​Testimonials – How to get them and how to use them effectively.

The power of testimonials - I used to own a high end outbound B2B call center, we would routinely call C-level executives (including the CEO) of Fortune 1,000 companies. This was not only an expensive service to purchase but it was critical that it was done well. You can't just call the CEO and start reading a script if you want happy clients and if you sound like you are reading a script you won’t get past their personal assistant and secretaries in the first place. There was a lot of money on the line; the clients were selling services with a six and seven figure ticket size.
 
The challenge in making sales was I was always competing against a half dozen other companies and inevitably I was the most expensive, usually twice as expensive as the cheapest.
 
I did a lot of things to show the prospects why they should pay more; I sent them the obligatory three references, I explained how we recruited (It was not unusual to test and/or interview 100 applicants to hire one employee.) how we wrote the scripts, how we interacted with the secretaries and personal assistants to reach the decision makers, how we optimized the timing of the calls by time and day of the week and so on. And it worked, I won more than my fair share of the business despite being the most expensive option and I had a lot of repeat business.
 
But the real game changer was when I started adding five testimonials to my email signature file, and when the prospects asked for three references, I sent them ten references and each reference included the testimonial from that reference. Often as not, they wouldn't call more than one reference if they even called any of them because they already knew what the person was going to say.
 
Then I added the testimonials to the last page of the proposals.
 
Then I added a testimonial to the bottom of each page of the proposals.
 
My sales percentage doubled at that point with little additional effort.
 
Adding testimonials to your website, your proposals, and even your email signature file will result in a nearly effortless increase in sales.
 
How to get testimonials – Talk to your customers.  Ask if they are happy.  When they aren’t, try to fix it if you can.  If you cannot fix it, try to figure out what the situation is that prevented them from being happy so you can exclude those people from your sales pipeline in the future.  When they are happy, ask if you can quote them on that.  (They all say yes)  You may or may not want to use their name in the testimonial but always ask first, it’s the polite thing to do.

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