Features and Benefits

When showing a customer that your product is perfect for them, the best format is ‘Feature’ -> which means -> ‘Benefit’.

Features on their own mean nothing to a customer (why should you care that I’ve got a Cambridge degree?) and Benefits on their own aren’t convincing – everybody claims that their product is brilliant, and some sales people lie!

But if you have BOTH then the feature is the proof of the benefit, and the benefit brings the feature to life.

And the connecting phrase is “Which Means”  – that means you’re doing it right.

Sometimes you can find that a feature brings several benefits, or that several features support one benefit – you’re DEFINITELY going to get THAT one!

Finally (and the only bit I can’t do in this blog) is that you find out which benefits the customer wants, so you only need to show him or her the features which give the required benefits – you don’t bore them with the whole lot!  So you pick and choose from your pre-prepared table of F&B depending on what the customer has expressed an interest in.

Here’s an example, using me as a case study.  

You can see that some of the boxes are intermediary – features lead to other features which eventually become benefits.

The arrows are “Which Means” 

So if I’m talking to a customer and they want the course to be different I can show how it’s designed exclusively by me, while if they want it for senior people I can talk about Vistage, my career and degree, if they want to be safe, or engaging to a large audience, I can show them my 25 courses filmed by Linkedin, etc

Time to start working on YOUR F&B flow chart!

Onwards an upwards

CC