If your USP needs explaining, it isn’t working
Your prospects are busy, they are not sitting there analysing your website, comparing features, or trying to work out what makes you different. In fact they are not thinking about your business at all. They’re scanning and in those first few seconds, they’re asking themselves one simple question: Is this relevant to me?
If you don’t answer that quickly, clearly, and in a way that is relevant to them then it’s a no!
It is so common; businesses pull their team into a dark room, define what makes them different, they have got strong capability, great people, and a solid offer which all sounds great around the internal board room table. However, when it comes to actually putting it in front of a prospect out in the wild how often does it turn into……
- generic language
- internal terminology
- a long explanation that needs a meeting to explain.
Your USP isn’t there to sound good internally it is there to open doors externally!
Your USP should encourage a prospect to think ‘tell me more’
Or at least think ‘that sounds interesting’. That is what sets Your Lead Generation and the work we do apart , we don’t sit in a room perfecting messaging in isolation we take it into the market and gather the intelligence about whether it does make someone stop, engage, and talk.
If it doesn’t do that, it’s not ready and that is where we find most businesses get stuck. You can’t create a strong USP without doing the uncomfortable work. You have to:
- look properly at your market from their point of view.
- understand where you actually fit (not where you’d like to fit)
- face all the gaps and make decisions about what you’re going to stand for.
That’s not easy, for you or for us. There are always moments where it feels like things are getting more complicated, not less but when you get through that work, everything changes and it all starts to land. That means conversations become easier, prospects understand you quicker, your confidence goes up because you know where you fit and you speak so much clearer
It feels like freedom because instead of trying to be relevant to everyone you work on being really relevant to someone.
From USP to “ways in”
This is the bit most businesses miss as a strong USP isn’t enough on its own, if all it does is sit on your website its theory, a hardworking USP is commercial in that it translates into specific ways into a conversation, ideally the one that is happening in the prospects head. To give you an idea this means taking your USP and turning it into things like:
- “We work with companies like you who are struggling with…”
- “We’re seeing a pattern where…”
- “Out of interest, how are you currently handling…”
USPs in the wild…
We recently worked with a supplier in the IT and technology sector, a space that’s notoriously difficult when it comes to generating new business. When we started, there was no visibility in the market, no pipeline, no interest, no real recognition of the name. Like many businesses, the default route had been PPC and it was delivering very little, not because PPC doesn’t work but because the message behind it wasn’t landing strongly enough to make people act.
We went back to positioning and we did the uncomfortable work with the client to get really clear on what the client actually delivered. Interestingly, when we documented it, the initial reaction was: ‘I’m not sure we can say we do all that.’ – they certainly could, they just hadn’t articulated it properly.
From that we sharpened the problems they solved, got clear on who to target, built some clear conversation openers and took it to the market. We had real conversation with real people and the leads and conversions started. Within two months, we had generated multiple qualified opportunities through direct outreach, significantly outperforming the existing PPC activity.
We were speaking directly to decision-makers, opening conversations, and uncovering real opportunities and we were gathering real market intelligence that we fed into their wider marketing, including PPC
So instead of guessing what might work we took them from assumption to evidence.
Done is better than perfect
You won’t get your positioning nailed in isolation. You have to get it out into the market, test it, refine it, and keep your finger on the pulse. Every conversation gives you intelligence to feedback into your positioning and that’s how we build strong positioning and a converting proposition.
Final thought
If your USP currently needs a meeting to explain it then it’s not working. If you’re struggling to turn what you do into something that actually opens conversations, generates interest from the people you dream of working with.
That’s exactly the work we do at Your Lead Generation.