Talk radio in Montreal is blowing up my kitchen speakers these days.
The hot topic lighting up the local airwaves is Bombardier — a local aerospace giant.
They’ve got the government strapped over a barrel for a $1 billion bail out. The money is needed to help salvage a botched airplane project, which, commentators say, has little hope of taking off.
Thing is, they employ a huge team of local people. So they’re seen by the local government as another one of those “too big to fail” scenarios.
It got me thinking about how and why companies (and products) fail.
My main man, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, says you can always trace a company’s success back to:
A) The team
B) The company/product USP
It stands to reason that if you fail, it’s most likely because one of these two factors didn’t cut the mustard.
And there’s plenty of speculation in the media over which of these is as fault.
So, in honour of the local project that’s crashing and burning in my area code, let’s look at a few of the most common reasons people screw up their USP:
- They improv their USP, time after time, whenever they need it — like on a sales call, or at a networking event.
- They’ve never dedicated time to thinking through their USP, talking to their customers about it, and documenting the findings.
- No one on their team can give a straight-forward answer to what their USP is. And everyone in their company gives a different answer.
- The appeal and exclusivity of their claims are distorted by “owner bias” because everyone’s too close to see things clearly.
- Their USP doesn’t have a “Powerful Only Factor”.
- They don’t recognize their secret exclusivity claim (it’s often staring us in the face, but — alas — it remains invisible).
- They don’t have a separate USP for each customer avatar.
- They haven’t figured out what their customers really want.
- They don’t educate their employees on the importance of the USP to the company.
So, there you have it… 9 ways everyday folks — including your competition — screw up their USP.
Knowing what the problems are is one thing. Fixing them is another.
Don’t worry though. It doesn’t have to be a painful fix… when you know what to do.
If you’d like to any of these problems in your business or product, jet on over to the link below.
It’ll let us setup a brief 20-minute chat, about how to banish these 9 problems from your business, for good:
https://calendly.com/rossolochlainn/usp-exploration
No fee. No commitment. No obligation.