You’ve got a problem…

Your sales staff was lulled to sleep during the good times and those that are left, now years later, well, they don’t have the skills or the confidence to go snap up quality accounts and get them at a rate you can be proud of.

They sit in the office trapped, as if in a box of their own making, believing that it’s not possible to rapidly grow their portfolio with quality credits at premium pricing…that it’s not possible to win an account without matching rates.

Now, I’m going to show how good banks, and even some struggling banks, transformed their loan growth, growing faster than they ever had before. Doing it by only targeting A+ quality credits and winning those deals at premium prices.

If you want to win more deals, you must be more valuable to a prospect (even at a higher rate) than another bank. And you’ve got to have a way to communicate your value to that prospect. You need a Unique Selling Proposition.

Rosser Reeves says it’s critical to have the right three elements for it to be a Unique Selling Proposition, or a USP. Let’s cover those three parts:

1. It must matter to the customer. It’s amazing how many things are made up that don’t really matter to the customer at all. If it doesn’t have that first, stop right there. If it doesn’t add some extreme value, stop right there. If it doesn’t have value that they’ll pay more for, stop right there!
2. It needs to be dramatically If somebody else has the same benefit, and it sounds the same, then it’s really not a Unique Selling Proposition and you’re not going to get more for it. So, bringing creativity to the table for every product line, every different kind of market you go after—is imperative for Unique Selling Propositions for you be allowed to get paid more of the money that you deserve to get for your differentiation.
3. It must have an explicit In other words, if it’s not said in a way that’s believable, either identified as a system a process, a checklist—a measurable way to say that it’s believable—the customer is not going to believe it. We’ve all been lied to in advertising, so we don’t want to hear the puffery. We want to hear documentable proof. That, in fact, I will pay $10,000 more, Bank A, for what you have, because it’s going to bring me an extra $300,000, and I can explain how it would do just that.

That’s the kind of USP you want to have in order for you to get paid more, at all that you’re worth.