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Features and Benefits: No Advantages

The terms feature and benefit are commonly used within the sales profession but, unfortunately, they are often misused. Sales professionals frequently interchange these terms, not clear on their meaning. Feature/benefit selling represents one of the cornerstones of professional selling. It has been an effective strategy for centuries and I dont expect it to change, not in our lifetime. Its part of the common currency of every sales call.

To be an effective sales entrepreneur, you must relate your product to the prospects unique situation. You do this by translating your features into benefits that satisfy the customers needs. It begins with an understanding of both features and benefits.

A feature is defined as a quality or characteristic of your product or service: what it has. Simple. As part of our planning we need to recognize and appreciate the four feature categories. They are the features of:

your industry

your company

your product or service

Each category, of course, offers a host of features. There can be 100 features just about your company, 100 features about your industry, and so on. These features combined become your corporate menu. Its a menu of all your offerings, including you (which happens to be the most overlooked feature category). When was the last time you said to a prospect, And another reason you should buy from us is because Im your salesperson. Dont sell yourself short. Make a list of all your features. If you are uncomfortable with this exercise, go back to Chapter 2, Attitude #3.

A benefit is defined as what the feature does for the customer. It is how a particular feature will help a customer and is tied directly to buying motives. At the end of the day it addresses, Heres how I can help your business. Also, benefits must answer the proverbial question Whats in it for me?

You may be familiar with the FAB approach of selling: features, advantages, and benefits. I have eliminated advantages. Not required. As it is, sales professionals have a tough time separating features and benefits. Lets not complicate it with an unnecessary step. Few salespeople can clearly distinguish between advantages and benefits. That being the case, how would you expect your customers to appreciate the difference? Both of you end up confused. My approach is simple. Customers buy only benefits, not advantages or features. For example, when you buy a car the feature (your hot-button) is power windows but the benefits are ease of operation, convenience, and control.

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Avoid the Feature Dump

One of my favorite topics is the good old feature dump. Almost all salespeople (including sales entrepreneurs) are guilty of it. The feature dump is talking about what the product is, how it works, and how it compares with the competition, but not what it will do for the customer. Salespeople jump into a monologue, talking ad nauseam about all the features, often boring the customer to tears. Believe it or not, customers simply dont care about most of that stuff. The conversation with your potential customers often lacks the critical connection between your product, service, or company and their needs. Customers need to know how you can help improve their efficiencies or their margins, or help them become more competitive. More often than not salespeople are selling what they need to sell, instead of selling what their customers need to buy.

Typically, sales professionals show up to the call and after asking only a couple of probes begin spewing all their knowledge, telling not selling. They engage in a verbal avalanche of information, statistics, specifications, and whatever else they can think of to impress the customer. After all, salespeople are supposed to be good talkers, right? Wrong. The underlying problem is the vast amount of product knowledge that salespeople are exposed to. Companies inundate their salespeople with product knowledge, company policies, price lists, catalogs, brochures, flavor-of-the-month promotions, new product launches, and so on. Its no wonder salespeople show up and cant wait to tell the customer about all the features. Its what they have been trained to talk about, to regurgitate all the information in the brochure. In fact, a brochure is nothing more than a glossy feature dump, just as a corporate video distributed by head office is a high-tech feature dump. A brochure or video cant possibly reflect benefits, as they are very subjective. It is the customers right to identify the benefits that are important to them. Customers decide the benefits, not the salespeople.

More often than not, salespeople respond far too quickly when asked for a brochure. They willingly send out or hand out their corporate brochures, creating a false sense of productivity. Tell your potential customer that you are better than a brochure, and a 15-minute appointment is necessary to explore the possibility of doing business.

On the lighter side, rather than spend the day handing out or mailing brochures with a business card ( Just leave us your card and a brochure ) youd be better off to rent an airplane, fly over your territory, and shovel out 1,000 brochures. It would certainly get more attention! My point is this: Doing an in-person brochure-drop does little to drive your business. Brochures should be used as a leave-behind to augment the sale-not used as a lead-in. However, they can be an effective mailer if you highlight relevant features and follow up with a telephone call to make an appointment after they have received it. This approach will sometimes impress the customer enough to grant you an appointment. What drives the feature dump is our natural tendency to be helpful. We are often seduced by a false sense of helpfulness created by telling the customer all about our features. Sales representatives love to dispense information. As one customer said, salespeople tend to show-up and throw-up. This situation reminds me of those PEZ candy dispensers we had as kids: pull the head back and all this information comes spewing out. We often get overzealous in our desire to enhance our customers welfare. Its nothing short of blah-blah-blah selling, inundating the customer with useless information. I consider PEZ to be an acronym for Please Excuse my Zealousness. Go out and get yourself a PEZ dispenser and put it on your desk as a visual reminder to banish the feature dump. We must appreciate that our call-effectiveness is measured in terms of the customers perspective, not ours. The redundancy of a feature dump is further supported by this statistic: Your customer will decide to buy from you based on less than 5% of your total features. Thats it! If you ask your customers why they bought from you, their answer reveals no more than two to three reasons (benefits). Imagine the poor customer having to endure a feature dump that is 95% useless information to them. I compare it to the menu analogy. When you visit a restaurant, you are presented with a menu. The menu is nothing more than a list of available features. You, as the customer, decide what features will become benefits. As you are handed your menu, your server might as well say, Here is our list of features. Ill be back in a few minutes to take your list of benefits. After reviewing the menu, which can easily include 100 or more features, you place your order of only four to five benefits. Theres your 5%. The rest of the items remain as features. The only person who can decide on the benefits is your customer. Your customer is the ultimate authority to either accept or reject your features as benefits. There lies the challenge: Identify the features on your corporate menu that will benefit your customer.

Feature Dumpers Syndrome is an undetected virus that has plagued salespeople for centuries. It sabotages more sales calls than any other sales virus.

The common feature dump virus quietly goes about its business disguising itself as a routine, predictable component of a typical sales call. If you dont think you are a feature dumper, just ask your customers.

Unfortunately there are no pills, antibiotics, or prescriptions available to cure this unproductive approach to selling. But dont fret, help is here at last. The cure lies in your willingness and commitment to embrace a sales entrepreneurial code of conduct. Its time to do more selling, and less telling; features tell, benefits sell.

The feature dump is not something we can totally eliminate. From time to time you will find yourself engaged in an elaborate monologue spewing out so-what information. If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do is finish your thought, pause for a moment and say, Well thats enough about me, how about telling me more about you. Invite the customer to talk about his or her business by asking conversational probes. Resist the temptation to revert back to a feature dump. Take notes and truly listen to what your customer is telling you.