Features, Advantages and Benefits

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotions and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good example. One of my Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within 2 months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and 6 months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works! I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

A Financial Maverick @ Work

Once upon a time in a jungle village not so far away, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy live and healthy monkeys for $10 each.

Since the villagers considered the monkeys a real nuisance, many of them went into the jungle and began setting traps to catch them. The man bought thousands of monkeys at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers reduced their efforts. When this happened, the man announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each.

This reinvigorated the villagers efforts and they started trapping monkeys again. Gradually the number of free monkeys diminished even further making hunting efforts much more challenging and time consuming – people started going back to their farms. The offer was increased to $25 each, until it was difficult to find even a single monkey, let alone catch it!

The man then announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf. As soon as the man was off on his journey, the assistant let the villagers in on a secret. He invited all the hunters and their relatives to have a look at the monkeys in the big cage that the man had paid for. And then he made them an offer that they simply could not refuse.

“I will sell them to you for $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each as he promised.”

The word spread like wild fire and before long, most of the villagers gathered their savings and managed to buy every single monkey held captive in the massive cage before releasing them into the jungle so that the hunt could begin anew.

They never saw the man nor his assistant again.

In the above article the names were changed to protect the innocent. The ‘financially sound’ structured products were represented by monkeys in the story but the facts remain the same; this was no accidental occurrence it was simply a version of the now popular Ponzi game. You probably already know this but, a ponzi scheme is a scam where the perpetrator collects money from new investors and uses these new cash inflows to pay high returns to past investors, so that these influencial existing investors believe that their capital is intact and working for them. All the while, the scam artist has been spending the initial capital on himself rather than investing it as advertised. To attract a special breed of greedy investor, such schemes often are promoted as exclusive clubs as in ‘by invitation only’ thus toying with the wealthy and famous have-it-alls psyche to the point where they absolutely must be part of this exclusive ‘winners circle’ in order to maintain their image.

What Exactly is Marketing?

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
– Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

– Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

– Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.

The Results Leader

Fundamental to the success of any small to medium sized company’s marketing campaign and their marketing plan is understanding the concept of the sales funnel.

Yes, whether you like it or not, marketing your services is key to your success and just like any other professional service such as business consulting, legal services or even psychological counseling, your services oriented company is a business that needs to follow the fundamental rules of marketing in order to succeed.

The cornerstone of any successful marketing method begins with an understanding that not every person you or your firm comes in contact with, is ready to become a Client. In fact, many prospects will never become Clients.

In other words, your marketing efforts will generate leads and these leads go into the top of the sales funnel but only a small percentage will drop out of that funnel as Clients. If the percentage of conversions is greater than 50% then you simply need to market to a broader audience – the shape of your sales funnel in this case will appear more similar to a pipe than a funnel indicating that conversions are unusually high.

Many firms tend to concentrate (generally to the exclusion of all else) most of their marketing efforts on improving the conversion rate or closing rate which amounts to the percentage of prospects that they have converted to Clients.

This helps to explain the fascination with networking, luncheons, presentations, meetings, seminars etc. The idea being: “If we spend more time trying to build relationships we will close more new deals.”

So called ‘thought leaders’ tend to foster this approach and sadly it’s very misleading as a marketing concept. Please allow me to illustrate. Charles Green, author of the book “Trust Based Selling” has written an excellent article titled: “Why Your Sales Process Matters Less Than The Psychology Of Selling.” The article is well written with numerical analysis of an entire sales pipeline start to finish. Unfortunately it misses the whole point of what a sales funnel is supposed to do.

An ideal sales funnel is designed to generate the maximum amount of QUALIFIED prospects possible from within a given marketing universe. It is from that pool of qualified prospects that we might apply the concept of relationship building so that prospects are converted into new Clients over time.

Here is the point of today’s article.

Regardless of how skilled you are at relationship building, you simply will not close any deals if you don’t have anyone to sell to. Here’s the good part, the more people you have access to, the more new Clients you will likely acquire (even if your relationship building skills need work).

Here’s a simple example.

Suppose you are a sales superstar ‘relationship’ builder and you have 10 qualified leads to work with. Over the course of a year, you wine them, dine them, schmooze them, golf with them and literally do anything they want using the company’s marketing budget as your weapon of choice.

