Testimonials are powerful.

Well, they can be, but the truth is that for many companies, they’re flat, vague and meaningless and add little value.

No one really wants to hear the nice things you have to say about your business. Of course you’ll say great things about your company. Why wouldn’t you? But you have no credibility.

That’s where your customers come in. They have lots of credibility. They can say much more in far fewer words than you ever can.

Why be average?

Too many testimonials lack specific results. Others hide the identity of the speaker. None of these motivate a buyer.

Build powerful testimonials

Many companies approach testimonials all wrong. They ask their customer if they would please provide a few sentences on what it was like to work with them.

The customer comes back with something bland like, “This Company provides an excellent service. It has helped us in our business.”

That’s a plain vanilla testimonial that’s forgotten as soon as it’s read.

It’s not the powerful, testosterone-charged variety that will make an impact and encourage people to buy.

You need to direct your customers. Otherwise, they’ll come back with bland generalisations that miss the mark. It’s not their fault. How do they know what you’d like them to say if you don’t tell ‘em?

Ask them to focus on an aspect where you really excelled, such as delivery, customer service, innovation or choice, say. Ask them to include numbers. . .

ROI matters most!

The best testimonials are quantifiable. They speak to the return on investment of working with you. How much more money did they make or save because of your business? How did you help them grow? Get hard numbers in you testimonials whenever and wherever possible. It makes a big difference.

These are what motivate other buyers.

Confront objections head-on

What are your prospects’ apprehensions about working with you? Maybe it’s your relative high price or your newness to an industry. Use your testimonials to confront and trump those objections.

This is where testimonials can be really persuasive.

Resist the urge to edit

Testimonials are most effective when they’re delivered the way people talk. I’ve battled with too many internal over-eager grammar police on this one. You know the types, the people whose contribution to the organization comes from their superior knowledge of split infinitives, correct use of apostrophes and verb forms. BO*@***S.!

They get all worked up over the placement of the comma in the testimonial. And the stupid customer said “that” when they really should have said “who.” Please. Unless the wording makes your customer look illiterate, leave it alone. People don’t always use pristine English. People talk like they talk. Let them! It gives the testimonial much more credibility.

Make it visual

When possible, include the speaker’s photo. For the most impact, of course  a video testimonial is best. . Have your customer discuss how you’ve helped them be successful. Encourage specifics. Edit it so it puts you and your customer in the best light. Video testimonials are increasingly affordable—and incredibly high impact.

Be on the lookout

Your sales and accounts people should identify the best sources for testimonials. They’re the ones on the front lines talking with customers. When customers praise your work, ask them to put it in writing—with a little guidance of course. (You have been reading, haven’t you?)

Always be on the lookout for powerful, meaningful testimonials.

The kind that can and will grow your business. 

“If you don’t lose ‘em, you don’t have the replace ‘em” is a maxim that’s served me well in business over the last few years.

It’s something that we pay quite a bit of attention to within N5 and whilst it’s never possible to retain every single customer it is feasible, in most businesses, to keep a whole lot more coming back much more often, and there is a single key to achieving this …

KEEP IN TOUCH.

You see, it’s not your customers’ job to remember to come back and do business with you. It’s your job to remind them.

It is commercially criminal the way that so many businesses in the UK operate.

Business owners are so quick to blame the government and the recession and the economy and the competition for downturns in their sales, yet the percentage of businesses, particularly small and medium sized businesses that keep in regular touch with their customers and provide those people with solid tangible reasons to come back and do business with them is absolutely tiny.

I was running a large training session a couple of weeks ago and I asked the group there how many of them had a database of their customers. About a quarter of the room raised their hands, “Not bad …” I said. “… now how many of you with a database use it to regularly communicate with your customers?” Almost all the hands in the room went down. One guy however remained, arm aloft. “I use my database very regularly” he says, so I asked him what he did “Every year I send them a Christmas card” he said, proudly.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sending your customers a Christmas card is, in fact, not the smartest thing you can do (everyone sends Christmas cards so your message never gets through, you’re just part of the pack, you don’t stand out and you’re just kidding yourself if you think that it in some way strengthens your relationship with your customers, but that’s another story for another day).

