Nobody cares about your products or services… and neither should you. Sure, your company’s advertising focuses on your products and services—their unique advantages and benefits. And, your marketing department has gone to great lengths and expense to produce extensive marketing brochures and spec sheets that further elaborate on the unique aspects of your products and services.
Nobody cares.
Prospects aren’t interested in nor are they buying products and services for their unique aspects, features, benefits, or advantages. They are buying products and services for what those products and services can do for them.– for what it helps or enables them to accomplish. They are not buying the product or service; they are buying the intended outcome of using the product or service.
Does a prospect care about the pounds of pressure in the hydraulic cylinders of your scissor lifts? No. What they care about is whether the lift will raise three pallets of parts twelve feet in the air to reach the top shelf of the storage bins. Does a prospect care about the process by which your diamond tipped concrete-cutting saw blades are made or that 38 state road construction departments use your blades? No. What they care about is how many feet of four-inch concrete pad they can cut before needing to replace the blade. They care about the end results of using your products or services.
What’s the point?
All too often, salespeople become so caught up in, even fall in love with, the “unique selling points” of their product or service—code words for features, benefits and advantages—that they pay scant attention to the outcomes the products or services are designed to achieve. Prospects care about outcomes before they care about or consider “unique selling points.”
It’s OK to “love” your product or service and speak passionately, emotionally, and convincingly about it … after you’ve determined that it provides the outcome your prospect is trying to achieve.
