‍Everyone in Your Category Says the Same Thing and You Need To Be Different

Open the homepages of your five closest competitors in separate tabs. Cover the logos with a sticky note. Now read the headlines out loud.

"The AI-powered platform for modern revenue teams." "Seamless, scalable, end-to-end." "One source of truth for your entire business."

Can you tell which one is yours? Could your customers? Is it all so boring and bland that you’re falling asleep on line one?

If you've ever played buzzword bingo at a SaaS conference, you probably won before the first coffee break. Rory Woodbridge of The Product Marketer reviewed 100 of the biggest software homepages in 2025 and found 52 of them mentioned AI directly, rising to 67 once you count words like "agents" and "intelligence." At this point, "AI-powered" tells a buyer about as much as "has a login page."

With AI writing, it’s only getting worse. Quietly, what hits different is something that changes everything, and the kicker moves the needle. 

Here's how B2B messaging got this way, and a simple method so you don’t sound like everyone else.

Why everyone in your category sounds the same

Nobody sets out to write a beige homepage. It starts with reasonable decisions and ends up being suitable for everyone, boring for all.

Everyone copies the leader. The category leader's homepage becomes the template. Challengers borrow its structure and its claims and then tweaks three words to really make their USP ‘stand out’. 

Messaging gets written by committee. Product adds a feature. Sales adds an objection handler. The CEO adds "AI." Something that could possibly offend Jessica in Accounts is removed. Words that anyone might misunderstand or not understand are cut. End result? Meh.

Vague feels safe. A specific claim can be checked and found wrong. "Scalable" can't, so teams drift toward words nobody can disprove. Those words mean zero.

Products really do converge. Features get copied within a release or two, so teams end up describing the category and forget to describe themselves.

Each makes sense on the day. Together, they give you a market full of companies holding up identical, boring, signs.

What sounding the same costs you

When buyers can't see a difference, they fall back on whatever is left: price, familiarity and whichever name feels safest to put in front of the CFO.

The research is old but still stings. A study by Google and CEB's Marketing Leadership Council found that only 14% of B2B buyers were willing to pay a premium for the differences they saw between suppliers.

Even the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, famously sceptical of differentiation, makes the case against generic copy. Jenni Romaniuk, Byron Sharp and Andrew Ehrenberg found that perceived differentiation is usually low for all brands, so their advice is to be distinctive: easy to recognise and hard to confuse with anyone else. A homepage that sounds like four others fails that test too.

A quick teardown of the usual suspects

Here's what the usual words say to a buyer, and what to write instead.

One test catches most of these. Call it the swap test: if a competitor could paste your sentence onto their homepage without anyone in legal raising an eyebrow, you haven't found your differentiation yet.

How to find differentiation in a crowded category

Three steps. Each one feeds the next.

Step 1: Mine your customers' language

Your customers have already written better copy than you have.

Good places to dig include win and loss interviews, discovery call recordings, G2 and Capterra reviews, support tickets, and the communities and Slack groups where your buyers vent.

Listen for four things: what life looked like before they bought, what triggered the search, the exact words they use for the problem, and what they would miss most if you vanished tomorrow.

Customers almost never say "seamless integration." They say "we were live before the quarterly review" or "finance finally stopped emailing me spreadsheets." Those lines are specific, a little odd and very believable. When three customers use the same strange phrase unprompted, you've found something worth keeping.

Read competitors' reviews too. Their repeated complaints point to gaps you could own.

Step 2: Audit your competitors' claims

Now find out what everyone else already says, so you can stop saying it too.

Start with the right list. April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, begins positioning with competitive alternatives: what a customer would do if you didn't exist. That list often includes spreadsheets, an agency, an internal build or doing nothing.

For five to eight of those alternatives, capture the homepage headline, subhead and top three claims. Put them in a grid with claims down the side and competitors across the top, then sort every claim into one of three buckets:

• Table stakes. Everyone says it. Mention it lower on the page, if at all.
• Contested. Two or three say it. Only lead with it if you can prove you do it better.
• Open. Nobody says it. If customers care about it, this is your opening.

Now lay the customer language from Step 1 over the grid. Where something customers value sits in the open bucket, you've found your differentiation.

Step 3: Choose what not to say

This is the step most teams skip, because it feels like you’re leaving something on the table.

Dunford makes the point well: you might have a hundred differentiated capabilities on the whiteboard, yet you can only build positioning around one, two or at most three points of value.

So write a not-to-say list of true things you'll drop from your headline and hero. "Enterprise-grade security" might be on it. It's true, it matters, and every competitor says it, so it belongs on your trust page.

Choosing what not to say also means choosing who you're for. "Forecasting for RevOps teams at Series B companies selling into enterprise" will make someone in your company nervous, because it leaves people out. That's the point. We made a similar case in our post on category creation vs. category entry: owning a clear segment inside a known category usually beats shouting about the whole category.

The reward is focus. Pick one claim and repeat it everywhere, and buyers start to remember it.

How to tell if your differentiation is working

Look for these signs:

• Your headline passes the swap test
• Prospects repeat your phrasing back to you on calls
• Win rate improves against the competitors in your audit
• Fewer deals end in a discount conversation
• A five-second test with target buyers gets the right answer to "what do they do, and who is it for?"

Then keep it consistent. Our brand vs. demand budget split post explains why recognizable messaging makes demand spend work harder.

The short version

If everyone in your category says the same thing, that's good news. The bar is on the floor. Makes it easy for you to do better.

Mine your customers' language, audit what competitors already claim, and have the nerve to 

drop everything that doesn't set you apart. Say one specific thing, say it often, and let the rest of the category stay seamless.

Don’t be scared to be different. And if you are scared, drop us a line to chat. We love figuring out what makes you different from your competitors. It’s vital to build a strong brand.

FAQ

What does differentiation in a crowded category mean? It means giving buyers a clear, specific reason to choose you when several vendors offer similar products. It usually comes from a sharp focus on one segment, problem or outcome, described in your customers' own words.

Why does so much B2B messaging sound the same? Teams copy the category leader, write by committee, and favour vague words nobody can disprove. As features get copied, companies end up describing the category and lose sight of their own strengths.

How do I find my differentiation? Mine customer language from interviews, calls and reviews. Audit what your competitors and other alternatives already claim. Then pick the one to three points of value customers care about that nobody else owns.

Should we stop saying "AI-powered"? Say what your AI does. Name the task it handles, who it helps and what it replaces. A specific outcome tells buyers far more than a label everyone else uses too.

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