The “so what?” side of your products

One of the biggest mistakes common between sales and marketing professionals is that they think customers care about their products and services. The truth is that all customer care about is themselves. Talking about your products and services guarantees to put customers off and make them bored.

What they want to know is that how you can help them with their everyday challenges. How your products can help them grow, achieve their goals and cut costs?

Get away from talking about the features of your products and talk about the benefits. Benefits are what persuade customers to buy from you, they don’t care about the features of your offering. For example if you sell some advanced task lights with fluorescent bulb, then the fluorescent bulb is the feature of the light. The customer may not buy the task light because of the florescent unless he knows or learns the benefit of it. Florescent bulbs consume less energy; therefore, the result can be measured at the end of the month on the electricity bill.

What you need to do is to spend your next 30 minutes writing down the features of your products and services. When you have finished writing the features, read the features one by one, and for each feature, ask the question “so what?”. The answer to the “so what” question is the benefit of the feature.

When you are done, shortlist the 5 best reasons customers should by from you. The benefits are the reasons. But are the benefits you have discovered the core reasons customers buy from you? To answer this question you need to do a reality check.

Send emails to 10 of your best customers; ask them why they buy from you. What specific benefits have they gained from your products and services and how it has impacted their costs, productivity, life style and so forth.

Collect all information you can, write them down and compare the top 5 reasons with your list.

If all 5 are matching, then you have a very good knowledge of your products, but if not you will need to select another 10 customers, asking them the same questions, to finally learn about the benefits of your products.

Only after knowing about yourself, you can start marketing (which requires you to do even more research to learn about your customers and your competition).