Without a Unique Selling Proposition, “USP”, your law firm will never achieve true success.
I’ve long believed, based on my experience with my own law firms and from working with hundreds of law firm owners, that you’ll never create a truly successful law firm unless you have a killer Unique Selling Proposition or USP.
So what is a USP?
A Unique Selling Proposition is a compelling marketing message that really speaks to your ideal customers and pulls them towards your business. A USP has to communicate to potential customers, “What’s in it for me.” It has to tell them why they should do business with you. Put another way, your Unique Selling Proposition can be what your firm becomes known for.
The point of a USP is to clearly differentiate your law firm from your competitors.
It could be an overt claim that makes a specific promise or highlights a unique benefit of working with your firm. Most importantly, your USP needs to be a statement that positions you as distinctly different from the other choices in the market. It needs to be so strong that your ideal clients really have no other choice but to hire you instead of the competition.
A powerful USP needs to answer this question, which was devised by legendary copywriter, Dan Kennedy:
“Why should I choose your business, instead of any other option available to me, including doing nothing.”
Potential clients might even be saying to themselves, “Why should I hire a lawyer at all? Do I even need a lawyer?” A killer USP will make even those potential clients hire your law firm.
Now sometimes I’m asked why a law firm needs a USP at all. “We’ve done OK without one,” is the sort of thing some lawyers say to me. However, you need a USP to differentiate yourself, more than ever. It’s a cluttered market out there. No one stands out because everyone is offering the same thing.
Everyone is offering the same thing.
How many of your local competitors are making identical claims or offers, such as, “No win, no fee” or “Free consultation?” If all the other law firms in your market are saying the same thing, you won’t stand out if you copy them. You won’t be different. You’ll be exactly the same. So why should anyone choose your law practice over the competition?
Your USP needs to clearly communicate to your ideal clients why your firm is different.
If possible you want your USP to give a potential client a whole stack of reasons why your law firm is the only obvious choice.
Let me give you a great USP example.
The Dominos Pizza USP
Dominos Pizza used to use this as their USP, although that changed a few years ago. The USP everyone remembers for Dominos is:
“Fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed.”
Now, Dominos NEVER said their pizza was great. They didn’t say their ingredients were organic, never said anything about real Italians tossing their pizza dough. They never promised tasty pizza. They promised it would be fresh, hot and delivered within 30 minutes. Dominos knew their market. They started business serving students in university towns with late night attacks of the munchies. They knew that 2 am after a heavy night of partying, or studying, students wanted fresh, hot food, not a gourmet meal – and they wanted it fast. If someone wanted a really good, tasty pizza, you’d call somewhere else and accept the longer wait. But if you wanted hot pizza fast, you called Dominos. That was their USP, and everyone knew it.
Let’s use Papa John’s Pizza as a comparison.
On Papa John’s website, they say that the maxim behind the business has always been, “Better ingredients. Better Pizza. Papa John’s.” Papa John’s marketing is about having a “better” pizza. But at their heart, both Dominos or Papa John’s, are selling the same thing – dough, sauce and cheese. Pizza is pizza, right? With Unique Selling Propositions, both Dominos and Papa John’s have differentiated themselves in a very crowded market.
You want to build a successful law firm and, just like the pizza business, you’re offering the same legal services as your competitors. So you need a USP to explain to potential clients why you’re not the same as your competition. You need to instantly communicate why all legal services are not in fact the same, just like all pizzas aren’t the same.
The reason why a potential client will instantly gravitate towards your law firm is not going to be because of your technical proficiency with the law. Every law firm should have that covered. No, they’ll call you because of the other stuff. They’ll call you because they couldn’t find another choice that made sense.
And you do that with a compelling USP.
Other Real World USPs
Here are some additional USP examples:
Let’s consider the postal delivery industry. There are many delivery companies competing for your business. But only Federal Express has the slogan and USP which says, “When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight.”
FedEx started using that slogan in 1978 and it speaks for itself.
You could choose another parcel carrier, but if you need to send something and it needs to arrive the next day, well, you need to choose Federal Express.
Car insurance is another competitive industry. When you need to purchase car insurance, do you just get one price or do you call every insurer for a price?
You might want to start by calling Geico. Their USP is that if you call them, “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on your insurance.” Not only is Geico offering to save you money, they’re doing it while they manage your expectations. Call Geico and you can expect to be on the phone for 15 minutes.
Now, you could also have what’s called a “pre-emptive USP.” That’s a USP that, even though everyone in an industry is doing the same things, it doesn’t occur to any of them to claim something as a unique selling proposition. The first business that does claim that USP pre-empts their competition from doing the same thing.
If you’ve ever watched the TV show “Mad Men”, you may have seen this: Lucky Strike cigarettes used the pre-emptive USP, “It’s toasted”. Every cigarette manufacturer toasts their tobacco, but Lucky Strike was the first to claim that as their unique selling proposition.
Another example is Schlitz Beer. Back in the 60s, Schlitz was suffering falling sales so they asked advertising pioneer, Claude Hopkins, to help them. All the other brewers were talking about how “pure” their beer was. Everyone was saying the same thing.
