I did small and medium business development consulting for 15+ years.  Every contract began with me asking questions and listening to the owners and managers.

I often found that owners had very little analytical data on their customers.  They had no semblance of a CRM capability.  You can't manage what you can't measure.

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I also found that, most often, businesses marketed their services, what they did and what their qualifications were.  By contrast, most of their customers were looking for how can this company help me (the customer) with MY problem.

Remember, the guy that went into the hardware store really wanted to buy a hole, not a drill.

Sell your benefits to the customer from the customer's point of view rather than simply stating your services and qualifications and forcing the customer to figure out if what you offer is what he needs.

It is a very subtle difference but it makes a huge difference in the minds of your customers.

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Cost is critical to any decision.  If the customer does not clearly understand the costs or the benefits of a product or service, then they will most often not make the purchase.  

They must be able to clearly see that their gain after the purchase will be greater than the cost of the product or service they buy.  In order to do that, there has to be some intuitive metric to quantify that gain.  

Obviously, money is the most common metric but that can get a little esoteric and vague when talking about social, emotional, mental and/or psychological benefits. "Feeling Better" or "Improved Efficiency" is not a useful metric and often won't be enough to make someone purchase those services.

However, using money, as the universal metric, is the safest bet.  Slight variations can also be used, like referring to a specific percentage gain in aspects that directly relate to money (profits, productivity, sales, customer service, etc.).  That challenges you to put your benefits into the context of monetary gain or percentage improvement that can directly be related to monetary gain.  

In general, this will NOT work:

"Our employee attitude improvement program will increase your sales by 30%."

This is more likely to appeal to your customers:

"Studies show that if your employee enjoys his job, he will be 30% more productive.  An entire staff of more productive people has been shown to improve profits by up to 20%"

Bottom line - Sell what you do as if you are a buyer of what you do.