Features Tell, Benefits Sell

Features tell benefits was a principle or mantra that we talked about early on in the course. I want to highlight it here because we recently heard a great example that actually happened. What this means for a salesperson is that you can tell people about the bells and whistles of a product all you want, but that is not what will get them to buy. Features are cool, but benefits will make or break the product. The benefits in terms of sales are what about the product or service solves the customer’s problem. When salespeople discover the pain of a customer, their job becomes finding a way to fix it, which is easier and will result in more sales.

The recent example that we heard in class was one of David Starcher’s selling scenarios. This was the example he told us about, where he went to New York as a huge company was looking to buy mass furniture from Keystone. He was saying that they were evaluating several companies to see which would be the best. Starcher moved through a series of questions, which led the company towards leaning towards them, but what really sold them was the benefits that Starcher offered. Their problem was that all their properties had different furniture pieces that were not standardized. They wanted to know all of the various things that the properties were buying and have them standardized. David was able to offer a solution or a benefit to their problem. Thanks to Keystone’s fantastic IT guy, he was able to open a page where the owners could pick out several types of furniture that they wanted, and the different properties could buy directly from that. The owners hopped on this idea because it was an easy fix to their problem that other suppliers could not offer. This is a great example of how benefits can sell on products or services.