If everybody is “best in class”, nobody is

There is a peculiar class of business in which every supplier is the best supplier. Each is market-leading. All possess an unrivalled depth of expertise. Their solutions are seamless, their people exceptional and their commitment to the customer apparently without precedent. The buyer, who has downloaded six proposals containing these revelations, must feel very fortunate.

Most of this language is not a lie in the straightforward sense. It is worse for the writer: it has become information-free. If five businesses can make the same claim without changing a word, the claim does not help anybody choose between them. It occupies the place where a reason ought to be.

Compared with what?

“Best in class” might mean something if we knew the class, the test, the competitors and who had done the judging. Without those things, it is a man awarding himself a rosette in the kitchen. We would not accept it from someone selling a used car. Yet an entire professional vocabulary has grown around asking serious buyers to accept it in contracts worth millions.

The temptation is understandable. Specificity takes work and creates exposure. A promise about an actual response time can be tested. A statement about who makes a decision can be challenged. A description of where an approach has failed may make the sales director uncomfortable. “World-class service” glides past all three problems by declining to describe a service.

It also glides past the customer.

What helps is the unglamorous detail. Who picks up the call at two in the morning? What happens if the first person cannot fix the fault? Which decision can the local team make without waiting for head office? What changed after the last mobilisation went badly? We have heard enough about commitment. Show us its working hours.

The difference has to survive a swap

A useful editing test is to put a competitor’s name at the top of the paragraph. If it still works, we have probably described the category rather than our particular offer. That can be necessary background. It should not be mistaken for differentiation.

Sometimes the honest difference is modest: a better escalation route, a team with relevant experience on this particular kind of estate, an implementation sequence that avoids the customer’s busiest period. Those may look disappointingly small beside a claim to be transforming the future. To somebody carrying the risk, they can be the reason to buy.

AI makes the comfortable version easier to manufacture. Ask it for a compelling proposition without supplying a genuine difference and it can give us several fluent ways of announcing that we are excellent. The remedy happens before the prompt: ask the people delivering the work what they do differently, ask the customer what would make that matter and find evidence that joins the two.

We do not need a louder claim to greatness. We need a sentence another supplier could not honestly sign.