The Secret to Selling More? Hint: It’s Not Selling Features

Step one is just do an audit of all of your sales copy. Identify where you are selling features instead of benefits and then change it around to benefits. And then number two, ask your customers, why do you do business with us? Why? What's the benefit that you are getting from using our product? Because that is where the gold could potentially be lying.

You're listening to Freedom fastlane presented by capitalism.com this is the show about building business businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now, your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Ryan Daniel Moran.

It's James Swanick here, the CEO and founder of Swanick Sleep and the creator of Swanee's Blue light blocking Glasses. It's great to have you here and today we're going to be talking about the difference between features and benefits. If you have a product and you are banging on about the features of your product, then you are potentially losing many sales. But if you're able to articulate the benefit or the benefits of your product, then the chances of making a sale increase exponentially. Thank you very much Ryan for having me here to talk about this. It's great to be here. You may have if you're listening to me right now, you may have heard me on a previous episode of Freedom Fastlane where I talked about the cognitive biases and why people sell. And I went through about a dozen of those reasons on a previous episode. But let's get stuck into the difference between features and benefits. So let's use my Swannie's blue light blocking glasses as an example.

I don't talk about how we have acetate frames and spring hinges and polycarbonate lenses. I mean, I do mention that, but I don't lead with that. What I lead with is sleep better. Wearing our glasses will help you sleep better. That's the benefit. So if you were to go to swanicsleep.com right now and have a look on the front page, you would see a headline that says sleep better. Trouble falling asleep. Toss and turn in the night. Wake up feeling tired, sleep better. I'm not putting in their acetate frame. Spring hinges, sturdy, lasts a lifetime. Nobody really cares. Everyone is asking. Every prospect is asking, what's in it for me? How is this going to make my life easier? Another example of features. And just to define this, a feature really is like a factual statement about a product or service. But factual statements are not why customers buy. Benefits are. So here are some more examples of factual statements. A self cleaning oven.

Live operator on Duty 24, 7, award winning, made with 100% recycled product. So prospects and customers care very little about these statements because none of those examples that I just said tells a prospect how their life or their business is going to improve as a result of buying your product or service. Now, if we were able to turn those same statements into benefits, well, let's go again. Convenience, time saving, organization, easy access, quicker answers, reliability, they're all benefits. And benefits are what sell.

If we were going to look at another example, let's just say that you were trying to encourage a man to get a six pack abs, for example, to lose weight and to look amazing as many products do. There are many products out there. But if you notice when they're selling the products, they're not saying, get this 12 week workout program and you'll do this exercise, this exercise and this exercise. That's part of it. But what they're leading with, and you always see this, are the guys with great bodies and women sort of on their side coming up to them and smiling. Or when you have teeth cleaning or a hair grooming product commercial that you see on TV these days, aimed at a guy in the final scene, you always see a very attractive woman come up into frame and kind of put her arm around him and look at him adoringly and smile. And then they both look at the camera and smile. And the inference there is, if you have clean teeth or if you use our products for grooming, then you'll be able to attract women, you'll be able to get the girl. And that's the benefit. Okay? That's the benefit, not the feature. So yes, they do mention, you know, if you brush your teeth with this toothpaste, your teeth will be whiter. And this is how it works. And it fights plaque and all that kind of stuff. Like it does mention the features, but the overarching theme of it is the benefit. And the benefit is if you've got nice teeth or you're well groomed, then you'll feel happier, you'll feel more confident and you'll be able to get the girl.

We've always, always, always got to tell them the benefit. You have to go crazy with the benefit. In fact, in a good offer of any of your products, there's very little features, quite frankly. You just tell them, benefit, benefit, benefit. People only care about the benefit. A buyer is always asking the question, how will this benefit me? If you watch an infomercial, it's photo after photo of people talking, saying, I used to be like this and now I'm like this. So the viewers are imagining it for themselves. And it's all in the framework of you are going to be that person. So you can't tell people, oh, don't eat carbs or don't eat McDonald's. That's not really that interesting. You have to lead with benefit. And so a benefit would be, I'm going to show you how you can date Megan Fox. And Megan Fox doesn't date guys who eat McDonald's, period. So now guys listening to that would be like, oh, wow, now there's definitely, I'm definitely not going to eat McDonald's for a month. Because the benefit is if they eat well and they exercise well, then they'll be able to attract attractive women. If you're selling six pack abs, nobody cares about the abs, except from the standpoint that abs gets you something. And for guys, obviously it's abs getting them women or woman's attention. Now, for a woman, if we're going to use this, if we were selling a hair iron, for example, let's just say we had a hair dryer, hair iron, whatever you call it, because I'm not a woman. I'm not sure the exact terminology, but let's just say you wanted to sell a hair iron to a Colombian woman or a South American woman or any woman that's really focused about their looks. So you wouldn't even tell them about the product or what the product is until the end. So you might just say something like, oh, there's something that just came out of Hollywood that all the celebrities are using that you have to know about. Have you ever wanted a guy so badly that it hurt? Have you ever been hurt by a guy so badly that he left you at home crying?

What if I could show you in 30 minutes how you could be prettier than all of your girlfriends? And when you'd be walking down the street, guys would be turning their heads at you that you'd be able to get any guy you wanted, that any guy would pay attention to you. Well, I'm about to show you what it is. And then you would introduce the hair iron. Because no woman really cares about the hair iron and what the temperature is and how heavy it is in their hands or what it's made out of. Nobody cares. All they care about is the benefit of the hair iron. And in this example, the benefit of the hair iron is looking and feeling more attractive and getting guys attention. Okay? So.

