Selling Techniques: Tips for Selling Features and Benefits

Last month, our blog focussed on Questioning Techniques to help you to identify the needs of your clients.  This month, we are going to look at how you can further improve your selling techniques by selling the Features and Benefits of your Business, making sure that the client gets what they actually need and not what you have assumed they need.

Understand your clients first

Linking back to questioning techniques, before you get to sell any features and benefits of your business or product, it is really important that you have sought to understand the client first, and that you are not making any assumptions about what it is that they actually want.

Before you sell make sure you have a full understanding of what the client’s requirements are, and that you have tested your understanding of those requirements. This way, you will be best positioned to talk about relevant features and benefits to suit the client's needs appropriately.

Link each feature to a benefit

When you are actually talking about selling the features and benefits, it's really important that you link the two together. This sounds like a very obvious statement to make, but it is very easy to rattle off a list of things that you are able to do for the client. 

The key thing here is to remember that features will effectively cost money, whereas benefits add value. A useful tip here is to use a phrase which demonstrates just this; for example 

“We can offer you a fully global service (feature) which means that all of your Organisations across the globe will get a consistent service to with we are offering (benefit)”

Avoid Overselling

It’s fair to say that most salespeople are very passionate about the service or products that they actually offer, but herein lies the danger - If you are very excited about what you offer, there is the temptation to talk about it… a lot.  

So, the tip here is to only pick the relevant features and benefits. If you can, focus on the top 3 or 4 that are relevant to your client, based on what you’ve identified through your effective questioning earlier.

Ask for the Business

Selling in the relevant features and benefits of course will give you the opportunity to close and ask for the business. If you have just done a scattergun approach and just sold everything, there is less confidence that we have actually sold the right approach. So, as you are selling in the features and benefits, it’s important to listen out for “buying signals” for example, 

“How much will that cost?” 

“How long would it take to produce that?” 

Have the confidence at the end to ask for the business, where you can be in a position to ask,

“Is there any reason why you are not in a position today to proceed?”

Positioning yourself correctly in terms of what you can offer your client based on what you know he/she is looking for will give you a good chance of securing some business. 

For more tips on selling techniques, or to learn more about our sales training courses,  please call us on 01295 675506 for a free consultation.