It’s the benefits, stupid.

Doctors, scientists, computer geeks and engineers love to focus on features, piling them on products like balls on a Christmas tree. Unfortunately, there is a word for features that don’t provide benefits to customers-cost. Product features that are not benefits create engineering, manufacturing, logistical and inventory costs.

In addition, when potential customers or patients define value to a particular offering, they compute the tangible and intangible benefits less the tangible and intangible costs. Only then will they decide whether to buy your product or make a switch to yours from a competitive offering. Research indicates that you need to create at least 5x the value of other products in the mind of customers to make them switch to yours. What;s more, most buying behavior is predictably irrational.

Translating a feature into a unique benefit is the key to selling your product and requires an understanding of your customer or patient’s problem and the degree of pain associated with it as well as the analgesics they are using to cope. Product features describe how it looks or what it does. For example, a medical device can weigh a certain amount, can be a certain color, can spin at a certain rate or run on a certain power supply.

Benefits, on the other hand, describe what the features mean to the customer and how they think they will solve the problem they have. The benefit of a lighter weight instrument, for example, might reduce fatigue after prolonged use or make it easier to execute a certain maneuver during surgery.. Your unique selling proposition describes what your product does that no other competitor offers.

Here's how to design for success.

As part of your commercial feasibility analysis for a new product or service, do a features and unique benefits analysis after talking to potential customers. When you find the right key to the lock, the doors of opportunity will swing wide open.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@SOPEOfficial and Co-editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship