Features don’t sell — Benefits do!
Great salespeople don’t sell products, they sell the way the product makes the customer feel, or how it will improve their life. In other words, great sales people sell benefits, not features. This is an important rule to remember when designing marketing materials.
Great marketing is visceral and then supported by facts. To craft a message that will achieve results, use the following formula:
- State the biggest BENEFIT (not feature)
- Define the problem and show your solution
- Support the claim and make the offer
- Give value to the benefits
- Show the results
- Build credibility
- Minimize or eliminate the risk
- Create an urgency to respond
- Ask for immediate and decisive action
- Repeat the offer or the biggest benefit (or both) and request action again
Your marketing will be most successful when you creat a connection between a problem your potential customer wants to solve and your product — a connection they can feel.
Think about the last time you purchased a computer. On the box was a list of features that read something like this: 3.2 MHz Intel Core2 Dou Processor, 2 Gb RAM, 320 Gb Hard Drive, DVD-R, etc.
Unless you are a computer geek, most of these numbers may not even mean anything to you, except, perhaps that they sound really big. What every user does want to know is how those features are going to benefit them. Think of the marketing for Apple® computers, iPod®, and iPhone®.
It is the power of FEELING that will draw the customer in to your message so that you can support that feeling with facts. This is why features don’t sell products — benefits do.
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