Selling the benefits of your bookkeeping service: Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak

This article discusses sales strategy for selling the benefits of accounting and booking services for prospective business clients.

To sell successfully, you must know your service and its features thoroughly, but that's not enough. You must also be able to translate the features in to client benefits.

If you push service features instead of service benefits, you'll break a basic selling rule: Sell the sizzle, not the steak.

Here's a case in point: Janet Bell provides bookkeeping services. During a sales call, an office manager expressed her interest in Janet's services. She also pointed out that Janet's service was priced 15 percent higher than a competitor's. "You both provide accounting services," the office manager said.

"Yes, we do," Janet responded. "But it's how we do it that separates our service from theirs. We provide full data-entry services so that you can spend your time working with customers rather than entering information into a computer. That means greater sales for you."

Before calling on prospects, review the charts below.

Three key features of bookkeeping services.