How to Move Quickly from Selling to Providing and Delivering
To be successful in business sales is the ability to move the sales pitch from a generic discussion about features and price, to a mutual conversation about providing benefits and delivering value. Making this transition successfully enables sales and marketing professionals to appeal to the individual and his or her business motivations directly, and puts you one step closer to getting your prospects to sign on the dotted line.
But what’s the difference between a feature and a benefit? A feature is a factual statement about the product or service being promoted, in essence, a specification. But features aren’t what make customers buy. Features never answer the most important question your prospects are asking: “What’s in it for me?” That’s where benefits come in. Benefits are the real results and value derived from features.
So how do we move a sales discussion from features to benefits?
First, you need to provide Information, Inspiration, and Education
First, it’s crucial you understand how important it is to actually educate your prospects and clients about your product. By taking the time to make your prospects actually smarter about what your business can offer them, the faster they will move through the buyer’s journey and become qualified leads. This, in turn, will make them infinitely easier for your sales team to close and turn them into high-value clients.
Second, you need to answer “What’s in it for me?”
The question all your prospects are asking, but very few sales and marketing teams are answering. Before being able to answer this question, we have to understand the motivation behind it in the first place. Whether personal or professional, your prospects need to address specific needs or are looking for specific outcomes. Its summarized as follows: “I need to be able to do X better, faster, cheaper or more reliably.
X can mean a variety of things depending on your prospect. The two most common answers are either cost savings or generating more business. Giving you prospect the tools they need to make their own conclusions, such as a variety of content (templates, checklists, articles, social proof in the form of case studies) will help them calculate key metrics such TCO or ROI and go a long way to helping them visualize the real value in what you’re offering.
Third, you need to get Get Hands-On
Instead of inviting your prospects to a product presentation or pitch, bring them to a workshop where they can conduct their own assessment. It can be about how much they can save or make through the product or service that you have to offer. This way they get hands-on education and training and engage on a more personal and memorable level with the benefits you are providing.
Like the old saying goes “You have to see it to believe it”. Once your prospects actually “SEE” the benefits, they will definitely believe.
If you are interested to know more about how you can Engage, Empower and/or Educate your community then check our Organisation page.
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