A US enterprise buyer has four India-based IT services companies in the shortlist. But all of them make the same claims, the same “20+ years of experience”, similar client logos, and the same line about being a “trusted digital transformation partner.”
It is hard for the buyer to tell them apart. So they pick the vendor they already know, or the one that quoted lowest.
That’s the differentiation problem, and it’s the single biggest reason India-based IT services companies selling to US enterprise buyers lose deals they were technically capable of winning. We are a B2B marketing agency that has worked only with technology companies since 2010, and this is the problem we are hired to solve most often.
Every firm you are competing against also does great work. Every one of them also says so. The buyer cannot act on your claim of “we do great work”. It’s not falsifiable, specific, and it doesn’t tell anyone why you are the right choice over the three other firms in the RFP.
We wrote about this at length in Why “we do great work” is not a growth strategy. The short version: services are experience goods. A buyer can’t evaluate the quality of your delivery before they consume it. So they don’t shortlist on quality. They shortlist on who they already know and who showed up with something specific to say.
Delivery quality gets you renewals. It doesn’t get you on the shortlist in the first place. A strong brand does that job, and most firms haven’t built it.
Differentiation is a specific answer to one question: why should your buyers choose you over every other credible option they are looking at?
“We deliver cloud, data, and AI solutions with a global delivery model” is not the answer.
What helps is specificity. A platform you go deep on instead of wide. An industry you understand better than a generalist ever could. A buying situation, like mid-market financial services firms migrating off legacy core banking systems, where you can speak to the exact fears and constraints that situation creates.
We have seen this work well for a Pune-based firm that used to pitch cloud, data engineering, and AI as three separate service lines, competing with a hundred other firms saying the same thing. We repositioned them as: “SAP S/4HANA migrations for mid-market manufacturers”. They had built genuine expertise and delivery experience in this.
That’s the choice differentiation asks you to make. You give up sounding like you can do everything for everyone, and you become the obvious choice for someone specific.
This is more urgent for IT services companies because of the widening buying committee.
Forrester puts the average B2B buying group at 13 people across departments. Your salesperson has a strong relationship with the Head of Engineering or the CTO. However, the CFO, the procurement lead, a business unit head, and an internal skeptic who has seen a project go sideways before are all forming an opinion about your company.
We wrote about this in detail in An Average IT Services Deal Has 10+ Stakeholders. Most Sales Teams Speak to One.
This is where differentiation becomes a sales enablement problem. Your champion, the one person in the buying group who has actually met you, has to talk to multiple people and make the case for you. A firm that stands for one clear thing gives that champion something concrete to repeat. “We do great work across cloud, data, and AI” is impossible to defend in a room full of skeptics. “They’re the ones who have done 40 S/4HANA migrations for manufacturers our size” is not.
Differentiation isn’t a single deliverable. It’s a sequence, and the order matters more than most firms assume.
1. Positioning: Before any content gets written or any outreach gets sent, you need a specific, provable answer to “why us?” This comes from an honest audit of your delivery history, your competitors, and the exact language your buyers use when they are evaluating vendors like you.
2. Proof: Once you know what you are claiming, you need evidence. Case studies with real numbers. Documented outcomes, not adjectives. A buyer’s internal skeptic doesn’t get convinced by claims. They get convinced by specifics they can check.
3. Visibility. Positioning and proof mean nothing if the right people never encounter them. This is where content, LinkedIn presence for your leadership, and outbound sequences come in, each one built around the same positioning statement so a buyer sees a consistent story wherever they run into you.
Firms that jump straight to step three, running outbound or posting content without fixing positioning first, end up amplifying the same generic message louder. More visibility for a vague claim is not growth. It’s just a bigger audience for the wrong pitch.
We worked with a US-based ServiceNow partner for five years. Small firm, competing in an ecosystem with thousands of other certified partners holding the exact same badge and saying roughly the same things to the same buyers.
We narrowed their story to one module of the ServiceNow platform and built out their expertise on it: hundreds of practitioner-level articles, opinionated points of view, a LinkedIn presence that made the right buyers feel understood.
Buyers stopped comparing them to the other 3,000 partners.
The firm was acquired by a large IT services company for roughly $20 million. Their delivery capability hadn’t changed. Their technology stack hadn’t changed. What changed was that buyers, and eventually an acquirer, could answer “why this firm and not the other 3,000” in one sentence.
That’s the return on differentiation.
What we do about it
We build the positioning, proof, and visibility infrastructure that gets India-based IT services companies chosen by US enterprise buyers.
Positioning first, always. Then case studies your champion can actually use in a room you’re not in. Then content and outbound that carry the same story to every stakeholder in the buying committee, not just the one your salesperson knows.
Not with Midas Touch.
We help you powerfully achieve this through
Captivating content
Comprehensive, strategic social media presence on the right channels
Thought-leading opinion pieces by the CXO
