I was highly intrigued by Coach DiDonato’s lecture in class last week. The one concept that he addressed is obviously the title of this blog post – features tell, benefits sell. When you take the time to let that process and sink in, it really hits the nail on the head and for a second you question whether you’ve heard anything more true.
As we think about the direction that the world is going in, this mantra is something that should be in the back of a salesperson’s mind at all times. People don’t really care about all of the gizmos and gadgets your particular product has; the questions they are asking themselves are: “what do I get out of this?” or “what’s in it for me?”.
I would define myself as a “really frequent shopper”, and by that I mean more than the average frequent shopper. I’m also the type of person that kind of likes to run and hide from sales people that are going to try to convince me that my list of wants are actually endless necessities. Just doing their job, I guess you could say. Thirty minutes later after the salesperson has gone on to other customers and here I stand in the middle of the store rationalizing with myself why exactly I need something that I had no intention of buying in the first place. “What’s in it for me?”, I think to myself. Several minutes later, my list of pros and cons have been sorted through. Being that the pros list just so happened to be longer, off to the register I go!
The moral of the story is that people aren’t concerned with the features of a certain product, what it does, how it looks, they are concerned with what they are going to get out of it. And if one can convince them that there are endless benefits to what they are looking into, you may as well just escort them to the register! Case (or sale) closed!
BoweryJE22