When talking to potential customers, marketers often fall into the trap of listing all of the special features that their product or service offers, hoping to persuade them with cool traits and tricks.
While features are somewhat appealing to your leads (of course they'll want to know how your product or service works), they’re far more interested in what using that product or service will actually do for them.
What’s the value of your product? How is your service going to provide a positive experience for them? What goals can they achieve using that product or service?
A great benefit statement will help you answer those questions and entice your leads. What is a benefit statement? How does it help you inspire your prospects to become customers? How can you create an awesome statement of benefits to help your company improve conversion rates?
Basically, it’s a statement that clearly communicates the benefits of a particular product or service to a prospect. Your customers will be able to grasp the true value of your business and purchase based on that statement.
via GIPHYIt’s important to understand that there is a distinct difference between benefits and features.
A benefit highlights how the customer’s experience or situation improves as a result of your product or service. A feature highlights the product’s uniqueness and attributes.
Don’t be mistaken: There’s nothing wrong with sharing the features of your product or service. But keeping your marketing and sales processes centered around the customer and their needs will definitely do a better job of converting them than simply bragging "My product can do 'X' thing," where "X" is some random neat feature of the product.
Put yourself in the customer's shoes. When you’re considering which new smartphone to buy, it’s cool to hear about all the new camera lenses, speakers, and screen sizes.
But you’re only closer to making a decision once you hear about how the new camera will give you better-quality pictures to capture memories. Or how the larger screen size means better picture quality and visibility.
This goes double for B2B companies. When you're trying to market products and services to these prospects, they have their own goals that they need to meet. They don't care about the features of a product or service nearly as much as whether that product or service will help them fulfill their business goals.
For example, say that Bill is a C-suite decision-maker in XYZ Gaming Corp. His current business strategy requires him to reduce operating costs for his development team by 5% and increase productivity by 10%. How likely is it that Bill will care about a new computer having twice the operations per second of his current computers? Not likely at all.
He might think that feature is neat but without an explanation of how doubling operations per second helps everyone in the organization save time on processor-heavy tasks, he won't care as much. His dev team leads will probably have a firm grasp of how processing speed and power will affect their daily operations, but they aren't the ones with final decision authority. To make this feature matter to Bill, you need to communicate how it will help him achieve his goals.
Benefit statements can even be useful for making effective CTAs that encourage visitors to click on them. The challenge is getting the message across with very limited copy. For example, check out this simple statement:
Here, the copy indicates what the benefit is (increased sales and marketing results) and what you can do to get those results (reaching out to Bluleadz).
Long story short, benefit statements are important because they give customers context to their purchases upfront. This, in turn, leads to more sales as it helps link your product to future success in the minds of prospective customers. Benefit statements give marketers and salespeople leverage when customers might be feeling hesitant or skeptical.
Here are just a few advantages to a well-written statement of benefits.
All the gizmos and gadgets in the world aren't going to matter to a customer if they don't meet some kind of need for them. Oftentimes, making the connection between a feature and a need isn't obvious to them.
By having a benefit statement prepared for them, you'll be able to easily answer their question, "How is this going to help me?"
When you ask the prospect what problems they're facing and then tell them how your product or service can assist them, you're giving them a reason to believe in your business.
They'll also feel heard, which goes a long way in establishing brand trust.
Certain products, programs, and services actually cover a much wider range of pain points than advertised. This makes sense since you can't really fit every possible use case for every potential user into a single ad of reasonable length.
For a B2C example, when Sony's Playstation 4 was released, sure most customers were interested in the game library and new graphics. But the console also acts as a Blu-ray player, sound system, and streaming host for streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.
That hidden value broadened the audience to more than just avid gamers once people learned that they'd have an all-in-one entertainment center in addition to a gaming platform. Being able to replace multiple devices with a single one that only takes a single
Emotions help marketing and sales. We know this. Building relationships with prospects and customers often leads to a better quality sale both for the buyer and the company.
Customers are always more satisfied when they have a complete understanding of the value they're going to get out of a purchase.
via GIPHYBy leading both the marketing and the sales conversation with a benefit statement, you'll be able to establish trust and familiarity with your customers. That sort of relationship can lead to repeat customers and upsells.
It's actually incredibly easy to create a benefit statement if you truly understand your business, your product/service, and your audience. More importantly, it's even easier if you believe in what you're selling.
Here are five easy steps to help structure your benefit statement:
If you're having the right conversation with your customers, this should be the easiest step. Figure out what their need is by asking open-ended questions. You'll need to connect the problem to the benefit in order to showcase your product or service's value.
For marketing teams, you might instead want to base marketing materials on different problems that the sales team has identified during sales calls or that you've identified through surveys of your customer base.
Which aspect of the product or service is going to alleviate the customer's problem? Be sure to offer a specific feature of your product that's related to their need. A general "this fixes everything" isn't going to convince them.
This is what the customer wants to hear. Let them know exactly how that specific feature is going to improve their life. Whether it be big or small, if your business is providing true value, your product or service is going to help them in some way.
Of course, the customer will only benefit if they work for it. Explain to them what action (or actions) they'll have to take in order to see results. It can be as easy as uncapping toothpaste or as complex as building an Ikea bookcase, but they still need to know.
Paint a picture of their life after their stress is alleviated by your product or service. What does that end result look like for them? How excited should they be for it? If your benefit statement is great, then they should be very excited about it.
