Understanding Your Customer For More Profitable Sales: Find Out How You Should Be Selling Your Product

If you want to increase your sales, let me ask you a  question: When writing your product description, or putting together the packaging, are you talking about the benefits or the features?

This is something that most people get wrong. Your customer in the example above, Mario, is buying your product, the flower. However, this isn’t really what Mario cares about. What he really wants is to do is throw awesome fireballs, or in sales terms, what your customer can do with your product. If you’ve been focusing on selling the flower, you’ve been doing it wrong.

What you should be focusing on, is selling the benefits.

Let’s get practical.

First example: Shaving Cream

Pick a product, such as a shaving cream. People don’t want the cream, they want the feeling of the smooth, soft skin that will get their spouse to make the comment, your skin feels smooth, are you using a new cream?

Second example: Nonstick Pan

Let’s pick another product straight off Amazon, a nonstick pan. Here is the description on it?s listing: The unique T-fal Thermo-spot heat indicator shows when T-fal pan is perfectly preheated for cooking.

If we apply a benefits driven approach: Get delicious food every time with the Thermo-spot heat indicator that tells you when the pan is at the perfect temperature for cooking.

Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, a popular project management tool, summed it up well: Here’s what our product can do and here’s what you can do with our product. Sound similar? But they are completely different approaches.

Take a moment to review your product description, title and packaging and ask yourself: Are these benefits or features?

My area of expertise is the Apple App Store, where in the past 14 months, I’ve launched 10 mobile apps, all of which have topped their category in sales. Even after launching all of these apps, I continue to revisit this question each time I come to prepare my screenshots, as it?s so easy to slip back into talking about the features.

I’ll leave you with this rather mouth watering image of a paprika and sage squash soup from a new app we launched on the 1st of January.

Notice, in the description, I haven?t just spoken about how quick and easy the recipes are to prepare (the features of the product), but I’ve also tied this in to the benefit, which is that it’ll fit around a busy lifestyle.

Got a great idea for an app? Watch this video and learn how to turn it into a business!