PPB May 2018

Your Features Features are factual descriptions of the attributes of your services. Few people want to buy features; they want to buy the benefit or result. But you still probably spend a lot of time talking about your features, such as: • Dedicated, personal service • Access to more than 900,000 products • Industry knowledge • Professional certification Your Benefits Benefits describe what your service does for the customer. This is how you increase happiness or reduce pain in their business life. Benefits form the core of your value proposition. To develop your list of benefits, imagine all the ways your services can make prospects’ lives better. For example, review the features above and describe how those can improve a prospect’s life. For instance: • Service. You always know who has your back and cares for you. • Access. You always have access to the best, newest and most recognized solutions. • Knowledge. You’ll receive best practices and proven case histories, and benefit from our focus on continuous improvement. Plus, our dedication to continuing education gives you peace of mind that our solutions combine creativity with business acumen to achieve results. The Experience The experience is how you make the customer feel. It is the emotional reason why people buy from you. Do you make them feel smart? Important? Safe? How would they describe how working with you makes them feel? The emotional reasons why people choose to work with you are important elements of your personal branding and market position. Let’s see how features, benefits and experience might be described for a typical small promotional products distributorship. Service: Small Distributor Feature: Personalized Customer Service Benefit: Personal attention from the owner Experience: Feel valued with an ongoing personal relationship focused on results. The Customer Become very clear about your ideal customer. Have you ever thought about what your best customers have in common? What do they value? What do they want? What do they need? What do they fear? Customer Wants Keep in mind that the things your customers want are driven by emotion. Some examples: They may want to look good to their boss and their peers. They may want to have access to the latest trends, fads and information. They may want to make a difference by giving back to the community, being socially responsible or environmentally aware. They may want to grow their business’s staff size, position or profit. Customers want value, personalized solutions, great communication, listening and understanding, collaboration and new perspectives. Customer Needs These are the things they need to get done. Keep inmind that no matter how good you are, no one will buy fromyou if they don’t believe they need what you offer. Customers need to achieve certain outcomes within a budget and specified timeframe. They need tomatch their brand standards in terms of style and color. They need to eliminate or mitigate risk. They need your solution to fit into their bigger picture. Customer Fears Make no mistake, the fear of making a mistake is very much a part of your customers’ decision- making process. You must be able to convince them that when they work with you, they won’t need to worry about mistakes or other concerns such as fear of missing out, fear of loss and fear of the problems caused by switching. These are all reasons prospects may hesitate to buy from you. You must be able to communicate a promise of improvements that overcome the perceived safety of the status quo. A proven way to develop a strong value proposition is to ask existing and potential clients about their wants, needs and fears. Remember, you need to not only be better than your competition, you need to have a better solution than other alternatives available to your prospect, such as choosing other advertisingmedia and not using promotional products at all. Become very clear about your ideal customer. Have you ever thought about what your best customers have in common? What do they value?What do theywant?What do they need? What do they fear? | MAY 2018 | 65 THINK