It’s so easy to keep in contact with your customers and give them reasons to come back and see you – whatever business you are in.

It doesn’t have to be fancy newsletters that go out every week or month (although a regular newsletter sent in the post, and done properly, is probably the single most useful thing you can do to build a relationship with your customers). But dropping things into their inbox or through their letterbox reminding them that you are there and giving them a reason to come back and visit you with an offer of some kind can ensure that your business really bucks the trend and grows sales and revenue and profits whatever the economy is doing.

We see it month in, month out with the restaurants that use our Explosive Marketing service.

This is a completely “done-for-you” service where we maintain that contact with customers on behalf of the restaurants and it works like a dream. You see, when you’re planning to go out for a meal this weekend with some friends or perhaps just with your wife or husband or partner, where are you going to go? We all have a relatively small number of restaurants that we would default to and the truth is it only takes a little nudge from one of them to ensure that we go there this weekend as opposed to somewhere else. These restaurants are nudging their customers on a regular basis and they’re reaping the benefits at a result – because they are keeping in contact with their customers. They’re reminding them that they are there and business is booming as a result.

Funny that…

You don’t need to commission Cambridge University’s top research team to work out the fundamental difference between super successful millionaire businesspeople and the plodding wannabes that talk a good game but whose businesses in truth never amount to much more than a bean. All you’ve got to do is look at how much they get done.

It’s my belief that the single thing that separates people who have success in business from those who don’t is implementation.

• Making things happen.
• Doing it.
• Getting it crossed off the list.
• Delivering.

At the end of the day, the people with successful businesses have found a way to do all these things. They make things happen, they deliver. For them, it is an anathema to dream and plan but not to do. Once we make our minds up that something is worthwhile doing and that we ought to do it – we get it done. It’s this ability to execute and implement that I reckon is responsible for ninety percent of all my wealth. It could be more than ninety percent!

I had a really interesting email last week from a gentleman who had just read about the tremendous success of thebestof business. (thebestof is my UK franchise business that we launched in the summer of 2005 and which has gone on to become the fastest growing UK franchise ever with many thousands of UK businesses paying for membership.) The email said that back in 2003 he had an idea for a website that would do exactly what thebestof has gone on and done. He had the idea. But he didn’t implement.

It’s definitely easier to get an edge in business based on your ability to deliver and make things happen rather than, for example, to find a great new idea or spot the next big thing. The ideas and concepts are already out there and just implementing them effectively will be enough in many cases to skyrocket your business.

I had a franchisee last week, who’d lost a customer. I asked what his Tracking Number stats were for that customer and my franchisee told me that he hadn’t yet put the tracking numbers on that customer’s account. He’s had six months to do this but he ‘never got round to it.’ Oh he had lots of reasons why he hadn’t got it done. How busy he’d been, his wife had been ill, the snow had caused problems but I mean…six months to fail to complete a 10 minute task.

Result, the customer leaves and he has no means of defence to try and keep them.

If only he’d been swifter to implement …

Millionaires in waiting please take note.

It was my mum’s birthday last week.  She was seventy.

Three months ago, my sister and I had a meeting to decide what we should do to celebrate this special day.  Long story short, we decided that the right present for my mum would be to make a photo book of her life.  We figured she’d really appreciate this and if we did a proper job it would become a real family heirloom.  We divided out the jobs – my sister’s role was to find all the pictures, so she burgled my parents’ house when they were away one weekend (!), scavenged through the loft and spoke with all my mum’s family and friends to collect as many photos, especially old photos, as she could.

My job was to get the pictures scanned and then laid out properly in one of these great printed photo books that have become available over the last couple of years (my personal favourite is Bobbooks – www.bobbooks.com – they really are fantastic).

