A very counter-productive buzzword talk has entered through corporate and marketing communications. As an example, read the following sentence:
“XYZ enables customers to improve user service levels, reduce down time, and make more efficient use of IT resources while still increasing the performance, scalability, and security of their business”
Sounds familiar? Are you knowing actually more about XYZ now? I guess not. This kind of blabla violates the most important rule in presenting and selling: Never tell a feature without benefit, allways tell the benefit of a feature. The sentence above is all about benefit, but we have no clue about the “why” (-> feature). Therefore the reader or listener will not believe. Not until we said something about the “why”.
One can even make a slide out of the mentioned sentence. Sadly, 9 out of 10 slides are exactly like this:
It is not sufficient to excuse such a slide with “I will tell about the why during the presentation”. If at all, the slideshow must contain both. Even better would be a catchy picture, no text, but a great story that combines feature and benefit!
