How to Break Out of the Commodity Conversation
DemandSignals™ | Highly Persuasive
Has this every happened to you?
You’ve presented your capabilities. The prospect has nodded along — genuinely interested, no visible objections. You feel the meeting going well. And then comes the turn: “That all sounds great. What do you charge for something like this?”
The fee conversation arrives before the value has been established. The prospect compares your number to a competitor’s number. You rightly defend the gap. They push back.
You’re left with an uncomfortable choice. You either hold the position and risk the deal, or you concede something to keep the conversation moving. The engagement, if it closes, closes at the wrong price — and the next meeting with the next prospect follows the same script.
This is the commodity conversation, and it oddly enough, it is not a pricing issue. The price comparison is the symptom, yes, but the cause is upstream — in how your firm has positioned itself before that meeting started, and in the frame the prospect arrived with before you said a word.
Why the Commodity Conversation Starts Before the Meeting
By the time a buyer asks “what do you charge?”, their first impressions of your brand have already formed.
They’ve looked at your website, scanned your case material, possibly encountered your name in a list of potential suppliers — and formed an initial category association. That association determines the reference point against which your fee is evaluated.
If the association is “specialist who addresses this specific problem” the reference point is the value of solving that problem.
If the association is “firm that does this type of work” the reference point is what other firms doing this type of work charge.
The second frame is the commodity frame — and once a buyer is inside it, no amount of proposal quality, relationship warmth, or fee justification fully extracts them from it. You are now competing on price in a comparison the buyer designed without you.
The firms that never experience the commodity conversation didn’t get lucky.
They built a category association specific enough that the buyer’s internal price reference formed at the right level before the first conversation. The frame was set in the brand positioning — in the specificity of the case material, in the way the website described the problem rather than the service, in the intellectual presence that told the buyer this firm sees something that others don’t. By the time the fee conversation arrived, the buyer wasn’t comparing a price. They were evaluating an investment.
Breaking out of the commodity conversation requires changing the frame before the meeting, not during it. The Brand Gravity Momentum Session™ identifies the specific signals in your current positioning that are inviting commodity comparison — and the adjustments that would reorient the buyer’s reference point before any fee conversation begins.
The Three Mechanisms That Create Commodity Comparison
Category language that mirrors the competition. When your website, your proposals, and your introductory language describe what you do using the same terms your competitors use, the buyer’s mental model places you in the same category as those competitors. Same category, same evaluation criteria. Same evaluation criteria, same fee benchmark. The language of “we provide [service category] to [industry]” is the most common entry point into commodity comparison — because it is precisely how every other firm in the service category also describes themselves. The language that escapes the commodity frame describes the specific problem being solved and the specific outcome achieved, not the category of service being provided.
Proof indexed to service breadth rather than problem depth. Case material that covers many different types of work across many different sectors signals versatility. In competitive evaluation, versatility reads as generalism. Generalists compete on price. A case portfolio that shows depth in a specific problem domain — multiple engagements, varying contexts, consistent methodology, quantified outcomes — signals specialisation. Specialists compete on specificity. The commercial consequence of this distinction is the gap between a conversation about price and a conversation about fit.
The early fee reveal. As explored in the anchoring problem in B2B fee negotiations, the first number in a fee conversation disproportionately shapes every number that follows. Firms that respond to “what does something like this cost?” with a range — however qualified — have handed the anchor to the buyer. The lower end of that range becomes the ceiling of the negotiation, and the ceiling was set before the value frame had any chance to establish itself. The fee answer that escapes the commodity frame is not a number — it’s a reframe of the question: “that depends on what outcome we’re solving for — let me understand that first, and then I can give you a number that means something.”
The Commodity Conversation Diagnostic
Pull your last five engagements where price was a significant discussion point. Work through this framework for each one.
Step 1: When did the fee conversation start?
Before you had established the commercial problem and its cost → early anchor, commodity frame likely. After you had quantified the cost of the problem → value frame likely established before fee.
Step 2: What was the buyer comparing your fee against?
A competitor’s quote → commodity frame, category-level comparison. The cost of the problem you were solving → value frame, problem-level comparison. An internal budget estimate → depends on how that estimate formed — see Step 3.
Step 3: What reference point was the buyer using?
