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 How to ...
 Â(for new clients)
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 How to ...
 Â(for new clients)
How to ...
(for existing clients)
How to ...
(for existing clients)
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... translate features into client benefits.
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| A benefit is the value that a client derives from a differentiating feature of your firm. Unless your feature is “valued” by the client, it’s as worthless to you as it is to him or her, no matter how hard it was to acquire or satisfying it is for you to have.  Take the gps in your car. A few people (some, but not many) will pay for this feature because it’s new and expensive (this is called conspicuous consumption). For most people, however, the goal is not having another technogadget, the goal is never getting lost, never wasting time, never making unsafe “U” turns, etc. The value is in the benefit, not the feature, and the value is what clients are willing to pay for.  Of course, it takes a feature to produce a benefit – clients don’t pay for serendipity – so both features and benefits are included in an interview. Here are some examples:
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| Feature: Members of your staff have deep expertise with very narrow
problems like historic structure seismic retrofits and with cutting
edge solutions like earthquake actuated automatic gas shut-off devices.
Benefit: The definition of a client is someone willing to pay for the solution to a problem. If your prospect faces a problem like one you have solved, in comparable circumstances, then your expertise has great value. But the problem must be challenging and the expertise must be unique, or at least rare. If either one is common, then your feature doesn’t qualify as differentiating and cannot be linked to a benefit – a client gets “common” value from every vendor, and bids “common” work purely on price.
Feature: You have offices in Chicago, Honolulu, New Delhi and Madrid. Under the right circumstances, you can literally be working on a job continuously, with overlap for hand-off between the offices.
Benefit: You can meet deadlines that the typical 10 hour business hours shop can’t match. This is an extreme strategy that would require outstanding management, but if you could make it work, it would be a clear and compelling reason to select you for jobs with short fuses and can’t-fail deadlines.
Feature: Members of your staff hold new certifications like LEED, and employ new technologies like BIM (building information modeling) or IPD (integrated project delivery).
Benefit: Clients want the results of what you do, but how you do it can be important, too. The same schematic design by a qualified LEED designer can satisfy a client’s internal checkpoint for quality or “social corporate responsibility” that the same schematic by an un-certified designer will fail. If a client has ancillary criteria, credentials alone can make the difference even when the product is comparable.
With an understanding of your features and their corresponding client benefits, you can move to the next step, developing illustrations.
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... translate features into client benefits.
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| A benefit is the value that a client derives from a differentiating feature of your firm. Unless your feature is “valued” by the client, it’s as worthless to you as it is to him or her, no matter how hard it was to acquire or satisfying it is for you to have.  Take the gps in your car. A few people (some, but not many) will pay for this feature because it’s new and expensive (this is called conspicuous consumption). For most people, however, the goal is not having another technogadget, the goal is never getting lost, never wasting time, never making unsafe “U” turns, etc. The value is in the benefit, not the feature, and the value is what clients are willing to pay for.  Of course, it takes a feature to produce a benefit – clients don’t pay for serendipity – so both features and benefits are included in an interview. Here are some examples:
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|
| Feature: Members of your staff have deep expertise with very narrow
problems like historic structure seismic retrofits and with cutting
edge solutions like earthquake actuated automatic gas shut-off devices.
Benefit: The definition of a client is someone willing to pay for the solution to a problem. If your prospect faces a problem like one you have solved, in comparable circumstances, then your expertise has great value. But the problem must be challenging and the expertise must be unique, or at least rare. If either one is common, then your feature doesn’t qualify as differentiating and cannot be linked to a benefit – a client gets “common” value from every vendor, and bids “common” work purely on price.
Feature: You have offices in Chicago, Honolulu, New Delhi and Madrid. Under the right circumstances, you can literally be working on a job continuously, with overlap for hand-off between the offices.
Benefit: You can meet deadlines that the typical 10 hour business hours shop can’t match. This is an extreme strategy that would require outstanding management, but if you could make it work, it would be a clear and compelling reason to select you for jobs with short fuses and can’t-fail deadlines.
Feature: Members of your staff hold new certifications like LEED, and employ new technologies like BIM (building information modeling) or IPD (integrated project delivery).
Benefit: Clients want the results of what you do, but how you do it can be important, too. The same schematic design by a qualified LEED designer can satisfy a client’s internal checkpoint for quality or “social corporate responsibility” that the same schematic by an un-certified designer will fail. If a client has ancillary criteria, credentials alone can make the difference even when the product is comparable.
With an understanding of your features and their corresponding client benefits, you can move to the next step, developing illustrations.
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