Features and Benefits

What's a feature? For our purposes, a feature is an attribute of a product or service. Features include things like size, weight, color, material used, modules, and specifications. Product Marketing people take artistic license with these facts, adding adjectives to heighten the feature's presumed sex appeal and thereby make the product even more irresistible. This is where words like robust, seamless, and integrated begin to creep in.

The primary problem we have with sellers being taught to lead with features is that this approach counts on the buyer's knowing whether or not the feature is useful and therefore relevant. Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of salespeople who lead with product features in their sales pitches every day, and yes, in a lot of cases, it actually works. But it works best when buyers already understand how to use the proposed product or service, understand the value of using it, trust the seller, and trust the seller's company.