Ask yourself: before this meeting, what did the buyer probably know about what this type of work costs? Where did that knowledge come from — your positioning, a competitor’s pricing, industry norms, their previous experience? The source of the reference point tells you where in the sales process the commodity frame entered.
Interpreting results:
Most fee conversations start before the value frame is established: The positioning is not doing pre-meeting anchor work. Buyers are arriving with a reference point formed from category comparison rather than problem-level evaluation. The fix is upstream — in how the problem is described in your external presence before any meeting occurs.
Most comparisons are to a competitor’s quote: You are being evaluated in the same category as specific competitors. The differentiation between you and those competitors is not visible enough at the positioning level to create a separate evaluation frame. The fix is specificity — in case material, in category language, in the problem description your external presence leads with.
Most comparisons are to an internal budget estimate: The buyer formed a reference point before meeting you. That reference point reflects what your positioning implied about your price level. If the estimate was too low, the positioning signalled the wrong market tier. The fix is in the pricing register your brand projects, not in the fee conversation itself.
What Breaking Out of the Commodity Conversation Looks Like
A precision engineering firm based in Taiwan spent three years competing primarily on price against mainland Chinese manufacturers. The work was technically superior. The margin was thin. Every RFP came down to a fee comparison the firm was losing at least half the time.
The repositioning didn’t change the service. It changed the frame. The firm stopped describing itself as a precision components manufacturer and started describing itself as a supplier to high-mix, low-volume aerospace and medical device manufacturers who could not tolerate the defect rates and communication latency of low-cost sourcing. The problem being solved became specific: not “we make parts” but “we eliminate the hidden rework and timeline costs that high-spec manufacturers incur when they source offshore without sufficient engineering oversight.”
The reference point for buyers in that specific situation changed immediately. The relevant comparison was no longer “what does a machined component cost?” It was “what is our current rework rate costing us, and what would it be worth to eliminate it?” At that level of problem specificity, the Taiwanese firm wasn’t competing with Chinese manufacturers. It was addressing a problem the Chinese manufacturers couldn’t solve.
The fee conversation changed not because the fees changed, but because the problem being priced changed. Same capability. Same cost structure. Different frame. Different margin.
This is the mechanism behind why technically superior companies get priced like generalists: the commodity conversation is a positioning failure before it is a pricing failure, and it is solved in the positioning before it can be solved in the negotiation.
The Deeper Pattern
The commodity conversation is the market’s verdict on your positioning specificity.
Every time a buyer reduces your engagement to a price comparison, they are telling you that your positioning has not yet differentiated you sufficiently at the problem level to create a separate evaluation frame.
That verdict is not delivered as feedback. It is delivered as a question — “what do you charge for this?” — which sounds like a normal part of a sales conversation and is actually a signal that the work of positioning hasn’t been completed. The fee conversation should be the last thing a buyer is uncertain about, not the first question they ask. When it arrives early, it means the value hasn’t landed yet — and value that hasn’t landed by the time the fee question arrives almost never fully lands afterwards.
The fix is not a better response to “what do you charge?” The fix is building the external presence, the case architecture, and the category language that means the buyer arrives at that question already knowing, at a felt level, that the answer is worth whatever it turns out to be.
The Field Test
The next time a prospect asks “what do you charge for something like this?” before you’ve established the value frame, try this instead: “That depends on what outcome we’re solving for. Before I give you a number, let me understand what the problem is costing you today — because that’s what the investment should be calibrated against.”
If the prospect engages with the reframe, you have an opportunity to establish the value frame that should have been established by your positioning. If the prospect insists on a number immediately, you’re in a commodity evaluation and the positioning work should have been done before this meeting started.
Note which response you get more often. The pattern tells you whether the positioning is doing its pre-meeting work or leaving the fee conversation to carry the entire weight of the value argument — a weight it was never designed to bear alone.
The commodity conversation is not a sales problem. It is a positioning signal — specific, diagnostic, and entirely addressable. The firms that never hear it didn’t negotiate better. They built the frame before the meeting started.
If fee comparisons are a regular feature of your sales conversations, the commodity frame is entering before the value frame has established itself — and that gap is in the positioning, not the pitch. The Brand Gravity Momentum Session™ identifies the specific positioning gaps creating the commodity comparison and the adjustments that would reorient the buyer’s reference point before any fee conversation begins.
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