If clients can compare you line by line with someone cheaper, you lose the race to the bottom. Relationships make you hard to compare.
The idea
Knowledge and skills are getting easier to acquire every year. Anyone can take a short course in real estate basics, and hundreds of sites teach coding or financial modeling. Meanwhile your clients have more options than ever. Post a request online for an agent and you'd expect two dozen to ping you within hours. So the work itself is table stakes: you're good at it, and so are plenty of others. What sets you apart is who you are to the client and how deep your relationships run. Peter Thiel puts it as becoming a "monopoly of one" instead of fighting to win a crowded market.
How to do it
Ask honestly: how many others could do what I do? If the answer is "lots," you're at risk of commodity comparison.
Look at what everyone else in your field does, and zig where they zag.
Invest in the relationship until the choice is about working with you.
Example
John Corcoran, who helps entrepreneurs turn relationships into revenue, sees this constantly with lawyers. The report you never want to hear: someone checked out the lawyer you recommended, saw he charged $3,000, found another at $1,300, and went with the cheaper one. Lawyers who compete on price end up in a race to the bottom. Your job is to make an apples-to-apples comparison impossible, or at least a real headache to work out.
Watch out for
Trying to differentiate with the same gifts and events as everyone else. My lawyer has sent the identical brick of logo chocolate every December for about ten years. Now it's simply expected.
Personal Monopoly: Find where your competence, curiosity and character overlap, and be the only person who brings that combination.
The Reputation Advantage: The internet killed the knowledge advantage and is killing the skills advantage. Reputation built through relationships is the one that survives, on top of real competence.
Stand Out: Identical annual gestures become wallpaper. Change the occasion, the timing, the channel or the format, within reasonable bounds, so you get noticed.
Perceived vs. Actual Value: Labels like "trusted advisor" mean nothing to clients. Explain the invisible work you actually do every day, and that becomes your value.