Structuring Your Unique Selling Proposition
Understanding your value makes winning easier and more predictable. Your USP should combine functional, economic, and emotional value into one sharp competitive advantage that shows prospects exactly why you're the obvious choice.
Understanding and clearly communicating the value you provide is essential to succeeding in scaling a company. When you understand the value only your offering brings to the table, winning becomes easier, faster, and simpler. Growth becomes more constant and predictable.
Winning becomes easier, faster, and simpler
Once you can narrow down your competitive advantage, your daily sales work and decision-making are simplified because you know exactly where to focus and which opportunities to prioritise. Your external and internal communication improves, including how you help each other and play to win as a team. You can implement a clear and consistent way to measure progress across your team.
Where Does Your Competitive Advantage Come From?
Your competitive advantage comes from a combination of factors that competitors cannot easily replicate. A big part of this is called the Unique Selling Proposition. Before we explore how to structure a compelling USP, we need to understand what makes one work in the first place.
What is USP?
Your Unique Selling Proposition is the specific reason why a prospect should choose you over alternatives. It's what you own in the market that no one else can credibly claim.
A strong USP often combines multiple factors into a single, cohesive competitive advantage. Your USP isn't limited to one single thing. It's the unique combination of elements that no competitor can credibly replicate. Think of it as a recipe where the ingredients work together to create something competitors can't match. Each factor alone might be copyable, but the specific combination creates defensibility.
Not everything qualifies as a USP. Claims like "best customer service" or "innovative technology" are not USPs because everyone makes them. A list of features isn't a USP either. Features are what you do, whereas a USP explains why it matters. Competing on "best price" means you've commoditised yourself, which always loses in the long term.
What Makes a Good USP?
A genuine USP has four characteristics:
- It's credible and defensible. You can actually deliver it, and competitors can't easily copy it.
- It's specific, not generic. Not "better quality" or "great customer service" because everyone claims this.
- It directly addresses a high-value customer problem. It matters to your ideal customer profile, not just a vanity feature.
- It's provable. You have evidence through benchmarks, case studies, patents, or unique architecture.
These four characteristics form the foundation of a strong USP, but they need substance to work. That substance comes from understanding the three dimensions of value your solution creates: functional, economic, and emotional.
Three Dimensions of Value in Your USP
Your USP should sit at the intersection of functional, economic, and emotional value. The trick is to have one sharp USP that's backed by all three, not three separate USPs.
Functional Value
Functional value is what your solution does and the job it gets done. Anchor your USP in a very specific job to be done, not a broad claim. Make the outcome measurable in terms of speed, accuracy, coverage, or reliability. Tie the uniqueness to a structural advantage, whether that's architecture, data, workflow, or domain expertise. Functional value is not about your product's features, but it is the closest you should get to discussing them.
Functional value is what your solution does and the job it gets done.
Consider a security platform. The functional promise might be to detect cloud threats in minutes rather than hours. The USP layer becomes more specific: scanning purpose-built for cloud-native workloads, giving full visibility in under five minutes. This is a functional edge that (in this example, we presume) competitors struggle to replicate because of how you have built the product.
Economic Value
Economic value is how your solution impacts money through cost, revenue, risk, or productivity. Translate your functional USP into palpable financial outcomes, such as savings, avoided losses, or additional revenue. Make the numbers credible using benchmarks, customer data, and success stories.
Economic value is how your solution impacts money through cost, revenue, risk, or productivity.
Using the same security platform example, the economic promise might be reducing incident response costs by 40% and avoiding multi-million-dollar regulatory fines.
Emotional Value
Emotional value is how your solution makes the buyer and users feel. This usually means making them feel safe, confident, recognised, and in control. Behind every enterprise purchase sits a person with personal stakes in the decision. They want to know they've made the right choice, that they're in good hands, and that this decision will make them look smart rather than expose them to risk. When your USP makes someone feel confident in their choice, you remove one of the barriers to closing.
Emotional value is how your solution makes the buyer and users feel.
Start from the personal stakes of your champion, whether that's a VP of Engineering or a RevOps lead. Express how your USP changes their emotional state: from anxious to in control, from exposed to protected. Use language they'd use in a corridor conversation. Phrases like "I'm not the bottleneck anymore," or "I look like the one who fixed this" resonate because they're authentic. For the security platform above, the emotional promise might be that the buyer sleeps at night knowing there are no blind spots in their cloud.
One Sharp USP with Three Dimensions
Use this structure to combine functional, economic, and emotional value. With a bit of polishing, you can articulate your USP.
Here's how this works in practice, using the security example from all three dimensions:
For cloud security teams at fast-moving tech companies, we uniquely deliver complete infrastructure visibility, so they reduce incident response costs by 40% and avoid multi-million regulatory fines, and they don't worry about any blind spots because of our cloud-native architecture.
For VP Sales at Series B SaaS companies running complex sales cycles, we're the only revenue intelligence platform that surfaces hidden pipeline risks seven days before they impact your forecast. This gives you time to course-correct, improving forecast accuracy by 35% and eliminating last-minute scrambles. You stop feeling blindsided by deals slipping and start feeling in control of your number because our AI was trained on 10,000+ B2B SaaS deals at your exact stage, while generic tools use broad enterprise data that misses your patterns.
Above hits all three dimensions. The functional value is surfacing risks seven days early through AI trained on relevant data. The economic value is 35% better forecast accuracy and fewer late-stage surprises. The emotional value is moving from blindsided to in control, which matters deeply to someone whose job depends on hitting the number quarter after quarter.
The structural reason competitors can't copy this is the specific dataset. Generic revenue intelligence platforms train on all enterprise deals. This platform has focused its learning on the exact stage and motion at which these buyers operate. That specificity creates defensibility.
Why A Great USP Is Important
When your USP includes all three value dimensions, several things happen. Sales conversations shift from feature comparisons to discussions of business impact. Your team can articulate value consistently because the framework is clear. Buyers can justify premium pricing because they understand the economic return and feel confident in their decision.
Most importantly, you stop competing on price because you're the specialist, not a commodity. You're solving a problem in a way that no one else can credibly claim to match.
Understanding your value makes winning easier, faster, and simpler. When your USP sits at the intersection of what you do, what it means financially, and how it makes buyers feel, you transform from another vendor into the obvious choice.
