Don't stop at benefits - How my sales coach taught me a secret that supercharges your copywriting

Kirsten Back Author

Translating features into benefits is only one step closer to a sale. Translating benefits into outcomes takes your copy to another level...

Copywriting and sales are almost like twins. And yet they are very different. Being really good at one of them doesn’t mean that you automatically master the other.

To be honest – sales was my nemesis. I was hurting my own business because I just couldn’t lead sales conversations that ended in a conversion. I just couldn’t talk about my fees. And that’s no joke. Whenever a sales conversation arrived at the point where I was supposed to mention my fees one of two things happened:

• I moved the conversation in another direction and talked about something entirely different
  
• I named a stupidly low price because I couldn't bring myself to state fees that reflected my value
  

Without fail, my sales conversations were tragically inept, painful, and detrimental to my business. And my conversion rate was so gloomy that I had to admit that I needed help.

This was exactly the point where I had to admit that I couldn’t fix my problem on my own, that my problem was so severe that my business wouldn’t survive if I didn’t get some help.

I needed help from a professional. I needed a sales coach who could fix my problem holistically, someone who helped me overcome my appallingly poor money mindset and who would come up with something much better than a “Million-Dollar-Sales-Script” (done it, tried it and binned it).

I wanted a sales deep dive and really understand sales. I wanted to understand what happened at each point of the sales process, I wanted to understand my customers and what type of buyers they were, what they thought, what motivated them, what they feared, what their buying process is, what their story is, why they want to buy…

I wanted to be in control of the process and confidently state my prices because I was convinced of my value and the value of my services.

And then this happened…

HOW I GOT SOLD TO SELL…

I followed up on a lead and started a conversation trying to sell my newly developed 1:1 copywriting coaching programme. Three minutes into the conversation I found out that I was trying to sell to a ninja saleswoman with 20 years of selling multi-million-dollar deals under her belt.

I froze – and abandoned my “Million-Dollar-Sales-Script” on the spot. I closed the window on my screen displaying my limp and ineffective sales security blanket. I didn’t know what to do instead but saw no point in humiliating myself by trying to walk through a script that my lead had probably grown out of during her kindergarten years.

So I shut up and listened. I listened to her story and how she was building this business teaching women just like me how to sell without creepy sales scripts, manipulation, intimidation, and threats of scarcity.

She captivated me as she spoke about the method that she had developed, how and why she had developed it, how she wanted to bring integrity back into sales and let people like me feel comfortable and authentic in a sales conversation. How she wanted to empower women to skyrocket their closing rates and take their business wherever they want to.

She spoke about the contents of her future programme, what her programme would enable her clients to do and how that would change their lives.

And I wanted her to teach me how to change my life. I wanted to work with her (and funnily enough she wanted to work with me too as somehow, I must have got in a few compelling words about my copywriting programme too).

So we traded…

…AND DISCOVERED THE POWER OF OUTCOMES

We traded beta programmes and not only taught each other what we knew best, but we also became accountability partners in building our businesses.

But back to my topic. As a copywriter, I teach my clients about the difference between features and benefits and that you can never sell anything on features because they activate our rational brains.

Sales are made through benefits. Through the emotions that benefits evoke in our subconscious minds.

A very easy way of discovering benefits is to apply a simple formula like:

“You will learn feature No. 1 so that you can…”

A feature teaches you how to do something. It empowers you to do something. And that makes you feel good.

So that should be enough to sell, right?

Not quite.

My sales coach helped me to make another connection. She showed me that benefits were just the beginning. That I needed to move one step further.

I needed to translate benefits into long-term outcomes!

Yes, I had always done my research and defined my clients’ dreams, goals, and desires – but I had never connected them directly to the benefits and features.

If you make that connection, then outcomes are where emotions really start to kick in. Outcomes are what sells. The accumulated power of benefits processed and turned into outcomes that happen when you apply your new skills and abilities.

Here’s an example:

When learning how to write copy and content it’s not just about understanding how to use copywriting techniques and storytelling – it’s about the effect that your writing has on your audience and your business over time.

That you captivate the right audience and sell more which leads to more money in the bank and that team that you always wanted to build, the car you wanted to buy or the house that you’ve been dreaming of.

That’s where the power is. Benefits are just stepping stones to the real transformation. To engage emotions, you need to distil long-term outcomes that are directly connected to the features and benefits of your programme.

You need to help your audience to dream about the outcomes that you can provide with your programme.

Categories: Copywriting, Attention, Sales, Selling