I examined myself and many people worldwide, and I concluded that people do not care about your product’s features; they care about what your product can do for them.
What do I mean?
Try this exercise with me:
Assume you are interested in buying a phone. You have the money and are ready to purchase the phone; all you have to do now is choose the phone you want. So, you walk into a store, and the sales rep of two different phone brands walk up to you.
The first one, let’s call the brand – Lime. Lime’s sales rep walks up to you and says, “Hello, I see you are interested in purchasing a phone. Our phone contains a SOC (system on chip) with the GPU integrated. Our L13 Bionic processor powers our phone. It has a two-way radio chip, an NFC module, a 1810mAH battery, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and 5G wireless amplifiers. It has a Super Retina XDR display. The phone has a 6.1‑inch (diagonal) all‑screen OLED display, 2532‑by‑1170-pixel resolution at 460 PPI. And the case is an alloy of only the finest metals. It costs $900.”
The second rep, let’s call this brand – Wiz, walks up to you and says: “Hello, how are you today? What are the three most important things you want to use your phone for?” Your reply implies that you are a staff of a creative firm and you want a phone that can help you take great pictures, respond to your e-mails and browse. So the salesperson goes on to say, “That’s great! This Wiz phone takes pictures at high resolution 1920×1080 pixels. It’s as good as a professional Canon camera, and it has in-editing apps to ensure you don’t have to pay extra for editing software.
I’m sure you’re concerned that if it takes pictures in high-res, it might consume space. On the contrary, we added a compressor to compress files without losing the quality, and you have as much as 500GB of storage space. You can also store it in our cloud service for a subscription fee of 200 naira per month or 2000 naira per year. It is lightweight because we made it with light-weight materials. Your phone shouldn’t be too heavy. It is water-resistant and can be underwater for up to 15 minutes. You’ll have access to the Microsoft suite of applications, check your mail, and even social platforms you want. We just invented our processor to ensure that your phone is fast and you’ll design and play games without your phone hanging. Would you like to try it? It costs $950
You have $1000. What phone are you buying and why?
I’ll purchase the $950 phone because I understand how it fits into my life and can help me.
Let’s take a pen as an example. A pen has ink, cover, slender tip, and more, but no one cares about the pen’s diameter or the ink’s chemical composition.
We care about the fact that the ink helps us pen down our thoughts in visible ways. It helps us remember. We care that the cover protects the ink from staining our clothes & makes it convenient to carry the pen around. We care about the slender tip that makes our handwriting look like fine prints. We care about it being easy to carry.
My point is, once you can convert your features to benefits for your customers, you get their attention.
Most people don’t know their phone’s motherboard composition, but they know what their phone can do for them.
What can your product or service do for your customers?
That’s the real question.
Use this Value workbook to figure it out.
Have any questions or challenges you are facing? Please write me an email telling me your story, stating your challenges and asking me your question – [email protected] I’ll answer the top 3 every last Monday of the month.
