Another tremendous sales closing aid is customer testimonials. What is a testimonial? It is a written statement from an existing customer that explains how you, your offering, and/or your company delivered value to that customer’s business. These statements may be as brief as a single sentence, or they may be as lengthy as a multi-page case study.
Testimonials may be general statements of satisfaction, or they may be very explicit, step-by-step descriptions of how value was provided. The best testimonials include quantified business impacts (i.e., dollar values or percentages and time frames). Note that there is a difference between a quantified impact that is developed during Business Problem Qualification and a quantified impact that is documented in a Testimonial. The “Qualification” impact is a forecast or an estimate of expected results, while the “Testimonial” impact consists of actual results that have been delivered to the customer.
Helping customers calculate and document quantified business impacts has value beyond possible use in testimonials. This practice can also help you keep customers. How? Remember, circumstances change. Businesses see upturns and downturns in revenues and profits. Companies can be acquired by other companies, which can lead to significant changes in management teams. Individuals get promoted, leave companies to pursue other opportunities, and have health problems. All of these circumstances can impact whether your customers continue buying from you, and how much they buy from you.
What would happen to your sales volume if a key customer’s business “got soft”, or if their company was acquired by another company, or if your most vocal champion was reassigned or left to pursue another opportunity? If you have not helped this customer document quantified business impacts, the result may be a sudden drop in your sales. Why? Because the first things that get cut during business downturns or management changes are those things that management does not understand.
If your customers have thorough documentation on hand that clearly explains the quantified business impact of your offerings, the risk of a sudden drop in your sales volume is dramatically reduced. If there are any “why are we buying this?” questions, you can review the quantified business impact documents with them. Once they see how your offerings generate value, they will usually focus their cost-cutting attention elsewhere.
How does a salesperson acquire testimonials? They ask for them! Just like with referrals, the best time to ask for testimonials is when customers are feeling happy and satisfied. If a customer makes a positive statement that you feel would make a good testimonial, ask them if they would be willing to put their thoughts into writing. If they hesitate because of the amount of time it would take, volunteer to write the testimonial for them. Put their key statements into an electronic document and send it to the customer. Upon receipt, all they will need to do is edit the document, print it on their company’s letterhead, sign it, and deliver it back to you. If your customer is truly satisfied, they will be willing to invest this minimal amount of effort on your behalf.
While salespeople should make every effort to secure testimonials from their own customers, they can also benefit by leveraging testimonials that have been secured by other salespeople. Companies can facilitate this practice by investing the time and resources required to build a centralized testimonial repository. The testimonials contained in this repository should be coded to enable rapid sorting by industry, business problem, offering, etc. This makes it easy for salespeople to quickly find testimonials that are pertinent to specific prospect circumstances. It is also useful to document whether customers are willing to speak to potential prospects. If the answer is “yes”, any requests for such conversations should be routed through the salesperson who owns the customer relationship.
The quality of a centralized testimonial repository will be in direct correlation to the amount of effort and resources that a company invests in creating and maintaining it. If a company wants to make testimonial selling a key pillar of its sales culture, management should consider creating a “SWAT team” to help salespeople and customers identify and document quantified business impacts. Plus, one or more individuals could be assigned the responsibility of occasionally purging “aged” testimonials. (Ideally, all of the testimonials in the repository should be less than two years old.) Finally, companies should take steps to ensure that testimonials are still valid. In other words, they should ensure that customer satisfaction phone calls or written surveys are completed on a regular (quarterly or semi-annual) basis. This will minimize the chances of salespeople being embarrassed by using testimonials from companies that are presently unhappy or are no longer customers.