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.

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.)

This prompt set is part of the Un-Commoditizing Your Services series on Twennie. This series aims to help a services team enhance their services brand by delivering unique types of value beyond the minimum expected. Those types make the client experience different from what they get from competitors, thus making those clients more inclined to hire you based on something other than price. If you have conducted the Un-Commoditizing your Services exercise and have an un-commoditizing plan in play, completing this prompt set will support your team's efforts.

This prompt set is designed to help consultants and project teams operationalize the principles of un-commoditizing their services by integrating client-centered value into the fabric of everyday work. While proposals often articulate bold commitments to values like transparency, responsiveness, innovation, and reduced client burden, this prompt set reinforces the small, habitual actions that make those commitments real — and felt — by clients. After completing this set, your team will be accustomed to delivering on important KPIs in project management.

After an industry has become commoditized, reintroducing meaningful differentiation in a commoditized industry is difficult—arguably the hardest strategic shift a services firm can make. Twennie created this series to support this monumental challenge. Un-commoditizing is a term Twennie uses to describe a process of evolving your services so they can be differentiated on something other than price. This exercise comes with three templates in the same topic.

The Un-Commoditizing Your Services exercise is designed to help teams evolve their services in a way that differentiates them from competitors on something other than price. This template provides the small and large value cards you will use during that exercise. Download and either print or export this document to images you can use in an online collaboration medium.

Once an industry has become commoditized, reintroducing meaningful differentiation is difficult—arguably the hardest strategic shift a services firm can make. Twennie created this series to support this monumental challenge. This document contains the shell of a plan that will formalize the results of the Un-Commoditizing Your Services exercise.

Once an industry becomes commoditized, consultants can compete on little more than price. Reintroducing meaningful differentiation is difficult—arguably the hardest strategic shift a services firm can make. Twennie created this series to support this monumental challenge. This one is the display on which you will place your value cards and build several versions of your own value pyramid.