![Dare to be different]()
Here’s a super idea that might just give you exactly the right ammunition to create what we call a USP. USP stands for Unique Selling Proposition.And why do you need one? Quite simply because if you’ve got competitors then your customer has a choice. And they make that choice purely on the differences they perceive.
Developing a USP is a way of helping you focus on building and articulating that difference. Here’s a great way to do it.
You sit down with your team (or indeed with your Accountant and your team) with a white board. On the white board, you write this question.
What are the 10 reasons why I should deal with YOU?
Now in that context, the “I” means of course, any potential customer.
When you do it, it’s more than likely that your team will come up with fairly typical answers -answers like better service, better qualified temps, personnel and so on.
As they come up with answers, you write all the answers down on a board and then you do something really interesting. You tell the team that you’re going to be really hard. You’re going to rub out anything you’ve written down that one of your competitors would say to a customer about themselves -whether or not it’s true.
You ask the team to tell you which attributes they want you to rub out on that basis. In other words, you ask them to imagine that you’d asked their competitors the same “WHAT ARE THE TEN REASONS” question and rub out anything they thought their competitors would have given to the same question.
Not surprisingly, all the warm “feely-touchy” things will disappear – after all, everyone says they give great service, everyone says they have better qualified people, everyone says they have top quality products and so on.
If you’re really severe with the board eraser, you may have absolutely nothing left on the board. And that means you’ve got a problem. Either you haven’t got a uniqueness or, just as importantly you haven’t been able to find a way to articulate it.
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(The point is, of course, that if you haven’t got anything tangible, anything real, that differentiates your products and services from your competitors-you’ve got to find it.)
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I remember doing the exercise a while ago in Perth with a Personnel Agency. It’s a fascinating story because like most companies, they had difficulty at first coming up with unique things. But as we worked on it, we found they could build a USP.
The company did have two tangible differences.
- They had a LIFETIME guarantee (yes, you read that right -a lifetime guarantee) on all permanent placements they make.
- When it came to temporary people, they gifted you the first two hours of that temporary’ s time whilst they were familiarising themselves with your business.
But we needed to get some more. And by brainstorming it, we found them.
- We decided that the temporary staff that the company sent out have to be the very best. They had to reflect the company’s values-they had to be different.
- Training was the answer there. Every temporary (even though they might be skilled in their own particular area) got a special programme on Customer Care through a special video we created for the company. Remarkably, it’s a programme that the temporaries gladly paid to participate in!
That gave us another difference to communicate to potential customers.
But that left one more critical question – how do you communicate these unique differences to potential customers?
It called for a truly “classic” letter. You’ll see that letter in future blogs.
In the meantime, you could try considering what might happen if you took time to do the “WHAT ARE THE TEN REASONS I SHOULD BUY FROM YOU” exercise. It really is a fascinating one to do.
