Avoid the Feature Dump

One of my favorite topics is the good old feature dump. Almost all salespeople (including sales entrepreneurs) are guilty of it. The feature dump is talking about what the product is, how it works, and how it compares with the competition, but not what it will do for the customer. Salespeople jump into a monologue, talking ad nauseam about all the features, often boring the customer to tears. Believe it or not, customers simply don't care about most of that stuff. The conversation with your potential customers often lacks the critical connection between your product, service, or company and their needs. Customers need to know how you can help improve their efficiencies or their margins, or help them become more competitive. More often than not salespeople are selling what they need to sell, instead of selling what their customers need to buy.

Typically, sales professionals show up to the call and after asking only a couple of probes begin spewing all their knowledge, telling not selling. They engage in a verbal avalanche of information, statistics, specifications, and whatever else they can think of to impress the customer. After all, salespeople are supposed to be good talkers, right? Wrong. The underlying problem is the vast amount of product knowledge that salespeople are exposed to. Companies inundate their salespeople with product knowledge, company policies, price lists, catalogs, brochures, flavor-of-the-month promotions, new product launches, and so on. It's no wonder salespeople show up and can't wait to tell the customer about all the features. It's what they have been trained to talk about, to regurgitate all the information in the brochure. In fact, a brochure is nothing more than a glossy feature dump, just as a corporate video distributed by head office is a high-tech feature dump. A brochure or video can't possibly reflect benefits, as they are very subjective. It is the customers' right to identify the benefits that are important to them. Customers decide the benefits, not the salespeople.

More often than not, salespeople respond far too quickly when asked for a brochure. They willingly send out or hand out their corporate brochures, creating a false sense of productivity. Tell your potential customer that you are better than a brochure, and a 15-minute appointment is necessary to explore the possibility of doing business.

On the lighter side, rather than spend the day handing out or mailing brochures with a business card ("Just leave us your card and a brochure") you'd be better off to rent an airplane, fly over your territory, and shovel out 1,000 brochures. It would certainly get more attention! My point is this: Doing an in-person brochure-drop does little to drive your business. Brochures should be used as a leave-behind to augment the sale—not used as a lead-in. However, they can be an effective mailer if you highlight relevant features and follow up with a telephone call to make an appointment after they have received it. This approach will sometimes impress the customer enough to grant you an appointment.

What drives the feature dump is our natural tendency to be helpful. We are often seduced by a false sense of helpfulness created by telling the customer all about our features. Sales representatives love to dispense information. As one customer said, salespeople tend to "show-up and throw-up." This situation reminds me of those PEZ candy dispensers we had as kids: pull the head back and all this information comes spewing out. We often get overzealous in our desire to enhance our customer's welfare. It's nothing short of blah-blah-blah selling, inundating the customer with useless information. I consider PEZ to be an acronym for "Please Excuse my Zealousness." Go out and get yourself a PEZ dispenser and put it on your desk as a visual reminder to banish the feature dump. We must appreciate that our call-effectiveness is measured in terms of the customer's perspective, not ours.

The redundancy of a feature dump is further supported by this statistic: Your customer will decide to buy from you based on less than 5% of your total features. That's it! If you ask your customers why they bought from you, their answer reveals no more than two to three reasons (benefits). Imagine the poor customer having to endure a feature dump that is 95% useless information to them. I compare it to the menu analogy. When you visit a restaurant, you are presented with a menu. The menu is nothing more than a list of available features. You, as the customer, decide what features will become benefits. As you are handed your menu, your server might as well say, "Here is our list of features. I'll be back in a few minutes to take your list of benefits." After reviewing the menu, which can easily include 100 or more features, you place your order of only four to five benefits. There's your 5%. The rest of the items remain as features. The only person who can decide on the benefits is your customer. Your customer is the ultimate authority to either accept or reject your features as benefits. There lies the challenge: Identify the features on your corporate menu that will benefit your customer.

Feature Dumpers Syndrome is an undetected virus that has plagued salespeople for centuries. It sabotages more sales calls than any other sales virus.

The common feature dump virus quietly goes about its business disguising itself as a routine, predictable component of a typical sales call. If you don't think you are a feature dumper, just ask your customers.

Unfortunately there are no pills, antibiotics, or prescriptions available to cure this unproductive approach to selling. But don't fret, help is here at last. The cure lies in your willingness and commitment to embrace a sales entrepreneurial code of conduct. It's time to do more selling, and less telling; features tell, benefits sell.

The feature dump is not something we can totally eliminate. From time to time you will find yourself engaged in an elaborate monologue spewing out so-what information. If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do is finish your thought, pause for a moment and say, "Well that's enough about me, how about telling me more about you." Invite the customer to talk about his or her business by asking conversational probes. Resist the temptation to revert back to a feature dump. Take notes and truly listen to what your customer is telling you.