I have written thousands of product and service descriptions for everything ranging from products that sell relatively poorly to best-sellers in their category.

"Sell the benefits and not the features" is page one/paragraph one of a large proportion of the copywriting and sales manuals out there. This is a good article, but it's also basic advice.

People are also not entirely self-motivated. They may want to improve the condition of their family or a friend -- or to prevent themselves from getting worse than they are already. Loss aversion can be a more powerful motivator than a promise of an uncertain gain. The typical sales pitch for life insurance is to ensure that your family is taken care of, because there is no real benefit to the individual in most cases.

Also, features play a different role in the sales process. Features are much more important when selling to experienced buyers.

This advice to focus on the benefits can be taken too far, as in the case of some people who make things like diet pills in which they bury all the relevant information that a consumer might use to compare the offering to other products. For example you can say that the product burns fat using 'thermogenic' ingredients without mentioning that it's just caffeine. That way you would only be able to sell the diet pills to people who didn't know much about supplements that are supposed to raise your metabolic rate.

People with experience in the market would see through the appeal and scroll right to the ingredients list, see that they could get the same thing for half the price, and bounce. The people who don't know better will overpay for your product and may eventually have complaints when they figure out that they've been duped.

Ideally you should use different appeals for different kinds of prospects at different stages in the buying process. Someone who routinely buys a certain component as part of their job is really only going to care about the features and the price. Making it really easy for that kind of buyer to see that your product beats the competing ones on both features and/or price is going to win his business. Someone who doesn't even know enough about the product to evaluate the features is going to need a benefits-first sales approach. They don't know enough to evaluate the features, so they're not as relevant.

For example, someone who doesn't know the difference between an SSD and an HDD will not understand why a laptop with the SSD acronym in the features makes it a higher performance machine worth a premium price. But if you explain to them that the machine boots in under 10 seconds thanks to the lightning-quick internal solid state drive (SSD) they may understand why it's worth a premium price compared to a laptop with an HDD.

Sales and marketing types give this advice to engineers and other technical people about emphasizing benefits over features because people with technical knowledge are already aware of the benefits and may have a tough time understanding that other people are not similarly aware of the benefits of a given technological solution. But when experts are selling known solutions to experts, making it easy to evaluate features and buy with no fluff added can be a huge benefit in and of itself.