E232: Selling Your 'Features and Benefits' Is Losing You $$$ Sales Without You Even Realising, & What to do Instead Now to Grow your Trade Business: Trade, Leadership, Sales

There is no doubt that selling features and benefits lose trade businesses' sales without most of them even realizing. Today we're gonna work out what to do instead now so you can grow your business. Welcome to Trade Sales Made Simple, the show helping 7 to 8 figure trade, construction, and industry leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so that you can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, and over the last 15 years, I've helped hundreds of trade and sales leaders grow their businesses and generate over $200 million in additional revenue by simplifying their sales processes. Let's get started. Today we're gonna go through why features and benefits are not a great way to get deals closed, how value is an improvement on that, but more impactfully, we're focusing on outcomes moves the dial for our trade businesses more than any other way of presenting to customers. I love the debate around features and benefits versus value versus outcomes because no matter how many people I have the conversation with, the very vast majority talk about features and benefits as their way of adding true value to customers. And I had this debate with a roofing business last week. Now this roofing business had a terrific idea. They were focused on not just re-roofing but also providing some great value for their customers. So they rolled some ventilation into their procedures. Now, the ventilation didn't cost their customers anything, but for them, what they focused on was the ventilation, i.e., the features and benefits of the ventilation product that they provided for their customer to give them a little bit of extra value. However, after a discussion together— and I'm going to work through this example as we talk today— However, after our conversation, they actually were able to move from talking about ventilation to something far more impactful with their customers. So let's get into today, and we're going to roll this roofing example as we go through. Okay, so what are features and benefits? Features and benefits are all the things that you generally do, or your product generally does, at a technical level for their customers. An electrician— quality of light switches, quality of lights that you install. A plumber, how you go about waterproofing the shower so that it's not going to leak over time. Or if you're a pool builder, the type of chemicals that you use to set the pool up to have far less chlorine in it, which means a much better experience for children. Doesn't matter what they are, features and benefits are very much about the technical approach you bring to a deal. Now, features and benefits are nice when you're the only one offering a feature and benefit. What I mean here is to say, if you are doing something that no one else in your industry does, a feature and benefit can really give you some competitive advantage because quite simply no one else can copy it. But certainly my experience in the trade industry after 20-odd years in it is that it's very, very rare that you have a level of uniqueness that will win you deals. Yes, there are points of uniqueness. Perhaps you have a slightly higher quality material. Perhaps you have a process of installation that is going to allow the product to last a little bit longer. Or perhaps your speed of delivery means that you can roll out projects 10% quicker than others. But these very rarely features and benefits that win deals. And in fact, the features and benefits that you have are very similar in a trade industry to what everyone else is offering. So generally when we're leading with features and benefits, it means that we are competing against the masses. And when we're competing against the masses, it often means that we are competing on price. So the example for this roofer here was that they were re-roofing and they were providing a ventilation product. Now the ventilation product is nothing new compared to what others, uh, in their industry are providing. However, they were not only doing it at, at no cost, but they also had some really specific logic behind why they were doing it at the time of re-roofing. So that's when we start to talk about value, and value is absolutely the next step forward or the more advanced level of selling than features and benefits. And value talks about what happens from a feature and benefit. So if we were to go back to one of those examples I gave earlier, the electrician's light switch, when you have higher quality light switches, they last longer, they might be able to do a different style of dimming, they might be programmable, right? They're all features. But what happens from there is the value that that provides is the customer can control their lighting from an app. The customer has the ability to dim their lights for a home cinema, or the customer can rely on the safety of those light switches so their kids are less likely to get, get in and touch them. Now that's where we're starting to talk about value. So that takes the feature and the benefit, and if we use the roofer as an example, it takes the ventilation piece and says, okay, by providing ventilation in your roof, your roof is not going to be as hot because we have more airflow. You are going to reduce the risk of mold, particularly in warmer, in warmer countries or warmer regions. You're going to be able to reduce the risk of mold because we have airflow. And we're going to do that now when we're