A sales-focused podcast (hosts Harrison and Nick Clare) advising sellers to move from describing product features to describing the outcomes those features enable for specific customers. They introduce a simple feature→benefit→outcome table, illustrate with a Synthego example (a 200-point transfection optimization), and recommend tailoring messaging by customer persona to improve prospecting, discovery, follow-up, closing, and marketing.
Chapters
All right, Nick, what are we talking about today?
Hey. So, well, it's Friday, so we've got two options. We can talk about beer, which I'd quite like, or we can talk about some cool things I noticed in a training session recently.
Yeah, well, I would love to chat about beer, but let's talk about what will help other people.
Cool. So, as you know, Harrison, but for everyone listening, we was out in the US recently doing some training for a fairly large company and a pretty big team, mix of experience reps, mix of junior reps. But there was one thing that all of them seem to. All of them seem to think, huh, I've never thought about this before in this way. And that really helps was the general gist of it. So I think maybe we should dive into that a bit, which was when we spoke about feature, benefits, outcome. So lots of us are used to what's the feature, what's the benefits? And we run with that. However, that puts a lot of onus on the scientist and to think about the outcome of that benefit and what the impact of that is and how that really helps them move forward. And we're all busy people, so the more as sales reps, we can take them further down that thought process and help guide them and not put the onus on them, the better I think we are in our sales process.
So. Well, I mean, I think, like to add to that, right. The customers or prospects or whoever, right? People, they just care about what they're going to get from using a product or service, right? In reality, most of them probably don't really care about the product or service itself. It's like the outcome that they're going to get from working with you, right. That's all they really care about.
Right. And I, I hate using car analogies, but everyone does it. But when you go to buy a new car, right, there's a ton of features and each of them have a unique benefit. But maybe 50 of those things on that car you'll never use and never care about. So if that sales rep sat there and spoke for every feature and benefit you, you probably wouldn't close that. But if you can find out the thing that matters to you on that car, like for me might be safety in the back seats for the kids, right? There's some particular feature when my kids aren't in the car, it's probably how fast I can drive past with my tinted shades on. Right? You know, it's different things. So you need to focus in on what the outcome is for that person 100%.
And I think you're just going through the exercise of, you know, you basically make a little table, right? And if you guys want this, let us know. We could send a, you know, just reach out to us on LinkedIn or something and we'll give you an example of what it looks like. But you essentially have your first column is the feature, second column is the benefit, third column is the outcome. And so you just list your different capabilities, you know, on the left hand side and then like, you know, in that first column and then look at, okay, based on, of this specific capability that we have, what is the benefit to the customer? But then ultimately what's the outcome that that benefit drives? So like an example I like to give is when we were at Synthego, one of the things that really stood out to people or really differentiated us in some ways was that we had this 200 point transfection optimization that we would run. So any new like cell line that we would take or any sort of new project that we would have, we would run this 200 point transfection optimization. The idea is then based off of that, that you'd be able to get higher editing efficiency across a wide range of cell types, right? That's a pretty nice benefit. However, a customer doesn't really care about that, right? Like what they care about is the outcome is that now they can conduct research in more biologically relevant cell types because they can now edit cells that they previously weren't able to edit before. Right? So it's like the capability or the feature is this 200 point transfection optimization, which is fine on itself. The benefit is that now you get high editing efficiency in a bunch of cell types. But, but the only thing that the customer really cares about is now they have access to these other more biologically relevant cell lines that they weren't able to get or use before, right? And so that's kind of like how you want to think about this like feature, benefit, outcome.
And I would recommend that you do it where possible per customer, and you actually have this not only as an exercise, you can have it as a thought process, right? When you're talking to the customers, you should be asking questions to work out what they care about so you can position your benefit in their outcome. But if you can't go to that level, because that takes some practice and mental gymnastics, I would say at least think about customer Personas. So think of your feature, your benefit, list those out and then you can think about the customer Persona. So the customer Persona could be as simple as academic versus biotech versus pharma for that product. It could be more nuanced than that and you start to go into therapeutic uses. But the more granular you can get on the outcome, the more powerful it is.
Yeah, I tend to, tend to agree with that because like the outcomes are going to be different for different types of people for what they care about out.
Cool.
Yeah. And I think the advantage of doing this is it's going to help your messaging, like your prospecting become more resonant. Right. Like if you're talking about outcomes that people can drive. Like if you're sending an email today and just like listing out your features or capabilities or the things that you can do, like it's not really going to get somebody like that interested because it's like, okay, cool, like you could do all this stuff, but what is, what's in it for me? Right? Like why should I care? So if you keep asking those levels of why, why it matters, you're ultimately going to get to these outcomes that you're driving and that's what you want to be putting in your messaging and that's what you want to be talking about in your messaging, but it not only is for your prospecting. Right. It's also like discovery calls. To your point, when you're having that first conversation, you're understanding what are the outcomes you're trying to drive for that customer, what do they care about? And that's how you're talking about your product or service in relation to those outcomes.
Sorry, Even to the point of closing deals. Right. Because if you actually understood that and you're talking through getting something done by timeline or getting something done or someone's gone quiet on you, you can reference the outcome and see if people are still interested in that. Is it still important to you? You're looking at their side of the use of this and that's really powerful.
Yeah, example. Yeah, perfect example. Right. It's like when we talk to companies around like lead gen, there's typically a reason they want to do lead generation. Right. They want more opportunities, maybe their pipeline's low, they need to get their name out to more people, whatever it is. And, and so when we help with that, like obviously we help with that, but like when we go to like follow up after initial conversations, it's easy to be like, hey, you know, are you still looking to drive top of funnel? Are you looking to still drive more pipeline? It's a much more impactful follow up than it is to say, like you know, hey, did you have a chance to look at our proposal? Right. Like, what do you think? And so you can have more impactful follow up as well. Right. So yeah, or even shows up in your marketing. So how are you putting together marketing content? Most people listening to this are, I think, sales reps. But from a marketing perspective, being able to talk about outcomes in your messaging more than your feature is like how many marketing emails look the exact same, hey, we're launching this new product, here's what it does. But they don't really talk about how that's going to drive somebody's research forward. And if they do, they're probably using the term accelerate your research.
Yeah, I think a lot of reps try to do this, but they, and they try to do it by asking for application notes from the product team. Because that's the same thing. Right. The outcome of the patient is how the application runs and delivers data potentially. So you're asking for application notes from the product team, but you don't have to be that specific. You can do this by just conversationally.
Yeah, just do it yourself. Like make your own little Excel sheet. Maybe in like a team meeting or something. Just like write it out. Like this doesn't have to be complicated. It's just, it's just going to be a good thought experiment for then how you position all of your messaging going forward and how do you talk about your product service in relation to things.
So yeah, I think this is quite a nice quick one for you all. It's pretty actionable, pretty quick to do and should give some good results for you. So I recommend trying it.
Yeah. And if you want, we're planning to do a bunch more of these too. So if you want to give, you know, have questions or you want to give us like ideas or topics that you want to hear more about, there's a link actually in the show notes below where it'll say like, ask us anything. Just click that link, fill out the form with like what question you want and then you know, we'll pick it up and then go through it in another episode.
And if you want a template or the example of how to do this, just send a message and can I have a beer now?
