Just a quick note, since I was asked yesterday and didn’t have time to answer until now; regarding the difference between Features and Benefits.

Okay, the reason one would care, as a seller, is because the selling process may involve promoting all the wonderful things about your product, service, or information. When you want to highlight what makes you or your product so wonderful you’ll invariably need to tap into features and benefits (preferably tap into both – not just one or the other).

A feature is a specific, technical, quantifiable element of your service or product.
A benefit is a way to suggest advantages or desirable results a customer would gain by using your product, information, or service.

The best example would be in selling a computer.

Features would be:
Intel 3.4GHz chip, 4 gigs of RAM, 250 Gig Hard Drive, 512 meg video card.

Benefits of that computer would be:
Lightning fast, work more efficiently, multi-task on dozens of software applications simultaneously, be more productive, creative, and run the latest software to create movies, music, and photo albums for you and your family. Great fun for the family and effective work platform for home finances.

You see?

In the selling process it’s important to relay, to the prospect, not only the technical features but also the beneficial elements to their life (benefits) they’d gain by having those technical features. They both speak to the same end-product (service, or information) but touch on entirely different “hot buttons” in the mind of a consumer.

Obviously, some people and some products really lend themselves better to technical specifications by promoting features. Other times, however, it’s the list of benefits that seem more appealing. In general, though, it’s important to promote both. This can be done in your advertising, expanded descriptions, promo-text, or anywhere else you have a chance to tell people what’s so great about what you offer.