However, before I could put the photos into the software, I had to get them scanned and the situation was made doubly difficult because half the pictures that my sister was able to find were slides (remember them?) from the 1960s and 70s

I did a search online and found three or four companies actively promoting their services at scanning images like this, however, a little bit more research showed me that scanning slides was a real specialism and they have to be done at particularly high resolution if you’re going to be able to blow the pictures up to any kind of sensible size.  The number of companies able to scan slides at sufficient resolution was now down to only two that I could find online.

I called the first one and I got no reply (by the way why would you spend all that money marketing yourself online and then not answer the phone?) when I called the second guy, he picked up and what became clear was that he was in fact a one-man-band operating from his house in Greater Manchester.

I asked him how much it would cost to scan three hundred images, including a hundred and fifty slides, all at high resolution and get them back to me on a DVD.  Time was of the essence because I had to allow time for the printing of the book and my mum’s birthday was now looming large on the calendar.

I was dumbstruck when he told me it would cost £180 and that this would include individual touching up of the images in Photoshop prior to the DVD being sent to me.

Was this guy for real?

Here is a man, in business, who has no idea whatsoever of the value of the service he is providing.

His pricing is based entirely on some flawed thinking around what his time is worth.  He is basically putting his time out there at something like ninety pounds a day, working from home, and he feels that’s a reasonable return.  He is, I’m afraid, completely stupid and destined to always be poor.

Think about this for a moment.  What my sister and I are compiling here is, frankly, priceless to our family.  It’s an heirloom, something of immense value and great posterity and it is impossible for us to put it together without this guy’s help.

If he’d told me the cost was £5000 I would have paid it without blinking.

What I had in mind was my mum’s face on that Sunday morning when we gave her the book.  I really wanted to make this happen and the value to me of the service he was providing far, far outweighed the cost of his time.

It taught me a really valuable lesson.

You see, too many people in business base their pricing on cost.

They look at what the cost is of the goods or service they are providing and then add some margin on top for their profit.  The only thing you can guarantee if you adopt this approach is that you will never ever be wealthy.  Price is all about the value to the customer.

In truth, what this guy should have done is offered me three prices, he could have had a basic price where he scanned the pictures and sent them back to me (without any Photoshop touching up for instance), and he could easily have priced that at several hundred pounds – he’s one of only two in the country that I could easily find online, don’t forget, who could do these slides at the resolution required and the job was reasonably time critical so I couldn’t afford to wait three months for this to happen.

He could then have had a middle type service where I got the Photoshop facility and that might have cost £1500 or £2000 say, and then, if he’d offered me his platinum royal service or something similar whereby he came and collected the images, delivered them back to me, maybe even ordered them chronologically or did something around the naming of the files, there are other parts of value he could have added that wouldn’t have taken him much time or cost him much money but which would have been worth a great deal to me. He could easily charge £5000 for that sort of service and some people would pay it..me for one!

You see, here’s the thing, in pretty much any market, there’s a group of your customer base, around 20%, in my experience, who will willingly pay more for what you do if you give them the opportunity to do so. Just give them the choice and some will pay the higher price because they appreciate the perceived higher value.

When we introduced My Little Wrapper a couple of years ago we only had one product.  After three months, we introduced a “Professional” pack which gave people quite a bit more stuff.  It added about £300 to the cost (to us) of the product, but we added £1000 to the price so every time we sold a professional pack our margin was increased by £700.  Consistently, over two years, 22% of customers buy that Professional Pack – and that’s an awful lot of £700 I can tell you. (Just having that higher price option available has been worth well over £60,000 PROFIT to my business in two years)

So what my mother’s 70^th birthday taught me about business is that there are still too many businesspeople in the UK who don’t understand pricing and its importance in building a successful business.

Please don’t be a business buffoon like my photo scanning guy – get smart, put your prices up.