installing the roof, right? Because it's going to be cheaper and easier and it's going to last longer, right? It's not a retrofit, but it happens at the same time. All nice pieces of value. And I will absolutely stand here now and say that if you can move from features and benefits to value as your first step, you are winning, and that is absolutely what I'd recommend you do. But where things get really powerful when it comes to generating great results for customers is when we can talk about outcomes. So if we think about outcomes being an extension of both features and benefits and value, we can look at it something like this. So we use the pool example that I spoke about earlier about low chlorine water, ionic pool filtration systems, for example. So the features and benefits is it's, it's low chlorine. They're ionic watering systems. Yeah. The value is, okay, you're going to be able to have kids that swim in there for longer without sore red eyes. Logical, makes sense. The outcomes is where this gets really special, and that's to say something like, Now that means more time for you to be able to do what you want with your kids being entertained in the pool. Now that means when you have kids and families come over, the kids can spend more time in the pool and you can have more time socializing with your friends. We're actually starting to talk about what it means for the customer. More time with your kids in the pool means you're out spending less time going to do paid activities. Or for me, very specifically, one that's very close to home, when your kids are playing in the pool more often, they're asking for treats less often. Constant in my household, my beautiful daughter wanting treats. So by taking the feature or the benefit, which is the Ionic pool filtration system, talking about the value it creates— less red eyes— but then rolling it into outcomes, what it means for me, and for me, the one that would land most impactful there is your daughter's going to have more time in the pool, which means she's out bugging you less for treats. It drives me insane when my daughter's constantly asking me for treats. Right. For me, that's going to land and go, yeah, cool. I can have her active a little bit more often because she does sometimes complain about the chlorine in her eyes, right, in our current pool, for example. So that's the example there of an outcome far superseding features and benefits and then value. If we go back to this roof, for example, where we landed was that by having a cooler roof, it meant lower cost of air conditioning, which is, I think that falls somewhere between value and outcomes, 'cause we can start to talk about how if you're spending less money on air conditioning, you can spend more money on other things in your life. But the bit I really liked was by saying, by having a cooler roof cavity in summer, it means your house is running cooler during the day, right? Of course we're using the aircon less, but it means we're sleeping better. And we all know what happens when we have better sleep. For me, if someone says we're going to put these whirlybirds in, and in fact we put ventilation into our roof purely so we could be sleeping better, for me that was worth everything. Because if you get a good sleep, everything in life is better, and I don't think I need to go into that too much. But we were able to move with this roofer from saying, I'm going to give you ventilation in your roof, to I'm going to give you ventilation in your roof that keeps your house cooler with less mold, to we're going to put ventilation in your roof so you are going to sleep better on those hotter nights. And it's easy, it's quick, we're going to do it when we install it, we're not going to charge you for it, but that's one of the key outcomes we need to take advantage of when we put your new roof on your home. Fantastic, right? We have moved into something that is very, very impactful to a customer— better sleep versus ventilation in your roof. So the key thing that I want you to take out of today is, number one, there's features and benefits. That's nice, but at the end of the day, it means you are still competing against everyone else, and price can really become a driver. The next best is to take that towards value and the types of value statements you can get from, for example, right, a beautifully installed pool. Where we really see close rates move and trade customers win lots more business is when they focus on outcomes and trying to relate those outcomes to the highest hierarchy of needs that any of their customers can have. And the highest hierarchy of needs almost always falls back to health, their family, or friends, social, and everything that rolls around it. So if we can think of ways to make our customers happy, healthy, and well, then we are winning. And that would be my recommendation coming out of today. Now, if you are a business that is quoting a lot and you're not winning enough, and you're a little bit frustrated with it, which can lead to lots of wasted time and then not enough money in the bank to show for it, we've got a free quote quiz that will work through problems just like what we spoke about today. Okay. I.e., are you spending too much time on features and benefits in your quotes and not enough time on outcomes? It's easy to do. There's a free quote quiz link in our show notes. Click on it and we'll get things rolling for you. And did I mention it's free? Costs you nothing. That's it for today. Please keep thinking about being 1% better each and every day, and we'll see you next time. Bye for now. Bye for now.