An Essential Tool for Clarifying Your Marketing Message and Closing More Sales
If you’ve been in business for any amount of time you are acutely aware that prospects could care less about your product or service. Even if it is the perfect fit for them… They just don’t seem to notice. At least, not until they realize the explicit benefit to them of your products or services. They just want to know what real and applicable solution you provide them.
This might seem like common sense to you. Of course a business needs to connect their solution with the prospects pain points. However, failing to do so is a surprisingly common mistake. Identifying your various features, advantages, and benefits is a great way to get more effective with your marketing & sales messages. The FAB Statements are essential in explaining why someone should buy from you.
FAB Statements
FAB stands for Features, Advantages, and Benefits. A FAB Statement is explaining the feature, what it does (the advantage), and how that benefits the prospective client.
Features are one of the easier things to identify. These are facts or characteristics about your business, products, and services. For example, a “1 inch insulation layer” on a sleeping bag is the feature.
Advantages are what the features do. These tend to be factual, and aren’t connected to a prospects need… Yet. For example, “helps retain body heat on cold nights” (sticking with our sleeping bag example).
Benefits answer why someone should value the advantage. It connects the facts about your product to a solution for your client. For example, “when you’re camping, you’ll have a nice warm sleep at night so that when you wake up you’ll be well rested and ready for a day of fun activities.”
Here’s the full FAB Statement from the sleeping bag example in action:
“Our sleeping bags have a 1 inch layer of insulation on them. This helps to retain body heat on cold nights. You’ll be warm all night. Which means that you’ll get a great sleep and be well rested for a day of fun activities (that you’ll fully enjoy!).”
This FAB Statement will connect really well with people who are frustrated with camping because they are cold, never get a good nights rest, wake up grouchy, and can’t fully enjoy the trip. Can you see how this helps to connect your prospects desire to your product?
Turning FAB Statements Into Marketing & Sales Messages
Once you identify your various features, advantages, and benefits, you can start compiling them into succinct marketing & sales messages. The FAB Statements exercise will help you connect better with your prospective clients. And you know that means more business for you!
Follow a few easy steps to start creating your own FAB Statements:
- Compile a list of your product features. Leave room to add your advantages and benefits later.
- Go back over your feature list and write in one or two advantages of each.
- Put yourself into your prospective clients shoes, and develop a benefit statement for each advantage. Be sure to dig right down to the core human desire.
From here, you can put together a whole bunch of value statements. Now, there’s one final step before you have the perfect set of marketing messages: Flip the FAB Statements. Instead of stating the feature first, state the benefit. Then explain how you accomplish the benefit (via your advantage and feature).
For example, our final marketing message for our sleeping bag could actually be:
“While you’re camping, you’ll get a great sleep and be well rested for a day of fun activities you’ll fully enjoy. Our 1 inch layer of insulation keeps your body warm all night so you sleep comfortably.”
Leave Your Competition In the Dust
Hopefully you realize how important FAB Statements are to your marketing & sales success. It’s surprising how few people actually know about FAB Statements, and how fewer seem to properly go through the exercise. This alone is a good reason to take a few moments and try this in your own business. You may just end up leaving your competition in the dust.
If you’d like someone to help you develop some awesome benefit statements, fill out the form or give us a call at 250-516-4327. We’ll be happy to spend some time with you and determine if we can work together.
Have you ever tried using FAB Statements? Do you even believe there is value in taking time to do this exercise? Share with us your own thoughts and experiences by leaving a comment below.
