Do Your "Three Uniques" Matter?

With my first business, I was asked by my coach nearly 20 years ago to answer the question, “How are we unique from our competitors?” And when I first started business coaching and sales coaching over a decade ago, I would ask leaders to come up with the answer to this question as well. But, after enough experience, I started to wonder if the answer mattered or if this was even the right question.

Years have passed since I used to ask leadership teams that I was coaching to formally develop a list of three ways in which they are unique from their competitors. Frankly, we stopped doing this because prospects don’t ask that particular question. They may ask, “Why should I do business with your company versus another?”, but that is not the same question.

Let me give you an example. If you are shopping for a blender on-line, do you search for a unique blender? One that is different from any other blender out there? It’s not likely. You probably know what you want to accomplish with the blender, so you narrow it down to those that will meet your needs. You might read reviews to validate that you won’t be disappointed by the quality of the blender and then you make a decision probably based upon perceived value or price. You’re exploring why you should buy one blender versus another, but identifying which one is unique from the others is not really part of that equation.

But Jeff you say, that’s just a blender. When I make business decisions about whom to do business with, it’s more serious than that. Ok then, let’s get serious.

Let’s say someone is looking for a spouse. It shouldn’t get more serious than that. Do they want someone who is “unique”? Not likely. They are looking for standard qualities such as attractive, nice, loving, reliable, funny, and so on. Of course, who meets these criteria for each person is subjective. So, what people are really looking for is fit, and just because subjective fit may be rare, it doesn’t mean a prospective spouse is unique. In fact, being unique may keep one single.

Likewise, in the business world, trying to be “unique” in most industries is probably a waste of time and might even hurt sales.

So what question should we be asking?

We should be asking for whom is your company, your products, or your services a good fit. And once you have a clue, where do you put your focus to be the "uniquely best fit" for your prospects?

Now, this is a deeper question than just figuring out your prospect avatar and I won’t get into it here. Let me just wrap up today’s wisdom with this.

When giving dating advice, we don’t tell people to be unique. We tell them to be themselves. If I could modify that just a bit, I would tell people, and companies, to be their best selves to find the best fit.