The four Measurable Phases (MPs) and associated Measurable Phase Changes (MPCs) are:
MP 1: Spark Interest and MPC 1: Interest Confirmed
MP 2: Measure Potential and MPC 2: Potential Confirmed
MP 3: Cement Solution and MPC 3: Solution Confirmed
MP 4: Implement Agreement and MPC 4: Agreement Confirmed
Every sales opportunity has two columns that customers use to weigh their purchasing decisions. In Column 1, customers always assign the dollar value of price, delivery, relationship, and cost of change. In Column 2, which always starts out empty, only the sales-person can help customers assign dollar value to the measurable benefits of achieving their goals.
Productivity jumps when you concentrate more on Column 2 sales situations than on Column 1, which can waste selling investments of time, effort, resources, and profits.
Every sale involves an owner or beneficiaries with goals other than lowest price or fastest delivery.
The customer’s measurable goals must be clear before salespeople present solutions.
Chapter 2: Defining Value
Overview
If you do not define the Column 2 value your products or services generate, the easiest yardsticks for customers to use are Column 1’s lowest prices or quickest deliveries. This chapter encourages you to think like your marketing managers and competitors by explaining:
How features produce either benefits or liabilities
How benefits create value for customers and for their customers
How perceived and measurable value works for or against you
How unique strengths build bridges to higher profits and barriers to competition
How packaging and options help or hinder your selling efforts
How Product Profile sheets highlight the strengths of your products for quick referencing
Features
You probably learned from basic sales courses that features, the attributes or key traits of products, produce benefits. However, saying what a feature does is not the same as defining it. This oversight probably explains why most salespeople view features and benefits as being interchangeable. They are not—and understanding how they differ helps you to better define value for customers.
In selling, the words you choose to communicate the value you provide are critical to your success. Because of the key role played by features and benefits, you must pay particular attention to the words you assign to them. Grammatically speaking, there is another way to distinguish features from benefits. Features are described with an adjective followed by a noun, such as stainless steel or bullet-proof vests.
The table in Exhibit 2-1 highlights two features of a high-tech cellular phone and a low-tech bottle of barbecue sauce. Try to limit features to two or three words for clarity and brevity, so they do not become narratives that confuse customers.
Cellular Phone Features (Adjective-Noun)
Attribute/Image
Digital Signal
State-of-the-Art
Hands-Free Operation
Safety Conscious
Barbecue Sauce Features (Adjective-Noun)
Attribute/Image
Hickory Flavor
Outdoorsy
Fat-Free Ingredients
Low-Fat
Exhibit 2-1: Column 1 vs. Column 2 values.
Basic selling courses also forget to point out that features can produce liabilities when they do not achieve customers’ goals. This omission turned legions of salespeople into features creatures. You earn this designation when you think the sales pitch with the most features wins. To make matters worse, the more features you mention that do not achieve customers’ goals, the more you dilute features and benefits that do.
In addition, these diluting features make customers become more conscious of price. No one likes paying for unnecessary features. A customer’s price sensitivity becomes further aggravated when you explain how two dozen unwanted features are “free” because they come standard on your product. When customers feel they paid something for nothing, your prospects for repeat business become bleaker.
Example
You are shopping for a CD player for your car that can hold and play ten compact discs (your goal). You go into an audio equipment store and tell the salesperson you are interested in a ten-play CD player. The salesperson is a world-class feature creature on automatic pilot. He rambles on about how a particular ten-play unit offers random play, sequence order, and mix-and-match features.
Finally, about ten unwanted features later, he tells you the price is $500. You tell him: “Thanks anyway, but it’s not exactly what I want. Five hundred dollars is a lot of money for a car unit.” Especially one with a million gizmos you will never use. Off you go to the next store in your quest for the “perfect ten” unit.