Let’s say that at the end of a year, you were able to sign up 60% of them and thus 6 new Clients were acquired for the firm. If the main success metric your firm used were conversions from prospect to Client, you would be considered a ‘sales genius’. In reality, the average sales professional closes around 14% of qualified prospects in today’s competitive world.

What if I, on the other hand, through my integrated marketing efforts have created a pool of 100 reasonably qualified prospects. I’m just an average person so I close 14% of these prospects over a twelve month period. This is not a bad ratio it is simply average.

Pop quiz: If all deals are of equal size, who made more money?

I will have 14 new Clients and you will have 6.
You are almost 330% better at closing (read ‘building relationships’) than I am.

Please reread the above until you understand it.

Even though your interpersonal skills are 3x better than mine, I have made more than twice the amount of money you made during the same twelve month period.

The lesson here is if you are able to cost effectively convert prospects into Clients, you need to open the flood gates and fill your sales funnel with qualified leads. Good examples of tactics that provide you with tons of leads are going to be the subject of upcoming articles. In the meantime, if someone were to give you 100 highly qualified leads, what would you do with them to improve your relationship building skills and make more money next year?

I don’t know how you answered the above question, but I’ll take those leads any day over solely relying on my relationship building skills and I think most of you out there would agree.

More highly qualified leads equals more money no matter what business you’re in.

That is called results.

No disrespect to ‘thought leaders’, but I’d rather be a results leader wouldn’t you?

Should Everything Be Free?

As we sell more and more iPhone Apps, we collect more and more feedback from both our Customers and people who think that everything on the iPhone should be free. At first we were dismayed by the prospect that an entire generation of people (many iPhone users) actually paid for the mobile phone but now expect software developers to design, code, test and launch applications for free given the efforts involved, the costs for the hardware and the coding tools etc. We initially wondered how we could possibly make it happen. Could software be offered for free?

On a bustling corner of Sao Paulo’s quita district, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including a few by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns where they plan to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business – and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet. Not a bad way to offer free software we thought.

Back at ground zero, our developers were asking for their paychecks and our freelancers were requiring payment for Apps that had just been accepted for launch. We can’t blame them for wanting money after all, they need to eat too but, this same generation of gotta-haves want to get paid for their time and yet expect most things that they need to be free – someone is going to have to pay for all this free stuff if you read your college ECON 101 textbook it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later, it could just mean that someone else is picking up the tab. Money is not the only scarcity in the world today… the other items include time and reputation. if you build on reputation, you gain respect especially in the troughs of a given niche market. If you increase attention you can actually build a business as you convert from reputation to traffic and traffic as many of us in this digital age know, can be converted into cash. There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities – and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. This ‘free mentality’ shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in Euros, Dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

How a company presents an offer for a product today differs in many ways from the past in that the price of each individual component is often determined by using psychology, not cost. Your mobile phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes – it keeps that fee low because it knows that will be the first thing you will compare when picking a carrier – thus another component, your data volume and your monthly voice mail fee is pure profit to the carrier. So you see ads for free phones but I have yet to encounter free calling plans.

You get the pipes for free but the water passing through those pipes is expensive. So, what are we to do about our dilemma? Many of our target prospects want something for free and yet our developers need to eat. If we were to offer a free ‘lite’ version, then we would encounter higher dev costs and support costs but the idea has crossed our mind.

Wait, there is another way… How about building real value into your offering so that people won’t mind spending some spare change if an App helps them do something that they wanted to do before but were not able. If an App were to focus on leveraging those scarce resources that we listed a few paragraphs above such as helping a user to save time, gain respect or save money – the App would pay for itself and that, in essence, is currently our favorite model of ‘free’.

The Psychology of Sales

Sure, there are boatloads of books on this topic so I’ll do my best to keep this article brief, helpful and to the point. First, this page is dedicated to the many kind folks I meet each day who really need help selling their products and services.

Products and services are wonderful things from both the perspective of the consumer or Customer and the person or company that is offering or selling the products and services. For starters, the consumer gets some form of benefit from the products or services otherwise there would be little reason to purchase them. The seller, likewise receives a benefit in the form of compensation, usually monetary. The difference is that the consumer gets value whether perceived or real from the transaction or the receipt of the product / service.

How the consumer perceives this value is the topic of this article today.

From here on out when I mention the word ‘products’, please understand that I mean both products and services.

Here are my suggestions when you want to sell a product to a given target market.

