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Boost Your Product's Desirability by Using Outcomes not Features

Picture of Ryan Schweighart
Bottle of water isolated over a white background
You know your product/service provides immense value. But, for some reason, this value does not seem to resonate with potential customers/clients.
 
Assuming you feel confident there's a market for your product/services (which is another post), it may be time to review how you're describing your product or service.
 
Side note: for the rest of this article, I'm going to use 'customers' and 'products', but this strategy can be applied for 'clients' and the corresponding 'services'.
 

Here's how to increase desire for your product or service: List the outcomes a product affords your customers instead of the features or benefits of your product.

 
Let's jump into an example. Pretend we own a computer company and we have a top of the line gaming central processing unit (CPU) we are about to release. Some notable features include 32 GB of RAM and an Intel i9 core processor. The benefits of these specifications include reduced lag time and low latency. The outcome this affords the gamer is a seamless gaming experience that just might boost his/her Call of Duty KDR (kill-death ratio).
 
This is a simple, linear process, but if you do this for all of your features -- be ready to move some product!
 
To apply this to your own products, simply take your list of features, determine the benefits of each feature, then determine the outcomes afforded by the customer.
 
Let's do another example and keep it super basic -- our product is bottled water. A feature of our bottled water is it has 4 performance enhancing electrolytes. The benefit of the electrolytes is it hydrates the customer. The outcome it affords the customer is to recover faster from an exhaustive exercise or a long night on the town.
 
In our minds, we often think people will be able to connect the dots; however, people are bombarded with so many inputs that we must spell it out from the beginning. At the end of the day, most people don't care about the specifications. Instead,they want the answer to the question, "So what?"
 
Here's a very simple Google Sheet you can download to help you go from features to benefits to outcomes:
 
 
Let me know if you have any questions or other thoughts in the comments below.
Or, reach out to me via one of the contact methods at the bottom of this page.