Make It All About Them: Winning Sales Presentations

7   Making It Compelling

Myth: People buy benefits.

Truth: People buy compelling benefits.

Most sales professionals have had some exposure to sales training—and even those who haven't are probably familiar with the fundamental concept of features and benefits. I have found that, when asked, people understand that a feature is a fact about or characteristic of a product, and a benefit is an advantage or attribute of a product. Speaker and sales training expert Eric Baron summarizes this succinctly: A feature answers the question, “What?” A benefit answers the question, “So what?” Most of us know that customers buy benefits, not features. It is therefore important in a sales presentation to highlight the benefits.

Seems simple, right? It should be. But although this is an easy concept to grasp intellectually, it can be surprisingly difficult to implement during the actual sales presentation.

This has a lot to do with our perspective. As salespeople, we live in a sea of features. And since these features' benefits are so clear to us, we take for granted that they are clear to everyone else. We assume that clients will connect the feature dots to the benefits dots like we do. But the truth is that we need to connect these dots for them.

I cannot tell you how often I ask (or one of our other coaches asks) the question when coaching deals: “So what?”, or “Who cares?” In other words—why should this matter to the client? Sometimes team members will answer the question in a way that prompts ...