Impact Pricing Blogcast: Buyers Don't Buy Features
Mar 6, 2026
A lively take on why listing features fails to convince buyers. It explores how buyers hear fragments and must infer outcomes. It explains that buyers judge the trade, not the build, and why adding features or benefits often does not fix hesitation. It warns that feature-focused thinking spreads across a company and that failing to connect dots makes price the scapegoat.
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Episode notes
Buyers Trade Money For Value Not Features
- Buyers trade money for value, not features.
- Mark Stiving explains features describe what a product does while value explains why a buyer would give up money, highlighting the curse of knowledge gap between seller and buyer.
The Curse Of Knowledge Distorts Product Communication
- The curse of knowledge makes teams hear features as outcomes they already understand.
- Mark Stiving notes product teams living with the product cannot unsee the value, while buyers lack that context and hear only fragments.
Buyers Evaluate The Trade Not The Build
- Buyers judge whether the trade makes sense for them rather than evaluating your engineering.
- Mark Stiving emphasizes buyers implicitly ask if giving up money feels justified given their situation, so features only help if the buyer can see the trade.