Use benefits to strengthen your sales message

Thursday, January 19, 2012

The most powerful sales messages focus on features and benefits. 

What's the difference? 

Say you sell website design services. A feature of your service might be that you design sites on the planet's best content management system. The benefit? Your customer can manage their new website easily and quickly without expert help, saving a great deal of time and money and putting them in full control of their online presence. 

Another feature might be that you've got twenty years' graphic design experience behind you. The customer benefit? The end result is so beautiful that it reduces site visitors to tears of admiration and joy... so much so that they simply can't resist buying.

Features and benefits belong together and support one another. But have a rummage around t'internet and you'll see an awful lot of sites focusing on features with not so much of a sniff of a benefit. This is good news for the people who get it right because it gives them a significant commercial advantage in a competitive landscape. 

Using benefits and features in tandem makes it easy to get a compelling, logical rhythm going and build an unbeatable sales proposition: 

• Because our product does X, you get Y
• Unlike other products, which only do A, we do B as well. Which means you enjoy A and B all in one go, saving time and hassle
• If you're a discerning customer you'll love our D, which delivers the best E experience this side of Mars
• Our P service means you get the best Qs in the market... every time     

You get the picture!