1) Know your target market well.

That means that you need to understand who they are, how they tick, what they like and dislike etc. If you have hundreds or thousands of Customers this goes for you too – that is what databases are for!

Let’s start with something basic like Motivation Strategies.
Are your Customers motivated TOWARD something or Motivated AWAY FROM something?
If you were to ask them why they purchased your product, what would they say?
More importantly, what would you learn from their response?

If you were to ask your Customers something neutral such as “What did they do this past weekend?” and then follow up the question with “Why did you do X this past weekend?” Chances are good that you will learn something about their motivation strategy.

If they were to answer that they “went to the mountains to ski” this would indicate that the person is likely to be motivated TOWARD something and thus, they tend to know what they want and they will move toward their goal of getting what they want.

If the response to question 2 were “to get out of the city” then you might guess that this person is motivated AWAY FROM something and this sort of individual knows exactly what they don’t want.

In order to sell to these two very different types of people, you need to be able to identify their motivation strategy quickly and then apply a marketing tactic even quicker. Your first step is to create two sets of marketing tools from business cards and form letters to signs, messages and selling phrases that you will learn by heart. Your purpose is to communicate with your prospect effectively using their choice of motivation strategy so that your message is accepted with gratitude and your offer is given priority consideration.

If you wanted to sell a massage to a person that is motivated AWAY FROM something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Want to relieve stress?
Come visit our Spa on the 3rd floor right now.
(special offer limited to the first 5 people, today only)

– Need to get away from it all?
Experience our 100 minute vacation
(Hurry, we only have 4 slots left)

If you wanted to sell the very same massage to a person that is motivated TOWARD something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Are you ready to relax?
Our experienced massage therapists are waiting for you on the 3rd floor.
(special offer for first time Clients – today only)

– Would you like a treatment that is usually only offered to top athletes?
Sign up for a medical massage on the 3rd floor today – there are only a few slots left.

In addition to knowing your Client’s motivation strategy, learn all you can about them and take notes so that you can communicate in a very personal and meaningful way in the future. For example, if you do not see a Client after several weeks, why not send them a thank you note for their last visit and mention a few personal things in the note that would perhaps encourage them to get back in touch with you. When they contact you, present them an offer that they would find hard to resist.

2) Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS include a benefit in your marketing message. Just to be clear, I am referring to a benefit that your Customer experiences when they do business with you.

3) Incorporate some form of scarcity in your offer – there may be thousands of X available but to many people, the perception of scarcity is a very powerful magnet.

4) Upsell and Cross Sell at the appropriate moment but do it as often as possible. This is a lesson learned from McDonalds and it pays off royally. Have you ever been to a restaurant where they asked you if you wanted fries with your order? That would be an example of a cross sell. If you heard someone ask a Customer if they wanted a large order of fries for only 20 cents more, that would be an example of an upsell. Do not miss out on this essential element of profit building unless you really want to leave money on the table.

5) Practice each of the above suggestions with Clients, Customers, Prospects, Friends – you have nothing to lose

6) Test variations of the above to improve your results and keep track of what works and what does not work.

7) Reserve time in your schedule for building relationships. Many of our Clients are so busy delivering products that they forget to keep relationships warm. The result is that they have to work extra hard to acquire more new business. It is much easier to keep a Client than it is to find a new one so, spend a few hours each week, keeping tabs on your Customers and going out of your way for the ones you really want to keep. The idea is to grow the business you do with your best Customers in such a way that you build a lifetime of value into the relationship. Build those relationships and they will pay off big time.

Naturally, we offer our Clients courses in the above areas with the implied benefit that knowledge will increase their sales but we do things a bit differently over here. We select our Clients very carefully, only a few applicants are accepted each time we open the doors but those that make it through have a compelling business case and a determined desire to succeed. These are the kind of folks we enjoy helping. We could guarantee that our methods will double your sales or you get your money back but instead, we often opt for a success based fee thus, we only get paid if our efforts deliver results. Have you ever worked with a company like that before? Come on, give it a try and apply for a chance to be one of our top performing, revenue generating Clients today.

What’s a Website For?

A business purposed website exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) sign them up for a newsletter.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your potential Customers might value?

If not, this would be a very good first step in the right direction.
Always remember to use benefit’s based selling methods, track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and sign up for our Newsletter right now. BoxOnline is a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get the results that you desire.