Customer testimonials help making selling your product easy. Potential prospects often want proof that your product works the way that you claim it does. Customer success stories help validate your product and your company in general. If a customer loves your product, you have an easy job on your hands. Many times, customers will come running to you with their stories. However, sometimes you have to do a little digging. Here are 5 tips for producing great customer testimonials:
- Talk to your sales team. Your sales team always is going to be able to identify star customers for you. I am betting every person on your sales team has a favorite customer who loves them back and often talks to prospects for them. Sales representatives are good to turn to because they are always thinking in numbers—your product helped their customer save $50,000 last year. Testimonials with hard numbers and concrete evidence of savings are always preferable to a testimonial that reads “Bob’s Company Saved a Ton Last Year.”
- Create a platform for your customers to discuss your product. Fleetmatics has Customer Connect, a forum where customers can submit success stories. These are great customer testimonials because you hardly have to do anything—they come to you! Just publicize the channel through your normal email practices. When your customer has a great experience with your product, they will want to tell you about it.
- Talk to customer service. Customers who have had recent issues resolved with customer service will have a good story to tell. I know this seems like it could backfire—share a story of a customer who had an issue with your product? Well, if your customer service team was able to fix the problem, they may have great feedback about your customer service. Every company wants to be able to brag about how awesome their customer service is, let them help you get an awesome testimonial to help you brag.
- Look for what you need. What kind of testimonial do you need? A case study about a small business in Illinois? Narrow your search down by region, industry, or company size. Then, send emails. Make sure you are personalizing the emails and you are clear in your purpose. You want to hear back from these people, so don’t make yourself sound like a robot! You should come off as an interested and lively employee who wants to hear good things about his/her company from a brand ambassador. Don’t offer incentives for case studies or testimonials. You don’t want it to get out that you are paying people to say good things about you.
- Don’t force a customer testimonial. You have enough customers that love you. Don’t make yourself sit through a painful phone conversation where you are asking dead end questions to an uninterested customer. You should be able to find a customer who is in love with your product or service enough that you don’t have to dig at the bottom of the barrel for a testimonial.
As far as timing goes, you should always be following up with customers at milestones, such as 1 month, 3 months and 6 months after purchase. The most important thing to remember about testimonials is that they should come naturally. If a customer genuinely enjoys your product or service, they should want to tell you how it helped them save money, increase productivity, etc. They should be excited about it! Do you have any tips for procuring customer testimonials?
This article was originally published by Outright.com.
Regan Billie is the Social Media Coordinator for Fleetmatics. Fleetmatics provides GPS fleet management for small and medium business in the US , Canada, UK and IRL. Follow Fleetmatics on Twitter or contact Regan at regan.billie@fleetmatics.com.
Published: June 7, 2013
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