Selling on Benefits - Good Advice ?

January 07, 2018

Almost all Managers in Marketing & Sales know a Golden Rule - Features, Advantages and Benefits. Focus on the Benefits, not the features, is drilled into their minds. Focus on benefits (the problems you solve). That is the right thing to do.

Always ? Sometimes it may lead you to bigger problems.

Take an example. As the CMO, you have been asked to reduce the expenditure by 10%. Across the board. You have decided to outsource some of the routine, repetitive activities. You have 2 proposals - one, saving you 15%, the other saving you 20%. Which one do you choose ?? Obviously, the 20% saving proposal.

Need Not Be So.

Both the proposals will improve your bottom line, make the Board happy. The proposal reducing costs by 20% gives you more benefit. However, there is a factor that you may have overlooked - RISK INVOLVED.

Extra benefits comes only when things go as per plan. What if something goes wrong ?? If that outsourced company fails to deliver as promised, you could be in big trouble. Buyers, rarely try to simply maximize the benefits.

They are looking to maximize benefits at minimum risk.

So, in Marketing & Sales, whether it is to large corporations, the public sector or the SMEs, you need to focus on the benefits you bring plus lowest risk. Only this option will work best.

In such cases, a focus area needs to be minimizing perceived risk of buying from you by maximizing the perceived risk, if he bought a similar product from someone else.

What could that be ? A financially sound company ? Nobody wants to buy from a company that can easily go out of market in a short time. This is what happened with a flyover built in Mumbai, using new technology, at a very attractive price.

Problem area ? When after just 20 years, the flyover had a problem, they realized that the company had closed down many years ago !! They then had to to go to a prestigious engineering college, to seek help. Probably, spent much more than what they had saved, in the first place. 😢

Your customers will also be thinking in a similar way. So, think of various ways that a risk may arise, for your customer and work on how it can be addressed and handled.

Conclusion : This simple thought can change the performance graph of your Marketing / Sales department.

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