Value versus Features, the Product Conundrum

Geoff Anderson signing in for a new Technology Marketing Center post.  This time I am going to delve into a topic that was brought front and center lately in a session I was presenting to our sales team, principally what sells products.  As you know from the course on Strategic Marketing of Technology Products, when we talk about the "Whole Product", we often use terms like the ante, and how the features we either offer today or have in the pipeline drive differentiation and keep the competition guessing and off balance.  In particular, I recall the tale of the packaged chicken, and how the leader was always able to add to the whole product to keep ahead of the march of the competition.

This is well and good, and from a product management perspective, it is very helpful to define a backlog of features and functionality that the development and engineering team can execute on.  However, is this feature list how you want to portray the product to the market?  If you start down this path, it will become expected that each major iteration of your product will have X number of new features (widgets etc).  And if you deliver anything less than that, there will be disappointment that you have done less than in the past.

Turning this around, think about when you buy a product personally.  Do you buy based on a feature list?  Sure, for a tech product, you probably scan the tech specs or the data sheet, but is that really what tilts you to buying the product?  Or, do you buy a product to fill a specific need, and use the tech data to ensure that it will solve the problem at hand?  While there are certainly some shoppers who are the former, the VAST majority are in the latter crowd.  Thus we don't sell products so much as selling solutions to a problem.

Seems pretty straightforward, right?

Then why is it that when you are training your sales team on the new product(direct, indirect, distributor etc), they invariably focus solely upon the number of features you display, and will universally grumble how we used to have longer lists (i.e more new features).  We as marketers need to adopt, forcefully if need be, to expressing the value to the customer of what we are delivering.  In this circumstance, the presentation I was delivering to sales regarding the release broke the new features into 5 key, features, each of which had a clear proposition of value to the customer, and tied to the differentiation of the product.  Naturally, there were dozens of smaller items, or checklist type features, but for my 1 hour slot, I wanted to focus on the key reasons we will be successful.

Unfortunately, sales still needs to be educated on the difference between value and features.  The good thing is that customers get this.  If we get this (and if you are reading this, you likely do), we can together bring our sales channel into the fold.

In summary, features don't sell products, value does.  Value to the customers is what helps them solve problems.  Emphasize the value in your offering, and keep a pipeline of value differentiators in your development pipeline, and you will have a roadmap for success, even if internally you maintain it as merely a list of features.

Comments

[Tim Johnson]

I did a training session for an inside sales team where I was relaunching and repositioning a product. I challenged every sales rep in the room (about 20) to think of their top prospect, name the industry they were in, name at least one problem unique to that industry and how our product would address that problem.

I got blank looks in return.

Then I asked a couple reps about their prospect and told them the industry, challenges for that industry or prospect and how we helped with it. One rep went out and closed a deal based on that thinking but most went back to carping about number of reports, integration points, categories, etc.

Some get it, some don't. Jump on some sales calls with them and drive the conversation around discovering the implications for the customer, not what features they like, close a few deals for them based on that approach and then they might start seeing the light.

Sounds a bit adversarial of me but product marketing and product management have to live to the higher standard.

[Chris Halliwell]

Thank you Tim for the comment on Geoff's post. You are clearly a team player and that's what it takes to turn the sales team around when they get down in the weeds.

[John Wojewidka]

The biggest issue is language. And the best way to guide this good advice is to help Sales - and management - parse their language. If an accounting company sells auditing services, that's a feature. The benefit is they will have clean books. The value is peace of mind, and no jail time. Sometimes benefits and value cross, but neither are *ever* features. People always buy for emotional reasons. Always. One very fine example is an Apple billboard for the iPad. No words, no overt *selling*. Only the feeling you get from the setting. That final decision about whether to take something home is always made from that feeling they (we all!) get.