The feature dump sales pitch

I sit through many sales presentations. By nature of my job, I need to entertain new ideas and new software products that our company might consider selling. I have found that the most common sales approach is a feature dump. "Our product has thousands of placements." "We have outstanding technical support." "We have the best front end system or back end database." They spend a significant amount of time discussing why their product is better than everyone else's product. They tell me all the reasons why the product that I currently sell is not nearly as good as the product they want me to sell. People don't buy a list of features. People buy solutions to their problems. The list of features are not important if they don't solve a problem. The list of features don't provide any benefit to me if I can't see is increase my my efficiency or decrease my costs. Don't devolve your sales pitch to a feature dump. First find out what challenges your customer is facing and then provide a way for them to overcome those challenges.

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Corey Smith Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems.