Find Your Competitive Advantage Through "Why Us" Workshops

Most companies can tell you what they sell. Far fewer can tell you, convincingly and consistently, why a prospect should buy from them rather than from someone else. Too often, the answer circles back to price. The product is good, the team is capable, and yet deals are slipping away or closing only after a discount. This is not a product problem. It is a value communication problem.

This is not a product problem. It is a value communication problem.

Think about the last quarter. A deal you were confident about went cold. Another one finally closed, but only after a significant price reduction. Meanwhile, the growth targets have not changed. When you sit down with the sales reps to understand what happened, a pattern emerges. In both cases, the prospect could not see clearly enough why your offering was worth the premium. So they either walked or negotiated.

Unclear value leads to buying on price. Every time.

The fix is not a better pitch deck. Or a new feature. Not even a better product. It is a deeper, shared understanding of why someone should choose you and your offering. Not just what you do, but what you uniquely enable for your customers, and why that matters more than the alternative.

Articulating this is one thing. The harder part is getting your entire go-to-market team to internalise it and use it consistently, from online ads to the very first prospecting conversation through to closing. Your competitive advantage should sharpen who you go after, guide how you run discovery, and make saying yes to you at full price a straightforward decision for the buyer.

Take your team on a journey to "Why Us".

That requires taking your team on a deliberate journey. One that starts with identifying your competitive advantage, then zooming in before weaponising it.

Why Us?

A strong "Why Us?" has three dimensions. Functional value covers what your solution actually does and how it improves performance, reliability, or speed. Economic value translates that into financial outcomes such as cost savings, revenue uplift, or reduced risk. Emotional value speaks to how the buyer feels when they work with you, whether that is confidence, control, or the reassurance that they have made the right call. Together, these three dimensions form a USP that holds up under scrutiny and resonates across stakeholders.

Structuring Your Unique Selling Proposition

Build a USP linking functional, economic, and emotional value.

GTM ClubIlkka Vertanen - GTM Club Founder

The practical way to build this capability across your team is through a structured series of workshops. You do not need an external consultant to run them. You need commitment, the right people in the room, and a willingness to be honest about what is actually working in your customer conversations. Your team already has the raw material. They know what customers respond to, what questions come up repeatedly, and where conversations tend to stall.

Bring in voices from outside sales if you can. Customer success, product, and marketing often hold insights that the sales team has not yet connected. Plus, these are the things you need to align on to win. Make sure everyone can also voice the painful stuff: why customers have churned, why deals were lost, and why discounts were given. The pattern in those answers is usually where the most valuable work happens.

The programme runs across five sessions. Don't run them back-to-back, but let the thinking and ideas breathe. The programme can run over five weeks or five months, depending on your team's rhythm. What matters is that you do not rush the process or treat it as a box-ticking exercise. The quality of the conversations in these sessions determines whether you walk away with a genuine competitive edge or just a prettier version of your existing messaging.

Walk away with a genuine competitive edge.

Here is how to approach each workshop. This is a high-level overview, so adjust it according to your organisation's size and available time. You can do these in smaller groups or everyone together. Post-It notes are a classic workshop aspect that works here, too!

Set the Foundation

In workshop 1, bring your GTM team together and introduce the three dimensions of value. The goal here is to get everyone on the same page with what you are doing and why. You have been successful if you have buy-in from participants and some ideas to work with as you head into the next workshops. From now on, they also know what to look for in their daily customer dialogues.

The agenda for workshop 1:

1. Introduce the concept and the journey you started. Explain what you want to achieve (making winning easier) and why (so you all reach targets).
2. Run a quick brainstorming session for each dimension to surface initial ideas.

• What do you think makes you different or works to your advantage?
• What have customers responded to in each dimension?
• What sort of success stories does sales tell to prospects?
• What (business) goals do your won/lost/expanded/churned have?
• Why were the recent deals won/lost? What resonated with the prospects, what did not?

3. Collect all ideas. Capture them without filtering. Nothing is off the table at this stage.

Deep Dives into Each Value Dimension

Next, you will run three similar workshops (workshops 2-4), each focusing on a different value dimension. The purpose is to focus on one aspect at a time. So if you are discussing functional value, keep your focus narrow and the discussion on point. Make sure you take plenty of notes from these workshops, as they are gold for taking action afterwards.

You are successful with workshops 2-4 if you have many ideas and a lively discussion that steers toward a shared direction. If the direction is not shared, you are not at fault. However, as a leader, prepare to make tougher decisions later on.

Workshop 2: Functional Value

What does your solution actually do, and how is it different from others out there? Maybe it crunches the numbers faster? Or do you have better Salesforce integration than anyone else? Use real examples from won and lost deals. Focus the session on identifying the top functional strengths that buyers genuinely value.

Functional value is what your solution does and the job it gets done:

• Where have you created obvious, tangible benefits?
• What makes your approach different from the alternatives?
• What features are valued by the customers, and most of all, why?

Workshop 3: Economic Value

How does your functional benefit translate into money saved, revenue gained, or risk avoided? If your solution is faster than competing, what is the monetary benefit from that? Push for specifics.

