What’s your USP?

What makes you and your business special?

What makes you and your business special? How do you distinguish yourself from everyone else?

What makes you unique? How do you want to be remembered?

What is your unique selling point, what’s your USP?

I go to networking meetings and often there are a coachload of coaches(!) in the room…

– I’ve learned that it’s not a problem because we’re all different, we work in different ways and we attract different clients…

While it may be easy for me to know that – how do I make sure that potential clients or people who might refer me to colleagues/friends/family understand which coach might be the right coach for them..?

We need to be able to succinctly describe who we are and how we can help – rather than just giving our job titles. Hearing:

“I’m a coach”
“I’m a digital marketing executive”
“I’m a virtual assistant”

…doesn’t really help us figure out if we want to work with that person…

What’s your sentence?

Can you distil your life’s work, your purpose, into a single sentence?

…Or is it a woolly paragraph…?

Dan Pink (author of Drive – The surprising truth about what motivates us) asks:

“What’s your sentence?”

Getting your message across

How can you get your message across to potential customers or people who may refer you?

– in a way that they will remember?

Try this exercise:

Who are you ‘serving’?

(specifically what kind of customers, clients, patients, students…)

How do you impact their lives? What does that give them?

(think about ‘benefits not features’)

How does that impact you? What does that give you?

(- this is what drives you)

So what?

Or try answering the So what? question (multiple times if needed):

e.g.

What do you do?
I’m a …
So what?
I help people…
So what?
….

If I answer the ‘what do you do?’ question with a knee-jerk ‘I’m a coach’ it’s a flag to me that I’m tired (or lazy) – and I remind myself to talk instead about who I help, how I help them and why it’s important to me…

Best You!

When asked to talk about yourself, to radiate enthusiasm and positive energy, try telling people about the ‘best you’, about you at your best.

You’ll probably smile and so will they!

Try this exercise:

Telling Your Story

Stories can be very powerful – they trigger emotions in the listener/reader and are easy to remember. Are you telling your unique story to potential customers?

How did you get to be to where you are today? What’s your story?

Sometimes we can feel that we don’t have a good story or that everyone else’s story is more interesting! – but others may not see it that way…

What’s your USP?

What about you? What’s your USP?

Are you getting your message ‘out there’?

Please let me know your thoughts by adding your comments below…

To find out how I can help you to get your unique message across, please get in touch via the contact form or call me on +44 7526 740486.

[To get your free copy of the eBook ’10 questions to ask yourself about your business’ with exercises like the ones above, sign up for my fortnightly newsletter using the sign up box on the top right of this page, or at the foot of the page if you’re viewing on a mobile device.]

Best wishes!

Sian