Whenever you talk about your products or services in a phone call, email, newsletter, or website, what are you trying to communicate to your clients and prospects? We all know what we think we're saying, but that can often be quite different from the reality.

I came across a very cool tool recently called Wordle that generates "words clouds" from any text you provide. Simply paste in text from your value proposition, email messages, or website and it will help you see which keywords "stand out" the most. At the top of this blog post, you can see an example of my word cloud.

If you're like most salespeople, you probably don't like getting beat up on price or treated like a commodity. However, if you don't differentiate your services from the competition, the prospect is forced to make a comparison based on price. Here are a few things you can do to escape the commodity trap and stand out from the competition: