Flaccid USP Warning Sign #3 is when: Your customer is more in control of the transaction than you are.

He DEMANDS terms, concessions, price & delivery. When the receptionist puts his call through, she says, “Fidel Castro on line 2.”

Do people call you up or email you and say, “I want this list of products, these services, these delivery dates and this list of quality assurances, and X is what I’ll pay” ?

If so, that’s nails in your coffin. Buddy, it ain’t going to get any better.

If mass availability of information or connections makes you redundant, your only savior is a state of the art, killer USP.

Look at the price of ebooks over the last 10 years. In 2003-2005 it was commonplace for authors to get $29 to $199 for a reputable ebook on a good topic. It’s not common to command such prices today, as Kindle books have chewed up margins and spit them out.

People walk into stores with iPhone apps and do instant price comparisons with UPC symbols and barcodes. Retailers call this “showrooming” – where physical stores only serve the purpose of demoing the product for online buyers.

I consider this to be a form of theft. But most people under 30 think nothing of going into an electronics store, looking at all the LCD televisions for an hour, asking questions, sampling the wares at the local owner’s expense, then buying it online. With in-home delivery. For nineteen bucks savings.

That’s mass commoditization, baby. First the manufacturing jobs went overseas, then the retail service jobs got plundered by iPhone apps.

It’s GREAT if you’re a consumer.

It sucks when you’re the producer.

Doing five dollar tasks on your computer may be more humane than dragging cement blocks over stone rollers to build the Egyptian pyramids, but it’s still brutal and merciless.

Even so, the well of human desires is still bottomless. No sooner do they can buy the LCD television at the lowest possible price, than they want something they CANNOT get at Best Buy or Amazon. Humans always want something else, and you can easily be the person they buy it from – but it’s gotta be unique.

How do you make what you sell impossible to obtain elsewhere?

How do you de-commoditize the commodity?

That’s the focus of Breakthrough USP and it’s one of the most crucial projects you’ll undertake. A power USP writes your ads, you get more clicks for less money, and you make it to the top of the heap.

Your customer is asking:

WHY SHOULD I BUY FROM *YOU* instead of anybody else?

If you don’t have a bold, clear, authentic answer to this question, you are dead man walking. You need to take Breakthrough USP. Starts this afternoon:

http://www.perrymarshall.com/usp/

Perry Marshall

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.