Do this exercise to sell more benefits.

It’s the week of Valentine’s Day. What better week than to think about why prospects become customers? Prospects buy what they perceive your products and services will do for them. They buy benefits that produce impactful or helpful results that promote well-being.

Like the many couples affirming their love for each other this week, people fall in love because of benefits! And so do your prospects and customers.

Try this exercise, and share it with your team:

1. Pick a feature of what you sell. A feature is a distinctive attribute or aspect of your product or service.
2. What is the advantage of that feature? Write this down. An advantage is the performance difference relative to others that don’t have that feature.
3. What could be a benefit of that feature? There may be many. A benefit is what the feature does to help or fulfill the customer’s need. Write these down. There are four primary types of benefits:

• Making or saving money
• Saving time
• Increasing comfort or pleasure or decreasing pain
• Promoting safety, health, or wellness
  

4. Develop questions for each benefit to determine whether your prospect or customer cares about that benefit. Consider a house with a swimming pool. Does the pool add value to the house? Maybe, but it depends on whether the person buying the house wants a pool. If they don’t, the pool may reduce that house’s value.

Now you have new questions you can ask to learn more about what is valuable to your prospects!

But wait, that’s not all! If you ask a great question, you must listen to the answer. Research shows that 24 hours after a conversation, the average listener retains 26% of what was said. Yikes! That does not bode well for either the prospect or the salesperson.