Chris Brogan – Sell Benefits Not Features
Twitter isn’t amazing. The ability to connect to many voices in a collaborative way is amazing. Facebook isn’t the future. Having mutual social environments that permit deeper understanding of each other’s interest is the future. It’s important that we learn how to talk in terms of benefits and not the features.
This was an old sales lesson that I learned from Jason Chudnofsky, the CEO at Pulvermedia. He had a course that he’d been teaching for many years on that exact point. It’s not the various features that convince someone to buy. They might influence your purchase, but you buy benefits. With this car, you’ll save on gas. With this car, you’ll draw lots of attention. With this software, you’ll stay closer to the pulse of the larger community.
Do you see the difference?
Far too often, I hear social media enthusiasts talking about the software from the perspective of its features, but we’ve already proven that features don’t trump benefits. Twitter has fewer features than Pownce and Jaiku, and yet, we’re all on Twitter.
Blogging isn’t cool because you can tag, because you can use RSS, because there are all kinds of hot templates. Blogging improves a company’s organic SEO, gives their leadership a voice in the conversation, brings potential wide-funnel sales activity into a business.
Filed under: Business, Home, You Gotta See | 1 Comment
Tags: Chris Brogan
Scott Purdie 
The book Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfurth explains this phenomenon very well. He talks about how there was an improvement to SMS in the early days of it’s use. Problem was, nobody really wanted anything more than a quick little message. Same things applies to twitter. Who cares about all the features, all we need is 160 characters. It’s genius becuase it’s open software can allow anyone who wants more out of it to create an application to do whatever you want.