Sell Not Unless It's Boiling Hot

If you're a graduate of marketing 101, this may be an underwhelming concept, but in my experience most businesses miss the importance of selling benefits vs. features. For businesses in dire need of marketing help and advertising help, a great place to start is to decide what the key consumer benefit of your product or service is (NOT feature!). I've come up with an easy to remember saying of "sell not unless it's boiling hot" to emphasize the importance of "boiling down" the consumer benefit of your product/service. For example, a home security company should spend more time selling safety and security instead of talking about the technical aspects of their security systems. A lot of companies miss the mark by creating ads that don't connect emotionally with their audience -- instead they create an unemotional ad giving a laundry list of information about themselves. This is a common mistake of businesses that spend too much time touting their product features and not enough time on the benefits. If you boil down your key benefit and become very familiar with how to communicate to your prospective customer, you will be well on your way to shifting your selling strategy from laundry list of cold facts to "what's in it for the customer".

This is a topic worthy of further elaboration, but I'll stick with the "101" version for now...