they managed an engagement that had structural similarities to the buyer’s situation — is more persuasive than proof of overall quality.
A working method that felt different. Companies that could describe not just what they deliver but specifically how they approach the problem — in enough structural detail that the buyer could envision the engagement — created a sense of differentiation even when the underlying method was not dramatically different from competitors’. The ability to describe the method clearly implies a level of operational rigour that vague competence claims don’t.
None of these factors require better people. They require better articulation of what those people bring, applied to the specific concern the buyer is managing.
‘Our people are excellent’ is a symmetric claim — every credible competitor believes it and every buyer hears it. Differentiation requires an asymmetric claim: something that is true of you and less true of others, expressed in language that is commercially meaningful to the buyer.
The Brand Gravity Momentum Session™ works through the commercial architecture of your differentiation — identifying what is genuinely asymmetric about your company’s position and building the language and proof structure that makes that asymmetry visible before the evaluation begins.
The Four Sources of Genuine Asymmetric Differentiation
If people quality is symmetric, what produces the asymmetry that genuine differentiation requires? In most B2B professional services contexts, there are four sources worth examining.
Source 1: Proprietary Experience in a Specific Situation
Generic sector experience is symmetric. Specific situational experience is not.
An accounting firm that has advised “over 200 manufacturing clients” carries a symmetric claim — so have most of its competitors of comparable size. An accounting firm that has specifically worked with precision manufacturers during their first export certification for EU regulatory compliance has situational experience that is demonstrably scarcer. The pool of comparable firms is smaller. The buyer’s assessment of risk decreases. The fee conversation changes.
The asymmetry comes from specificity, not scale. The question to ask is: in which specific situation — defined as narrowly and precisely as possible — have we accumulated more experience than any directly comparable competitor? That’s the experience claim worth making.
Source 2: A Named and Defendable Point of View
Companies that have developed a specific, named perspective on the problems they solve — something they’ve articulated, published, and built evidence around — carry a form of intellectual capital that people quality doesn’t produce. The perspective can be argued against, which is what makes it meaningful. An opinion that nobody would dispute carries no information. A perspective that requires evidence and reasoning to defend signals that the company has done the thinking that most competitors haven’t.
Building genuine thought leadership authority is the mechanism through which named perspectives become commercial assets. The firms that most consistently command premium fees in professional services — in law, in management consulting, in engineering advisory — have typically named something: a dynamic, a framework, a diagnostic. That naming is asymmetric in the way that people quality never is. If you want to diagnose where your current brand signals fall short of that standard, the Brand Friction Report is a practical starting point.
Source 3: A Client Profile That Is Specific Enough to Be Exclusive
Companies that can precisely describe the type of client they work best with carry an implicit selectivity signal that people quality claims do not. “We work with companies like yours” is symmetric. “We work specifically with mid-size B2B industrial companies that are entering Western markets for the first time, where the gap between technical capability and commercial credibility is creating pricing friction” is not symmetric — the claim defines a territory narrow enough that very few competitors can make it credibly.
The specificity premium works through exactly this mechanism. Narrow client profile specificity reduces the comparison set, increases perceived depth of relevant experience, and changes the buyer’s question from “who’s cheapest” to “who has done exactly this before.”
Source 4: A Delivery Architecture That Is Visibly Structured
Companies that can describe their working method with genuine structural precision — not just “we follow a four-phase process” but a description specific enough that the buyer can envision what phase two looks like and why it precedes phase three — carry a differentiation signal through methodology transparency. Most companies describe their process vaguely because they haven’t structured it precisely enough to describe it clearly. Companies that have done that structural work earn an inference of rigour that translates into pricing power.
This is the professional services equivalent of what Ramboll, the engineering consultancy, demonstrates through its technical publications and methodology documentation: a visible architecture of thinking that implies the precision of the work the buyer can’t yet evaluate.
The Differentiator Stress Test
This diagnostic determines whether your current differentiation claim is genuinely asymmetric or symmetrically shared with competitors. It takes about 30 minutes and works best with honest input from someone outside your leadership team.
Step 1: The competitor substitution test. Write your differentiation claim in a single sentence. Now substitute the name of your three closest competitors into the same sentence. If the claim remains true — if a competitor could credibly say the same thing with the same evidence level — the claim is symmetric and not doing commercial work.
Step 2: The so-what test. Read your differentiation claim aloud to a buyer-proxy — someone who plays the role of a procurement director seeing your company for the first time. Ask them: “Given this, why would you choose us over an equally reputable alternative?”
If they can’t answer without asking you for more specificity, the claim isn’t providing enough asymmetric information to anchor a decision.
Step 3: The evidence test. Identify the best single piece of evidence you have for your differentiation claim. Is it specific enough to be verifiable? Does it demonstrate the specific claim, or does it demonstrate general competence that any competitor might also evidence?
A claim that cannot be supported by specific, verifiable evidence is a claim that procurement’s risk function will discount — regardless of how confidently it’s presented.
Step 4: The transmission test. Ask three people in client-facing roles in your company to describe what makes you different, independently and without discussion. If the three descriptions are substantially inconsistent, the differentiation isn’t yet clear enough internally to be delivered consistently externally. Messaging alignment is a prerequisite for differentiation to work commercially.
Scoring interpretation: If all four tests produce satisfying answers: your differentiation is genuinely asymmetric and commercially articulated. The opportunity is in distribution — ensuring the right buyers encounter it. If any test fails: that failure is the gap. The investment required is in the specificity of the claim, not in finding better language for a claim that isn’t yet specific enough to differentiate.
The Field Test
Next time you or a colleague pitches your company to a new prospect, conduct this experiment immediately after: ask the prospect, without prompting, what they found most distinctive about your company in the conversation.
If they describe your people — their expertise, their manner, their experience — you’ve confirmed the impression. You’re credible. Likeable, even. But you haven’t differentiated.
If they describe a specific way of thinking about the problem, a specific type of situation you know better than anyone, or a specific concern you addressed that they hadn’t expected — you have the seed of genuine differentiation. Something that could, properly articulated and consistently delivered, become the reason buyers choose you before the evaluation formally begins.
That’s the distance between “our people are excellent” and a commercial position that earns a premium.
Symmetric claims create shortlists. Asymmetric claims create preferences. The commercial difference between those two outcomes — in pricing, in close rate, in cycle length — is what genuine differentiation produces. Most companies haven’t found the claim yet, not because it doesn’t exist, but because they haven’t been specific enough to find it.
The Brand Gravity Momentum Session™ works through the differentiation architecture systematically — identifying what is genuinely asymmetric about your company’s experience, perspective, and approach, and building the commercial language that makes it legible to buyers before they’ve asked the question.
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