Buyers no longer care about your features—they care about the future outcomes you can help them create.
A long time ago, you might have had to list the benefits and features of your solution. Your clients would have given you the time to rattle off your long list and describe how each feature worked. I don’t remember the exact year that I noticed that my clients ran out of time to listen to this information. Decision makers, and their stakeholders are giving you less of their time, so you must use your shorter meetings wisely. This means shifting from focusing features and benefits, to discussing strategic outcomes.
From Selling Solutions to Delivering Strategic Outcomes
Let’s agree that the 1990s was when clients ran out of time for the legacy sales approach. It was also the Era of the Solution—when everyone in a sales organization talked endlessly about their solution, believing it was their single source of value. For certain, every sales rep was taught that their solution was better than their many competitors’ offerings. Those same competitors believed that their solution was the best. Meanwhile, none of them had never seen their competition’s solution.
Obviously, they couldn’t all be right. In most industries, solutions are relatively interchangeable. Your client could get good results from your offering and your competitors’, regardless of the features you painstakingly describe in your initial meeting. After years of this, buyers’ eyes began to glaze over when salespeople pulled up the “Why Us?” slide in their presentations.
Why Buyers No Longer Believe Your Solution Is Unique
Eventually, the Era of the Solution ran out of steam because buyers found that everyone’s solutions seemed to work well enough. Sure, sometimes a few were better, and others were not quite up to snuff, but overall one solution in the market did just as well as another.
This is a sign that certain industries, products, and markets are commoditized, meaning the offerings are interchangeable. Listening to a spiel about all the bells and whistles—which were quite a bit like the competitors’ bells and whistles—didn’t give clients anything useful to base their decision on. They could just as easily have visited the sales organizations’ websites, read up on each one’s features and benefits, and picked one out of a hat.
Commoditization makes it difficult for salespeople to differentiate their products. If they’re all about the same, what can a salesperson say to convince a prospective client to buy from them instead of their competitors?
To get your prospective clients’ attention, your sales conversation must change.
The Shift from Features to Business Outcomes in Sales
As a young sales rep, I asked my clients to tell me why they were buying my service and how it helped their business. Over time, I recognized that they had very little interest in the actual solutions, but they lit up when the conversation was about the better results they wanted or needed.
Talking about a solution’s benefits is boring, but talking about strategic outcomes really grabs your clients. It gives them a chance to talk about what is most important to them. Their desired strategic outcome is the whole reason why they are buying.
You’ll also probably find it to be a more interesting conversation because you can learn more about your prospective client’s goals and processes. You can also uncover the root causes of their problems. Understanding your industry and clients at this level will set you apart. It’s the first step to becoming an advisor rather than a salesperson.
Stop Selling Features—Start Selling Outcomes
Nobody buys what you or I sell. Instead, they buy the strategic outcomes that what you sell can bring. Clients buy things that are important enough that they will pay you to deliver results.
You would do well to say less about your solutions and spend your client time explaining how you will ensure that you deliver what the client wants—namely, the strategic outcomes. This puts you on another level. In order to be an authority and advisor, you must be able to talk to contacts about more than your solution.
An effective salesperson can provide insights related to industry trends, including opportunities your client can capture and threats they can eliminate. By discussing the context of the business environment, you can elevate your sales conversation so it becomes more than selling. Instead, you can lead your contacts through a conversation about the things that matter most to them. This is far more valuable to clients than a pitch about your product’s features.
Sales Messaging That Positions You as a Strategic Partner
Words have meaning. Talking about features and benefits makes you look like a peddler. You come across as someone who doesn’t understand what is important to your clients. Your contacts don’t care about your solution. They care about making a change that will get them the strategic results they need. They care about staying in business, hitting their targets, and not falling behind. If your solution can do that, great.
Top salespeople know they must focus on what is most important to their clients, so they frame their conversation about strategic objectives. This approach helps you differentiate yourself from average salespeople, who will go on and on about features while ignoring the big picture. Average salespeople talk about what they’ve been trained to get excited about. Top performers talk about what their clients value most. And they do the work to understand some of it better than their clients.
This is how you become a strategic partner—someone your client relies on for advice and guidance over the long term.
