Certainly benefits and features are the fuel of any sales or marketing effort. But I'd argue that the fire -- the emotional wallop that elicits response -- is usually in the story.
Sometimes it's a big story: A young radio enthusiast with Morse code skills is toying with his set late one evening when he hears something unusual -- an urgent distress signal from a ship in the north Atlantic. The ship turns out to be the Titanic; the enthusiast is David Sarnoff, who goes on to found RCA.
Sometimes it's a little story: I recently sent out a self-promotional direct mail letter that led with the following headline -- "The client asked for 500 qualified leads. They got 1,200." The first two paragraphs sketched out the rest of the story, and the letter became one of the must successful business-generators I've ever released.
The scale of the story isn't what's important. What's important is that your product, your service, your business, your organization, your brand -- or just plain you -- has an element of drama, an emotional fire. In short, a story.
What's your story?