If you read these newsletters, you know I generally try to avoid “marketing-speak.” There is, however, one foundational tenet of marketing and advertising that we should all keep in mind, and that is our “Unique Selling Proposition.”
Your USP is the reason or reasons that your clients choose to do business with you, versus another option in the marketplace. A unique selling proposition can take many forms, but it typically starts with some foundational building blocks: high quality work, impressive customer service, competitive price and the value your clients receive from these qualities.
Typically, it’s not just one of these elements. Take for instance a traditional “low cost” provider, Walmart, or TruGreen in our industry. They definitely deal on their price as a hook, but those millions of clients are getting some level of value out of the transaction, even if they are settling for lower quality and service in a tradeoff for price. They just may have a greater tolerance for things being “good enough.”
Our businesses all thread a similar needle. You can put all your eggs into having absolutely unbeatable quality, but the prices you will charge as a result will narrow your prospect base considerably. You can be over the top with service, like my “account representative” at the music retailer Sweetwater, who called me today and left a voice mail to thank me for ordering a $12 set of strings. This too comes at a cost, and in some cases, clients don’t really want that much connection; they just want things to be taken care of.
The challenge is to figure out the specific reason why people do business with your company specifically, and in my experience, it helps to verbalize it in a sentence. “At Focal Point, our clients have told us that they do business with us because we have a depth of experience in this industry which makes working with us easy, we have a family-business mentality, which makes working with us pleasant, and our design work makes them stand out in their marketplace.”
Try to write a similar sentence for your own business, and understand that it can be a fluid thing. When Focal Point was started in 1987, we were literally the ONLY company offering advertising services for the green industry. That’s a unique selling proposition! This has evolved, of course, as the industry has changed, and our USP has changed as well. A unique selling proposition is a tremendously helpful tool to run decisions up against by asking yourself if a given process in your business supports your USP.