Weekly Success Tip

Testimonials...

In so called tough economic times, you need every advantage you can get.

One of the cheapest and most powerful ways to increase your sales and make all your marketing more effective is to use testimonials.

The highest form of marketing for me, is not what you say about your product or service, but what your customers say.

Let’s face it, today the average consumer is fairly skeptical to say the least and has been burned once or twice as well, so no doubt they have a right to be skeptical.

With this in mind, one of the most powerful ways to connect with your prospective customer is through your happy clients. Reading, seeing or hearing what your happy customers have to say about you is disarmingly powerful. After all, your prospect really wants to know if your product or service can do what you say it can do, so why not prove it to them?

Your prospective customer also wants to know that you will be there to support them should something go wrong.

And by far the easiest way to achieve this is to show them dozens and dozens of letters, cards, videos or audios of very happy customers.

To achieve this you need to approach some of your current or past happy customers and ask them about their experience of using your product or service. Now, if you just go up and ask for a ‘testimonial’, you might get some pretty strange looks. Many of them won’t understand what you mean.

So, one of the best ways is to question it out of them. What do I mean by that? Well, you might choose to use questions like:

• Tell me about your experience with our company?
• What benefits did you experience from our service?
• What worked well for you? etc…

I'm sure you get the picture. Then when they respond, you simply ask them if they would mind if you jotted that down, get them to approve it and then ask their permission to use it in your future marketing.

One very powerful example of this I am aware of is a car sales man in the U.S. He has photos of all his happy customers and himself, in front of their new cars. More importantly, he has two, three and four or more photos with them, with each new car they have purchased from him over time.

Of course he has these plastered all over his walls so that when a new customer comes in they are told he is busy and asked to wait in his office. While they are waiting they see all of these photos, all of these happy customers and they can’t quite believe their eyes as they realise these people keep coming back and back again to this one guy. You can see their changes in fashion, families and life reflected in their photos as they keep coming back to purchase from this gentleman.

I'm sure you can see the power of this technique as it builds instant trust and also helps to alleviate any price resistance as people know they will be looked after for many years to come.

Remember, when you say it, they doubt you. When your clients say it, it’s true

Action Step:

Your action step this week is to first observe all the places you can see this principle being used in action. Second is to go out and collect two testimonials for your product or service from happy customers. Now, if you’re an employee you can certainly do this on behalf of your company, with their permission.