Find the Needs only you can fill

Look at each of your top competitors, and for each one, identify where you’re strong, the competitor is weak, and the customer has needs. These are your Unique Selling Points (USPs). 

After conducting about a dozen or so of these competitor analyses, you'll begin to find at least three to five Unique Selling Points you can apply consistently to most sales situations.

Types of Needs to meet

1. Functional Needs: What your product or service does.
2. Business Needs: All businesses have these four needs: Increase profits, Lower costs, Strengthen Image, and Lessen Risk (internal and marketplace)
3. Human Needs: Individually or in combination: Money Needs, Safety Needs, Esteem Needs, and Pleasure Needs.

Areas to explore for these needs include

1. Prospect’s products and services: How can your Unique Selling Points make them better.
2. Prospect’s critical processes: How your Unique Selling Points impact their ability to make money.
3. Prospect’s business plan: How your Unique Selling Points support their strategic initiatives, goals, buying cycles, budgeting, and so on.

How to discover the needs

If the prospect does not have your Unique Selling Point’s Feature, then they logically do not have its Advantage nor its Benefit.

Feature: A concrete, tangible characteristic (big, blue, plastic, etc.)

Advantage: Explains the Feature, tells what it does (function), and how this is a better way to deliver the benefits (easy to find, color matches the control handle, won’t rust, etc.)

Benefit: What the customer gets that fills their Functional, Business, or Human Needs (saves time locating, lowers the risk of mistake, eliminates replacement budget due to rust)

Look for the missing Advantages and Benefits to determine if the prospect has the need. For example, suppose you sell plastic containers to replace metal ones that rust. You would look for rusting containers, rust stains, unhappy employees who must deal with rusting containers, budget to buy new containers to replace rusting ones, and so on.

Review the preceding paragraph to see if you can pick out the Functional, Business, and Human needs met with the plastic container example.  

You can get in-depth information about this blog by reviewing Chapters 7 and 8 in the bestselling book Objection Free Selling.

Previous blogs discuss using the Competitor Analysis to find your Unique Selling Points and write Features, Advantages, and Benefits (FABs). Select the Blog List link at the top of the home page on this blog to find them.

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