Description
Selling Benefits In An Online World
Expert salesmen have always known that it’s about selling the benefits, not the product. While it may seem counter intuitive online, the same strategy is still the most important strategy to generate sales for many of the same reasons. Selling benefits appeals to people more than selling features of a product. They directly show what a person will gain by closing the deal. They leave a small opening for imaginative sales pitches, and they clear all objections that are uttered.
Traditional Way To Sell Benefits Offline
There are differences in how those benefits are reiterated online. For one, in a traditional setting, a salesperson is offline, engaged directly with a customer, who can interact with him/her one-on-one. This allows the salesperson to hear the objections that most customers have to buying the product. As any good marketer knows, the minute an objection is raised, the sale is almost finalized. That’s because people generally want to be convinced to buy a product; they just have some small issue or objection that they haven’t been able to resolve themselves. When a salesperson hears an objection, he/she typically will have a ready response as to why that objection is not the way it is perceived, and frames it differently to produce a statement of benefit for the prospective customer. This allows the customer to rationalize or harmonize his/her feelings so that the final sale is accomplished.
How can you do the same thing online, though, when the customer is anonymous; you don’t see him/her and he/she doesn’t see you? How do you know what his/her objections will be and what benefits to list when you can’t even engage a website visitor to talk to him/her directly? The key is to brainstorm every possible objection that a customer might have and list the benefits of your product on a sales page that includes ALL of them.
The online sales page is the equivalent of your sales introduction to the customer, and it better clearly list the benefits for them to read. If human nature is taken into account, though, you know that no one wants to read a long list of benefits. In fact, they may not even bother to read past the first two sentences of your sales page before deciding that they don’t want to read further. What do you do? There are ways to write these sales pages so that the attention is grabbed and gently led down the page in a way that elicits an emotional response that keeps them reading and eager to buy. The next few pages will give you some idea on how to do just that.
