How to Wield the 4 Customer Benefits for Pure Persuasion
Chances are you make daily decisions that benefit you: taking the short route to work, eating a healthy lunch over junk food, buying a high-quality shirt instead of fast fashion. So why should a customer choose you over their other options?
Of course we all want our customers to know our product’s cool, unique features. But overwhelming them with fancy feature information won’t get you far.
To excite your audience and keep them interested, try taking a benefits-focused approach. When you talk to people with their needs at the forefront, they’re more likely to be willing to hear what you have to say. We’ll help you figure out which benefits matter and how to sell them.
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as your own
Henry Ford
Features vs. benefits
To understand what customer benefits really are, you need to step into the shoes of the customer and see from their perspective. A good way to do this is by using the FAB method (features - advantages - benefits). It allows you to better identify your customer benefits to create effective sales messages.
When taking a customer benefits approach, try focusing on the customer’s needs and expectations. Show her how your product or service simplifies her life easier or solves her problems. Skip the long speech about your product’s new updates and features and keep the fancy tech lingo at home.
By speaking with your customers in terms of benefits, you’ll earn their trust and show that you have their best interests in mind.
The types of benefits you should be paying attention to
There are four different levels of benefits you can employ when talking with your customers.
- Core benefits
- Expected benefits
- Augmented benefits
- Potential benefits
The different benefit categories address distinct levels of specificity and personalization. The further down the list you go, the more you win over the customer. Here’s a breakdown of each category’s purpose.
1
Core Benefits
Core benefits are the obvious primary benefits your product offers. Most likely, customers will already know what these are because that’s the main reason they’re attracted to the product. And just like the name implies, these are the benefits upon which all others are built.
With Userlike , customers visit our website because they want a new solution for reaching their own customers. Live chat is a modern and innovative way of getting in touch with your website visitors right from your site.
2
Expected Benefits
These are the benefits your customer expects from the product they’re buying. Just like core benefits, they’re not really necessary to point out, unless your customer isn’t that familiar with your product.
For example, visitors who check out Userlike know that by adding live chat to their website, they’re adding another way to communicate with their website visitors. They want to decrease the need for customers to search for an email address or phone number and simply start a chat conversation right away.
Chat makes it easier to answer customers’ questions faster, which makes them happy and shows that the company cares.
3
Augmented Benefits
At this level, we begin to see the more personalized, specialized benefits of a product that aren’t so obvious anymore. These benefits ignite your customers’ interests because they’re unexpected and unique.
Here’s a tip for explaining these benefits to your customers: try tailoring your pitch to the audience or specific customer you’re talking to. That way, these customers can imagine just how your product can benefit them in exclusive ways that no other product could.
Take our CRM integration, for example. If you use other business tools like Helpscout or Slack, an unexpected benefit is that you can connect them with Userlike. This makes it easier than ever for your support team to keep track of open inquiries and get back to your customers in record speed.
4
Potential Benefits
Last but not least are potential benefits. These are highly personalized benefits and are most effective when they evoke feeling.
Because you can’t prove these benefits, they’re hardest to back up with concrete reasoning. But when explaining them to the customer, formulate your sentences in a way that will make your customers imagine already having the product, and how it has improved the way they live, work, etc.
Building solid customer relationships is crucial in the world of endless market options. When your customers trust you and feel comfortable doing business, they’re more likely to choose you over your competitors.
With Userlike, your customers can reconnect with operators they’ve already chatted with. That way, you can pick up right where the conversation left off.
Phrase benefits in a way everyone can understand
After you’ve considered what your audience may perceive as benefits, think carefully about how you’ll present them to your customers. The curse of knowledge may be a factor here, so try weeding out the technical language that might confuse your audience.
Let’s go back to the days when we all had iPods. I remember being in an Apple store trying to choose which one I wanted when an employee approached me. She tried to help by clarifying the difference between the models.
“This iPod has 7 gigabytes of storage,” she explained.
But when I seemed uninterested in her fancy (albeit basic) techy language, she quickly changed her tune to be more benefit-focused, “It can hold about 750 songs, that's about 50 hours of music.”
All of a sudden, the bland description of “7 GB” turned into a weekend dance party with a never-ending choice of music right there at my fingertips.
By phrasing benefits in a different way, you can transform a product’s basic features into something that excites customers and keeps them interested.
Gain perspective to be benefits-focused
Ideally, we’d like to know exactly who we’re talking to when we’re thinking in terms of benefits. What are their needs and expectations? What are they interested in?
However, it’s difficult to know exactly what people want or what’s troubling them, so you have to create your own conclusions and connections.
You can troubleshoot this issue with the What’s in it for me? technique. Try imagining that you’re the customer and you don’t know much about the product except for its basic details.
Then ask yourself, just as the customer would, “Why should I buy this? How is this going to make my life better or easier?”
Dale Carnegie even wrote in his famous book “ How to Win Friends and Influence People ,” “The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.”
Canon used the “What’s in it for me?” technique by rethinking a camera’s features from the customer’s point of view:
- Versatile 10x Zoom Range: Shoot up close and far away with a single lens.
- Five-stop Image Stabilizer: Take sharp photos even when moving.
- Weighs just 750g: Portable and lightweight for shooting on the go.
Learn to listen actively
Active listening is a great skill for anyone, but it’s especially important for those working in sales or customer service. It’s about paying close attention while someone is talking and concentrating on what they say, instead of configuring your next response.
You can easily adapt this skill while talking to customers (or anyone, for that matter). During your conversations, ask them about their pain points or issues they’d like to resolve.
Looking for better customer relationships?
Test Userlike for free and chat with your customers on your website, Facebook Messenger, and Telegram.
Read moreWhen you have an idea of their situation, try explaining different benefits to them depending on what they’ve told you throughout the conversation.
I’m not suggesting you make false promises here. It’s important that your customers trust you, and you will lose that by lying or exaggerating what your product can really do for them.
Customer-centric instead of customer manipulation
Deceit in sales is a real thing. When someone is solely focused on making that sale and getting a commission from it, that person is probably willing to lie to the customer or at least exaggerate the truth. But that isn’t our purpose when we say to focus on customer benefits. Actually, it’s the exact opposite.
Many of us are aware when someone is lying to us just to push a sale (“Drink this tea to lose weight!”). On the bright side, we can also spot sincerity and when someone is genuinely trying to help us.
By focusing on the benefits when you’re talking to your customers, you’re in a better position to gain their interest and excite them about what your product has to offer. And that’s what being customer-centric is all about.
Taking a customer benefits approach enables you to speak with honesty and integrity in a way that both you and your customers benefit from. A pretty good win-win situation if you ask me.
This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, Userlike earns from qualifying purchases. We donate all of these proceeds to our non-profit cause, the Atefa Girl's School .