There are a few best practices for writing a great benefit statement. It's a pretty simple process, but it never hurts to look for additional ways to optimize your efforts.
If you're having a tough time matching features and benefits, an easier way of brainstorming is to think of them in a cause-and-effect scenario.
For example: "Our mouthwash kills 99.9 percent of germs in the mouth." This is a fairly common claim made by mouthwash brands... which means: "You'll have better breath throughout the day."
In the example above, I included an effectiveness percentage. Customers appreciate measurable benefits like percentages, survey numbers, and statistics that support the value of your product or service.
Adding quantifiable facts validates your business and keeps your benefit claim from feeling too general or vague. When making these claims, it's important to verify that they're accurate as well—the FTC can be kind of strict about making companies verify that they can back up their claims!
Along the same lines, you'll want to be as straightforward as possible in your benefit statement. Get to the point and address the customer's needs before you go into great detail about other features. If they ask for more, that's when you can dive deeper.
Chances are you have some competition within your market. Another business, or maybe several, are selling the same products or services as you. Mention benefits that are going to set you apart from the others. This is also known as your unique selling proposition or, in the case of writing a benefits statement, your unique value proposition.
When talking about the happy ending, make sure you're not setting unrealistic expectations for the customer. You'll be setting them up for disappointment if you're trying to sell your goods as being more than they actually are.
Let their true value speak for themselves. If it's a good product or service, then it'll do well simply by being high quality.
If you have to go on for a long while trying to sell the benefits of your business, then you probably don't fully understand them yourself, which can be unconvincing to the customer.
via GIPHYKeep your statement concise and to the point, hitting all of the key benefits of each relevant feature efficiently.
Artificial Intelligence tools have come a long way in recent years. While they certainly won't replace a good sales rep in the sales process, they can be useful for helping you get a good start on a statement of benefits.
For example, you could feed a prompt like "sell a [Insert product/service name here]" into an AI generative text tool and see what it gives you. Naturally, you probably can't use the raw text a tool like this generates. These AI "train" on publicly-available text from across the internet—and that includes a lot of bad information.. Also, odds are that the AI won't be able to express your company's unique value proposition.
What an AI text generator can do is give you a decent starting point—a bit of text for you to polish up and leverage for your benefit statement. Also, since it trains on text from across the web, it can potentially give you a general idea of what's being said by most so you can make your statement more unique.
It's one thing to write an initial draft of your benefit statement, but how do you know it's as awesome as it should be? You could experiment with real customers... but it's probably a better idea to roleplay a sales call with another member of the sales team first.
Your peers—especially those who consistently generate great results and have a wealth of sales experience—can provide invaluable feedback for your benefit statement. They can help you revise your terminology, cut out excess language, and even refine how you deliver your statement.
Additionally, if you come up with an awesome statement of benefits that will help improve sales, your team can benefit from using it in their own calls—helping bring up numbers for your whole department. Sharing yours by participating in these roleplay sessions can help your entire team.
There are so many ways you can write a benefit statement. You could write several on one product alone, highlighting all the different ways it can provide value to a customer.
Alternatively, you could create a benefit statement that encompasses a range of features of your product when they're used synergistically — HubSpot does a great job of this, since the more tools you use on their platform, the better your sales and marketing data analytics will be.
Need some inspiration to help you get started? Here's a list of benefit sample examples for you.
A business owner is having a difficult time marketing their business. You're an agency offering marketing consultations.
Benefit statement: Creating a clear marketing plan with us will help you organize the information you need to take intentional and confident action in marketing your business and attract at least five new clients over the next quarter.
A homeowner is debating whether or not to purchase hurricane insurance for the upcoming storm season. You're an insurance broker looking to help them find coverage.
Benefit statement: Hurricane insurance helps you bounce back in the unfortunate event that your home is damaged during a hurricane. Our homeowner's insurance policies cover hurricane damage equal to [value of the prospect's home or the insurance cap for your insurance company's policies] to safeguard your home.
An influencer is purchasing a new smartphone because she wants a higher camera quality. You just got a shipment of the latest smartphone models.
Benefit statement: This new smartphone's camera mode features will guarantee that you're ready for any spur-of-the-moment photoshoots or video recording opportunities no matter where you are.
A mountain climber is stocking up on gear that will help him on his three-week expedition. Your company sells compact, sustainable camping stoves.
Benefit statement: Carrying our lightweight, collapsible burner stove means you'll have hot meals with the push of a button. Save up to 50% pack space and weight compared to a standard camping stove to spare your back on a long trek through the wilderness.
A small company is looking for help rebranding and rebuilding their website. Your digital marketing agency has a full staff of developers and copywriters with over 25 years of experience.
Benefit statement: Our team of developers, designers, and copywriters have over 25 years of experience developing websites that generate leads, increase brand awareness, and promote business for clients.
Here's one for a more traditional retail setting: A parent is looking for a present for their child's thirteenth birthday, but they don't know what to get, they're too pressed for time to do serious shopping, or the item their child really wanted is out of stock. You're a customer sales rep at a major retail chain trying to up your sales numbers.
Benefit statement: Don't know what to get for your kid right now? Get them a gift card so they can pick and choose what they want! You can either have them use it here or on our online store and have your special birthday gift delivered to your door.
Your benefit statement is essentially your product or service's claim to fame. Bragging about features can only get you so far into a conversation before the other person asks, "So what?"
You'll always be ready to answer that question with confidence if you understand the value of your business and have benefit statements ready to back that value up.