The customer focused company talks to customers in their language. Their language is the language of benefits - how your product or service improves their lives. It's also the language of impact - how does this give me a return on my investment. And finally, it's the language of evidence - show me the proof.
In Winning Pitch, we use the acronym F.B.I.E:
- Features
- Benefits
- Impact
- Evidence
It really is amazing how often customers, even highly educated professional buyers and specifiers don't understand how your product's features actually translate into benefits. The customer focused company therefore makes it easy for them; it spells out the benefits, summarises the impact and provides hard evidence - typically through testimonials, case studies, reference sites.
One of our team fondly recalls one of his first consultancy assignments. This was with a company manufacturing huge insulated industrial doors used in cold stores i.e. the facilities where supermarkets hold their frozen produce before it's transported to the retail stores.
The company's marketing trumpeted the virtue of its doors being 'insulated with in-situ rigid polyurethane' - a feature. Yet their customers and specifiers simply failed to appreciate the virtues of such a feature - improved insulation properties leading to much lower energy bills and running costs for cold store operators. Moreover the company could demonstrate the payback and had hard evidence from reference sites.
The moral of the story is spell it out, both in your one-to-one and one-to-many communications with customers. Translate the features into benefits - and translate the benefits into impacts (savings, return on investment) and support this with hard facts. Do this and you will be amazed at the returns you will make on your promotional expenditure.
Blog written by Winning Pitch, who are a lead delivery partner for the Excelerator Consortium that manages the Business Wales Accelerated Growth Programme.
Details of the Programme can be found on the Accelerated Growth Programme website.