Are you selling features or benefits?

This week, consider this – Are you selling features or benefits? This really is one of the easiest ways to increase the footfall to your door.

Look at your offer, your website, your adverts, your brochures. Listen to your sales language. Are you constantly communicating how a buyer will tangibly benefit from becoming your customer, or are you listing the technical features of your product or service.

This week’s learning point: If you are not screaming benefits at every opportunity, then I can guarantee that most of your potential buyers do not understand what it is that you are selling.

Buyers buy products when they recognise some way that the product will provide them with a benefit they want (otherwise what’s the point?). Are you presenting these benefits to them, or do you expect your buyers to work these out for themselves?

How to you convert a feature into a benefit? The three magic words are “which means that…”

“<which> means <that>”

“This pc has a 500 GB hard drive which means that you’ll never have to worry about running out of storage space.”

“This machine has 4 GHz speed which means you can surf at the speed of light.”

So the messaging for a pc like this could be:

“Do you want to able to surf at the speed of light and store all your media on one machine?”

“Call us to find out how you could have one on your desk this afternoon”

As part of standard sales coaching activity, sales managers can support their direct reports through listening to their language, and by helping them to add in the three magic words, “which means that”, to automatically improve their sales messaging.

On projects with customers we review the sales messaging across all sales channels to create a compelling message to potential buyers, and of course, you can run this process yourself.

We have lots of experience in this area and to keep this email to a manageable length, I’ve left lots of great examples out. If you’d like some more detailed guidance, pick up the phone and we’ll help you to get started.