Why does everyone's messaging sound identical?
Everyone's messaging sounds identical because it describes the service layer. At that layer, everyone really is doing the same thing. Three leadership consultants all run assessments, workshops and coaching, and describing that accurately produces three near-identical paragraphs.
The convergence gets worse because of two habits that feel professional:
- Everyone reaches for the same abstract vocabulary. Growth, impact, transformation, strategic partnership. Those words appeal to us precisely because they're broad enough to be safe, and broad is the opposite of distinctive.
- Everyone benchmarks against everyone. A consultant surveys competitor sites, writes a slightly improved version of what she found, and adds one more entry to the sameness.
So the sameness is structural. It's what happens when a whole field describes itself at the one level where the field really is similar, and the words that create it are the ones that feel most polished.
The good news in that diagnosis: nothing about your work has to change to escape it. What changes is which layer you describe.
What layer should I describe instead?
Describe the client and the moment they're in, because that layer stays specific even when services overlap completely. This is the whole move, and it takes one rewrite.
Watch two consultants who do identical work separate on the page:
| The service layer, where everyone converges | The client-and-moment layer |
|---|
| I provide leadership development and coaching | I work with newly promoted directors in their first year running a team |
| I do brand strategy and messaging | I work with companies whose product changed and whose message never caught up |
| I offer operational consulting | I work with teams that have outgrown the systems they started with |
| I deliver change management | I work with departments that have been reorganized twice in two years |
The left column is competing with hundreds of people. The right column is competing with almost nobody, and none of these consultants changed a single service to get there.
Notice also that the right column is checkable. A reader either is a newly promoted director or isn't, so the sorting happens without any claim about quality, and that's what arguing address means in practice.
Isn't my process what makes me different?
Your process is real, and it's the least differentiating thing you own. Clients can't evaluate a process they haven't experienced, and every consultant believes theirs is distinctive. From inside your business, the process is where all your thinking lives. From outside, it's a list of stages that looks like everyone else's.
Three reasons process-based differentiation underperforms:
- It's unverifiable in advance. A client has no way to tell a better sequence from a well-described one.
- Named methodologies mean nothing untaught. A framework name spends the reader's attention on your vocabulary when you needed it on their problem.
- Everyone's stages rhyme. Discover, diagnose, design, deliver. However different the substance, the shape is shared.
Your process becomes valuable later, once a client is deciding how the work would run, and it belongs in a conversation and a proposal, never in your first line.
What does differentiate, in rough order: the client you serve, the moment you serve them in, the specific problem you name, and the proof that looks like them. Your process comes after all four.
How do I find what's distinctive about my own business?
Ask somebody outside your business what's distinctive about it, because you're the worst-placed person to see it. You can't read the label from inside the bottle. What makes you unusual is the thing you stopped noticing, because it's normal to you.
Three ways to get at it, cheapest first:
- Ask three recent clients why they picked you. Their answers are rarely what you'd have guessed, and they're phrased in the language you want.
- Ask a peer outside your field to describe your business back to you. What they notice is what a client would notice.
- Read your own call notes for what clients say when they're relieved. The sentence right after "oh good, you get it" is your positioning.
There's also a version of this I teach for outreach that transfers directly here. Newness is what's new in your work: the thing you've been testing, the approach you've refined, how you've grown in the last year. Specialness is why that should matter to this particular client. Consultants tend to have plenty of newness and never translate it into specialness, so it stays interesting and never becomes a reason to hire them.
If all of that comes back thin, the problem is usually one step earlier: you haven't decided who you're for yet, and that decision is what makes distinctiveness available.
Leah's take
There's a trap in this question, and I want to name it before you spend a month inside it.
When consultants decide they need to differentiate, they almost always reach for something new: a fresh framework, a clever name, an angle nobody's taken, a bolder claim. It feels like the right kind of effort. And it produces a page that says something unusual about a service that isn't unusual, which reads as marketing and lands as noise.
Differentiation in consulting is almost entirely subtraction. You get distinctive by claiming less: fewer client types, fewer problems, fewer promises. That's harder than adding something, because it means giving up territory while you're already worried about not having enough work.
And I'd point at what you said, because "we all say the same things" is a precise observation about a real thing. You're right. Everybody does. Which means the bar for standing out is much lower than you think it is, and it isn't a creative bar. One sentence naming a real client in a real moment puts you outside the sameness immediately, and nobody has to find you clever to hire you.
