“Engaging people is about meeting their needs – not yours.”- Tony Robbins
One of the common pitfalls of marketing is to focus solely on the features of product and services. Although features are important, potential buyers are more likely to be intrigued by in the real-world solutions they offer. This blog will cover forgetting features, and how you can start to sell solutions.
Features vs Benefits
Take five minutes to think about the product you are promoting. If you were to write a list to describe the product, what would be included? Perhaps you’d write a list of the features – colours, size, textures – these are all features that may come to mind.
At what point on the list would you start to consider the benefits of your product? When a consumer can see the value they will gain from what you are offering, they are more likely to take note and take action. This is solution selling.
Unravelling Complex Products
Selling solutions, rather than features is even more important when marketing complex products. Let’s look at an example. An Apple MacBook Air has CPU speeds that are 3.5 times faster and GPU speeds up to 5 times faster than the previous model. It comes with 16 billion transistors and 16GB of memory. Unless the customer was knowledgeable about this sort of thing, they may have no idea what this is all related to. Does it mean it will load up software quicker? Will it store all my files, photos and videos?
For those looking to buy a new laptop, they want to know that it will tick all the boxes. Features are important, but customers need to see how these translate into benefits.
Perhaps you offer a service, which is fairly confusing and complex to explain and deliver. The best way to promote this is to describe the pain point that it answers instead – does it save them time or money? Does it reduce risk or liability? This way, your product or service becomes much more relatable. There is a mutual understanding of what the outcome will be once the customer has experienced the product or service. It’s all about simplifying your marketing message.
Ask the Right Questions
Solution selling requires you to ask the right questions. Instead of ‘What’, think about ‘Who’ and ‘Why’. If the laptop has more memory, why is this important and to who? This will get you thinking about your target audience too.
In our blog, ‘It’s business, but it’s personal’, we cover personalised marketing. When considering your ideal customer, you need to think about their pain points. This should then align with what your product or service is able to actually do for them. Let’s say the ideal audience of the laptop is students. The large memory will be ideal for both storing university work, as well as the PC games that fill those spare hours.
A cybersecurity company will know exactly what their service consists of. But what’s important is why. Cybersecurity services exist to keep data safe and secure. So, companies don’t need to worry about financial, time or reputational costs.
Tips on Solution Selling
Are you ready to forget features? Follow these tips below to take the next step to selling solutions.
- Create your ideal customer persona
- Discover who the decision maker is and how you can gain access to them
- Put yourself in their shoes and consider their pain points
- Find out how their pain points are affecting their business, or personal life
- Ask yourself why the features on your product will help solve these pain points
- Start showing the value – what benefits will it bring your audience?
- Highlight the values and benefits in your marketing messages
- Use personalised marketing to make a bigger impact
Is it time for you to forget features and sell solutions?
If this blog resonates with you, but you’re struggling to develop the right marketing messaging strategy, let’s talk. Here at Octima, we not only create bespoke marketing plans, but we deliver them too. We are all about communicating the right marketing message to the right audience to showcase the solutions your products offer in a way that will truly resonate.
Get in touch with us to find out more about how we can help you.
