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How to Use Features and Benefits to Sell Successfully

It is a well-known fact in sales circles that the easiest way to increase your sales is to use features and benefits. They are essential for convincing your sales prospect that the product or service you are offering will make their lives easier, more enjoyable, less rushed or whatever. So do you know what the features and benefits of your product or service are? If you don’t, you should really find out. Use the exercises below to discover them. But before we move on to that, let’s look at the difference between features and benefits.

What are Features and Benefits?

A feature is a straightforward fact about the product, for example:

• 500 gigabyte memory
• waterproof
• wireless mouse

As you can see, these describe properties of the product.

A benefit, on the other hand, tells the potential purchaser how it will make their life easier. Look at the examples below: 500 gigabyte memory benefits:

• allows you to store a huge amount of data
• value for money
• stops your PC from slowing down

waterproof benefits:

• allows you to take it out in all weathers
• is protected if accidentally dropped in puddles

wireless mouse benefits:

• search from your sofa
• no wires to mess with so safer for your family

A really easy way to find the benefits of a product is to take a feature and ask ‘So what?’ Why do you think that feature is important to me? If you can answer, ‘Well, this product will make it easier, quicker, cheaper to do... ’ – you have your list of benefits!

How to use Features and Benefits to sell Your Product

So now we know what the features and benefits of the product or service are, we can get down to using them to sell! It’s important to remember when trying to convince people to buy that just talking about your product being better than the competition is not enough, you need to show them why this is the case. They need to be convinced that buying what you are offering is going to benefit them and this is where your features and benefit come into play. So, you are selling a vacuum cleaner. The features of it are:

• a HEPA filter
• handheld attachments
•  bagless
• self adjusting to carpet depth
• weighs only 5.4kgs

Now, it’s not hard to see how many of these features could be turned into benefits for your potential buyers. And careful tailoring of your sales patter will improve your sales even more. So, if you see that the buyer is elderly, you may want to point out that the vacuum is lightweight, has lots of attachments to make cleaning easier, it’s self-adjusting, so easy to use and there’s no need to spend money on replacement bags, so it’s economical. If you find out the customer has a dog, you should emphasise the HEPA filter for cleaning up pet dust and dander and so on.

As you can see, when you think about features and benefits in this way, it’s easy to see how to use them to sell. Try this out next time you are after a sale and see how it goes.

If you’d like more information about selling, why not request our Professional Sales Techniques Course prospectus.