Unique Selling Proposition at Work Place

Do you take ‘yourself’ to your workplace every day or are you too busy trying to be like everyone else? Many of us often make the mistake of ‘commoditizing’ ourselves in the hope that if we think like everyone else, dress like everyone else and behave like everyone else, we will be safe and our chances of succeeding at our workplace will increase.

This, however, is not always the case. In most markets nowadays, companies as well as consumers are moving away from a numbing uniformity of offerings in both products and services into something that differentiates itself through a Unique Selling Proposition.

Differentiation versus Commoditization

A workplace—any workplace—is often the microcosm (a miniature version) of the larger marketplace and the economy. What is true in the marketplace is also often true in successful organizations. Differentiation is one of those factors.

The same phenomenon is entering our workplaces as well. As employees, we are like brands that communicate a certain set of values, beliefs, offerings and potentials that organizational seniors, line managers and employers evaluate when they conduct performance appraisals and make important decisions related to our growth (or demotion) in the organization.

When deciding who makes the cut, it has often been seen that employees who have something unique to offer to a client or to a project are most often the ones who succeed.

Think Out-of-the Box!

When Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of the troubled International Business Machines Corporation, he made it a point to wear a blue shirt one day and get himself photographed wearing one.

IBMers were shocked that a senior executive was not wearing a white shirt and that too the CEO himself! This was Gerstner’s symbolic nudge to his employees to start thinking out of the box that IBM had become and to begin transforming the way that IBM went about doing its business.

And today, thanks to the corporate stewardship of Lou Gerstner followed by Sam Palmisano, IBM has transformed its commodity businesses, exited the space that it occupied for too long (manufacturing laptops—they have sold that business to Lenovo) and are now enthusiastically taking on the young and vibrant IT firms in services and in software.

During the recent economic meltdown, the IBM scrip remained one of the best performers across asset classes in the stock markets thanks to their dynamic and out-of-the-box approach!

What’s Your Unique Selling Proposition?

Closer home, Ramesh, a fresh MBA from one of the premier B-schools in India, had joined one of the top Consulting companies with fresh ideas, insights and inspiration that he had absorbed and acquired from some of the best professors of management in the country. But in a bid to appear strait-jacketed, he held back some of the truly transformational insights he had had on a very important public sector assignment.

His run-of-the-mill advice did not earn him rave reviews from either the client or his supervisors and he was soon advised to start “looking out” since the company did not see the point in paying such a huge salary package to get the same old run-of-the-mill input from a new employee.

Having learnt the hard way, in his next assignment in the next company, Ramesh reverted to being his true self that had stood out like a shining star at one of the most competitive campuses in the country.

His fresh insights helped retain and strengthen several troubled client relationships and he grew to become a partner in half the time it usually took for others to achieve that career level.

Conclusion – Unique Selling Proposition

Have the courage to be yourself and don’t hold your unique strengths back if you want to be more than a ‘middling success’ in your career.

You can only be a ‘second or a third-rate’ someone else but you can be a ‘first-rate’ yourself. And that is exactly what top employers are interested in hiring and retaining in the competitive workplace of today.