@Helen – the best approach is to keep digging. I’ve gone as far as cutting people off and saying – “That’s not an USP” and showing them competitor sites that say the same thing (sound familiar?) :) If you can do this in a funny, lighthearted way, the client usually gets it. Not always. But usually. And then a deeper conversation can take place.

You can ask them to talk about the cases that have really stood out for them personally. What were the specifics? How did they help? What makes that particular case stand out? When you can get the client to go off autopilot and start telling stories, you can often tease out some wonderful information. You just have to get them past “soundbite speech.”

I hope this helps! :)

LOVE your ideas, @Matthew! Thank you! :)

What’s your approach when you really can’t get your client to pin down any sort of USP?

And as for those goofy ideas, sometimes, it’s actually very useful, I find, to exaggerate to illustrate.

The point is to get your client’s prospects to make a highly memorable connection between their commercial [i.e. serious] requirements and your client’s industrial strength solutions.

If I was in the need for a serious A/C solution, I’d want to know it would stand up to a beating, in severe conditions.

Remember the gorilla jumping up and down on the Samsonite luggage?

[And decades ago, Timex ran TV ads for years, depicting Timex watches in extreme scenarios, e.g. strapped to the ankle of an elephant wading through mud, only to keep running smoothly. The tagline was: “Timex: It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”]

Just sayin’…

On that note, and in that spirit…

“A company that repairs doors only for commercial businesses.” Hmmm, two ideas spring to mind [just in the first 5 seconds, so I’m sure there are better ones out there]:

1. A bouncer, only admitting commercial clients

2. Monsters Inc style theme [you know, the doors they went through?]

Anyhoo, like I said, that’s just in the first few seconds…

As for the commercial A/C and heating units, I immediately thought of this scene from Good Morning, Vietnam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpktBGInl60

Funnily enough, I was ‘chatting’ on Facebook a year or two ago with an Australia who is in the A/C business. He [like the boring Lt in Good Morning, Vietnam] thought he was funny. Trust me, he wasn’t.

I told him if he wanted to really get funny, he could go wild on Facebook, with all kinds of jokes about being too hot or too cold. He sort of took the bait, but barely. [And you can’t do this stuff well if you only dip your toe in the water timidly.]

Hope that helps!

I once compared underlayment for buildings to underwear for people and said something like, “Unless you’re Madonna, no one will ever see your underwear. But buildings need underwear for the same reasons you do…” The words got attention but, more importantly, the analogy worked well for the product. Good luck!

Thank you SO much for this.
It’s come at a really good time as I’ve got a number of articles to write about a particularly dry subject at the moment. I need to do some creative thinking about how to tackle them…

Sally.

:)

A company that provides portable A/C and heating units for commercial use only.

Go!

(these are actual clients, btw)