256: Revising Our Unique Selling Proposition

<p>You would think that if your business has survived Covid, then the pandemic will have cut a swathe through your competitors.  Therefore, we would all be granted a temporary reprieve from the usual rigorous competition for client business. Counterintuitively, there seems to be more and more competition for the same clients, so we need to differentiate ourselves very clearly.  What we absolutely don’t want is for the buyer to think they can just swap another company’s solution in to replace us, like a modular part in the modern car engine. </p> <p> </p> <p>We need our Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) to be crisp and sharp to make sure the buyer knows we are different and better than the competition.  We need to point out what we are offering, that they are not.  However with all of this focus on bare bones survival have we looked at our USPs lately?  Are they a bit dusty and the sheen gone off from lack of attention?</p> <p> </p> <p>Some things to think about when crafting our Unique Selling Proposition is to look at things from the buyer’s perspective.  This seems completely obvious but often we are operating in our own little bubble and we see the world through the limited prism of our own value system.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is no help talking about what we sell in our USP. That is tremendously interesting to us, but not as important as what is of interest to the buyer.  Do we really know what they are interested in now?  Have their interests shifted since Covid shook up the business world?  What are they trying to buy today?  What new problems do they need help solving?  In today’s commercial environment where do they need to receive more value? </p> <p> </p> <p>Let’s use Dale Carnegie as the example. We may think we sell sales training.  However, what company buyers want is to receive greater per head sales revenue outcomes from their salespeople.  In fact, we need to sell outcomes and our training services are the tool to achieve that.</p> <p> </p> <p>Let’s see some examples of our USPs </p> <p> </p> <ol> <l