Plain Speak: A humble sandwich for public relations pitches

There's an awful lot of twaddle talked about the oldest profession. I think we all know what profession I mean. Having 'grown up' in a highly competitive technology media sales environment, as both and editor and a publisher, my contention has always been that, in fact, the oldest profession is sales, because you have to sell something before people buy it.

Sales is about presentation of the salient facts to the right buyer: the decision maker. It's about highlighting those facts that match the needs of the buyer, about finding out what people may want and then matching your product to that need. The recipe for successful sales doesn't start until you've got the key ingredient, so first, find your buyer.

And then all you need to do is listen to what that buyer needs and then communicate your proposition, clearly and crisply. No decent salesman hits the road without knowing what the product's unique selling points, or USPs, are. And, of course, all salesmen define 'pitches' for those products. A good pitch tells people what's on offer, why it's amazing and why people should buy it.

If we can accept that this a reasonable definition of sales, then it's not a huge leap of faith to draw a parallel with public relations. This is particularly true when we look at product PR. And yet there's often a broad level of resistance to mixing the lordly discipline of public relations with that nasty, messy business of selling that often blinds marketers to the very fundamentals of communicating crisply with a defined target audience.

This is wrong. Great product PR informs customers, drives sales, drives opportunities for the sales team to convert leads into money and helps to build your market share by driving preference in a market for your product offering. And the skills that are taught to sales teams are important to the PR process, too.

Take the business of defining a 'core proposition' as an example. The process that is drilled into the team at Spot On PR during training sessions is based on nothing more or less than the good old-fashioned fact, feature, benefit sandwich. This is pure-play sales training, but it is the most powerful way to reach a cogent, crisp and easily understood definition of what a given product is and does. It helps us to answer the most important question that buyers everywhere have for sellers: 'So what does that do for me?'

The fact of the matter is that people are stupid (as Boy George once so memorably told us). We don't think enough. We don't like to make those cognitive leaps of faith that turn a statement of fact into a clear understanding of benefit.

We like people to do it for us. It's not enough to say that product X is the most powerful widget translator in its class, because that statement of fact leaves us asking 'so what?' We need to reach a more customer-focused way of communicating that benefit. Enter the sandwich.

The fact, feature, benefit sandwich is a way of presenting a fact so that people can easily understand its relevance to them. All you have to do is fill in the variables with your product messages.

And, hey presto, you have a nice clear product proposition to communicate. The algebra goes like this: 'X is Y because of Z which means that you can ABC'. Try it. "The Mercedes is the leading luxury sedan because of its history of superb engineering which means that you enjoy comfort, luxury and impeccable reliability." Neat, huh?

The fact must be based on a feature, what we call in PR a 'proof point'. Every product feature supports a fact. Feature: the desk is finished in black ash. Fact: it blends into your office environment. And then the important part is those three words, which means that. We know there's a feature, we need to know what it means to us, what it makes us. And so the benefit tells us just that. What's on offer from our point of view. Why we should buy it.

Get this right and you've got the philosopher's stone. The fact, feature, benefit sandwich helps to simplify complex things, to render them down and get rid of the waffle and hype. It helps us to simply communicate a clear benefit, based on fact, to the buyer.

It's a important tool for creating clear, crisp messages based around a product's advantages for potential buyers. And it's a pure sales tool that is used highly effectively in defining the messages that public relations campaigns will carry to your audience.

The author is group account director at Spot On Public Relations, the communications firm focused on technology-driven organisations