What is feature?
A feature is something that can be replaced. It’s something that makes up your service or product. An electric window is a feature.
What is benefit?
A benefit is the positive impact that it has on your customer’s life.
I want to share with you a really simple three-step process of turning features into benefits.
The more benefits you’ve got, the more you can charge. The more you can charge, the more you can earn and benefits make it easier and faster to make sales as well.
Example #1
I want to start off with a few examples. This is a basic website:
We have a homepage, a page to book a call, a product page, a testimonial page, and an about us page.
Now, most people as an agency will try to sell these five ingredients on the left-hand side. It’s a bit like saying, well, if you buy a car, you’ll get an engine, you’ll get a body, you’ll get some chairs, you’ll get a steering wheel and we’ll even give you four tires as well. That’s not compelling enough as to why someone should buy from you.
A feature is something that can be replaced. A benefit is something that makes their life better. So when you’re selling a website to someone, rather than saying our websites have a homepage, a book, a call page, a product page, a testimonial page, and then an about us page, why don’t we turn it into a series of benefits that make it so compelling that someone would feel stupid if they didn’t buy from you?
A homepage, for example, is a really good place to turn visitors into leads. You could say to someone, “Imagine that when anyone clicks on your link on Google, they immediately land on your homepage and they are more likely to turn into a lead. Does that sound interesting to you? Great.”
Looking at call page basically means filling their calendar. This is what I like in particular about this. Fill their calendar with calls and on automation, something like that basically demonstrates, would you like to be having more sales conversations yet? Or would you like that done on automation yet? Great.”
A product page would be like a sales page or the thing that actually demonstrates what someone could buy. What we need to think of is why would someone want it.
Now, the obvious answers are to inform the customer or to make sure that we are educating them. Those aren’t really very strong benefits. Instead, if we said we will give you a salesperson that works 24 hours a day and they are pitch perfect every time. What would that be worth to you?
Well, we’re also going to include a testimonial page, but why are we going to include a testimonial page?
One of the things that I like to sell when I’m selling websites is shorter sales cycles.
A sales cycle might take 30 days, 90 days, but with a testimonial page, we know that we have shorter sales cycles. Shorter sales cycles means get paid faster.
This is another thing I like to do is called value stacking, which is where I’ll take one of these benefits and I’ll repeat it for a page. So the about us page, for example, should actually be really similar to a book of call page. So that’s why I again, would like to repeat filling their calendar with calls on automation.
Now, if you don’t like the idea of value stacking, personally, I do. I like saying, “I’ve got five or six ways to fill someone’s calendar with calls.”
You could say instead something along the lines of saving time by having calls directed to the right person on an about page. You could say, “Well, if someone needs to speak to this particular person about shipping or this particular person about sales, you can root those calls depending on where they are within the about us page.”
Example #2
Let’s look at another example. So this would be a pretty standard marketing funnel:
A squeeze page, a thank you page, a sales page, an upsell page, and a down sale page, but that’s not enough to the customer when we start translating it and putting it into context about how it makes their life better. That’s a benefit.
For example, a squeeze page, we could say 40% of your website, visitors turn into leads. Now, that to me sounds pretty compelling. I want more leads and if I could convert 40% of my website visitors into leads.
In my opinion, one of the benefits of a thank you page is to get paid faster. It’s a really good way of immediately capitalizing on a new lead or an opt-in.
It’s a really good way of getting paid faster because you are capitalizing on that opt-in action. I really like saying to someone immediately after they’ve opted in, “Hey, if you like that, you’re gonna love this.”This is another good way to start booking calls for people as well.
Sales page, again, is essentially a pitch-perfect person selling 24 hours a day. It’s also a really good way to increase sales conversions.
An upsell page is a really good way of saying we are going to increase your customers’ lifetime value. If you can say to your customers, “Hey, what’s your average spend with your customer?” And they’ll say a hundred bucks.
If you can say to them, “If we could make that $200 on average, would that be valuable to you?” You’re essentially doubling their revenue overnight with a really simple upsell page.
But for those who don’t buy the upsell, we can offer a down-sell which still increases the customer’s lifetime value, but does it in a slightly different way.
These are the benefits of a funnel compared to the features. Hopefully, you can see here how the list on the right-hand side is way more compelling to someone who’d be looking to buy, “Hey, if you’re a marketing agency owner or a freelancer and you are struggling to get clients in the door or find the right audience or generate new leads, it’s probably because your sales system needs a little bit of tweaking and the process needs a little bit of work.
That’s why I created this channel, Sell Your Service. One of the problems that we face on the internet today is that there is so much information. There’s an abundance of advice, and it’s very difficult to know what’s going to work and what isn’t going to work.
This can often lead you to having lower confidence and closing higher ticket products, because you don’t know where to turn to get that information.
I have made it my life’s mission, helping as many people as possible, make as much money as they want, selling what they want while feeling like they’re making a meaningful contribution.
So, if any of that resonated with you, this is the reason I’ve created the the Sell Your Service Channel. Go check it out.
Benefits are what make a product or service compelling. The more compelling we can make it, the more likely it is that someone will justify buying it. By delving deeper into compelling reasons, we’re painting a picture in the customer’s head and helping set the context as to why they would want to buy from you.
3-Step Process of Turning Features into Benefits
Most agency owners believe that they need to get more technical in order to show that they’re unique when in fact the opposite is true. The more simple you are seen, the more compelling you’ll be.
Let’s look at a feature. Now, this is something that you’ve put into your business and you think is a good idea, such as a sales page.
1. Who cares?
The first question we wanna answer is who cares? now in this particular case, it’s anyone with a product to sell.
2. So what?
The next question to answer is so what? This is where people get bogged down. They go, “Well, I don’t really know that it should be obvious. I’m not going to move on, but if I’ve got a product to sell, so what? I’m gonna help you sell more of them.”
3. So you can…
So you can retire early. So you can generate a six-figure income. So you can double your monthly revenue. There are a lot of, so you cans, but this is where you need to focus on one thing.
In fact, actually, you can have multiple so you cans, but in my experience, the tighter you’ve got this final aspect, the more unique your value proposition is as well.
So for this one, I might say, so you can launch a six-figure course. So you could do a six-figure course launch by using sales pages. This is the benefit. This is ultimately why someone would wanna buy.
So we go, who cares? So what? So you can…
Features and benefits are essential to all products and services. You need to understand the features you’re delivering as a part of your system, but your customer needs to understand the benefits that they’re gonna get after working.
In my experience, people buy benefits. They think they want to understand features, but actually what they want to understand is features in context to their life and that is a benefit.
Let me say that again. A benefit is a feature in context to their life.
