OK, the How To Sell Coach guide to Features and Benefits for any product or service. Let's start with the basics:
A Feature is what it is.
A Benefit is what it does.
A Personal Benefit is what it does for your customer - and this is the key one.
Sometimes sales presentations can go wrong because the sales person just starts rattling off the features of their product. They don't get to the benefits and worse still, don't even think about the Personal Benefits.
It can also go wrong, and I've seen this many times, when a sales person overloads the customer with features and benefits. One after another after another. Generally what happens here is that the customer begins to glaze over, loose interest and starts to think, "I wish he would just get to the point."
Unfortunately the sales person doesn't know how to get to the point because he doesn't know what the Personal Benefits are to that particular customer. He didn't ask open ended questions to find out what the customer wants, whats important to him and what's in it for him.
Features and Benefits are the meat of the sales presentation but they have to be relevent. Your product could have thousands of Features and Benefits but the important ones are those important to your customer - the Personal Benefits
The may not be the ones that you believe to be the most important or the best features of your product, but to an extent, that's not what is important. What does your customer want? What will make his life easier? What will save him money? What will improve the service he gives to his customer? What will make him more money? Whatever's important to your customer is whats important and they are the Features and Benefits you need to focus on.
Chunk them down.
What I find useful is to get a blank sheet of paper and on the top put the following headings:
Product
Feature
Benefit
Personal Benefit
Open Ended Question
Between the words Feature and Benefit write the words 'this means that'
Between the words Benefit and Personal Benefit write the word 'which means that' (I'll explain why later)
Now just write down every Feature, Benefit and Personal Benefit you can think of for your product or service. And I mean every one you can think of. Just focus on what you're selling. If it's a physical product. pick it up, turn it round, really study it. Do this for 20 minutes then give yourself a break. Let the on board computer which is you brain, consider it for a while and come back to it and keep coming back to it until you have them all down.
This exercise will also help your product knowledge or perhaps identify aspects of your product that you need more information on in order to make the best sales presentation.
Once you've listed all the Features and Benefits, now create an open ended questions based on the Personal Benefits. Don't worry if first time round they sound a little contrived. You can work on that to make them better but for now the important thing is that your thinking about it and more importantly, writing them down.
I've added a video by Martin Rafferty of the MRT Group. Slightly different terminology from mine, but the message is the same and he puts it well.
