As a business owner, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical details and specifications of your products or services when you’re working on improving your sales and marketing.
After doing so much work to create your product, you want to showcase all the impressive features that it has to offer. Unfortunately, customers don’t really care about the features! What they care about is how those features will benefit them and improve their lives.
Your customer is always thinking “WIIFM”… What’s In It For Me? This is where explaining the benefits rather than the features comes in.
The big example here is the iPod. Apple never pioneered this technology and MP3 players existed well before the iPod came along. However, Apple nailed the pitch. Instead of talking about the storage capacity in megabytes, it positioned the iPod as having ‘1,000 Songs in your Pocket’ and explained the exact benefits of the product in one hit.
The iPod took off because customers didn’t care about the 32MB of storage — they cared about the benefit of having instant access to their entire music library.
Features tell people what is included in a product or service, and benefits tell people why or how something will improve their situation. This is a critical distinction for you or your sales team to understand. Your customers don’t want to be bombarded with a laundry list of features. They want to know how your product or service is going to make their lives easier, save them time or money, or help them achieve their goals.
How to highlight your benefits
If you’re working on sales and marketing for your business, make a list of all the features of what you have to offer, then take the time to link each one into a clear benefit.
For example, instead of just saying “Our software has a user-friendly interface,” you could say “Our software’s intuitive design means you’ll be able to get up and running in no time, saving you valuable hours each week.”
As you work on this, try applying the phrase ‘so you can’ to make the transition.
Some examples:
- This product weighs 200 grams, so you can carry it anywhere
- Business Blueprint hosts four conferences per year, so you can access dozens of business experts in person
- You get 100 x free blueprints for your business, so you can save at least 6-12 months
- of work and avoid costly mistakes
By focusing on the benefits, you’re speaking directly to your customer’s needs and pain points. You’re showing them how your solution is going to improve their situation, rather than listing out technical specifications that might not answer that WIIFM question.
An extra tip for business owners
Once you have the features and benefits of your product or service clear, make sure you share them with your team. They can form part of your sales and marketing systems, and make onboarding new team members much faster and easier.
This article is an excerpt from Business Blueprint’s members only Sales Deep Dive. To access exclusive training for business owners from leading entrepreneur Dale Beaumont, book a call with our team today.
