Unique selling points are the part of an EIC Accelerator proposal that most applicants treat as a section to fill in, when they are in fact the element that holds the entire narrative together. The question comes up repeatedly in conversations with companies preparing an application, and the answer is usually the same: the unique selling points are not written last, they are calculated first.
The Narrative Has to Connect
Creating a narrative for a proposal means genuinely connecting its parts: the competitors, the technology, the market problem, the unique selling points, the traction the company has, and the way the customer groups are presented. All of these have to be connected to each other rather than written as independent sections.
Within that structure the unique selling points sit at the centre of the whole story. It does not really matter what problem you describe, who you say your customers are, or what the technology does. What it all boils down to is how good you are at what you are doing — and that is precisely what the unique selling points express.
The Comparisons Are What Actually Sell
Are you forty percent cheaper? Five times faster? Whatever the numbers happen to be, these comparisons are what will sell the technology to customers. They are not decorative claims attached to the end of a technical description; they are the substance of the commercial case.
It helps to write the proposal from the position of the buyer. The customer is going to ask: why should I buy from you? Because it is cheaper? Because it is better than what is currently in the market? Is your technology the only one that can actually do something, or is it enabling me to do something new? These are the questions the proposal has to answer, and each of them has to be answered with a quantity rather than an adjective.
Software Is Easier to Quantify Than Hardware
For software companies this is usually much easier, because it is much easier to quantify things that already exist as data. The measurement is a natural by-product of how the product works.
Hardware is a different problem. Cost can obviously be calculated: you can say, buy this hardware, which costs so much, or buy my hardware, which is going to be cheaper. That comparison is straightforward. But as soon as you move outside cost and try to quantify benefits in speed and accuracy, or whatever the core of the technology actually is, it becomes very difficult — and that difficulty is most pronounced in hardware products.
This is the reason the work has to be done deliberately rather than improvised while writing. The numbers that matter most are usually the ones that take real effort to establish.
Absolute Numbers Are Only Half the Case
One of the things you have to do is write down what the unique selling points are, and then quantify them. That means quantifying the absolute numbers — what your technology can do — but also the relative numbers compared to your competitors.
Forty percent faster, thirty percent lower cost, whatever the benefits happen to be. These are worth calling buzz numbers, because they are something you repeat a lot. You want to make sure the evaluators understand these numbers, since they are the core of what you are doing. A figure that appears once in a table and is never referenced again has not done its job.
Calculate First, Then Write
If you are preparing your own proposal, it may well be that you do not have clear unique selling points lined up. The recommendation is to take a step back and first calculate what your unique selling points are, before you start writing the proposal.
Writing first and quantifying afterwards produces a narrative built around whichever claims were easiest to phrase. Quantifying first produces a proposal whose competitor analysis, technology description, market problem and customer groups all point at the same defensible set of numbers — which is what connecting the narrative actually means in practice.
