Un-Commoditizing Your Services by Delivering What Clients Truly Value
When clients see your service as interchangeable with competitors, price becomes the only differentiator. This topic teaches you how to rise above commoditization by understanding and delivering what B2B clients truly value.
Based on the framework from Bain and Company’s 'The B2B Elements of Value,' this topic helps you escape the trap of being viewed as a commodity. It introduces a five-tier value pyramid that includes functional, emotional, personal, and inspirational elements—all of which influence client loyalty and decision-making. Through video summaries, editable templates, team exercises, and structured prompts, you'll learn how to map your current value delivery, gather meaningful client insights, and design targeted enhancements. Whether you're refining your offerings or launching a new strategy, this topic gives you the tools to identify what your clients value most and build around it.
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ARTICLE: Un-Commoditizing Your Services by Delivering What Clients Truly Value
This article is the first in a series on un-commoditizing your services by delivering what clients truly value. Twennie created this series not just to teach the B2B Elements of Value framework—but to help you live it. By combining strategic insight with practical application, each unit empowers you to deliver real value to your clients in ways that are more differentiated, more emotional, and more human. We use excerpts for educational purposes only, with full credit to the original authors. If you'd like to read or license the original article, visit hbr.org.
VIDEO: Un-Commoditizing Your Services By Delivering What Clients Truly Value
For this series, Twennie has drawn from a landmark 2018 Harvard Business Review article titled The B2B Elements of Value by Eric Almquist, Jamie Cleghorn, and Lori Sherer. Building on that framework, we guide Twennie’s learners—especially those in technical and design services—through the process of planning a brand differentiation program using a custom-built “value pyramid.” This pyramid helps you define and deliver value that makes your firm stand out for more than just price. (We recommend reviewing the Twennie article and/or the original HBR article before starting the exercise.)