My agency is better than your agency

After a brief respite into the valley of personal recollection, It's back to do some harvesting in the business landscape.
Here's a question a client of mine has been asking themselves "how do you differentiate yourself as a marketing / communications agency". Your small, have limited capital, one or two blue chip clients and very little name or brand recognition. You believe you have an excellent creative team, however the scope of the published work is limited.
Differentiation in the agency world is a steep hill to climb, there's a finite number of claims you can make; the quality of your work, the effectiveness of your work and most importantly the success your clients have achieved as a result of your work.
Most agency's have a story about how it's their unique processes or methodologies, which enable the above or their tightly integrated model, which creates economy's of scale and there's probably some truth to all of that.
That, however still doesn't make for a unique position statement.
You can market to a unique market segment (a specific demographic) and only focus on that, however that approach while it provides focus also limits breadth and creates a new set of problems when you try and scale the company.
You can radicalize the concept and try and create an approach, which is just far enough out there, that no one's in the same ballpark. However you run the very real risk of being too far ahead of the curve that you scare your prospective customers silly.
In this world people want to see real and tangible results, not hyperbole and extravagant claims. No one is going to sink a multi-million dollar budget into your radical concept, unless you have a track record of turning radical concepts into dramatic and positive results.
An agency can have all the integration and methodologies in the world, but at the end of the day it always comes down to two things; Creative ability and Relationship management. They are the cornerstone of the industry and will continue to be so.
So what's the moral of the story?, Don't spend your time trying to be unique, as an agency anyway, as a person, absolutely. Spend your time being creative, put sustained and focused thinking against what your client needs, understand your client and their consumers better than your competition, focus on what needs to be said and then think about how your going to say it.
That's almost unique.