The 3 Key Components of a World Class Unique Selling Proposition

written by john c ashworth

Ask most small business owners to share their unique selling proposition and far too often you’ll get a blank stare...

Sometimes, you’ll hear them share a tag-line. Maybe from a recent advertisement they put together or something they created long ago without much forethought and nary an interesting thought about it since.

When starting their businesses, most small business owners race off to create new logos and sometimes a tag-line to go with them, but they almost NEVER grant the process the time and attention to detail it takes to create something unique, interesting, engaging, memorable, and made to stick. Made to implant into the prospect’s mind the benefits of doing business with their business instead of any and all other choices they could make, including doing nothing.

I’ll bet your guilty of this to some degree. And even if you don’t own your own business and maybe just working as a salesman like I am, this idea still holds great importance because you still have to get this across to your prospects in order to garner interest and create a desire within them to buy your stuff. And if you’re company has not done a good job for you, you have to do it yourself.

Sometimes people will refer to this as ‘your elevator pitch.’

In other words, if you and I were riding together in the elevator, what might you say to me in a few sentences that might grab my attention before the door opens to my floor, and leave me with either a strong desire to discover more about you and your business, or at the very least, position you and your business in my mind in a meaningful and memorable way.

Big companies get this wrong too, so don’t fret about it too much if you haven’t taken the time to craft your own unique selling proposition. In fact, I read an article recently that demonstrated how few people if any remembered the USPs of some very big companies who had invested millions of dollars in their so-called branding efforts. To get this right, takes someone at the top who truly understands the importance of this idea.

In fact, the above USPs were so poor, you could have used them interchangeably for each of the companies identified in the article. That’s how out of touch and lame they were. If I can dig up that article, I’ll share it below. If not, I think you get the idea.

The good news is that you’ve found this post on the subject and are hopefully beginning to get a sense of just how important your unique selling proposition really is and how much potential it holds for you and your business when you really get it right.

When you really get it right, your USP drives your entire sales and marketing machine. You can think of it like the transmission in your car. Without it, you might be able to move forward, but it’s going to take a lot of grinding, be very inefficient, waste a lot of effort, and create a lot more wear and tear than necessary.

While there are entire workshops you can participate in that will take you through this process in detailed fashion, I realize that most of you probably think you don’t have time for that. The fact is that this one of the MOST important things you can do inside your small business or your sales pipeline because it will focus everything you do in incredibly powerful and productive ways.

My goal today was to plant the seed of this idea and hopefully reinforce its importance while providing you the three key ingredients of any good unique selling proposition so that at least you can get started.

Here they are...

The 3 Components of a Good Unique Selling Proposition are as follows:

  1. Your unique selling proposition MUST have a direct or implied benefit statement. “Buy my stuff, and get this benefit.” Most tag-lines you see in the world will be completely missing this idea. Start paying attention and you will see what I mean.
  2. Your unique selling proposition MUST have an influential benefit. Meaning that the benefit you’re describing MUST move me emotionally in order to get me to take action on your product or on the information you are offering related to your product or service. If it’s not compelling then who cares and Your prospect is on to the next thing pretty quickly.
  3. The benefit you’re describing in your unique selling proposition MUST be UNIQUE. You MUST have something that your competition cannot or does not offer. Otherwise, you’re still lost in a sea of sameness.

Got it?

OK, time to get to work and if you want to share yours once you have it in the comments section below either here on WordPress or using the facebook comments section, I would love to see them 🙂

Keep up the great work!

-John

About the Author
John Ashworth is an empathetic sales leader with an incredibly diverse background as a salesman, business consultant, marketing maniac, writer, Dad and full time Bohemian Athlete. aka Johnny Renaissance.

Leave a comment

s2Member®