Steve Jones
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

There is no such thing as a USP.

dogs

What’s the USP on these dogs?

Every day I see or hear people talking about their USP (Unique Selling Point). A USP is a concept first proposed as a theory to explain a pattern in successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940's.

Yet so much is still written and promoted about the need to define your USP. Guides abound on tips to define your USP. I’m sure many marketing agencies will help you spend 1000’s defining your USP.

Sorry to break this to you — there is no such thing as a USP!

What — Heresy I hear your shout!

From a marketing and sales perspective, I’m not saying that you don’t need to closely define who your customer is, far from it. Every business needs to closely define their ideal buyer persona. Break your target market down and define your ideal customer.

Many templates exist to help you define your buyer personas.

Make sure you spend time on defining your ideal buyer persona. Give them names to make them real to you. Technical Tim, Successful Sally, Financial Francis — whatever works for you.

but back to USP’s.

Why do I say USP’s don’t exist?

If I’m selling a product it will have many features and benefits. Which one is the most important to the customer?

Looking at the picture above with 8 dogs — what’s the USP?

If you look closely you’ll see that each dog is unique. There is something missing from each dog — making them all unique.

So many technical businesses are desperate to tell their customers all about their wonderful product. Look at all the shiny features of my widget. It has so many go faster stripes. It has more green & blue lights than any other product. It has a AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, or Intel Xeon Gold 6154 CPU. It’s written in SQL, Java, C#, Python…?

Most buyers don’t know, and don’t need to know, every feature & benefit of your product. The differences between dog 1 and dog 8 is so small most buyers won’t even notice.

Taking the dog example, they need to understand that it’s a dog, great. But what feature of the dog is most important to them?

Does it matter if they prefer dog 6 (look at right front paw) to dog 2? (look at right front paw).

USP’s don’t exist. The reason they buy are unique to each buyer. It’s what’s important to them not you.

You find out what’s important to them by asking questions. Your job as a sales person is to find this and ascertain the value to them of this UBP. Their unique buying point.

Stop wasting time thinking about USP’s. They don’t exist.

Steve Jones

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How do you buy? Why then is selling different? Successful Selling in Today's Digital World. #Speaker & Technologist. #Socialselling #Kilfrew

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