Customers don’t care about benefits.

I thought it was features they didn’t care about?

We’ve all heard the statement “customers don’t care about your product/features”. This statement is designed to get companies to tell the customer the benefit of the feature as it is said that “features tell, benefits sell”.

Feature-benefit is a technique that has been used by GTM professionals for decades. It involves identifying the key features of a product or service and then highlighting the benefits that those features offer.

But benefits don’t sell. Your customers care about the value they derive as a result of using your product. They buy a desired outcome.

That’s right: in truth, the only thing the people who buy from you care about is what problems of theirs you can help solve.

It’s not that benefits and features are useless. Instead, there’s a specific hierarchy of importance. Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

The trouble with market research

I read a report recently from IDC on why hotels are upgrading/purchasing a new Property Management System. The details of the product and vertical are not really relevant to the core message of this article. This could have been any vertical SaaS product that is the functioning back-office operating system for a company. The PMS just happens to be the system of record for hotels and their ability to provide property managers and frontline staff with tools to quickly and efficiently service guests while they are on property.

The conclusions of the report remind me of the quote by David Ogilvy,

“The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.”

This report resembles the quote in that the survey had respondents pick features that they believe are drivers of purchase intent.

But people don’t buy your features. They buy the promise of what their life looks like after they’ve implemented your solution. This requires understanding what their life looks like now, what their life looks like after, why they want this life, and what will enable them to have this life. All of this needs to map back to the feature/functionality that you know will enable them to achieve.

Features do not drive purchase intent

A feature is simply an attribute or fact about your product.

Topping the list of reasons hoteliers are looking to upgrade their PMS are ease of use (41%) and improved integrations (38.8%). There are another 15 drivers that IDC reported on.

All of these are functional features. None of these are why the hotel finds it necessary to upgrade/purchase a new PMS solution.

If the PMS vendors follow IDCs advice, they will likely get themselves into a Product Death Cycle, which is a perilous loop of adding features without customer validation, a common pitfall that accelerates the demise of a product through continuous cycles of complexity, diminishing user value, and eventual market irrelevance.

Benefits do not drive purchase intent

Benefits are the ways features help the customer.

The report goes on to provide the insight that hotels are looking to innovate and find technology solutions for their top business goals… which they cite as:

“These top 5 goals for hospitality organizations include increasing revenue (41%), increasing customer loyalty (37%), reducing operating costs (32%), improving employee experience (32%), and improving employee efficiency (27%).”

Ok, so now we have identified some benefits. But the benefits are not linked to the features. For example, which features of the 17 identified help them increase customer loyalty? But more importantly how do these features map to the value or desired outcome sought by the hotel? What can these benefits do for the customers?

The reality is that neither features or benefits matter. What matters or what customers care about is what those features and benefits can do for them.

What do the features and benefits do?

Your features enable benefits for customers, which can be translated into a value that your customer is trying to achieve.

Here’s how I would think of it using “Ease of Use” as an example. What is it about your product that makes it easier to use and how do you prove it? Do your competitors’ products require training and your product doesn’t? Can you quantify how long it takes to become proficient with your product versus alternative products?”

Attributes like “Ease of Use” enable benefits for customers like “reduced time to proficiency”. Articulating value takes the benefit one step further: putting benefits in context of a goal the customer is trying to achieve.

Value could be “Every part of the organization can make better decisions based on improved proficiency of accessing guest information.”.

Features enable benefits, which can be translated into value in unique customer terms.

Features lead to benefits and benefits eventually lead to value. To build a successful business, you have to work backwards. First determine what your value needs to be and then build the features that will ultimately deliver that value.

If this sounds like the definition of value proposition, that is because it is. A value proposition is the outcome that is derived by the unique combination of features of your product. That unique set of features may have to change over time (innovation) as customers ascribe new or different values to those features or competitors replicate them in a way that erodes the level of value.

The job of strategy is to offer a superior value proposition to a target set of customers. Start here and map that value back to the features that enable it.

Thanks for reading. I’m John McAuliffe and I help companies accelerate growth more consistently and with greater predictability.

I am a learner. I find myself constantly reading on a variety of topics with an insatiable appetite for continuous learning. My thoughts on business have been influenced by many. You may feel a bit of déjà vu in reading some of my thoughts because of this. When it comes to strategy and business management systems I follow the likes of Jim Collins, Roger Martin, Gino Wickman, Verne Harnish amongst others. On consumer insights, marketing and sales I am influenced by the likes of Adele Revella, John McMahon, Geoffrey Moore and many others. Thanks for reading.