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Trainer, Kill Your Competition With a USP

How are you different from the others?

Your Unique Selling Proposition (or USP for short) is what makes you stand out from other trainers. Although USP contains the word selling,  it is really about the reason why your customers pick you instead of the competition. Ideally, your USP is a strength that only you possess: an unfair advantage, so to speak, that your competitors cannot overcome. From your customers’ point of view, it is the answer to the question “Why should I buy a training from you?”.

Suppose you are a business trainer specialized in establishing business relationships in China. You help out entrepreneurs who are looking to expand their businesses into China, or maybe off-shore their production there. For instance, you might be training them to recognize the importance of guanxi, or connections and relationships, in Chinese business.

Now, if you were a native speaker of Mandarin and all the other Chinese business relationship trainers only speak English, you would have an unfair advantage. You visit the country on a regular basis, read Chinese business papers and magazines and talk to lots of Chinese business people.  You are uniquely qualified to explain the nuances of Chinese business etiquette. All other things being equal, your customers are more likely to pick you instead of your competitors. As long as you clearly state your USP in your marketing materials, of course.

So how do you come up with your own Unique Selling Proposition? If you are at least moderately successful, you probably already have a USP even if you don’t know it. You just need to find out what it is.

Discover Your USP

Find out what your USP is by asking your customers. Why did they choose you? Get on the phone and ask: “Why did you pick me as a trainer?”. If a pattern begins to emerge, that’s probably your USP. They could be telling you: “All the others have some experience doing business in China, but I heard that you also actually speak Mandarin.” Bingo! You’re the training expert in Chinese business relationships who speaks Mandarin.

But what if you don’t get a consistent answer? What if somebody tells you: “You happened to be the only trainer  available.” Or worse: “You were the cheapest.” Competing on price cannot be a USP – by definition – because there will always be some upstart willing to undercut you be a few percent.

If you cannot identify your USP by querying your customers, you are in the same boat as a trainer who is just starting out, with no customers yet.

For Starters: Find and Validate Your USP

As a starting trainer, you cannot ask you existing customer base. Instead, try to identify your strengths by yourself. See if you have a marketable unfair advantage over other trainers. An unfair advantage could be a unique skill that nobody else in your market has. In the example mentioned above, speaking Mandarin Chinese is an unfair advantage turned into a USP.

But a USP need not necessarily be a unique skill. It can also be: offering your training in a new way. For instance, I know an IT trainer who realized that his competitors were all offering face-to-face training sessions in a traditional way. Given the topic of the training, computer skills, this is more than a bit odd: you can easily train computer skills through online training. This IT trainer started offering his services for a much lower price, which he could afford because he no longer needed to travel so much – his training sessions now took place online. But more importantly, his customers’ employees could do a large part of the training in their own time!

To identify a potential USP:

1. Make a list of all the potential benefits you as a trainer can offer through your training (e.g. comply with the law, increase work floor safety, increase productivity).
2. Compare the list with what your competitors are offering and scrap everything that your competitors are already listing.
3. For the remaining benefits, see what you are really good at as a trainer. Also, think about what you’re willing to offer. Don’t advertise flexible training hours if you’re not willing to work during vacations.

Once you have identified a few promising USPs, it’s time to validate these. This simply means: interview your potential customers to see which USP really resonates.

Making a USP Work for You

Your USP only works for you if customers actually recognize it. If your advertised USP is “Free post-training support” but your customers always call you because you’re available during vacations you know you should change your USP (anything ‘free’ is probably a bad USP anyway, because the ‘free’ part of it can be easily copied).

Another prerequisite for making your USP work, is that potential customers actually get to know it. This part is relatively easy – include it everywhere in your marketing:

• website
• brochures
• email signature
• facebook page
• linkedin profile
• twitter profile
• business cards
• even business conversations

As a matter of fact, if you are starting out as a trainer, you may even want to name your company (assuming you have one) after your USP – assuming you have carefully validated your USP of course.