Economic value is how your solution impacts money through cost, revenue, risk, or productivity:

• How does your product help customers, and how can you measure that in money?
• What does a good outcome look like in financial terms?
• How do you consistently help customers get there?

Workshop 4: Emotional Value

Behind every B2B purchase is a person with personal stakes in the decision. They want to feel confident, in control, and reassured that they made the right call. Can you provide that? Would a customer be happy to announce they work with you? Why? Think about the language your customers use in real conversations, the corridor conversations, not the formal presentations.

• What does your offering do for the person buying it, not just the business?
• How does working with you change how they feel about their own role and decisions?
• What do people say about you when you are not represented in the room?

Suggested Agenda for Workshops 2-4 (approx. 2 hours each)

1. Introduction and framing (15 min):
Set the context for the specific value dimension you are covering. Briefly introduce what it means and why it matters in customer conversations. Share 1-2 examples to get everyone on the same page.

2. Idea generation (15 min):
Individual or small group brainstorming. For example, write down ideas on Post-it notes and put them on the wall. You can use the same or similar prompts as in WS1 to spark thinking.

3. Grouping and prioritising (30 min):
As a group, cluster the ideas into themes and discuss which ones are most impactful. Aim to identify the top 3 for that dimension. They are the ones you will be working with more in the future, even though they would not be your USP. For example, let's say your customer support consistently delivers great NPS scores. The fact that your customers feel they are helped quickly and feel cared for is worth mentioning, right?

4. How do we communicate this? (30 min):
Split into small groups if there are many people. Each group takes one of the top ideas and works out how to communicate it clearly to a customer. What is the problem it solves? How do you explain it without jargon? What discovery question opens that conversation?

5. Presenting findings and wrap-up (30 min):
Each group presents back. Discuss and agree on the strongest point. If something needs more validation or customer input before you rely on it, now is the time to get it. After the workshop, it's also time to start testing the findings in actual customer conversations (before locking anything). If you reach out to recent wins and losses and do a DIY win/loss analysis, you can verify your findings.

Pull It All Together to Start Winning

We have reached workshop 5. Take the findings from the previous four and work towards a shared understanding of "Why Us", your competitive advantage.

From this point forward, the "Why Us?" is not a document. It is how your team works.

The goal is alignment: everyone on the team should be able to explain your competitive advantage in the same way, even if they adjust the language from time to time. Use this session to lock in your core USP. From this point forward, the "Why Us?" is not a document. It is how your team works.

In addition, you will have a lot of supporting arguments why to choose you.

Workshop 5: This Is Why Us (approx. 2 hours)

1. Recap and consolidation (20 min)
Present the key findings from Workshops 2, 3 and 4 side by side. What are the strongest ideas from each dimension? Where do they overlap or reinforce each other? This gives the whole group a shared view before the real work starts.

2. Defining your USP (30 min)
As a group, draft a clear articulation of your "Why Us?". One statement or a short set of statements that covers all three dimensions. It does not need to be polished copy at this stage, but it needs to be true and specific to you. The likelihood that you do not unanimously agree is high, so this is where the leader steps in and points the direction.

3. Aligning on messaging (30 min)
Agree on the core language your team will use going forward. Not a script, but a shared vocabulary. What words and phrases reflect your USP accurately? What language should you stop using because it is too generic or too feature-focused?

4. You vs. competition (30 min)
You probably have a bunch of usual suspects you run against on a weekly basis. Use a moment to align your findings against them. How do you shine against your main competitors? Map the findings from all workshops against them (in addition to USP, you might have better support than one of them and an easier product to use than another). Start now, and your team can expand these even to battle cards later on.

5. Commit and close (10 min)
End with a clear commitment from the group. The "Why Us" is live from this point. It is something your team believes in and will use from the next customer conversation onwards.

The "Why Us" is live from this point.

The purpose is not to have concrete items, such as a new slogan, ready after workshop 5. The purpose is to align with the USP that marketing can use to develop a new slogan. Similarly, sales can narrow down the customer profiles where you win, agree on how this changes your prospecting criteria, discovery questions, and closing conversations.

You Have Opportunities to Win and Work to Do

After the last workshop, your work leading the change starts. While the series of workshops establishes mutual understanding with your team, there is still work to do. You need to ensure the insights, lessons, and the agreed "Why Us" transition to action become part of daily execution. Running the workshops is just the beginning.

You probably want to finish those battle cards, update website copy, maybe redo the slogan, and structure sales demos differently. From all the notes in the workshop, marketing can create a lot of "Why Us" themed content that is now aligned with what sales is saying during customer calls. You want to encompass the lessons here in your regular pipeline reviews to measure adoption. We also recommend sitting in on sales calls to see firsthand how customers react to your messaging. Oh, and you need to make sure the product team is on the same page with you as they continue developing the product.

Run the sessions. Do the work. Then go win the deals you should have been winning all along.

Special thanks to Kert Kenner, whose presentation at Summer of Sales back in 2023 got me thinking about the three dimensions of value. That presentation led me to run these workshops for the first time the following autumn.