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Features and Benefits

The Products a company sells determines its basic nature. The salespeople ought to know about the products, namely features and benefits, they are supposed to sell.

Feature can be described as a fact or description of the product or service.

Benefit can be described as what the product or service will actually do for the customer.

 

Customers don't buy features, they buy benefits and, perhaps more important is that, they buy relevant benefits.

 

What you need to do is state the feature and go on to explain to the customers how they will benefit from that feature. As, after all, you are selling benefits and not just products.

The easy way to do this is to simply state the feature and follow it with…and then go on to explain how the customer will benefit and what results the customer will achieve from the use of the product or service.

 

Consider an example: Suppose you take a standard pen. If you were selling that pen in bulk to the stationary buyer of a large company, the benefits would be that the pen is cost effective, that it doesn't leak, and that it can write in a variety of colours. However if you were selling the same pen to a stationary shop or a pen retailer, the major benefit would be, what profit the retailer could make by selling that pen to the ultimate customers.

 

Thus you need to mould the benefits of your product according to the type of the customer and for this you need thorough product knowledge.

 

Let us now examine some standard features of standard products and be aware of the benefit to a standard customer: -

• Feature: A clip on a pen.
• Benefit: The benefit of having a clip on a pen is that he/she don't lose pen and thus save money as they don't have to buy another one.

 

• Feature: The product is made on a good-quality machine.
• Benefit: The benefit for the customer is that the product will be of consistent quality and the customer can have peace of mind.

 

• Feature: The product is made from good- quality materials
• Benefit: The benefit to the customer will be that, it will last for a longer time and therefore they will save money.

 

• Feature: Fast delivery or own delivery vans.
• Benefit: The customer will be able to take delivery within their own specified time requirements, which will save them money, and give them peace of mind.

 

It is totally unnecessary to tell a potential customer all the benefits of a particular product. You need to be careful that you are selling only relevant benefits.

If that particular benefit is met, there would be no need for explaining yet another 10 benefits when the customer has already decided to buy.