Regardless of the your industry, your job as a B2B marketer is to convince your prospects to do something. It might be to buy your product, use your service, share your content, or sign up for your webinar.
The surest way to get your prospects to act is to offer them real benefits that impact their work in a positive way. When you offer benefits, you connect with your prospects at the deepest levels.
The question then is: Which benefits best convert prospects into clients? And besides, what’s the difference between features vs benefits?
Features: What You See
Features belong to the product. They are the same for every user. The horsepower of an auto engine is a feature. It doesn’t matter who owns the car, the horsepower remains the same.
In themselves, features will not convince your prospects to buy your product. If you only focus on features, you’re asking your prospects to consider how those features will impact their work.
Why not further help them by showing some benefits…
Benefits: What You Get
Benefits answer the questions: what does the product really do for ME. What do I get? How does it change the way I do my job? The simplest of benefits –the most obvious ones– are the ones you can get by thinking about the features generically. They exist there right on the surface and could apply to any person who would be interested in what you’re offering. They are easy to figure out, even for an non-user.
As an example, let’s say you’re trying to convince your prospect about the effectiveness of new testing equipment for fiber optics.
The first level of benefits is the day-to-day improvements that the product produces for the user.
For instance, ease-of-use:
- The setup can be completed within minutes without special instruction.
- The technician simply has to push the green button to get the measurement.
Then, you must be more concrete, more persuasive; the best way is to compare the actual work as it is currently done with how it could be done using the new testing equipment.
The second level of benefits is where you should add numbers that illustrate how the user’s work will be impacted.
For example, time savings:
- The complete characterization: completed in fewer than 3 minutes.
- The number of technicians needed to test dispersion: reduced by half.
- The number of locations visited: reduced by half.
Finally, the third level of benefits should be the one that resonates the most to every user and for each company—money savings:
- Operational expense savings: 50% to 75%.
- $10k yearly savings in maintenance and repairs.
With these three levels of benefits, you are much better equipped to convert prospects into clients than by simply trying to convince them with generic features only.