Is it time to end the features vs. benefits messaging debate?

There are two camps:

1. Disciples of Theodore Levitt, who once said, “People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” Sell the benefits and outcomes—that’s what people care about.

2. Challengers who say benefits are (no longer) differentiated. Especially 2nd-, 3rd-, and nth-order benefits—things like “save time” and “save money” (yuck). These days, prospects care more about capabilities and features—what a product does and how it works.

But I think there’s more nuance here. In my experience, you need full-spectrum messaging to resonate.

You need the concrete, nitty-gritty capabilities and features, big, aspirational benefits and outcomes—and everything in between.

In B2B, we communicate with multiple people in the sales process—multiple ‘levels’ of people who care about different things. Some care more about outcomes. Others care more about how they’ll incorporate the product into their workflow.

In T2D3, we simplify this into three general personas:

• P1: the User

• P2: the Supervisor

• P3: the Executive

Each group cares about different things, and you need to communicate value to each.

One of the best techniques we’ve found to create messaging that spans the entire spectrum is the How/Why Ladder.

The idea is simple:

• Ask “why?” to step up on the “ladder” of your value proposition.

• Ask “how?” to step down.

First, choose a seed message to start with. For example, if you’re Figma:

“Our tool makes product design and development processes more efficient.”

Ask, "Why is that important?" to go up in abstraction. Going up the ladder helps you articulate the benefits or contextual frame of the issue your product solves. The result is messaging that usually lands with teams or decision-makers—P2 and P3 in our personas framework.

Ask, "How does it work?" to go down in abstraction. Going down the ladder helps you clarify your capabilities, features, and use cases. This is often most useful for users—P1 in our personas framework.

Keep asking How and Why to get different levels of specificity to resonate with various personas. And use different seed messages to branch out into different solution areas.

Something to watch out for: if you get too high on the ladder, you'll almost always land at "save time" or "save money." If you find yourself there, you've gone too far.

"Save time" and "Save money" are weak value propositions—they’re undifferentiated. Ultimately, most B2B products are designed to save time or money. The special stuff comes a layer or two down from that—how you help them save time or money.

One of your biggest opportunities is to build messaging that covers the complete spectrum of your buyer group's interest.