Understanding features and benefits in sales jobs

It’s a component of almost any basic training for sales jobs, the use of ‘features and benefits’ to sell products and services. Despite this, after many years in sales jobs myself, and indeed being sold to on a daily basis now, I rarely see this most basic of components ifnthe sales process used. Even more rarely do I see it used well.

I really don’t think many sales people understand the true importance of selling the benefits of a products rather than trying to sell features, if indeed they have even taken on board ‘how’ to work out what the right benefits to sell are, and how to sell them.

Firstly, lets get one thing straight, contrary to the laymen’s frequent perception, good selling is not about being able to push a product or service onto someone who does not need or want it. In most cases, good selling is about persuading someone who has made a decision to buy, and persuading them to buy your particular choice of product. For example, your unlikely to persuade someone who already has a car to buy another one! However, once someone has decided to swap their car, a good Ford salesman’s job is to persuade them to buy a Ford.

From this, you can see that success in sales jobs is about

Being able to persuade people who have made a decision to buy, to buy your choice of product or service.

Finding enough people who have made a decision to buy, in order to try and persuade them that your offering is the best.

Number 2 covers a multitude of topics and skills such as marketing activities like mailings and advertising through to skills such as ‘cold calling’ until you find people to whom you can sell. Our topic for this article lies within number 1.

Allow me to present you with a couple of personal examples which I remember, that you may be able to relate to. Years ago, I was lucky enough to have a choice of rather nice company cars. The choice was huge from people carriers through to diesel cars with low fuel consumption, fast cars and prestige cars and so on. In the end I went for an E-class Mercedes which classed as the prestige car. I proceeded to tell myself that it had enough room for the children, was pretty good on fuel, had a big boot and so on. All very good practical reasons why it was a good choice. Lets take a step back and look at what was going through my head when I made the buying choice…..honestly!

As a person, I am shamelessly driven and competitive, motivated by reward and recognition from others. Personal features, I might add, which can cause a lot of problems! On this occasion, the over riding thought was of the perceived impact on others around me. For example, first evening we invite friends around for lunch, sitting in my arm chair peering down the drive at my friends admiring the new wheels as they approach the front door. The first occasion of turning up at the squash club…, the tennis club….the list goes on. Sad though it may seem, it’s this emotional warm fuzzy feeling which has driven the desire to buy this particular cart. For me, there was no warm fuzzy feeling from the thought of saving £30 per month on fuel, or having 2 extra seats in the boot. For others, this may not be the case.

For a second example, I recently bought a new computer, it’s fantastic, it has 2 processors, 3 flat screens, makes no noise and a whole load of other great features. Why did I buy it? I was hammering my previous machine, and was becoming utterly fed up by the delays in programs and pages opening because the machine was working so hard. In some cases, it may have only been a minutes delay, but the minute felt like a year, during in which I would head butt my desk, chew my nails, shuffle my papers and feel utterly cheesed off. The computer I have bought is the fastest thing available, the guy that sold it to me asked me to remember that feeling I had when a page was slow opening, to then tell me I would need to remember it, because if I bought his machine I wouldn’t be experiencing it again….sold!

So, ultimately, people’s buying decisions are not driven by features, but buy strong emotions relating to their own experiences. For my choice of car, the salesman needed to uncover the fact that prestige was the most important thing to me at the time ( pretty difficult to get people to admit to) and them try to create that warm fuzzy feeling within them while presenting their choice of car. Similarly with the computer, the number of screens or size of processor was never going to sell me, what the salesman needed to do was to re-create the strong emotions (in that case negative ones relating to the problems) at the point of sale.

The best examples of this being used well are TV adverts. Count how many times you here the word ‘Imagine….’ in order to stimulate and stir the viewers emotions using their past experiences. They are experts at using language and images to create ‘warm fuzzy’ feelings in viewers whilst presenting their products, and it works, with dramatic effects.

Next time you go to construct your sales pitch, whatever your product or service, consider what the strongest emotions are in your potential customers and how they may relate to your product and work out how you can re-create these emotions at the point of sale. This, in itself, is the subject of another separate article. If you can truly master the art of ‘benefits’ selling through latching onto your buyers strongest emotions, your sales will rocket, imagine how that will feel!