Have a look at your own product and your own products and just look at all the words that you use in your marketing to describe it. And if you are just going on and on and on about things to do with self cleaning or one click or made of steel or sturdy or you know all of these features of the product, just know that nobody cares, really. Nobody really cares. All they care about is the benefit. So a couple of action steps you can take here.

Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll return to the show in a second.

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Couple of action steps you can take here is number one, do an audit of your sales copy and identify where you are selling features instead of benefits. So how do you know if you're doing this? Well, it's actually a lot easier than you think. So if you ask yourself this question, okay, and you should probably write this question down.

Will this one thing improve the life, cost, health or well being of someone, will this improve someone's life? And if the answer is yes, then you have a benefit and that's great. But if you are looking at your products and you're talking about the steel or the feel of it or whatever it is, and you ask the question, will this thing, this part of my product, improve someone's life? Will it improve their cost? Will it improve their health? And if the answer no, then chances are you've identified a feature and at that point, you really have to then find the benefit associated with that feature. And if there is no benefit, then you are harming your chances of making a sale. Another great action step that you can do is ask your existing customers why they do business with you. Maybe you offer benefits that you don't even know that you're offering. With my Swannies blue light blocking glasses from Swanic Sleep, initially all I was doing was promoting the sleep benefits of it. Obviously you wear these orange lens glasses. The orange lens blocks out that artificial blue light from your cell phone, from your TV screen, from your laptop, from the bathroom light. And I've been encouraging them since we created encouraging prospects since the beginning of this company two years ago to wear these in the last hour before you go to sleep. The orange lens blocks the blue light. You're able to produce more melatonin, you're able to fall asleep quicker, sleep deeper, wake up feeling refreshed. However, I wasn't even aware that people really loved wearing these glasses for daytime use as well when they were using computers in the daytime. And a lot of people told me that they had reduced eye strain and reduced headaches and reduced eye fatigue from wearing them on during the daytime using computers. And so what we found is that a lot of graphic designers and a lot of people who are stuck on their computer all day really found tremendous benefit from wearing our glasses in the daytime. And that all just came from listening to our customers. I was in the beginning of this business, late 2015 and early 2016, it was all just, hey, wear these glasses, they'll help you sleep better. But now, yes, it is that. But secondary. Just by asking our customers and listening to our customers, what are the benefits to them, they've now told us reduced eye strain, reduced migraines, no more headaches, more clarity, more focus.

Now you can also take those benefits even further. If you have more clarity, more focus, less headaches, what does that equal? Happiness. It means that you're happier. And what happens when you're happier? Well, when you're happier, you tend to work better. When you work better, you tend to get promoted more and make more money. And when you make more money, you tend to be happier. When you're happier, you make more money, and so forth and so forth. These are the benefits. These are benefits, benefits, benefits. So yes, there are sections on my site where I'm talking about the glasses and the spring hinges and the acetate and the all natural materials and the polycarbonate lens. And of course we have that, but that's not why people are buying. People are buying because they're asking, well, what's in it for me? And a lot of times it's the pain that someone has that they want to solve. And in our case, their pain is that they can't sleep very well. They toss and turn in the knife, they get headaches and they get migraines. So now all of my benefits and all of my marketing is all around no more headaches, reduced eye strain, sleep better, wake up feeling refreshed. Benefits, benefits, benefits. Third thing I would do is I would type out a big piece of paper and write on it and stick it in front of your computer so you see it every day. That says benefits, not features. That's all you got to do. Three words, benefits, not features. And then keep doing step one, step two, step three, step one is just do an audit of all of your sales copy, identify where you are selling features instead of benefits and then change it around to benefits. And then number two, ask your customers, why do you do business with us? Why? What's the benefit that you are getting from using our product? Because that is where the gold could potentially be lying. Because customers will tell you and sometimes it might turn out that the benefits that someone is getting from your product you weren't even aware of. So now you can go back and you can start changing your sales copy and start peppering benefits all throughout your copy, all throughout your marketing, and the sales of your product or products will increase. So remember, convenience is a benefit. Time saving is a benefit. Better sleep is a benefit. Attracting the opposite sex is a benefit. Immediacy a benefit, getting quicker answers, reliability, all of these things are benefits. If you can save someone time, wow, that's a huge thing. Everyone's busy, right? If you can do something quicker or faster, if you can make someone happier, if you can make someone attract the opposite sex, if you can improve people's relationships, these are all benefits. So stop banging on about, oh, my product's this and you get this and you get 15 calls and you'll get and fancy app and all you got to do is do this and that and no. Yes, that's part of it. But when you're marketing it, what's in it for the customer? What is the benefit and the benefits that that customer is going to get from your product. So there you go. I hope this was helpful. Go ahead and do those action steps. Do an audit of your sales copy. Ask your customers why they do business with you and type out a big benefits, not features on your wall and go out there and sell the benefits. You will make more sales. I am James Swanick. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can find me on Instagram at amesswanik. It's spelled Swanwick S W A N W I C K. You can check out all the benefits that I've got on my sales copy on my swanwicksleep.com website. You can see all the benefits that I'm using to promote the Swanee's. I'm also on Snapchat and you can find me at jamesswanik. Com. Get out there and sell those benefits.