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Warren Wechsler's
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Features or Benefits?

Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Some restrictions apply to the use and distribution of this information. For more valuable materials, visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com. All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.

Today I'd like to talk about advanced presentation skills: features and benefits. I was in northern Minnesota at a beautiful resort called Cavanaugh's. North of Branard there is a bunch of resorts on Gall Lake and a bunch of other lakes up there. There's Cragan's Resort and Rutger's Resort and Madden's Resort and Cavanaugh's.

I had a chance to be at Cavanaugh's Resort working with Hawkins Chemical Company. I did an exercise called "Features and Benefits." I handed everybody in the room a clothespin. I said, "OK, everybody, you all now work for one of two companies." I split the room in half. "Half of you work for the Wonderful Wood Company, and the other half of you work for Snap-On Springs. I am the owner of the Wechsler Clothespin Company. Your job is to tell me why your wood or your spring would be of benefit to me. I want you to focus your presentation not on features but on benefits."

The room looked at me and said, "What do you mean, Warren? What's the difference?" I went on to explain to them the difference between features and benefits, and I'd like to do that now with my listening audience here on the radio.

A feature is what it is or what it does. Let's take the example of a clothespin. You might say this clothespin is made out of wood, and the wood is sanded. So now we know it's sanded wood. Well, that's a feature. That's what it is or what it does. As salespeople, I've noticed this many, many times working with people in the field, we tend to focus our presentations when we're talking about our company, our products, our services, we focus on the feature, what it is and what it does.

And then we make the customer work so hard because people, customers, don't buy features. They buy benefits. Let me explain to you what a benefit is. A benefit is why it's important or what it means to the person who owns or who will buy it. For example, if I told you this clothespin is made out of sanded wood, you might say, "That's the feature. What's the benefit?"

Now I'm going to give you the real big hint of the day, and that is that in order to test whether something you say is a feature or a benefit, you apply what's called the "so what?" test. If you can say "so what?" to someone's claim, then it's not a benefit to you. Let's go back to the clothespin example. Here's this clothespin. It's made out of sanded wood. What's the benefit to me? So what? It's sanded wood. What does that mean? What is the benefit? The benefit is I will be able to hang my clothes up without having them make runs in the clothing, and I don't have to worry about splinters. So it's a very safe way to hang up my laundry. So now I can't say "so what?" to that. I can't say, "Oh, so what? I'd rather have bloody fingers. Or I'd rather rip all my beautiful cotton and wool and silk clothing." Now we have a benefit. So the benefit of sanded wood is no splinters, safety, and your clothes won't get ruined. I can't say "so what?" to any of those things.

Interestingly enough, a lot of people spend a lot of time talking about features and not enough time talking about benefits. Let me give you some of the major examples of what benefits are, and what will cause people not to say "so what", what will get people to sit up in their chairs and pay attention to what you're offering, and will also help them buy in a much easier manner.

People love to save time. If you can come up with something that will help your customers save time, if you are selling accounting services and you have some type of software program you can install on your client's computer, that's the feature. The feature is, "Let me set this software up on your computer. The benefit is it's going to save you time. You'll be able to get those reports to me, the accountant, a lot more quickly. They'll be accurate; they'll be simple; and the most benefit to you is they'll save time." So saving time is a real key benefit.

Saving money is another real key benefit. That doesn't mean lowest price. It means that if your overall solution can help people save money, then that is something that they cannot say "so what?" to.

Another thing that people like to buy is something related to lifestyle. How can they be safer? How can they have the image they want? How can they keep up with the Joneses? How can they be innovators or leaders within the groups that are important to them? These are all examples - image, safety, security - to which people will not be able to say "so what?" So these are other examples of benefits.

When I talk to my clients, I do feature and benefit type statements as well. For example, I say to people, "I am a sales trainer and sales consultant. I'm a resource to management. I conduct workshops, seminars, keynote speeches, and I have a whole lineup of educational materials that people can use as sales professionals." Now if that were all I said I would just basically have done all those things I talked about earlier. I feature, feature, feature, feature, featured you, without giving you any benefit.

Now what are the accompanying benefits? When I have a chance to work with salespeople, I can help them increase their incomes. I can help them make more money. I can help them be more efficient with their time. I can help them have more career satisfaction. I can help them overcome some of the morale issues that they face as salespeople. I can help inspire them to be the best people they possibly can be. I can help them find and keep more customers. I can help them increase the revenue and profits of the company for whom they're working. These are all examples of corresponding benefits that I talk to people about when I'm mentioning the features.

My charge to you is to go into your own company and figure out different things that would be features, aspects of your business that are feature-related, and convert those into benefit statements, so that you don't make your customers and your prospects work so hard to leap to the benefit in their own mind. This, by the way is what happens. So many times we make our customers work so hard to establish what the benefit statement is when it's our job as salespeople to point out the benefits to our customer base.

