Persuasion Sales

Benefits vs. Features

Benefits vs. Features is something that’s been covered a lot of conventional sales programs but I’m just going to go over here just a little bit to point out a few things that most sales trainings fail to teach.

What people want to buy are benefits not features yet time and time again many times sales go out there and pitch products features. For example we have been talking about selling a BMW. If we are talking about the features what are the features of a BMW? One example would be it can go from 0-60 in 3.5 seconds. The benefit of this feature would be that you’ll be out of there while they are still sitting to catch up to your smoke behind you.

Now is that useful to people? Well it depends on which way you look at the thing is, its’ still feature the way to hide it in the usefulness is to create its usefulness.

For example, if you link it with a story and you make it so that you’re saying to your customer “imagine yourself sitting there in your brand new BMW at the red light and someone you don’t like pulls up beside you. Imagine when the lights turn green, you are going to leave them and take off in the dust behind you. That’s what this car has the ability to do, it can take off from 0-60 in 3.5 seconds that’s why with this car you will be out of there while they are trying to catch up, they have been left behind in your smoke.”

That’s an example of taking a feature and turning it into a benefit.

So what are features?

Features are facts about your products, there are things that can be proved about your products. For example if we are talking about a laptop computer one of the features might be that it has a 17 inch screen on it, the speed of the processor is a feature .

Benefits are what you can achieve using those features. For example if we know that this computer has 2.5GHz processor. What does it really mean? It doesn’t really mean anything unless you link it to a benefit. So if you selling it to someone who is looking to upgrade because the have an older and slower computer, the benefit to influence them would be that this new computer can process in three seconds flat what your old computer took fifteen minutes to do. Now you can have those fifteen minutes of more time of productivity .

It’s important to emphasize what the benefits are and not what the features are of the products. As much as it is a old fashion sales technique, it is still today one of the fundamentals is to emphasize the benefits rather than the features.

What I want you to do this week, is to look at your products and to make a list of all the features your product has and also make a list of how those features and could be a benefit for your particular customer.

So for example you might look at whatever you product is, make a list of 10 features that your product has and for each feature I want you to think of at least three different benefits for each feature because you never know what benefit is for one customer may not necessary be a benefit for another customer.

This is where Criteria will come I extremely useful. Criteria ( I will cover this much more fully in a future article) is where you don’t need to go through all the features and benefits with a customer, its where you can get them to reveal what is most important to them, so that you can focus in exactly on the benefits that will influence them.

While standard benefits and features is outdated when compared to using Criteria with a customer, it is still important to go through the exercise of writing the benefits and features to increase your product knowledge and to know what benefits to use when you have elicited someone’s Criteria.