Sales Mistake No 1: Features versus Benefits

We’re often asked “what are the main mistakes that businesses make with their sales operations?” It’s a great place to start when setting out to improve performance so I’ve decided to write a series of short articles about what we would regard as the “Top Sales Mistakes”. We hope you’ll find them helpful. Please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts with us.

So in no particular order… Let’s start in very familiar territory, no surprises here, with the traditional features v benefits trap that sellers can easily slip into, especially after you’ve just put them through intensive product training. Watch out for creating technical experts in your products. You need technical experts for sure, though they’re more useful in operations than they are in sales.

Technical experts slip into sales patter loaded with (usually geeky) features. In doubt? Watch a buyer’s eyes glaze over as your seller explains to them how the new XLR3009 model runs at 1,523 rpm, within a cycle time of 29 minutes 37 seconds, and a temperature range of 30 – 60 degrees Celsius. “Yes, but will it wash my shirts?”

The quickest fix to this problem? The easiest way to get your sellers to consistently turn a feature into a benefit is to get them to insert “which means that” frequently into their language when they are talking about the product.

“It runs at 1,523 rpm, which means that… It’ll spin all the water out of your shirts and dry them really quickly”

“It has a cycle time of 29 minutes 37 seconds, which means that… You can run a wash cycle while you’re watching the news”

In our experience, sellers like this tip because it is so easy do. It is also really easy to install into sales culture. When you hear “which means that” being used by your sellers, you can be confident that they’re talking to buyers in terms that they (the buyers) will want to hear.

Also to consider:

Talking about features too early in a sales discussion can create anxiety for the prospect that the eventual cost will be high, An anxiety that can stay in the front of the prospects mind all the way through the sales presentation.

Presenting unsuitable benefits (ones not perceived as benefits by the buyer) will spoil the selling relationship, creating the “this seller doesn’t understand me” dynamic.

The process of converting a feature into a benefit moves the seller’s position closer to the buyer. Rather than standing back and delivering feature after feature (heaven forbid, actually reading them out), the seller is forced to move closer to the buyer as they have to consider the benefit from the buyers perspective.

So I’m happy to admit that this sales mistake number one looks like an obvious one (though is often overlooked). It is though a very damaging one to the sales process. Fortunately, it is easy to fix!