Let me just give you one more example. I am looking at a timer that's on this desk in the studio. One of the features of this timer is that it has three buttons. So you might say, "Big deal. Why is it important to have three buttons?" Actually the buttons are ergonomically placed so that when you hold it in your thumb and forefinger, it fits right in the palm of your hand and the two buttons are right at the place where your thumb and index finger would be. Feature, feature, feature, feature. What's the benefit to me if I was going to look at this particular timer? The benefit is I'm able to time people accurately without thinking about it too much. It's easy to use. It's quick. And it's going to be accurate. I'm not going to make mistakes. If I want to time runners going around a course, I can watch the form of the runners, keep my fingers right on the buttons, and be able to access the time without having to look at it. So I can be a more effective coach. I can be a better coach for my runners because I don't have to focus my energy on looking at the stopwatch. The buttons are placed so well that it's natural for my thumb and index finger to touch them just at the right parts.

Now, I'm impressed. I just picked this up and I was able to create those feature and benefit statements. A salesperson's job is to paint pictures for people, and that's the example that I've given you.

In your business you know an awful lot about what those features and benefits are. I would suggest to you that it's time to take out a piece of paper and a pencil and start writing these things down.

And I'll tell you something. When I started my business in 1987, I remember sitting in the basement of my house in a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota, sitting down there writing out the features of my company and the corresponding benefits. Now you might say, "Why in the world did you, the sales professional, sit down in your basement and feel compelled to write those statements out?" The reason is palest ink is better than the best memory. Ooh, a Chinese proverb. The palest ink is better than the best memory. If you write those things down when you go out and see your customers and prospects, you will remember what you wrote down. That's why I took the time to write those things out when I was new at my business.

Two more quick points I want to make about advanced presentation skills. One is what I call the salesperson's paradox. The paradox is that your customers expect you to know all kinds of things about your products and services.

Let's go back to the paint example. There are so many things that those people over at Fairfield Lumber, and I'm sure at Luckman's Sentry Hardware and at Wal-Mart, wherever they sell paint in town. Heck, maybe Linda Petit sells paint at Finishing Touch for all we know.

There are a lot of places to buy paint, and you expect that those people know their paint. They know what surface to put it on, how long it takes to dry. How do you apply it? What's the temperature at which you can apply it? What's the coldest? What's the hottest? What works better on metal or wood or new wood or old wood or wrecked-up wood, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? If you walked into the store and had a very simple question such as, "Should I use a pastel color? Or should I use a solid color on painting my deck?" Let's just say that was your question.

The paradox is, I just got done telling you the tip of the iceberg. You can imagine the experts at the paint stores, the people who practice this craft, whether it's the hardware store, the lumber yard or whatever, they know so much about paint they could probably have a paint lecture. They could probably have a paint course at Indian Hill Community College on paint.

Now what's the paradox? I'm dancing all around the issue and not telling you what it is. Now I will. The paradox is your customers expect that you're going to have 100% of the knowledge on the products and service that you sell, but on any given day with any given customer you need probably 1%, 2%, maybe a maximum of 3% of that overall knowledge. The issue for salespeople is that when the customer comes in and asks the eyedropper question, "Now, would it be better for me to use the pastel or a solid color on using the paint or stain to paint my deck?" That's the eyedropper question. What do we do in the sales profession? We open up the fire hose. We soak them with all this information, and pretty soon they are so confused they don't know what is happening. In order to make sure the paradox is your friend and not your enemy, the key is to remember that when people ask you very small bits of information you respond with very small answers. That's the paradox.

Here's the final thing on presentation. That is the use of visual aids or presentation aids. If you're going to hand someone something to look at, be quiet while they're looking at it. So many times you go in and you're having a presentation made to you on a new car or a new something, somebody hands you a sheet of paper, and they put you into an immediate conflict situation. You don't know if you're supposed to be looking at the paper, reading the paper, looking at the person, listening to the person. And people abuse those visual aids. I know there are a lot of marketing people that spend a lot of time and energy making those things up. My suggestion to you as salespeople is to be careful the way you use those. If you want people to listen to you, don't push something in front of them. If you want them to read something, if you want them to visually understand what you're saying or what you're trying to convince them of, then show it to them and then shut up and let them read it.

Those are some ideas on advanced presentation skills.

This was a partial transcript from Warren Wechsler's weekly radio show. Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com Also, listen to Warren's weekly radio broadcast Wednesday's at 4:05 - 5:00 pm Central time, on KMCD-AM 1570AM. Shows are broadcast live on the internet at http://www.warpradio.com/asx/KMCD-AM.asx