Feature Benefit Selling: How to Sell Your Product or Service Effectively

“What customer problems are you going to solve?”

Before spending money on marketing, every business owner should ask this question themselves. 

Most people are not interested in how cool a product is or its unique features; the only thing that matters is how they can benefit from your product. What problem can it solve for them?

Feature benefit selling is an effective way to answer that question for your customers. You can connect with your users by formulating a sales cycle focusing benefits of the features your products or services offered.

In this blog, we will cover the difference between features and benefits, the definition of feature-benefit selling, and how to use it to boost revenue.

Features VS Benefits: The Difference

Features and benefits are interconnected with each other.

While features represent the functionality of any products or services. Anyone can use the products and services features for their purpose. A phone can have features like an HD display, smooth touchscreen, fast OS, and durability. These are extensions of the phone.

Benefits are the results of the functionalities mentioned earlier. What people do with the features are the benefits. For example, a hones durability can be helpful if you want to travel and keep using the phone without charging.

It is common for companies to upgrade their products and services with new features and expanded functionalities to improve from the previous version. Customers’ suggestions and constant needs often fuel this innovation super fast.

A phone company can offer different phone models based on demographics’ needs with their desired features and functionality.

Benefits are influential to a customer’s purchase decisions. A product and service’s features often present the same benefits a customer needs to solve a problem in their life. Thus customers buy it to solve the problem. Companies often design features with specific benefits targeting customers’ problems, which play a massive role in people’s buying decisions and collecting more revenue.

What is Feature Benefit Selling?

Feature benefit selling is a business term used mainly by marketers and salespeople. 

Feature benefit selling is a process to help your potential customers make connections with your products or service’s features and the benefits they can reap from the functionalities.

In this process, salespersons or marketers identify customers’ needs, learn more about the functionalities of the products/services, help customers understand the features, and connect them with the benefits of the features to solve the problems they want to solve.

For example, our helpdesk product Fluent Support helps small businesses to run their customer support without spending big bucks for Zendesk, Helpscout & Freshdesk like costly saas tools. Any business owner can host their support ticketing system in five minutes with WordPress from their hosting account.

As you see, we did not say any features yet but showed the benefits in these sentences. We have lots of features that help business owner fulfill their needs.

• Automation – automate repetitive tasks, save more time, and support more users.
• Fast loading –  Our helpdesk is built as a Single Page Application with VueJS & REST API. It loads fast, enabling super-fast customer support.
• Super rich dashboard – We offer a feature-rich dashboard for both admin and agents. Admin can manage and see the progress of their agents with one click. Agents can access recent tickets and reply fast to customers’ tickets.

We are using a few examples of feature benefit selling points to showcase our customer support ticketing system. You get the idea!

Why Use Feature Benefit Selling?

The advantages of feature benefit selling are profound. If used correctly, it can help the sales team and marketing reach new customer demographics. Here are some advantages of feature-benefit selling techniques:

• You can quickly identify customers’ problems beforehand through feature benefit selling techniques. This helps pinpoint what customers face and what they look for to solve the problems. You can even ask customers a set of questions to learn more about their preferences or what they liked/disliked about previous products and how convenient features can benefit them.
• Educate your customers on how your product’s feature can solve their desirable problems. You can easily do it through the feature benefit selling process. When a customer learns about this and connects to how the feature benefit can produce their desired result, it will be easy to make the purchase decision.
• When a customer makes a connection with features and benefits, it can help them understand the goal of the product. The more your customer base understands your product goal, the more likely they feel compelled to make a purchase. 
• This will help build loyalty among them too. Feature-benefit selling helps your customers understand the advantages of the result of a product’s features, which can make your product superior to them your competitors. It will increase the potential of brand loyalty.
• The main goal of the feature benefit selling process is to increase awareness of brands among your customers, close more deals and grow more revenue. When your feature-benefit selling meets the customer’s needs, customers make the necessary connection with your products and make the purchase. They are more likely to buy more from the brand and recommend your brand to others. 

How to Use Feature Benefit Selling?

Feature-benefit selling uses people’s emotions to influence them into buying. The sales team or marketer uses a wide range of emotions in every aspect of a marketing campaign. The future benefit selling process helps people eliminate their frustration by making the right purchase decision to solve their problem.

You can also tap into a person’s emotion to understand their desire and make them aware of a problem they might not know they are facing, then provide them with the solutions.

Here is a step by step guide to implementing future benefit selling techniques into your marketing process:

1. Study your products or service thoroughly, top to bottom. Without knowing your product’s features, you can not formulate a feature-benefit selling process. Study and compare the previous versions of them, compare the products with other competitors to learn more about feature advantages & disadvantages.

2. Try to identify the benefits of the features without any distinct features in mind. This will help you connect with features and benefits, and you can use this learning in the sales process. Also, remember that some features can have multiple benefits too.

3. Ask your customer evolutionary questions. Like these:

• What are you looking for in a product?
• What type of products can fulfill your need?
• What products did you like previously?
• Do you buy these products previously?
• What type of products do you dislike previously?
• What benefits do you need from a new product?

There are more questions you can explore based on your demographics and product category.

4. Use customers’ answers to your questions to learn more about their needs. You can learn more from users’ previous uses, what they liked and disliked from a product, what specific features benefited them, and what features they might expect in a new product. Consequently, this learning helps to connect with your customers in your marketing campaign.

5. The primary helpful goal of feature benefit selling is to make a meaningful connection with customers to guide them and educate them on how a product or service can impact their life. While doing it, use the learning about what customer needs, point out how an existing feature can benefit them, and help them make the purchase decision on their own.

Conclusion

While selling your products or service, presenting features is not enough. Customers do not care about features; they care about how these features solve their problems. Focus on benefits and use storytelling to grab customers’ attention. Impactful features benefit the selling process not only increase revenue but proper implementation of it can also increase brand loyalty and increase customer retention.