Features, Benefits, and Advantages

At today’s EO Accelerator education workshop on sales, one of the comments the facilitator, Jim Ryerson, said really caught my attention: every company needs to quickly explain their features, benefits, and advantages. Most startups talk about features and benefits, but rarely explicitly get into their advantages. Let’s look at simple definitions in the startup context:

• Features – product functionality and abilities
• Benefits – the outcomes from using the product features
• Advantages – differentiating factors compared to other competitors in the market or traditional methods

For the advantages, stating the competitor’s name isn’t required, but a nice sales tip when a prospect says they use a competitor is to ask how they accomplish some task or provide some service that the other company doesn’t do, without being condescending. For example, say your competitor doesn’t offer quarterly strategy calls you might ask, “How did your most recent quarterly strategy call go?” Of course, since the competitor doesn’t do those you’ll get the prospect thinking as to what else the competitor doesn’t do.

My recommendation is to have scripted messages around features, benefits, and advantages while making sure everyone in the startup is on the same page.