The Differentiation Dichotomy
Why trust beats differentiation in IT services
About a year before I moved from sales into product, I lost the biggest deal of my career because of a trust failure.
It was a multi-million pound outsourcing contract. We were the preferred bidder from the final two. Just needed to close the gap to their budget. We agreed that scope and price both had to move. And I started cutting scope to get the price down. Made sense to me - lean proposal, fair price.
We lost.
The other supplier cut their margins first, then trimmed the scope. We both got to the same place. Same final price. Same scope. Same capabilities. But they'd demonstrated better intent - they showed they were willing to hurt themselves before cutting what mattered to the client.
I only found out a month later when my CEO managed to get back in and ask what happened, and it still pains me today. It wasn’t that they distrusted us. It was that, in the moment that mattered, the other firm demonstrated better intent.
The dichotomy
Here's the strange truth about IT services: differentiation is both essential and irrelevant at the same time.
You need it to get noticed. Without some clear point of view, some reason to engage, you won't even make it into the conversation. Buyers and sellers both lean on differentiation like a crutch - we're told to find it, articulate it, defend it.
But when it actually comes down to choosing who to entrust with business-critical work, differentiation barely features.
In fact, differentiation doesn't just fail to help. It can actively make buyers less comfortable.
If you ever need to choose a surgeon, you don’t want someone who does things differently. You want judgement and reliability — someone who will act in your best interests. Too much choice, too many approaches, or too much visible variation increases anxiety in the decision.
Many complex services decisions behave more like this than we admit. Buyers may still ask for differences - and sellers will still present them - but the underlying comfort test is about credibility, judgement, and intent.
And the uncomfortable reality that we’re all too painfully aware of, is that most IT services firms aren’t meaningfully different anyway. We all fundamentally do the same thing: same cloud platforms, same frameworks, same people, same accreditations, same partnerships.
Which means trust becomes the entire game.
But trust is just table stakes, surely?
This is a misconception that I encounter frequently. And there’s some truth in it; you’ll certainly lose your seat at the table very quickly if you’re not trusted. But trust isn’t a true or false thing. The difference between a normally trusting business relationship and a high-trust business relationship is significant. Think of your own relationships and consider the differences. And if winning trust is the entire game, then trust becomes hard currency when positioning IT Services.
What trust actually looks like
In “The Speed of Trust,”[i] Stephen MR Covey presents a brilliantly insightful model for trust, which I’ve found enormously helpful over the years. It breaks trust down into two core questions:
Character – can I trust that you’ll do the right thing?
Competence – can I trust that you’ll do the thing right?
You’ll see a similar split elsewhere (like Edelman’s trust barometer that we’ll get to shortly). Covey then splits those two parts into four cores, which is the level I find most helpful[ii]:
Character:
Integrity - Do you do what you say you'll do, even when it’s tough?
Intent - Are you acting in my interests, as well as your own?
Competence:
Capability - Do you have the skills and resources to deliver?
Results - Have you actually done this before, successfully?
Simple and practical. And it explains almost every deal failure I've seen.
The problem: we optimise for the wrong 24%
Research from the Edelman Trust Barometer[iii] consistently shows that character drivers (which Edelman label as “ethics”) account for roughly 76% of trust in business relationships, while competence accounts for around 24%.
Yet most companies score higher on competence than character.
We're optimising for the wrong 24%.
Don’t misunderstand — competence matters enormously. Without it, you don’t get taken seriously. But in a market where most firms are broadly capable, competence rarely decides the deal.
Capability is usually the easy part. Most firms know how to show they can do the work. Accreditations. Partnerships. Technical expertise. Service portfolios. We're good at this.
Results are harder than most firms admit. It’s not that we don’t have them, but we struggle to surface them.
I remember a meeting at Tesco years ago. Senior stakeholder. Big integration opportunity at the very early stages. Everything tracking well. Then they asked about our retail experience.
I had finance case studies. Really good ones in fact. But I had overstated our retail experience based on recent sales wins, and we didn't yet have meaningful results to show from them. The air left the room, and I knew it was over before I finished the first sentence.
We had the technical capability. There was no question of our intent. But what I didn't have was results that proved we could deliver in retail.
A lack of relevant customer stories is a common problem. Marketing case studies take enormous effort to produce but get so sanitised through the customer’s approval process that they end up as shiny stories that try to make everyone look good and appeal to such a broad audience that they just aren't interesting to read. The unwritten stories - the real battles, the lessons learned, the close calls that matter most - are harder to circulate.
These are solvable problems. They take deliberate effort. Speaker notes in PowerPoint decks are a good place to start. And deliberate actions from leaders that encourage the retelling and sharing of stories, and don't rely on salespeople being in the same customer meeting for these stories to be heard.
And never give a discount without getting something in return – so try asking for pre-agreed reference calls in exchange. Let customers tell their own stories to each other, and get it pre-agreed so you don’t feel like you’re walking on egg-shells to pull in favours every time it comes up.
But here's the thing: most firms already know they need to demonstrate capability and results. It's the mainstay of every pitch deck. And written case studies - which are still valuable despite their shortcomings - are an ongoing effort for every marketing team I've ever worked with.
Character is where the real gap sits. And character is where deals are won and lost.
How organisations demonstrate character (beyond hiring good salespeople)
The extensive research that went into the book, The Challenger Sale[iv], shows that 51% of decision makers rank trust as the top factor they desire in a salesperson. The rep matters enormously - they are the face of the firm, and if they don't demonstrate understanding and intent, the buyer won't trust you.