Again, you state your interest in a ten-play CD unit (goal). This time the salesperson is not a feature creature. She explains only how the features of a particular model are designed specifically for ten-play. She focuses on how its interchangeable cartridges (feature) will also fit your home model, how easy they are to change, how they reduce handling wear and tear. She also highlights why a ten-CD cartridge (feature) has a higher resale value than units with five CD cartridges. The salesperson then tells you it costs $600. You say, “It’s exactly what I want, I’ll take it.”
You go home and start thumbing through the operating manual. You find yourself saying, “Wow, it has this gizmo too,” as you read about its peripheral features. The difference is that after the sale, secondary features build value; before the sale, they dilute value.
Note Regardless of whether you sell a tangible product or an intangible service, both have features. Therefore, for the sake of brevity, the terms products and services will be used interchangeably throughout the book. For example, you could just as easily read the Product Profile sheet as a service profile sheet.
Describe Features Clearly
When you highlight features to customers, specific descriptions are better than general ones. The more specifically that you can describe features, the harder it is for competitors to claim they offer the same ones. Describe your features in a manner that clearly differentiates them from those of competitors. One of the most common challenges salespeople face is describing technical differences to nontechnical buyers. (Chapter 7 explains this concept in detail.)
Example
A stereo salesperson states that a certain model provides “great sound.” The me-too competitors claim that they also provide great sound. General features make it difficult for customers to make objective comparisons between competitors making the same claims.
A better description for great sound would be “undistorted sound up to 200 decibels.” However, you must ensure that the customer knows what a decibel is and in what range he or she listens to and appreciates (that is, places value on) undistorted sound. These technical details make it harder for competitors to mimic or customers to discount without a solid basis.
Benefits
Benefits are the value customers derive from features that achieve their goal(s). A benefit’s value results from saving customers’ time and money (ultimately, time translates into money too). Benefits are described with a verb or adverb followed by a noun or noun phrase such as increases efficiency or reduces downtime. Like features, limit benefits to five words or less to ensure clarity and to make them sound powerful and vivid.
Benefits produce two types of value: perceived value and measurable value. The former is fleeting; the latter is permanent.
Perceived Value
Customers use subjective evaluations like emotions, prejudices, preferences, and experiences to assign value to benefits. Benefits with perceived value are hard to prove or disprove.
Example
Does the Rocky Mountain flavor of Coors Light taste better than the Missouri Valley flavor of Budweiser? It depends on your individual preference. Therefore, taste is perceived value.
Note Although subjective, benefits with perceived value can have perceived dollar amounts attached to them. For example, the “better” taste of one beer might be worth a dollar more of perceived value per six-pack than another beer.
Measurable Value
Customers use objective data to assign value to benefits. When benefits have measurable value, they require more efforts to calculate their worth. Yet, once calculated, the benefits of measurable value are easy to prove—and to sell.
Example
Does a bottle of Coors Light have fewer calories than a bottle of Budweiser? Absolutely. You can look up the calories on the labels and calculate that Coors Light has forty fewer calories.
The tables in Exhibit 2-2 and Exhibit 2-3 illustrate how benefits and value type apply to the cellular phone and the bottle of hickory-flavored barbecue sauce.
Cellular Phone Features (Adjective-Noun)
Benefits (Verb-Noun)
Value Type (Measurable or Perceived)
Digital Signal
Improves reception
Perceived value
Increases battery life
Measurable value
Extends talk time between recharges
Measurable value
Hands-Free Operation
Increases safety
Perceived value
Exhibit 2-2: Features, benefits, and value type.
Sauce Features (Adjective-Noun)
Benefits (Verb-Noun)
Value Type (Measurable or Perceived)
Hickory Flavor
Improves taste
Perceived value
Eliminates costs of wood chips
Measurable value
Eliminates time and expense of grilling
Measurable value
Fat-Free Ingredients
Reduces grams of fat intake
Measurable value
Exhibit 2-3: Features, benefits, and value type.
Note When you use measurable value, make sure you can explain (if asked) how the feature technically achieves the benefit. For example, the digital signal extends talk time between recharges because it consumes less power to process voice transmission than does an analog signal.