Just in case you need a reminder (we all do sometimes 😉)…
YOUR favorite features don’t matter.
Here’s how you should think about features (and, honestly, everything else) to see more leads and sales from your marketing campaigns:
TRANSCRIPT:
I don’t know who needs to hear this but… The features that you care about are not always the same features that your potential customers care about and are looking for in a solution.
Years ago, I worked with a company that had a product that was… what was innovative about it was that it was AI-driven.
It was the first product in its category that was built on AI.
And keep this in mind: this was years before AI, you know, now is a really hot topic, especially in the marketing space, but it was years before AI was really like a trending topic.
The AI component was very important for the founders, right? They were leading with the AI message very strongly in their messaging.
When I did the research, none of their beta customers (and they had quite a few) cared that it was built with AI. What they cared about was what the AI actually enabled, which was the ease of use and the speed that they could do what they were looking to do compared to how they had been doing that before.
So I brought this insight to my client and said:
You know no one cares that it’s built with AI. And even though it’s important, what we have to do is give that feature meaning. We have to lead with what they actually care about, which is the speed and the ease of use. And then, of course, support that with how we do that, which is through the AI-powered technology that we have in the product.
And so that’s a really great example that:
What matters to you as the builder of the thing doesn’t always matter to the user of the thing.
So it’s really important that you know what potential customers care about.
You want to make sure that your sales messaging is ticking those internal mental boxes in your potential customers’ heads so that they know that this is the right solution for them. Because it aligns with what they’re looking for.
Some great ways to figure that out is to host customer discovery interviews and explore the context around what they were doing before they found you and why they made this switch from what they were doing to you.
You don’t ask specifically about features because that’s a leading question. You want to ask questions like:
What were you doing before?
How were you solving this problem before?
And then what made you switch from that solution to our solution?
Those types of questions will help you figure out what it is specifically about your product or service that potential customers are drawn to.
That way, you know that the features or components or aspects of your product or service that you’re leading with in your sales copy are aligned with what you know potential customers and clients are looking for.
I’ll also note here that your testimonials are not always a good source of data to figure out this what-features-are-most-important question. Because sometimes, there’s a difference in the reason people choose you initially as a solution and the reason they continue to choose you or the reason they stay.
So there could be a discrepancy in the features that attract someone to your solution for the first time and the features that that they mentioned in their testimonials that they didn’t know they were looking for but they very much appreciated and is the reason that they continue to use your solution.
Let me know in the comments below if this has ever happened to you. Have you discovered that the thing that you thought mattered most to your customers or clients actually was something completely different than you thought it was?
And if you need help figuring out why your best buyers choose you and, more importantly, why they choose you over your competitors (either indirect or direct), we should chat.
