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by Greg Cryns

The painful truth is that your product description can be extremely boring. 

Have you ever heard the old advice "sell the sizzle not the steak"? What does that mean? It means that people naturally want to know what is in it for them.

If you are out kicking tires on a new or used car, how important is it to you if the carburetor is at the cutting edge of carburetors? Do you care how the fuel is mixed in the engine to 

produce acceleration? Hardly. What you care about depends on your station in life and it usually involves things like seating comfort, inside noise control, smooth handling and, of course, the color of the car.

This is not to say that the ingredients in your product are not important. They are. It is just that when you are trying to sell someone about something, they will immediately ask themselves, "What's in it for me?"

Your goal must be to answer that most important first question with candor and completeness. To get the prospects interest you must sell the "sizzle" first. The sizzle is the benefits. In addition, you must make the benefits very realistic to your prospect.

If you are selling vitamins, for example, it is probably not wise to say the vitamins will allow you to "live to be 100." If you are selling a business opportunity, it's probably not too smart 

these days to promise "a thousand dollars a day." People will turn their minds off if you make the mistake of inflating the benefits. At that point you might as well be talking to the wind.

Instead you might say "these vitamins are unlike any other in the market" and "I am sure you will be able to make a good living from this opportunity."

A few years ago my wife and I were looking for a real estate salesperson to put our house on the market for us. A very businesslike lady showed up to make her presentation. I heard her say she would put our house in the Chicago Tribune and that her office sold 429 houses the past year. I heard but I wasn't listening so I politely ended the conversation and rose from the table to escort her to the front door.

On the way to the front door she pulled a large, photo storage type book from her briefcase and said, "Take a look at these homes I listed in the past two months." What I saw amazed me. She had taken personal pictures of each home she had listed and pasted them into the book. Next to each picture was a copy of the multiple listing form for that house as proof of her statement. In her "little black book" were pictures of about 30 homes.

I was stunned. Surely this real estate lady knew what she was talking about. She saved her "sizzle" for the most effective moment. We gave her the listing that night.

I bought the computer I am using right now from Circuit City two years ago. The salesman saw that I was indeed looking to buy but that I could walk to another store across the street to check out the pricing. He asked me how I would be using the computer. He spent 10 minutes learning about my business and I got the feeling he really cared about ME. Finally, he showed me a mid-priced model and said, "Based on what you told me, this computer will do the job for you."

Enough said. I had no idea how much storage the hard disk handled nor any other specs on the machine. I bought from him because I trusted him. HE was the sizzle.

There are a few people who need specifics before they buy. You must learn to recognize the engineering types and be prepared to talk about numbers and sizes smoothly. But for most people the specifics of a product are not as important was what the product will help them accomplish or how it will make life easier for them.

 About the Author
Greg Cryns is the owner of Wahm Search Engine