When Features Work

When selling to business or highly technical people, features alone can
sometimes do the trick. Pandering to emotions will only annoy them. Besides,
unlike consumers (who mostly “want” things rather than “need” them),
business and tech buyers often truly need a solution to a problem or a tool to
complete a task. When a feature is fairly well known and expected from your
audience, you don’t need to sell it.

However, with innovative features, you still need to move the prospect
down the four-step path. While the phrase “contains an artificial intelligence
algorithm” may be enough to get the Slashdot reader salivating, he’ll still want
to know how it works and what it does for him. The What’s in it for me? aspect
remains crucial.


For business buyers, you’re stressing “bottom line” benefits from innovative
features. If you can demonstrate that the prospect will be a hero because your
CRM product will save her company $120,000 a year compared to the current
customer relationship management choice, you’ve got a good shot.
While that may seem like a no-brainer purchase to you, you’ll still need to
strongly support the promised benefit with a detailed explanation of how
the features actually deliver. Remember, change scares the business buyer,
because it’s their job or small business on the line if the product disappoints.
Sell With Benefits, Support With Features
We’re not as logical as we’d like to think we are. Most of our decisions are
based on deep-rooted emotional motivations, which we then justify with
logical processes. So, first help the right brain create desire, then satisfy the left
brain with features and hard data so that the wallet actually emerges.
Persuading your reader with features and benefits is important -- but you
also need to know how to craft a truly compelling offer. Let’s look at some
guidelines for creating offers in our next section.
“Kids Eat Free” and Other Irresistible Offers
The sign says it all — “Kids Eat Free Every Monday and Tuesday.” It’s out in
front of a Mexican food restaurant on my way home.


That’s called an offer. It’s not the restaurant’s main offering (which is trading
Mexican food for money). As far as that goes, this is probably the third best
(out of four) Mexican food joints in my hometown.
But every Monday and Tuesday night, the place is packed. They’ve made an
appealing offer that caused people to take action.
“Offer” is a contractual term. It’s an invitation to enter into an economic
relationship, or any relationship really.
The relationship is based on mutual promises. I’ll do this for you if you give me
money or attention or sex or friendship…
If there’s no acceptance of the invitation, there’s no contract and
no relationship.
Uber-marketer Mark Joyner devotes an entire book to the subject of offers.
He demonstrates that hugely successful businesses are built upon an
Irresistible Offer.
Joyner’s work makes great companion reading to Seth Godin’s All Marketers
Are Liars, because both books say the same thing in different ways.
Formulating an irresistible offer means telling a story that people want to hear,
so they naturally respond.


You must then live the story and fulfill the offer.
It’s helpful to think about offers as coming in two varieties – primary and
promotional. I’ll highlight a couple of Joyner’s favorite irresistible offers to
demonstrate one of each type.