The UnStoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power

Chapter 9

Everything You Need to Know about Your Unique Difference (in about an Hour)

“WHERE IS THE CENTER?”

When you ask experienced business people what a difference is, it’s amazing how few can actually tell you. They react like it’s a silly question, then they offer up a slogan, a generic claim, a piece of puffery, a nuance, or a cliché—anything but a real difference.

And yet a real business difference is the most important distinction you’ll ever make for your career or your company. A difference is not just a word, it’s a term of selling science, a condition of measurable value, the reason potential customers think you will take away their pain or make their life better. It’s a perceived distinction that persuades me to buy; in other words, it’s a selling difference.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you want to be able to discern a genuine, meaty difference in your sleep. In commercial enterprises—in capitalism itself, where customers have free choice in the marketplace—this is the center.

A selling difference is the one thing that’s most unique, important, and memorable that only you offer, that makes you the number one choice versus your competitors. It’s the tipping point of customer choice because it tells the world you’re the only, the most, or the best in their price range.

Whether the difference is 1 percent or a 100 percent, it doesn’t matter—remember, an inch is as good as a mile when it comes to winning—so long as it’s obvious, important, and believable to the ...