Features Are Sub-Purchased

Let’s explore this idea that adding features helps you sell a product.

Pretend for a minute that you’re a buyer. You’re trying to move away from a situation you dislike, and you’re hoping in some way to land way over there, where you have this bigger aspiration. You’re open to making a purchase, to move away from a ‘from’, and toward a ‘to’.

You fall upon a new tool, and it looks promising. You come back in a week, after you hit your point of “enough is enough”, because you remembered: “There was this tool, maybe I can give it a shot.”

Two things could happen here.

You get to the page, and you hesitate: “Whoa, there are way too many features. I don’t want to become an expert in all of these things.”

Or you get to the page, and you’re feeling inspired: “Whoa, they understand my pain. I can get started right away. Oh, there are also these other things I can do with it. Maybe those are going to be useful later on. No need to use them right now if I don’t need to.”

The second experience came from a successful sales page, describing just enough about the features so that the buyer could make a confident decision for the progress they want to make. Away from the ‘from’, toward the ‘to’.

Later, maybe they’ll take a new decision, a decision to “purchase” an extra feature. “Purchase” here is a loose term, they might not need to pay extra, but they’ll need to exert effort to change their ways. They’ll pay in attention, in deliberation, in decisional effort.

Put another way, pretend for a minute you’re using the product, and you have a new “enough is enough”, a different struggle than the initial one, and the right feature is right there, where you expected it to be. It will come as good news, discovered as if for the first time. Yes, this, now. “Purchased.”

Features are sub-purchased in a different context than the original purchase. Features are a bit of a “maybe later” sub-product to purchase later.
Features are a bit of a selling point, but not too much.

That’s how features can help people make progress.