Why Offering Too Many Features Can Kill the Deal

Welcome to this week's show entitled Why Offering Too Many Features Kills Your Sales Deals.

Today I'm gonna unleash the Power of Fab Your Jedi sales weapon.

So yeah, in the realm of sales and marketing, there's a powerful trio known as F a b. , f a B stands for features, advantages, and benefits.

Think of it as your light saber in the battle to close deals and win customers. Now, recently I've been working with Grant Cardone honing my scale sales skills and business coaching skills, and he offered some profound insights on features, advantages, and benefits. I mean, I can explain what a feature is, what an advantage and what an benefit is.

Um, but he got me thinking there is something deeper within this. So let's embark on a journey to explore how mastering features, advantage and benefits can make or break your deal. So let's start with the, with the simple basics. what is a feature? Feature? Let, it's about unmasking the technical specs, right?

The features are the raw, unfiltered specs of your product. These are the gritty technical details. The building blocks, the ingredients that make your offering stand out. Features, right .

Advantages give you a competitive edge. An advantage takes it up a notch, right when you're going into battle. They're all about showing how your product stomps the competition into the ground.

Advantages are weapons that you need to use. It's ammo in your arsenal to prove that your product or service has a higher level of capability. It is a competitive differentiation. So advantages are all about competitive differentiation.

But the real game changers are benefits, benefits. These are the deal sealers.

This is the stuff that dreams are made of. The benefit. A benefit is all about the impact your product or service will have on your prospects life or business.

They're the emotional triggers that reel them in and make your offering irresistible. So let's, let me give you a few little examples. I think you, you know, the basics, but let's just ground everybody at the same level.

Let's take a bottle. Our humble bottle of plastic bottle of water, right,

the feature, it's a small plastic bottle of water.

An advantage, well, our bottle has a resealable cap for convenience. So you can take a tip sip now and again,

the benefit is it's convenience, it's small, and you can put it in your pocket and have refreshment at any point that you need.

Let's take a different example, like a mobile phone

feature. It has a touch screen.

Advantage, it's two times brighter than its nearest rival.

And the benefit is you can easily read your texts and eBooks while you are sitting on a bright sunny beach drinking your margarita.

And then one last one is, I've posted this before. I do a little picture of a Diet Coke can right

a feature. Is it has zero calories

advantage they claim it tastes better,

but the benefit look better than the vamp at the office party at the end of the year.

Got it. Alright. Now let's talk about the three levels of, capability from Padawan to Jedi Master. Here's what you need, right?

So Padawan level, I talk. I, I could sum this up by, by craft calling it crafting your fab list.

So when your prospects are looking to buy something, they create a mental checklist of features they're looking for, and they'll stack your feature list against your rivals. It's the way they roll when they're out shopping, but. Don't be fooled. Merely listing features won't cut it. Your mission is to showcase why your product is the champ.

To do that, study your competition, pinpoint what sets you apart, and write it down. Make it clear. Make it strong, and use it , to your advantage. So you've, you've got this, you've got this rote list that you know your features, advantage and benefits. It's scripted. You've got it there, and you list those features and those benefits and you're pretty good as a padawan level Jedi.

Now, once you, the force starts to build, right? You start to get to Jedi level and you recognize that, Features, prospects search for features, but they buy advantages and benefits.

So they search for features, but they buy advantages and benefits.

Now, every prospect's different, right? And you can't bore them all with a laundry list of features that would be like droning on through an encyclopedia.

You've sat through those presentations. In fact, I'm, I'm going through, I'm going to one of them today. I'm sitting through a marriott timeshare presentation and they'll list 5,000 features. 4,999. I won't be the least bit interested in, and it'll take two hours and I'll be asleep. You know, it puts you to sleep faster than a tranquilizer dart.

 I talked to you about earlier about selling up the bottle of water. You could, spew out features until you hit a snag. You know, you might be selling, you're selling a ton of features, and the last one is, and you can throw that bottle away when you are done. Uh oh. Your buyer is eco-conscious!

He's trying to save the planet, and when he hears you can throw this as a disposable bottle, then your deal is toast.

You went one feature too far.

So what Smart Jedi know is how to ask the right questions to unearth what truly matters to the buyer. Then you've gotta laser down on those features, right, to keep your prospect engaged and razor sharp.

But let's elevate ourselves to Yoda level right now. Here's, here's, here's the subtlety, but power of f a b

features dictate price, perception, benefits, stoke the fire.

Now Voltaire once said, the great philosopher Judge a man by his questions, not his answers.

We heard earlier, ask good questions to identify the appropriate features, and then you get your prospect engaged.

But in the world of the Sales Jedi, you've gotta heeded Yoda's wisdom:

"do or do not offer benefits. In feature alone, there is no try".

What does that mean? Here's the truth, bomb. Your prospects equate features with price. Let me say that again. Your prospects equate features with price.

Therefore, the more features you drop, the more expensive your product seems.

It makes sense, right? If something has, you know, one feature you buy, you buy a piece of software, like might, you might be buying a A C R M, you know, if it just does one thing and keeps your contacts in a database, that's one feature. But if it keeps your contacts, it mails them, uses artificial intelligence., It reawakens, old relationships you know, you can list 10,000 features. It connects with this, it connects with that.

You know, that. C r m probably gonna be more expensive than the first one that just kept your contacts in a database. And if all you want is to keep your contacts in the database, those additional features are gonna make your product a little over designed, little over complex, maybe too expensive.

 You must never, you must. Here's, this is the golden rule. I wonder if you've, one thing I want you to take away from this podcast, here's the golden rule.

Never throw out a feature without also serving up an advantage and a benefit.

Remember, it's advantages and benefits that connect the prospect emotionally with their outcome, right?

And you want, and that's what gets them to open their wallet. If you just throw out an open-ended feature, It's like a cliffhanger in a TV series. It's all stress panic. It, it's intimidating and there's nothing in the benefit column, right? It's just a feature.

So the feature, remember, elevates the perception of price and complexity, but you didn't give a corollary advantage or benefit. So there was nothing to offset that. So you never, never just throw out tons of features about your product without articulating a benefit.

You must always stress the benefit because Jedi Masters know that it's all about emotion.

That's what drives buyers to act. That's what gets them to, you know, open their wallet.

So the, the Jedi Masters, the Yodas of the world, want to find out what your prospects crave deep down. What is the outcome that they're looking for. They're, they're really looking for, you know, one of three things.

Will your product boost their status? Right? Will it elevate their status? It may make them sound more intelligent. Maybe it'll make them look better. Maybe, maybe that car that they drive will will elevate them when they're driving the Lambo rather than the Camry. They feel more important. Right. So it's all about status. It might be the, the capabilities and skills you are building will help them get a, you know, promotion, right? It's all about status. We like to, we like to improve, we want to get better.

The second one is, you know, saving them money or time.

And last one is making them more money, you know, fattening their wallet.

It really comes down to those three things.

So you want to discover their emotional hot button and then tie your product to that benefit. You'll talk about features that, uh, pertain to that outcome, but then you'll describe the advantages and the benefits, how your product can help them realize that outcome.

So, never under underestimate the power of fab. It's not a sales tactic. It's mastering the forces of features, advantages, and benefits.

And then you can close those deals like a Jedi Master.

May the fab be with you.