Partners in EXCELLENCE Blog/David Brock: Features And Benefits

Partners in EXCELLENCE Blog

Follow:
    RSS
    Email
    Twitter

Partners in EXCELLENCE Blog — Making A Difference
Making A Difference – In Business and Your Personal Life

    Home
    About and Services
        Transform Your Organization
        Hire Dave As A Speaker
        Hire Dave As A Coach
    Partners In EXCELLENCE Radio And Podcasts

Features And Benefits
by David Brock on June 17th, 2018

Somehow, we think features and benefits are important.  Every beginning sales course talks about how we present Features And Benefits (When I first started, I learned how to present Features-Advantages-Benefits —-FABs).  Our product marketing and marketing teams load us up with content and presentations with endless lists of features and benefits.

Visit any web site, and one is inundated with features and benefits.  We see the comparative tables showing features and benefits on one axis and the comparison of our solution with various alternatives–and we know our solution always checks off all the boxes, the alternatives don’t.  Ironically, when you visit the websites of those alternative solutions, their comparisons always show them checking all their boxes and the alternatives–including us don’t.

These are all games we play in pitching our products. and focusing on features and benefits.

But the problem is, not all features benefit the customer.

This is the first place where Features and Benefits discussions fall apart.

Customers may not care that we have certain features, they are irrelevant and the benefit is irrelevant.  Let me take an extreme example, say we offer our product in four colors, while the competition only offers their product in black (Think back to Henry Ford–“We’ll give you a car in any color as long as it’s black.”)  The feature is 4 colors, the benefit is you can match your office decor, you have colors that are soothing and restful to your employees.

The customer responds, “I don’t care, all our employees are color blind so that’s meaningless to us.”

Features and benefits are meaningless if the customer doesn’t care about specific features or benefits.  Yet, too many sales people will rattle off all the features and benefits they offer, forgetting the ones they should be focusing on are the ones the customer cares about.  If they only care about one benefit, then the only features relevant to them are those that produce that benefit.

The second area Features and Benefits are meaningless is we have to translate them into specifics that are meaningful to the customer.  Just the fact that we enable the customer to reduce operational costs and improve profitability is meaningless to the customer.  (Plus the competition is saying the same thing).  How much will we reduce expense, how will profitability be improved, how long will it take, when will they see results. Without making the benefits specific to the customer and their situation, we aren’t articulating our value in ways that are impactful and relevant to customers.

Features only benefit the customer if they produce value the customer cares about.  When we’ve narrowed our focus to those relevant features, we must articulate benefits specific to what the customer should expect to achieve.

Absent this, we are not creating value with the customer.

 Book CoverFor a free peek at Sales Manager Survival Guide, click the picture or link.  You’ll get the Table of Contents, Foreword, and 2 free Chapters.  Free Sample
Be Sociable, Share!

    inShare

Related Posts:

    “Our Product Is Better Than Theirs”…
    Does Your Customer Understand Your Differentiation?
    Are You Really Different?
    Turning Your Value Prop Upside Down
    “If You Take Away Your Products, What’s…

Share this:

    PrintEmail

From → Insight Selling, Lean Sales And Marketing, Value Proposition
No comments yet
Leave a Reply
Name: (required):
Email: (required):
Website:
Comment:

Note: XHTML is allowed. Your email address will never be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

    Making A Difference – Thoughts, Observations and Opinions

    This is Dave Brock's Blog. It offers my views on a variety of business, sales, marketing, and leadership topic. My goal is to make a difference for you, the reader, in both your professional and personal lives.
    Subscribe To Our Newsletter
    Sign Up Now
    For Email Newsletters you can trust.
    Get Our Posts Delivered To Your Email
    Follow Me:

    View David Brock's profile on LinkedIn

    iTunes logo
    Partners In EXCELLENCE Radio

    Click on "menu icon" on upper right for all episodes.
    Recent Posts
        Features And Benefits
        What If Sales Enablement Is A “Rotational Assignment?”
        Sales Enablement, “Build It And They Will Come….”
        You Can Lead A Sales Person To Water, But You Can’t Make Him Think!
        What We Do Is Not Complicated–Yet We Have A Tendency To Complicate It.
    Search
    Topics
    Topics
    Blog Archive:
    Blog Archive:

About

Partners In EXCELLENCE

22715 Barlovento

Mission Viejo, CA 92692, USA

PHONE: +1-949-305-7146

info@excellenc.com

www.excellenc.com

    Call Me Through Google Voice
    Want to reach me right away? You will be asked to enter your name and number. You have the option to keep it private. Then click connect. The number you entered will be called and then you will be connected with me.

Search

Copyright © 2018 Partners In EXCELLENCE. Titan Theme by The Theme Foundry.