Everyone wants one thing, few have one thing: the unique selling point (USP), which meets the customer\’s goals and decision criteria.
The USP is an often misunderstood concept. The ability to find a difference relevant to the customer in an important decision criterion off the price is much less common in companies than is assumed. Most companies try to present their USPs as a combination of hard factors, such as product portfolio, price or delivery capability, and soft factors, such as solution competence, customer relationship or brand, that are intended to get the customer to buy.
But that does not end the problem. Even where real USPs can be found, companies struggle with the challenge of communicating them convincingly. At trade fairs, everyone says the same thing and it is difficult for customers to understand the differences. How can we build trust so that customers truly believe and interest in our USPs?
From our experience, the key to this is the sales process. Practice shows that customers perceive very closely how well we focus on them and their goals.
- How professionally do we connect with the contact persons?
- Do we understand the task and the motivation behind it?
- Do we create added value for the customer and can we formulate it for different contacts?
- Do we help our customers make a better decision by supporting their \”internal sales process\”?
- Do we differ from what the competition does, or do we just develop another, arbitrary offer?
The task of sales is to answer these questions in such a way that the sales process itself becomes a distinguishing feature: \”How we sell, is why we win!\”. Then a purchasing process becomes a unique buying experience: the experience that working with us during the purchasing phase brings added value for the company, the team and the individual contact person.
Let\’s compare a classic sales process to a unique buying experience.
With the UBE, advantages over the classic sales process automatically develop:
- Due to the targeted expansion of the contact persons, we develop a better understanding of the requirements.
- We are able to communicate tailor-made benefit arguments/value propositions for the various contact persons. The customer feels better picked up.
- Our solution fits the requirements better because it is not based on general information from fewer contacts.
- The targeted communication with documents, which the customer can also use internally, makes his employees lobbyists for us.
- Access to the decision-making level is facilitated by valuable documents for them.
- Our approach is different from competition. Whoever does what everyone does gets what everyone gets: No differentiation!
Prerequisites for a sales process that provides customers with a unique buying experience are a common understanding of the sales process, the availability of the necessary tools and personal skills of the employees.
Conclusion:
USPs are wonderful. However, we also need a unique buying experience to create a highly productive sales process.
Pierre Martin,
blue frog GmbH
