848 – Tell them what they need to buy: Tom talks Features and Benefits

Episode 848 – Features and Benefits
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 848 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about features and benefits. This is part of my copywriting series starting at episode 836. So anytime you want to get to one of these back episodes, go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. The copywriting series starts at 836. Then you go 837 838. There are only about five minutes long each, but each one of them can make a great improvement in your sales process. So implement the things you see in these episodes. And of course, this is if you want the whole shamir, this is the number one skill in my entire business career. Copywriting. Go to copywriting901.com. And if you like our training episodes, all of them are listed at screwthecommute.com/training. And of course, I want you to grab a copy of my automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree so that you're not fighting with your computer. You're spending that extra time with your family or making money. Okay, how about that? And of course, if you want everything, you go to greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and that is my mentor program. Okay. Let's talk about features and benefits. The features and benefits are pretty much the core of your product. You need to know these features and benefits or you need to show I mean these features and benefits to your prospective buyers.

[00:01:49] And I'm going to show you the way I do it. It's not the only way, but it's worked for me for um, multi multi millions of dollars in sales. So first let's define features. A feature is what your product is and a benefit is what your product does for the buyer. It's up to you to show the potential buyer how they will benefit from having your product or using your service. When I make my students stop and think about their product now, many of them say they have a hard time coming up with their features and benefits. And I tell them, hey, you better get busy and figure that out because if you, the creator of the product, don't know the features and benefits, how do you expect the prospective buyer to figure them out? You can't. So here are some examples of features. And then I'll give you some examples of the benefits that tie to those features. And then I'm going to show you a formula that I learned to put them all together in a sales letter. And I've been I've used it hundreds of times. Okay. A feature might be that your product is digital. It might have three modules, it might be a comprehensive course. That's what the you know, the feature is what it is.

[00:03:06] It might be plastic. It might be metal. It might be sharp, like a set of kitchen knives. It might have eight cylinders, like in a truck engine. It might have 4K resolution, like in a monitor and so forth. That's what it is. Now here's a couple examples of tie in some of those features. I didn't do all of them, but you're going to get the idea here. Two of the benefits. So feature. All right. The first one I said product is digital. The benefit is you can download it immediately and be studying it, you know, in five minutes from now. Or another benefit would be you save on shipping. The other benefit is you can use it on any of your devices. See the feature is it's digital. The benefit is all those other things. Here's another feature. It's plastic benefit. You'll never have to worry about it rusting okay I mean, these aren't rocket science folks, but you have to clearly delineate the feature from the benefit and sidebar here. If you're going to mess up in your sales letter, mess up and put the benefits in and not just the features, because people care about what the product's going to do for them. Not exactly the features. All right. Another feature. It's metal. You know, the last one was plastic. Now this would feature its metal benefit.

[00:04:24] It's going to last a lifetime. Another feature it's eight cylinder benefit. You won't get bogged down when pulling a heavy load. You see you get the idea. Now let me tell you the formula. I was taught to put the features and benefits into a sales letter, and I've done it this way for hundreds of sales letters. So here's the the formula. You have a list of bullets, but you have an opening blurb we call it. So an example of that would be you will learn. That's the opening blurb. You will learn with a colon after it. And then each bullet is going to have the feature first, and then an ellipsis or a dash dot, dot, dot to separate it. And then the benefit that goes with that feature. So here's, here's a just a three part example of some of my speaking stuff. You will learn how to sell a ton at the back of the room. Dot dot dot. Of course you don't read that out loud. You'll never be seen packing up unsold products again. Feature. You'll show you're going to learn how to sell at the back of the room. But what's the benefit of that? Well, it's very embarrassing for a speaker to be in the back of the room after the event, packing up everything because nobody bought anything. So the benefit, you'll never be seen packing up unsold products again.

[00:05:42] And you will learn 31 humor techniques. And by the way, when you're doing this, any kind of list of bullets, if it starts with a number, use the numeral version. That's a little sidebar nuance. So you will learn 31 humor techniques dot dot dot. You'll have them rolling in the aisles. That's the benefit of being funny on stage. There's lots of other ones. You'll get invited back. More people will give you higher evaluations, you know, so forth. All right. You will learn 12 contract tips. Dot dot dot. Unscrupulous meeting planners won't be able to take advantage of you see. So that's the method we use to format features and benefits. Don't do more than seven bullets at a time. And it's funny because when I talk about bullets, you know they're supposed to stand out, right? But if you had like, tons of bullets in a row, people, their eyes glaze over. So don't go more than seven bullets in a row. And here's here's one. I had to do 60 bullets one time. And so this is as simple as it can get. Folks. When I show you how to break this up. So I said you will learn. And then I did seven bullets of stuff just like I told you. And then I put another subheading. Hey, you think that's something? Where do you see this? That was a subheading to break up the bullets.

[00:06:59] And then I did seven more bullets. And then you ain't seen nothing yet, folks. Uh, more are still coming. You know anything like this? Simple stuff. But one of the things about sales letters is the format is just as important as the words. Because if it's too dense and too monotonous looking to read, people won't read it. So this these subheadings break things up. So so that's my method for putting features and benefits. You need to sit down and knock out every feature of your product, and then a bunch of corresponding benefits and get them in your sales letter and you will sell more. All right. This is part of my copywriting series. Go to copywriting901.com. Grab yourself a fully comprehensive course. There's only like 297 bucks where, folks, I took a headline writing course for $4,500. That's just one of the elements of a sales letter. There's about 31 different elements that go into a sales letter. So this is the bargain of the century, but it's the number one skill in my entire business career that's let me sell many, many, many millions of bucks for myself. And I can't even possibly calculate for my students. All right, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.