The FAB Method: Ensuring Your Teams TRULY Understand Your Product

As an experienced startup sales leader with over a decade of experience running go to market teams, one of my primary frustrations is when these teams lack a deep understanding of the product. You might wonder, how is it possible that the teams interacting with prospects and customers aren't experts? With 67% of customers preferring self-service over direct interactions with company representatives, something is evidently amiss. In the realm of Software as a Service (SaaS), I've found that this issue often stems from the technical sophistication of the product, coupled with a lack of comprehensive training on not just the product's features but also their corresponding advantages and benefits.

The article below underscores how using the F.A.B Methodology can ensure that your go-to-market teams are well-prepared to represent your business at the highest level. Is this just for sales teams? Absolutely not. In fact, these core concepts can help drive not only Product Marketing but Product development itself. Keep reading to learn how to do this FABulously well.

Let's begin by defining the basics: features, advantages, and benefits, as succinctly encapsulated by this HubSpot article.

• Features describe the attributes of a product or service, essentially answering 'what' the consumer is getting.
• Advantages outline the factual significance of the features, explaining 'how' they provide value to the consumer.
• Benefits elucidate why the advantage is valuable in a way that emotionally resonates with the consumer, answering 'why' that value matters.

Now let's delve deeper into Features.

Features: Most organizations consider product training to be training on features. Yet unless your prospect clearly understands the advantage and corresponding benefit a feature provides, mentioning your feature is irrelevant. Recall the last time you were in a purchasing process and were inundated with features you didn't grasp. For most buyers, this can be intimidating and diminish their interest in a complex product.

On the flip side, have you ever been promised significant savings through a product or service, but the explanation was ambiguous?

The key to discussing features lies in making them easily understandable for your audience and linking them with the advantages AND benefits they provide. Consider this example of selling features without corresponding advantages and benefits:

• The Cinema 50 has outputs for 11 speakers, and can power up to nine at the same time. Use all nine channels in a 5.2.4 or 7.2.2 Dolby Atmos or DTS:X® system.  

While your buyer might be an experienced audiophile who can connect the dots, do you want to rely solely on that possibility? Can you explain WHY these features matter if asked? Listing your features is NOT enough.

Advantages: Many organizations conflate advantages with benefits. Advantages are the micro-results your product or service generates for customers, which then translate into benefits. While advantages can overlap between products and services, they specifically derive from features. Generic examples of advantages include:

• Speed
• Reliability
• Service
• Flexibility
• Scalability
• Etc

Advantages are not sufficient on their own.  If you tout your solution as the fastest, prospects may speculate about the benefits (such as time or money saved) and the features that enable that speed. What happens when your competitors derail your sale by positioning your quoted advantage of speed as potentially a safety risk? The key with advantages is to tie them into both the benefit and the feature. Here's an example of just tying to a benefit:

• Without the speed of our platform, your organization will deliver your product more slowly. We see this result in increased costs and reduction in revenues, and your customers may choose to buy from a competitor that can deliver the product faster.

While better than the feature on it's own, this still falls short for two reasons. Firstly, nothing is quantified here (e.g., how much faster, increased costs). Secondly, the advantage of speed is too generic; it should be tied explicitly to specific features of your product.

Benefits: The first important premise of benefits is that there are a finite number of benefits that exist. I don’t care what product or service you sell, everything boils down to just a few categories of true benefits. For me, these are the following (stack ranked in terms of average value). 

• Safety
• Money Saved
• Time Saved
• Money Earned 
• Recognition
• Happiness

Have another one? My hunch is that what you’re thinking of is an advantage, or one of the benefits above reworded. One important note is that benefits can also be communicated in the negative, which can often be more impactful. Given psychology tells us people place twice the weight on negative consequences than it's positive alternative, framing in terms of potential time wasted v. time saved can be more effective.

If you don’t understand your product or service well enough to define the specific benefit(s) it provides to your customers, you’ll never be effective at communicating your value. However, it’s not enough to be able to say that your product saves customers money, you have to be able to define exactly HOW. This is where we can bring everything together. Let's see a detailed example below that brings the three together for a complex product.

• Our platform runs workloads on Amazon EC2 X2i Instances which deliver up to 50% higher compute price performance than comparable X1 instances. Without the additional speed at comparable pricing, your organization’s software cycle time could be delayed by an average of 20%. We’ve seen cycle time delays increase engineering costs by anywhere from 25-40% and also caused estimated revenue losses of between 10 and 20%. Our platform will help you improve margins by 30% and increase revenues over 10%.

Takeaways? Every feature you develop, market, or sell needs to have a clearly defined (AND UNDERSTOOD) advantage and benefit. This methodology can be used as the starting point in a Linear ticket, a marketing campaign, or sales training.

Find this useful? Disagree? Shoot me a DM, I’d always love to hear feedback. 

References:

1. Study.com: "FAB Selling Technique: Features, Advantages & Benefits" from Study.com.
2. Userpilot: "Features, Advantages, Benefits (FAB) Explained & How to Use It" from Userpilot's blog.
3. HubSpot: "How to Sell Benefits, Not Features" from HubSpot's sales blog.
4. ScottySchindler.com: "Selling with FAB (Features, Advantages, and Benefits)" from ScottySchindler.com.
5. Crutchfield: Product page for Marantz Cinema 50 from Crutchfield.
6. TheKeenFolks.com: "10 Mind-Blowing Stats About Consumer Behaviour"