How To Get Glowing Testimonials

Photo by Ville Miettinen

You and I both know the crucial role trust plays in any sort of commercial transactions. And trust, as you might have known, is not easy easy to earn.

Large corporations spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build trust with their buyers. But you don’t need to do that. As a small business owner (or maybe you’re just starting out), testimonials from a dozen or so of your clients might be more than enough.

But Not All Testimonials Are The Same

Some testimonials does nothing that taking up space. Some testimonials gives good vibe and nothing else. Some testimonials persuades. What you want are glowing testimonials that put you into the savior pedestal.

What’s the difference?

Well, general testimonials like, “You Rock!” is sure as hell useless. It doesn’t give a reason why “you rock”. It didn’t doesn’t any sort of details and there are certainly no progression in it.

You see, testimonials are like stories. You have to have the basic elements of a good story to make a good testimonials. There are five basic elements to a story and they are:

1. The bad guy
2. The good guy
3. The benefactor
4. Progression
5. Moral of the story

Easy enough right? Let’s dive into a little more details here.

If there is a bad guy, name him. If not, then the bad guy is the problem. What sort of problems were your customers having before they came looking for you? What have they tried before they come to you and failed?

The good guy would be you. Your NAME has to come up in the testimonial.

The benefactor is the customer giving the testimonial.  I think this is straightforward enough so I’m going to skip this one.

Progression means there’s got be details on how your customer faced a problem. How he look for alternatives to no avail. How they look for another solution. How they found you. How you helped them with their problem. And lastly, how they feel after the solution.

The moral of the story for testimonials will always be “If you have this problem, I can help you solve it.”

If you followed the 5 basic elements of a story, your testimonials would all be glowing.

The Problem With Acquiring Glowing Testimonials

But most of us aren’t exactly story tellers. If you go up to your customers and ask for a testimonial (IF you even ask for testimonials…), the testimonials you would get from a large majority of them would be… well, let’s just say you can improve on them.

You have to give them a helping hand in providing testimonials.

Use questions to guide their answers then combine all those answers to make your testimonials. It’s something like an interview.

And if you really deliver value on the things you sell, your customers would be delighted to get an interview from you. See, it’s not that difficult to get a glowing testimonial right?

P.S. I’m going to explore the topic of acquiring testimonials for newbies later next week. Subscribe to my feed below if you don’t want to miss them!