Two prospective clients confidently told me that "our people are the difference" as an answer to my question of what makes their firm different.

I've written about this before. It was actually the topic of the very first newsletter over two years ago. But it's still a problem I consistently see, so I'm diving into it again this week.

Every founder I've ever met believes that their people are the difference. Yet every prospect discounts the claim completely. And both of them are right.

The belief in your people isn't the problem, but the framing is. Your people most definitely make a difference, but they are not your differentiator. Not in the eyes of the people buying your services.

This may seem like semantics, but if you stick with me, I think you'll that the original framing was doing much more harm than good.

Water is Wet

Let's start with a basic truth we can all agree on: your people do the work. Without them nothing gets delivered to the client. No results. No recognition. So yes, your people make a difference. Obviously they do.

Yet this is exactly why saying out loud to your clients and prospects costs you something.

A claim your competitor can make word-for-word isn't a differentiator. Let me ask the question in a different way to prove the point. Would you honestly say that your top comptitor has shitty people on staff? Many of you have probably even poached and hired people from your competitors, so you couldn't possible answer that question in the affirmative with a straight face.

"Our people are the difference" is just a table stakes statement, that only adds noise to an already noisy market.

Obviously water is wet.

Your Buyer Can't Do Anything With It

Put yourself in your buyer's shoes for a second. They hear you say "our people are the difference" during an initial sales meeting, see it plastered website homepage, or see you post it on LinkedIn. Then what? What do you expect them to do with that statement?

• They can't validate it. They've never worked with your team.
• They can't quantify it. There's no number attached to it.
• They can't compare it. How many firms in your category have
• they actually hired? One? Maybe two? Often zero.
• They can't test it before they sign.

Even your existing clients are working with a thin comparison set. The firm that hired you for outsourced accounting and fractional CFO work has probably hired one other firm like you in a decade... that's an anecdote at best, not a comparison that would hold any water if they send you a referral.

So that statement does nothing. Eyes glaze over. And then the buyer falls back on comparing you with the things they can actually evaluate: scope, cost, logos, case studies. You want them to judge you on your people, but they have now way of doing that yet.

As a quick aside, that statement does nothing for your employer brand either. Every careers page says it. Every "grateful for this crew" post says it. Repeat a claim often enough across an entire industry and it stops being a claim, and becomes a platitude everyone scrolls past.

This is The Perception Gap at Its Widest

The Perception Gap is the distance between how you want the market to perceive you and how it actually does. The "our people are the difference" claim is likely turning the gap into a canyon.

It's the thing founders are legitimately most proud of. If questioned, they defend in a room as though their personal character was being questioned. It's the thing many built their firm around. But it lands as a complete commodity.

You are only hurting yourself by saying. You're confirming the suspicion the buyer already brought into the meeting: that all these firms are basically the same, so pick one and negotiate the best price.

There is one exception I'll allow: Walmart. And even back then Sam Walton had the right framing. His exact line "our people make the difference" is a foundational part of Walmart's corporate culture and core philosophy. They've said it for decades, and they own it. You are not Walmart. Stop borrowing their line.

What's Actually Different is the Thinking

The service is a commodity. Thousands of firms deliver outsourced accounting, M&A advisory, digital transformation, fractional leadership, etc. The people are a requirement. What's actually unique is the thinking behind the work. What's unique is the methodology your team built based on their lived experience.

Here are three examples of firms I've repositioned, and the shift we made in each:

The offshore staffing firm. They delivered great placements, faster. True, but completely commoditized: they were fishing from the exact same talent pool as every competitor, so "we recruit well" was a race to the bottom. The actual magic was what happened after the placement. They trained and managed those people to maximize what each one contributed to the client's organization. We moved the post-placement work front and center and made recruiting the price of entry. They stopped selling a commodity and started selling the thing that actually produced an outsized return for their clients.

The financial services consultancy. Their value prop was "practitioner-led". They were all ex-banking executives turned consultants. But many of their competitors could say the same thing. But being practitioners had given them something the claim never got into: a methodology for innovating inside a bank. They understood the politics, the org structures, the regulatory scrutiny, all the reasons innovation normally dies in that environment. And they'd built a repeatable way to drive it in spite of all those constraints. We repositioned the firm around practical innovation. Practitioner-led is about the people. Practical innovation is about the outcome.

Outcomes are what people buy.

The management consulting firm. "People-first" and "people-centric" were plastered across the website, the pitch decks, every piece of sales collateral. Anyone could say it. Many competitors did. What nobody else could say, that this firm actually did though? They had built brands inside their own organization, spun them out, and sold them. They weren't consultants who advised on building businesse. They were business builders who consulted. That history put them in the room as peers instead of vendors, and it gave them a way of thinking and operating that competitors couldn't copy without living it. The combination of strategy and execution, backed by businesses they'd actually built, is what we put front and center.

Each founder had the real differentiator sitting inside the firm the whole time. None of them realized that not naming it was holding back their revenue growth and compressing margins.

Here's What I Want You to Do

The "our people are the difference" claim is one of many commodity claims out there.

Take a look at your home page, your capabilities decks, your sales call transcripts. Identify the claim(s) you are making. Then ask yourself two things:

1. Can our competitors make this same claim?
2. If this claim is true, what are we saying about our competitors, and does that seem plausible?

Over the coming week I'll be breaking this down even further, including how to actually talk about the difference your people make, instead of just claiming that they are the difference.

If you know a founder who just posted about how proud they are of their team... forward this to them, with kindness.

-Mike

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