For a long time, I thought success came from being better.
Better designer. Better developer. Better results.
And, like a lot of us, I spent a ton of time trying to prove it. As if clients were going to pop open DevTools, inspect my page, and say, “Ah yes! What an exquisite use of semantic HTML!”.
To most clients, good, better, and dumpster fire all look the same.
Better can be subjective. But worse than that, it’s forgettable.
What people actually remember is when something is different.
If you say something like “We run every website through a 63-point inspection before going live” you create a point of differentiation.
We see this everywhere… We fly Southwest because bags fly free. We order from Amazon because we don’t want to get off the couch. We ping people on Slack because we can’t find a damn thing in our inbox.
Are all these solutions the “best”? Of course not. But they’re specific about how they are different. They are now measured against a different set of criteria. One they’ve created themselves and now own.
Your competitors probably have a quality assurance process too. Maybe even a better one. But if they never talk about it, it might as well not exist.
When you bring up what makes you different — without bragging, trash-talking, or twisting yourself into a pretzel trying to prove you’re better — you carve out your own little patch of real estate and plant your flag. Suddenly, you’re not competing with every other “me too” agency… You’re the 63-point inspection people. The ones that ensure everything’s done right and nothing gets missed.
It’s not a gimmick, and it doesn’t excuse you from delivering high-quality work… It just gives your clients a story to remember about you.
Something they can repeat in the meetings you’re not in. Something they’ll silently question when the next agency they talk to never brings up QA.
No need to start doing something new… You’re already different. All you have to do is embrace it and make sure everyone you talk to knows about it.
