Quit Talking About Features & Start Talking About Benefits

No business is immune from living inside its own echo chamber where their world starts revolving about their own product or service. This can lead to lots of unfortunate side effects, but one of the most common is to focus its messaging and sales efforts on “features.”

The problem is that most people don’t care about features, they’re not buying features, they’re not putting them on their wish lists or begging their account managers for them. What customers care about are “benefits.”

Why Care About Benefits?
Your product may be fast, but its actual speed isn’t meaningful to a customer; it’s about empowering them to maximize their resources or shrink their timelines. Your product may have more storage, but customers don’t care about gigabytes, they care about how many apps they can have or hours of video it can hold or transactions it can support.

Of course, customers have been forced to adapt because technology has gotten so spec-heavy in its messaging. They have had to do the math themselves to interpret arbitrary measurements into meaningful widgets of knowledge. But they shouldn’t have to.

A prospective car buyer shouldn’t have to figure out how many suitcases they can fit in the trunk based on the cubic feet listed on the window sticker; the car manufacturer should be boasting about how the car is great for vacations because it can fit all of your gear. A potential purchaser shouldn’t be sifting through supported APIs; they should be told that the built-in Salesforce.com support means sales commissions will be automatically calculated once payment is received.

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