Sales daze

In the old days, sales people used to talk about features and benefits. In fact, old dazed sales people still talk about features and benefits. This is a technique devised by marketing people to avoid the need to hire intelligent sales people. Here's how it works.

I have a product and I want it to be sold in a certain way by sales people who I don't pay much, so since staff turnover will be high and I don't want to keep retraining them, I'll just write a feature/benefit script for them to read out. If they read out enough features, a few are bound to stick. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And it's lazy too.

Feature: Modular training program

Benefit: Fit training around your work commitments

What happens is this; by the time I get round to telling you the benefit, you already decide what the benefit is to you (e.g. not too many nights away from home in one go) so when you hear my benefit statement, we lose rapport because I am contradicting your interpretation.

If you must talk in features and benefits, then at least use 'benefit because feature'. You get to manage your normal workload more easily because our modular training program breaks up the training time.

Just thought I would share that with the world...