You’ve heard it before: “There’s so much competition right now.” “How can we compete when we are perceived as a commodity?” “Why isn’t marketing helping us with our messaging?”
We believe that it is everyone’s responsibility within a company to craft and communicate their firm’s unique selling proposition.
Call it what you like: “competitive advantage,” “reassurance statement,” “raison d’ętre.” It still has to answer the following questions:
- What is your company delivering that your competitors are not?
- Why do clients keep buying from you?
- Why should your clients-to-be invest their time with your sales staff?
- What are you providing that makes your clients’ lives easier?
It’s not what you say, it’s what your customers say that counts. It’s not a tag line. “Built for tomorrow” is not a competitive advantage. It’s a snappy little ditty that your company spent tens of thousands of dollars on.
Far too often, unique selling propositions are developed in the vacuum of the corporate boardroom by the marketing department alone. By involving sales and customer service – the people that are in the trenches with your clients who advocate your solutions – in the development of your unique selling propositions you will create more realistic and compelling advantage statements.
Unique selling propositions can become short-lived. With the onslaught of competition in this open-market economy, what was new can become a commodity like quality and value.
Your clients have minimum expectations when they invest. They expect that everything they buy will save them time and money. Look way outside of yourselves to determine what matters to your customers. Dawn dishwashing detergent is using “Helping wildlife for over 20 years” at the end of an emotionally arousing commercial. Who would have thought to link dishwashing detergent with wildlife? Unilever did.
Make it a policy that when your company is chosen as the preferred vendor and your solutions deliver on exactly your clients’ requirements that a letter of endorsement is written by your sales staff and that permission is granted to publish this letter. Collect endorsements from everyone that was involved in the project from the CEO to the manager in charge. These written words will spawn the new script for your sales team.
Measure what you have accomplished and then brag about it. Create mini case studies with your clients. These are one-page factual descriptions of the original situation, the solution that was implemented and the data supporting quantifiable results. The data should be exact and measurable, like percentages or specific numbers.
For instance, 6,489 new customers may not be a compelling measurable. However, “a 36% increase in new customers in just one year” may be. State the measured value perceived by your customers, not internal quality control.
Share your positioning statements with your marketing team, your sales team and your customer service team. Ask your teams to test them with their customers and clients-to-be. Your positioning statement must be in alignment with what your customers think. If they don’t respond with the words: “Really? How do you do that?” you do not have a compelling competitive advantage.
A carefully crafted, compelling advantage statement, after being tested in the marketplace, should be used willingly and often by everyone in the company. Develop at least three to match the market that you are addressing and in order not to sound like a broken record. Take the time to memorize them, and then use them, often – with new clients as well as existing. Today’s over-stressed buyers need to be constantly reminded of why they invested with you in the first place. Provide them with the tool that will enable them to retain the conviction to not stray when your competitors comes a-knocking on their door.