There are very few soft skills that are universally beneficial to grow, regardless of your age and position. I would ask you to guess which one I have in mind, but given the article’s title, you probably already know that I’m talking about sales.
You might believe that this is something that makes you a salesman, but that’s a very narrow look at it. If we open the definition up, you will discover that the ability to sell is nothing more than getting what you want at the price someone is willing to pay. That might mean you get your parents to send you to an expensive space camp, but also it means you can sell an idea to an investor.
That leads me to my field of choice: product management. While, in theory, there are is little selling a typical PM has to do, a PM will often be a little like a start-up founder looking for investors. However, here it’s about adding new features and getting support from your stakeholders, and part of this process (and a great way to prepare for your sales performance) is to craft your unique selling proposition.
A unique selling proposition (USP) is a statement that summarizes how your product solves your customers’ problems, what makes it different from other products in your category, and why it is the best choice for your target market.
It’s not meant as a marketing slogan, but a statement of fact that makes your product stand out from the competition. It’s not hard to confuse it with a marketing slogan though. For example, M&Ms: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand” would have fooled me, especially when seen after one of Red Bull’s “Gives you wings” commercials.
It’s actually a good challenge early on in this article: how would you replace Red Bull’s slogan with a USP? My take would be “Get stuff done with the original energy drink.”
This USP is not the best, but let’s face it, with tons of copycats that either use less sugar, natural “energy” chemicals or are simply cheaper, the only thing going for Red Bull nowadays is its brand. Back in the 80s when Red Bull first appeared, “Get stuff done (with our soda)” would have been a pretty good USP.
As mentioned in the intro, much of what we do to get what we want is sales. A unique selling proposition allows you to create the uniqueness that is often the key to being noticed. In a world where everything has dozens of copycats, you need to be ahead of the curve and make your users explain why they should choose you.
As a product manager, you are the one responsible for building the USP for your product — and usually, it’s not built around sales or marketing terms. You do, however, have to develop your product in a way that allows both sales and marketing to craft materials and discussions about your product and its unique features.
Don’t get me wrong: unique doesn’t usually mean innovative. It’s more of a “The whole is greater than the sum of its part” situation. Two products can have the same set of features and fix the same issues while having different USPs. Say, when I compare Skype and WhatApp. Both do essentially the same: offer free chat and video calls. However, those two products couldn’t be further apart!
Whatsapp offers a great free alternative to basically replace your phone provider and open you to costless calls from around the world within the Whatsapp user base. Skype allows you to do that (with far worse phone integration and UI) and calls any landline from any device.
Other than that, creating your USP means doing your product due diligence right. Only by knowing your users, market, and competitors and having a strong vision and strategy are you able to provide a compelling USP that will work.
I often see my product students struggle to create a great product vision, often confusing it with a marketing slogan. A USP and vision are really not that far apart, and only by perfecting each are you able to create marketable products.
Now that you know what USP is and why it is important, let’s look at how to create it for your product. Let me propose the following process for that:
Depending on whether you are creating a new product or feature, you will need to address different users. With this, you can achieve the right focus and better craft your communication.
Be warned though! It’s not easy to find the right target audience. You may feel compelled to over-generalize or over-focus. While the topic of choosing the right user segment could make for a separate article, let’s just say for now that you need to spend some time on this to make the right call.
After you know who your target audience is, voice out the problem you want to solve for them. In other words, what pain points are you looking to solve with the product or improvement you wish to present with your USP?
This is a crucial step — very often, junior PMs or stubborn heads of the product will start with a new product, decide on their “solution,” and then try to find the “problem” it solves. This is how the stories feature made it to Skype and failed.
Now that you know what problem you are solving, let’s focus on the outcome of the item as the focus of USP. Here, you are looking at the outcome the user will see when interacting with your product or feature.
As a product manager, deciding which metric or user behavior you want to impact and by how much is critical. While you don’t want to have pure guesses here (and the more data you have to support your claims, the better), it is also OK to do a little guesstimation when needed. After all, if you are doing something for the very first time, you might not have a frame of reference to ground your estimations on. It will make the next step easier.
Evidence is needed for creating the right communication and being able to ground any claims you might have in your USP. Very often, big words and promises come with no grounding at all. Without that, your proposition will be only an empty shell with nothing to offer, really.
With those five steps, you should be ready to write your unique value proposition. Let me provide you with two examples.
I’d like to start with the Red Bull in the 80s, as we already touched on that:
And thus, the USP: “Get things done with our Red Bull drink.”
Which, on a second inspection, is not that far off from “gives you wings,” but that carries too much of a metaphor to be a unique selling proposition.
Just a personal sidenote, I don’t drink energy drinks and their negative impact on your health is undeniable. I wish I drank less (or no) coffee though! Don’t treat this example as an endorsement. It’s just a good example to call.
Speaking of personal references, let me guide you through crafting the original thinking behind my original product management course:
My USP is then “Become a great product manager! Land your dream job with big tech’s senior product manager.”
Before we close this article, let me leave you with two opposing Apple stories where the USP made a big difference. Let’s start with a potentially shocking revelation: did you know that the co-founder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, used to work at HP where he pitched the concept of a personal computer five times and was rejected each time?
That’s right! Imagine that Steve was better able to pitch his idea of a personal computer in times when such devices were extremely expensive and reserved for business applications. It might have been that our iPhones would have HP logos on them, not semi-eaten apples.
Speaking of smartphones from a fruit garden, one thing that blows my mind every time I remember this is that the first iPhone had very few innovative ideas in it. Almost all the technology in that phone already existed in different devices. Those implementations lacked the polish and the right level of technical perfection. That even includes iPhone’s ancestor, Apple’s PDA device: Newton.
This allows me to come back to an early article’s remark: a unique sales proposition doesn’t imply direct innovation. It can simply mean providing clients with something they potentially already know but in a new, exciting, and improved way!
Let me come back once more to my own product management course and a failed USP I had there: making the promise of a practical product management course. For me, it was justified and unique. After all, I was building the curriculum based on my own experiences and giving students direct advice on how to follow in my footsteps.
That, however, led to declining enrollment figures and more and more negative reviews. Why? Because the word “practical” doesn’t mean the same for everyone and my students expected different aspects of practicality of the teachings that simply weren’t there.
Thus, before I conclude, let me leave you with this final, practical advice about framing your USP, which stands in direct opposition to a song by Depeche Mode: “Words (in your unique sales proposition) are meaningful and memorable!”
I started this article by claiming that being a good salesman is a universally useful skill. That often comes down to having a loud, unique, and interesting call that will stand out above the millions of other sounds.
You have microscopic windows of opportunity to grab their attention and make a case for your product, idea, or feature. Thus, regardless if you are looking for your stakeholder’s support or funding for your idea from a venture capital company, your unique sales proposition may be what will make or break your opportunity.
Hopefully, it will be easier after reading this article. Thank you for your time and see you in the next one!
Featured image source: IconScout
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