How to convince clients to choose you, even when you’re not the cheapest, biggest or most well-known

If you’re a B2B (business selling to other businesses), you’re facing a sea of competitors all trying to grab your slice of the pie. You can’t — and likely don’t want to — win the competition by being the cheapest. There’ll always be somebody to steal that spot.

And you’re right. It’s not only about price. Verizon, Allstate Insurance, and Apple aren’t the cheapest options in their fields, yet customers choose them in droves.

Why? Because they know that with Verizon, they’re getting blazing fast connection. With Allstate, they’re in good hands. With Apple, they’re getting cutting-edge tech. In other words, these three mega companies have done a brilliant job selling themselves via a one-liner that shows exactly what unique value they offer you.

In the world of marketing, we call that a value prop (VP for short): a stellar, one-sentence pitch promoting something special about you that your competitors don’t have. Your VP is there every time you open a conversation with a potential new customer — be it on your website’s headline, the message on your voicemail, your proposals and marketing swag and even in your elevator pitch — making it clear why to customers why you’re different and better than anyone else out there.

Back in the ’40s, Mars and Murrays (M&M) was one of hundreds of chocolate brands, each competing for a slice of the pie in an overcrowded market. Until they unveiled the most famous value prop in history, and became a hit chocolate brand practically overnight.

World War II was raging at the time, the army was recruiting tens of thousands of men as soldiers, and they all needed long-shelf-life foods in their kit bag. M&M saw the need, and grabbed the opportunity to market their unique chocolate in a super-specific way with one of the most powerful and long-lasting slogans of all time: “The milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hands.”

That’s what the right value prop does for your business: It shows how you’re desirably different. Explains why customers should choose you over the thousands of options out there. Gets you remembered, wanted, and sold.

IN

12 words, a VP is:

Something great your customer gets from your brand — that they won’t get anywhere else

In 4 words it’s:

How you’re desirably different

In three words, it’s:

Your wow factor

In 1 word, it’s, well…

Dumb. Sorry. But I’ve never seen a great value prop shorter than seven words.

Your value prop could be something unique and incredible about the product you provide, like the features, warranty, how it works, how long it lasts. It could be the way you service customers, like your return policy, US-based support, or the hours you’re open. It could even be the reputation you have, or the values your brand stands for, like Toms shoes — for every pair you buy, they’ll donate one to someone in need.

Really? Just create a VP and watch sales soar? Well, finding the right value prop for your biz isn’t as simple as pulling a cool one-liner out of a bag. How do you even figure out what your business’s unique value is? Here’s the five-step process I use to double, triple, and even multiply tenfold the selling power of brands I work with.

STEP 1

FIND YOUR UNIQUE ANGLE

What’s the one claim nobody else is making?

For your value prop to be effective, you’ve got to look through everything that makes your brand powerful, from your history to your process, to be sure nobody else is saying what you are. Ideally, you want your claim to be something nobody else can replicate. Like Coke’s secret ingredient. Or Amazon’s same-day shipping. Or the 24-hour service no other neighborhood pharmacy offers.

But what if you don’t have a super-unique angle to brag about? Here’s the wonderful thing about marketing: Even if you’re the same as everybody else, if you grab a claim before any of your competitors do, you get to own it.

Take VoIP phone service. Because it connects calls through the internet, connection isn’t completely reliable. It has a reputation for dropped/scrambled/delayed calls.

So when I was writing copy for 8x8 (one of the top five VoIP providers in the US) I noticed that their competitor Vonage marketed themselves as providing “99.9% uptime.” It meant their phone service (despite using VoIP technology) was practically glitch-free.

What a claim! I was impressed, and annoyed. How would my client compete against that?

Then, as I dug deeper into analyzing the competitor websites, I noticed that four of the top five, (including my client) could make the same claim. But because Vonage got to it first, we couldn’t use it.

“We also do 99% uptime.” Kinda feeble, isn’t it?

So I dug deeper, and discovered that my client used the same system used by hospitals, the US navy, and NASA. Honestly, it’s a claim most of his competitors could make — but they hadn’t. Bingo. Unique VP found.