Take a look at the Sales Proposition Chart from our recent Working Smarter series article "Four Simple Steps to Understanding Your Market".
The chart is designed to help you both determine your product's unique selling proposition and communicate to others.
"Unique Selling Proposition" sounds like a nice piece of marketing mumbo jumbo, but what does it mean to me, you ask? My answer is "A lot!"
After 25 years of seeing both success and failure in businesses of all kinds, I believe that it is essential to understand exactly
- what you are selling
- to whom
- and why they buy from you and not a competitor.
Your "Unique Selling Proposition" is simply a fancy name for the answer to these fundamental questions, and the selling proposition chart is a simple template for answering them.
Let's step through it.
Step 1: Market
The first box is labeled "Market." The implied question here is "Who will buy your product?" Think carefully about the answers as you fill them out. It's often worth a discussion with your co-workers about each answer. You'll be surprised just how controversial this can be.
In my example, I am using our own product, SmartDraw. We define our market as Microsoft Office® users because virtually all of our potential customers also use Office®.
Step 2: Need
What simple need does your product satisfy?
In SmartDraw's case, it's the need to create business graphics.
Step 3: Pain
Now the questions get more difficult. What "pain" does your product relieve for the buyer?
This starts to differentiate your product from the competition.
In SmartDraw's case, most people consider creating business graphics to be a painful task: slow, difficult, and producing bad results.
Think of other business innovations and the pain that they removed. McDonald's® - the first fast food restaurant - what pain did they remove from the need to eat out inexpensively?
Answer: The slow service and unreliable quality from mom-and-pop short order restaurants. Predictability is a big part of what McDonald's sells.
Step 4: Solution
How does your product relieve that pain and therefore separate itself from the competition that still inflicts the pain?
In SmartDraw's case, it's to automate the creation of business graphics that are fast and easy to make and look great.
The answer to steps 3 & 4 define your differentiation from the competition and your unique benefit to the customer. Once you understand this, you can communicate it more effectively to customers and generate sales more easily.
The Sales Proposition Chart is just one of four steps you can take to understand your market. Follow them all and you'll have everything you need to increase your sales and success.
Learn More about Building Unique Selling Propositions
If you'd like to see how to draw a selling proposition chart, please view our screencast "Building a Unique Selling Proposition with SmartDraw."
Also, if you'd like to try SmartDraw, you can download a free trial of SmartDraw.
SmartDraw 2008 Owners: To get the templates discussed in this document, download and run this file: http://www.smartdraw.com/downloads/sd2008/sd2008_Marketing.exe