But you can't just tell your reps to "be more trustworthy" and expect it to work. The organisation has to support them.
That’s a huge topic in its own right, but there are six main levers that marketeers and product people have at their disposal. And this is what I’m most interested in.
Consistency across touchpoints
An old colleague of mine had previously worked at IBM and spent two years building trust around a specific point of view on a data centre modernisation. The client had been hesitant – this point of view seemed contrary to the company stance - but he finally earned their confidence. Then his exec arrived to help seal the deal, but ignored his brief and blurted out: "Obviously we'd prefer you go with [different approach], but we can still do this if you want." And with that, trust evaporated, and so did the deal.
Buyers notice when you aren’t consistent. Whether it’s website copy, prospecting emails, or blunders like the one my colleague experienced, inconsistency signals delivery risk. Buyers assume what you say in the boardroom won’t match what you do in month three.
Quality of assets
If your salespeople have PowerPoint decks that looks like it was knocked up in the Pret across the road five minutes before the meeting, customers interpret that accordingly.
If you give them polished decks that look like you've spent money with a design agency, it signals that the whole organisation – not just the salesperson - is invested in this messaging. Similarly, if the rep has a datasheet to hand - even if that datasheet is never read - the fact that it exists shows that the organisation is backing this product. It's not made up.
Product maturity
I've designed managed service products before that were somewhat intentionally over-engineered – and have delivered considerable success as a result. Because doing so signals a thorough understanding of the problem being solved, and a mature product. Not just a 'make it up as we go' proposition.
Conversely, “Bespoke” often sounds like: “We haven’t solved this problem enough times to standardise it.” I've tried to sell managed services on the basis of being 'bespoke' and experience tells me it’s a bad idea. Too often it looks like you haven't solved the problem enough times to understand the common elements. And customers know that bespoke doesn't scale. So bespoke usually erodes trust.
Mission and purpose
Is there a reason why you do the things you do, beyond money? Is your organisation mission-driven? Simon Sinek's "Start With Why"[v] isn't just inspirational fluff. Having intent surfaced in sales pitches - and consistently evidenced, with substance - is part of the puzzle.
Customer Stories
Customer stories don’t just evidence results – we can also use them to show character. In fact, I think customer stories have three purposes: demonstrating results, evidencing character, and inspiring action.
When it comes to character; there’s limited benefit in just saying, “we have good integrity – you can trust us when delivery gets tough.” Or, “we have good intent – our mission is to build lasting partnerships that make technology just work.” If those things are true then by all means say them, but if you want someone to remember and believe you then evidence them through stories. Then it becomes powerful.
Empathy: the missing piece
Covey's model implies empathy but doesn't name it explicitly. By contrast, the trust model in Donald Miller’s “Storybrand 2.0”[vi] simply has two parts: Empathy and Competence. So, empathy is everything when it comes to showing character in the Storybrand world.
Other research has similar conclusions - that building credibility begins by showing you understand the customer's world through well-researched understanding of their challenges. Showing the customer that you grasp the core of their issue builds trust and confidence and earns you the right to explore the problem further with them.
We show empathy by describing the problem as well as the customer can - or ideally better. The more accurately we can articulate their situation, in their words, the more they will assume we have a solution.
What this means in practice
If you're building propositions or enabling sales teams, here's what changes:
Stop leading with capability lists. Accreditations and service menus prove you can do the work. They don't prove you understand why this work matters to this buyer, right now. And yet this is where most firms spend 80% of their proposition energy.
Make character visible. That means:
Demonstrate empathy through accurate problem articulation
Think beyond ‘mini case studies’ when sharing customer stories
Have some sort of mission or intent, beyond just making money
Build high-quality assets that signal organisational commitment
Ensure consistent messaging across every touchpoint
Develop mature, productised (not bespoke) services and solutions
Diagnose trust failures. When product growth stalls, ask:
Where in this proposition have we demonstrated integrity?
Have we made our intent clear, or are we hiding behind neutrality?
Do we have relevant results for this situation, or just results in general?
Have we articulated their problem better than they can?
Trust as a discipline
Differentiation gets you noticed. Trust wins the deal.
Most IT services firms know how to demonstrate capability. We’re good at it — and product and marketing teams tend to major on this.
The harder part — the part that actually matters — is making character visible. Not inventing it or rebranding it. But surfacing it deliberately and consistently, so that every touchpoint reinforces the same message: we understand your world, we’re invested in solving your problem, and we’ll act in your interests, even when it costs us.
This isn’t new thinking. But it is thinking that most firms haven’t operationalised.
---
I help IT services firms build propositions and enablement that demonstrate trust, not just capability. If your products aren’t growing the you feel they should, or if you're struggling to move beyond feature lists and accreditations, let's talk.
[i] Covey, Stephen M. R., with Rebecca R. Merrill. The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. New York: Free Press, 2006.
[ii] Covey’s book then goes on to explore 13 behaviours that are aligned with these four cores. There’s some interesting content, but it’s a hefty tome of a book, and I hesitate to recommend it to anyone as a general read. Understanding the four cores and the significance of trust is enough for most of us.
[iii] 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer | Edelman
[iv] Dixon, Matthew and Brent Adamson. The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation. London: Portfolio Penguin, 2013.
[v] Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (London: Penguin Books, 2011)
[vi] Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand 2.0: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen (Nashville, TN: HarperCollins Leadership, 2025)