What’s your USP?

Business consultants and sales trainers talk about ‘Unique Selling Propositions’.  But what is one of those really - and do your business, your services and your products all need to have one?

We all have competition - there are few truly unique businesses.  That means that ‘unique’ is a hard thing to define for most business owners.  As the business environment is more and more based on networking, referrals and connectors, that hard sell is less likely to be a big issue, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be clear about what you’re offering.

Know your audience

I bang on at length about ideal customers - if you’re trying to help everybody, you’ll find growing your business an uphill struggle.  The most important part of your business plan is to have one or more detailed client avatars.  This gives you focus and makes finding your potential clients in the places they gather and then giving them exactly what they really need.

Know their challenges

Go and sit in your ideal client’s seat.  What are they having to deal with?  What are the challenges they face? What keeps them awake at night?  When you’ve got a clear idea of the answers you’ve got the gold nuggets that will help you to craft the offers that will have them falling gratefully into your hands.

Understand how you can help them

Look at each of your services or products and test it against how it helps your potential clients with their issues and problems.  Not what it DOES, but what they GET from having it.  Known in the sales business as ‘benefits’, these are really solutions to their problems.  

When you’re generating benefits, remember the key phrase ‘So what?’  If what you’ve listed as a benefit can be challenged by ‘So what?’ you have not yet arrived at the benefit, you’re still talking about advantages - keep going!

This is the foundation for your promotion.  When you’re talking to ideal clients (or people who might refer you to an ideal client) you should be focused on their problems and outcomes, not what you do (HINT: they don’t care what you do!).

Educate

When you’ve got your benefits clear, it’s time to talk about them.  When you go to networking events or meet business connections and you’re asked ‘what do you do?’ use these benefits to educate people.  I find it works well to tell a story about a (fictitious) client who experienced a typical problem, then got the service or product you’re offering and got all these amazing outcomes (the benefits).

If your listener either has similar problems or knows someone who does, they’ll join up the dots really quickly!

So your USP isn’t really about what you’re offering - it’s what the recipient gets in the way of results.

How to plan a book

If you’re thinking of writing a book you probably have the subject in mind, but how do you get from an idea to a finished manuscript?

I’m talking about non-fiction books in this article - there are different approaches to fiction and non-fiction, and non-fiction is usually easier to put together.

First step: Make sure someone else hasn’t just published something very, very similar 

While you make your book unique, because it’s your thoughts on the subject, there’s only so many ways to rehash any subject - unless you’ve come up with something revolutionary or a different way of looking at your subject.

Doing this research has a dual purpose.  Not only are you ensuring you’re not reinventing the wheel, but it will also give you more ideas about what kind of approaches to your subject work - and what don’t.

Second step: Plan your content first 

This process creates your skeleton plan.  First plan out the subjects for each chapter, then add what you want to include in each one in more detail.  You can include:

• Theory
• Anecdotes and stories
• Case studies
• Quotes
• Models and diagrams
• Exercises or activities

Third step: Create your chapter ‘recipe’

Before you start organising the content you’ve gathered, think about what your chapter structure will look like.  

• Will there be an introduction?
• Will you start with a story or quotation?
• Will each chapter feature a case study?
• Will the chapter be broken into sections under subheadings?
• Will you end the chapter with a summary, a quotation or an action plan?

These are just a few of the things you’ll need to consider.  Once you’ve decided on your recipe, then each chapter needs to follow that.

Fourth step: Fit your content into the recipe structure for each chapter

I usually do this as a mind-map, but if you like lists then by all means do a list.  Effectively you’ll have a template for each chapter and you just need to add the content into the template.  Now you have your skeleton plan.

Fifth step: Write around your skeleton plan

Writing your book should now be reasonably easy as you’re literally filling in the gaps and expanding your material.

While there’s no rule about how long a book should be - you’ll need to aim at a minimum of about 40,000 words to give you a book that has substance and is thick enough to be visible on a bookshelf.  If it’s too thin it will disappear among the other books - not good news when your book is on the bookseller’s shelves.

If you’ve got ten chapters that means you’re aiming at around 4,000 words per chapter.  If you aim to write a chapter each week, your book will be done in ten weeks!

However, procrastination is the writer’s biggest enemy - so my advice is put regular time slots in your diary and treat them as critical appointments.  You’ll find that your manuscript grows quicker than you might have thought it will.

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