My first management position was in retail with a company that strongly believed in sales training and among the many things I learned there, I was lucky to learn all about Features/Advantages/Benefits. We looked at every garment, determined what the details were, why they were worth mentioning and what it meant for the customer. More importantly, we taught our associates to convey the information in a way that made sense and was easy to adapt to any customer and any product. We stated the FAB in the format of “it is…so that…you can”.

Here’s how it worked. Let’s say we’re offering a white shirt to a customer. We’d look it over and say “This shirt is a 50/50 cotton/poly blend (it is) so it’s machine washable (so that) and you can take it out of the drier and wear it with little or no ironing (you can). Pretty simple, actually.

No matter how complex the service is or sophisticated the product, it all comes down to the same thing…understand the features, explain the advantages and define the benefits. I still use FAB when offering solutions to client needs. Maybe it can help you too.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 8th, 2006 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Marketing Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.