Marketing – USP Revisited

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Well, I’m back into the marketing world with a lot of my time, so bear with me.  I’ll get back to SAP again, but if you’ve been reading my stuff, you know that I wear a lot of hats.  Well, today I want to talk about the USP or Unique Selling Proposition.  Now I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but for everyone else, the USP is what makes you the go to guy or gal.  It’s what sets you apart from your competition.  It’s what makes you special.

Now you may be asking, “Mike, why do I care about that?”.  I know I would’ve been asking the same questions a year ago.  The answer is simple.  If you want to sell anything, and for you consultants out there this includes selling youself, you need to stand out.  Let’s use me as an example.  When interview for consulting positions, why should anyone want to hire me more than the other 10 people that applied for the position?  It’s simple.  I know Variant Configuration, Service Management and ABAP.  (SD too, but that one doesn’t stand out as much).  I’ve also been doing it for over 15 years.  Now, 15 years sounds great, but if you’ve been in the business long enough you’ve met consultants that supposedly have been doing “X” for 20 years, but what they haven’t explained is that they’ve been entering data into the “X” transaction as a user for 18 of those years, and for 2 years they got to play with configuration.  So to me, length of time isn’t my USP.  I focus on the fact that not only am I functional, but I’m very technical.  Again, you ask, “who cares?”  aren’t they looking for a BA or a functional consultant?  Yes…  but in the companies that I’ve worked for, typically the best people can debug ABAP and show the developer exactly what they want fixed.  It also instills a different mindset into the consultant.  If you know how things work behind the scenes, it makes you more efficient and more creative in your problem solving.  hence, why I use the functional and technical aspects of my personality to be my USP.So, ask yourself, what makes you special?

Now, the whole point behind why I’m talking about this is that I just recently read this in my Ultimate Guidebook to Google Adwords.  A completely independent source of where I originally heard this stuff.  So this tells me that it’s important.  When I start seeing the same “big” ideas coming for multiple places, it means that it’s worth looking into.

So if you haven’t already, start spending some time figuring out what makes you stand out from everyone else.  Then start formulate it into your own USP.  You may never use it to outright, but being able to answer that question in your head  gives you a great place to start when someone asks “Why should I hire you?”.

Thanks for reading.

 

As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike

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