Hopkins went to look at the Schlitz manufacturing process and saw all the steps they went through to create a pure beer. The same steps, incidentally, that every other brewer followed. There was nothing unique about the process.
But Hopkins did what none of the other beer brewers had done. He described the manufacturing process in print ads. Rather than claiming to be “pure”, Schlitz was able to demonstrate it by detailing the lengths a brewer went to produce their beer. Within a few months, Schlitz beer had jumped from fifth place to be neck-and-neck with the market leader.
Now, another way you could have a USP for your law firm is include, free of charge, something that your competitors charge for. For example, you could offer a free will writing service when you handle a client’s estate planning. Or you could offer to review the insurance coverage for an entire family when one of them hires you for a personal injury claim following a car accident.
You see, USPs really don’t have to be complicated.
Features vs. Benefits
Before I go on, I want to clarify for you the difference between Features and Benefits.
A USP should always be about the benefits to the client, not the features of your law firm. What do I mean?
Well let’s take the humble pencil with an eraser-top as an example. Having an eraser on top of your pencil is a feature. The benefit is that the eraser saves you time by allowing you to erase mistakes without having to re-write everything.
The eraser is the feature; saving time is the benefit. A USP should focus on the benefits.
When it comes to your law practice, don’t get confused between features and benefits when you work out your killer USP.
Having 30 years experience is a feature not a benefit. What having that experience means to a client, could be handling their case faster, and that is the benefit for them.
Now for me, whether it was personal injury or social security cases, my USP was the same. At both of my law firms, my big focus was on delivering great client service. And I had a USP and slogan that drove that point home. “Always Putting You First” was our slogan.
We offered clients our 100% satisfaction guarantee, giving them the option to walk away from us within 30 days if they weren’t satisfied for any reason. We would let them take their file without charging them a penny.
Having that 100% satisfaction guarantee created Risk Reversal. Instead of the client taking a risk by engaging a law firm they didn’t know, the risk was on us. We had to impress our clients immediately or they had the freedom to walk away at our expense.
When you get used to businesses who nickel and dime you for everything, it’s refreshing and different to find a law firm that assumes all the risk and lets their clients walk away if they’re not satisfied. It enabled us to stand out, when no other law firm would offer a similar guarantee.
By offering a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, we offered what no other law firm was offering and that made us stand out in the market.
I also encapsulated all the things that made us different in our Client’s Bill of Rights.
Here’s what our Bill of Rights laid out for clients:
- Right to be treated with dignity and respect.
- Right to be updated regularly and in a timely manner as to the progress of your case.
- Right to Wow client service.
- Right to expect competence from our firm and all who work here.
- Right to know the truth about your case.
- Right to prompt attention from us.
- Right to have your legal rights and options explained in plain English without the legal jargon most lawyers use
- Right to only pay us if we win your case.
- Right to a fair fee for the work we do.
- Right to have your expectations exceeded by our Law firm.
When you’re used to being nickeled and dimed, getting a stack of promises like that from a law firm is refreshing. It’s unique. It’s different from any other law firm in the market.
Potential clients who want to be treated with dignity and respect, or who are looking for “wow” client service, will choose MY firm. We promised to exceed client’s expectations. How many law firms make THAT promise? How many other law firms in my market had a Client Bill of Rights? The answer is NONE. By mentioning our Client’s Bill of Rights in our marketing, my law firm is immediately differentiated from my competitors.
But another sign of a great USP, one that my Bill of Rights achieves, is inviting further investigation from potential clients. A Client’s Bill of Rights? What does that mean? I need to know more. What rights do I have? I have to know exactly what that law firm is promising. You won’t see another law firm offer their clients a Bill of Rights or a satisfaction guarantee. The Bill of Rights and guarantee made my law firms verydifferent from the competition. It made it easy for potential clients to choose us instead of another firm. Our great client service was what my law firms became known for. Our service was what our clients were talking about to their friends.
By developing a powerful USP – great client service – and ensuring that we had the back-office operations to deliver on that promise, I knew for certain what clients were saying about my law firms. Our USP and our reputation with our clients matched up exactly.
All the other law firms are out there offering “Free Consultation” or “no win, no fee”, and you can’t distinguish between them. Meanwhile we focused on our satisfaction guarantee and our clients’ Bill of Rights.
My vision – and what I succeeded in building – was the preeminent law firm in my market. I didn’t want to blend in with my competition, I wanted to stand head and shoulders above them. And we did.
When you have a powerful USP, your law firm will magnetically attract your ideal clients. They will hear what your unique selling proposition is and say to themselves, “That’s exactly what I want.”
Let me explain it another way. Your Unique Selling Proposition, what makes you different, is what you want your clients to tell other people about your law firm. So, ask yourself, “what do I want my clients to say about my law firm, that would make more of my ideal clients want to hire me?” Or, to put it another way, ask yourself, “What do I want my law practice to become well known for?”
Having a powerful USP enables you to become well known.
That’s why I’m going to help you develop your own USP for your law firm.
