I used to sell shoes.
Was damn good at it, too. In fact, I made it through the company’s 18-month manager training program in just over 9 months. In my first store, as a manager, I was the #3 selling manager in one of the smallest stores in the chain.
And, I broke several store sales records along the way.
Anyway, we had this thing we did.
Out of Al Bundy’s bag of “tricks” if you will.
Let me give you an example.
“This is an XYZ Brand shoe. You’ll notice the high quality leather upper. The better the leather, the more it breathes and flexes over time. So, your feet don’t get hot and sweaty and the shoe will mold to fit your foot as you wear it.”
Here’s another.
“This shoe has a polyurethane outsole. The nice thing about polyurethane compared to a standard rubber outsole is it’s much lighter weight and more flexible while still being nearly as durable. So, your shoes won’t feel like they weight 1000 pounds, you’ll be lighter on your feet and less fatigued… without giving up durability.”
This is what we called the “FAB” technique.
Feature. Advantage. Benefit.
Leather upper. Polyurethane outsole.
That’s the feature.
And, it’s important because it’s something real and tangible you can point to about your product. Starting with it makes whatever you say more believable because your customer can see it right in front of them.
Lighter. More flexible. Breathes better.
These are all advantages.
Characteristics OF the feature that make it better.
This is the key link between the feature and the benefit.
It makes your benefit “make sense”.
And, not just sound like sales-speak.
Finally, the benefit. Less fatigue, more comfortable shoe, durability, feet that aren’t hot and sweaty… these are what the features and advantages MEAN to the customer and, ultimately, the only thing they really care about.
BUT…
You can’t just speak in benefits, otherwise it seems empty. By following this chain from real, tangible feature to ultimate benefit, you create a “logical path” that makes your sales presentation believable and real.
I sold hundreds of thousands of dollars of shoes this way.
So, think about how you can do this with your freelance services.
That said, this is one smaller part of the bigger technique which is to “productize” your services. And, you want to do that for a lot of the same reasons. It makes your services more real and believable to potential clients.
It makes your services fit more naturally with what your clients actually want.
Making them easier to sell.
Plus, it decouples your services from time.
So, you can charge more while working less.
Anyway, this is one of the things I cover (Lesson 5) in the first installment of my Freelancing 101 series called “What Services to Offer”. I teach you how to productize your services, pricing, picking the right niche, what services to offer and more.
As always, you can get access to it for nothing over on SkillShare.
As a teacher there, I can offer you an *exclusive* 2-month free trial of the site. So, just start the trial, take the course (plus any of the 21,000 other courses on the site) and just cancel before the 2 months is up.
And, you never pay a penny.
If you’re interested, the link with all the details is here: https://johnmorrisonline.com/niche
Later,
John
