Access IT Consulting

Release The Power of Past Client Feedback

Written by bmlengel on January 27th, 2010

Every business has an easy way to persuade customers of the value of their services - testimonials from past customers.  With around 8-10 testimonials, which can be written, audio or even video, you are in a position to get started.  This is an easy way to improve your sales and conversion rates.  The secret to using testimonials effectively is to use them everywhere.  Let’s get into that here…

We all know the power of having a product or service recommended by friends and relatives - it makes us far more likely to buy, but why?  Professor Robert Cialdini spent many years researching the way that sales people influence us to buy from them, writing a book about it that’s become a top seller amongst savvy marketers.  In this book, Cialdini explains how he went undercover at car dealerships and other pressure-sales environments to understand the techniques used to close sales.

From his research, he discovered that all of the different tactics could be condensed into just 6 broad strategies for persuasion.  It’s worth reading the book just to prepare yourself for the next visit to a car dealership!  When you demonstrate the value of your products to real people, using testimonials, you are employing one of these core influence strategies.  Here are some examples of testimonials by customers for business coaching.  One’s from a member of the Chris Cardell marketing club.  There are other examples too on a business coaching site.

What then, does a typical testimonial look like?  The typical testimonial you’ll read goes something like this, “Bill’s bakery is the best in town, we love them.”  This statement has no substance to it, it’s very vague and so doesn’t give you confidence in anything in particular.   One difficulty with this sort of sweeping statement is that your customers may think you’ve paid your customer to say it, or even written it for yourself!

To be effective at persuading your a new customer to buy, you need testimonials that quote specific aspects of your service and why they love it..  Going back to our example testimonial, “We all know about Blogg’s reputation for baking the best tasting bread in town.  In the many years we have been trading, Bill has always delivered on time.  While they may charge slightly more, they are so dependable in terms of quality and extra deliveries that we would never go elsewhere.  From the perspective of a catering company, we could not expect more.”

It’s the details that make the second testimonial so much more powerful than the first.  Even a cursory glance at the second testimonial will show several factors that will really matter to a commercial bakery customer.  Using a strong testimonial like this can really help you win new customers..  When you combine this with another 5-8 similar ones, you get the basis of a very powerful marketing and sales tool.

So how do you get testimonials to use in your marketing?  It’s starts with asking them!  You’ll receive very few testimonials if you fail to ask for them.  Some of your customers might be a bit tight for time and ask you to write it for them.  Most just use whatever you write as a prompt to remind them about what you value, and they’ll write it in their own words and almost certainly be a lot more generous in their praise of your services than you were. 

Once you’ve got your testimonials, use them liberally in everything you do for marketing.  Adverts can be embellished with a few customer comments, even put them on your letterhead and business cards, put them on your internet site, alongside the products or services they’re describing.

Now you’ve got the strategy, I recommend you take action and go do something with it!

Tags: chris cardell, marketing, sales, testimonials