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TESTIMONIALS:
How to use testimonials as a strategic competitive advantage in your sales and marketing

Part Three: Enhance Your Dream Testimonials With the Five Believability Enhancers

What you've been doing so far in this series has been collecting content for your testimonials. Now you're going to start refining the content using copywriting principles that I call Believability Enhancers. We'll review five of the best ones I know that relate to testimonials, but keep in mind that they apply to all kinds of copywriting and communication.

1. Voice: Endorsement or Testimonial?Many times I ask for a testimonial and what I get back is an endorsement. The difference is the voice that the writer uses.
   
   An endorsement is a recommendation from a famous person or an expert who suggests that your product or service is good for other people. A testimonial is a personal account of the individual experience of a real client.
   
   Let me give you two actual examples from my library of testimonials:
   
   Endorsement:
   
   "We all have to listen to Michel Neray, it's critical that we do. He knows how to help us perfect the way that we move from obscurity to visibility in our marketplace."
   
   Testimonial:
   
   "Using the Essential Message Telepathy Approach and your expert coaching in the Bull Pen, I got an 80% success rate in lining up meetings with "C" level executives! These people are busy and skeptical, and never in a million years did I expect to do that well. Thanks Michel!"
   
   Karole Sutherland
   Leadership Coach - Sutherland Group
   
   If you're like most people, you'll find the personal testimony from the actual client to be more compelling. If you know Chris Barrow, (who is in fact worth knowing) then you might be impressed by the endorsement. But if you don't know him, chances are it leaves you flat.
   
   Even if you do include celebrity and expert endorsements in your library of testimonials, they will be more believable (and powerful) if they are written from the standpoint of personal experience. Here's another example from a best selling author.
   
   Expert Testimonial:
   
   Michel, your virtual workshop, 'What Drives You Crazy Makes You Great' has changed the way we do business. It helped us understand how our prospects look at us, and what we have to do and what we have to communicate to bring out our differentiation. Thank you!
   Jacques Werth
   Founder and Author High Probability Selling
   
   
2. Language: Really Real or Business Speak?
   
   "I have just listened to your CD and I couldn't help calling you because I am just stunned at what you've done. I am your biggest fan now! The presentation is probably the most professional I have ever heard . . . and in terms of the content it's absolutely amazing."
   Milana Leshinsky
   ACCPOW Founder &CEO,
   Association of Coaching &
   Consulting Professionals on the Web
   
   
   This testimonial sounds like it was spoken by a real person because it was spoken by a real person!
   
   When a testimonial is 'cooked' up, people can smell it, and believability plummets as a result.
   
   The same happens when the testimonial writer tries too hard to make the testimonial sound professional. It loses believability.
   
   If you want people to believe the testimonial is really real, it has to sound really real. And 'really real' in this case refers to both the idiomatic speech of the testimonial author as well as to the terms that are unique to the industry or business sector you are targeting.
   
   Here are two more testimonials I could not have cooked up, and to see why it satisfies the other 'really real' language requirement, you only have to look at the authors. The first one is from a Ph.D. and C.M.H.P. and the second is from a clairvoyant.
   
   "I was particularly taken by the dual nature of your suggested communicative process, i.e. the symbiotic interaction of both the directive and non directive elements. The net effect on the prospect being the "gentille" experience of feeling accepted and validated while at one and the same time enabling us to actively align their essential angst to what it is that we essentially do, listen to our response and then to intrinsically seek out our solution for their problem. Quite brilliant and very powerful indeed."
   
   Gary Burge
   North Star Development Corporation
   
   "Your aura dances when you speak!"
   Irene Martina
   President, The CEO Intuitive
   
   
3. Detail: Specific vs General?
   You may have heard the maxim that 'God is in the details' and nowhere is that more true than in testimonials.
   
   Consider these statements:
   
   "You greatly improved my conversion ratio!"
   "I am now getting a 90% close rate on the phone."
   
   Both are wonderful testimonials, but the one with a number attached to it has added power.
   
   Numbers increase believability not because of the number per se, but rather because numbers are specific. In fact, the testimonial above would have been even more believable if instead of saying 90%, the author had said 88% or 91%, these numbers 'feel' even more specific, and therefore more real.
   
   So what happens if the benefits your clients enjoy as a result of working with you are difficult to quantify? For example, if you are a life coach, how do you put specifics to life balance?
   
   The answer is to dig deep enough to find a quantitative measure that proves the qualitative benefit is true.
   
   Let me explain.
   
   Continuing with the life coach example above, life balance may be measured by how many kids' soccer games a parent misses or attends. So, instead of a generic testimonial that says, 'my life balance has improved', the client may be able to tell you, 'last year I missed all 12 of my daughter's soccer games, this year, I made it to 10 of them. I'm making time for the things that are important to me, and my relationship with my kids is better than ever.'
   
   Digging deep enough to get specific details not only helps you develop testimonials that are more believable, it also helps you drive home the value that your clients received as a result of working with you.
   
   Here are three incredibly simple questions I often ask my clients when they give me a generic testimonial and I feel we could get more specific. For the very same reasons, they are also excellent coaching questions:
   
   "What do you mean?"
   "How do you know (repeat generic statement) is true?"
   "Can you give me an example?"
   
   
4. Proof of Person: Attributed vs Non Attributed?
   I often get asked, 'how important is it to show the name of the person who offered the testimonial?'
   
   The answer is always the same: 'very, very important.'
   
   The reason why it's important to attribute the testimonial is simple, it adds proof that the testimonial is genuine. Without any attribution, the reader can easily get suspicious that the testimonial was made up.
   
   So what should you do if client confidentiality restricts you from publishing the testimonial author's name?
   
   Again, the answer is simple: add as much information about the person as you can. Job title (eg: VP Marketing), name of company, size of company, business sector, geographic location, age of person and whatever else that's relevant to the product/service you provide are all fair game.
   
   For example, if you help product development teams enhance productivity in companies where people are scattered around the world, and you cannot name the author of the testimonial, you can still have something like:
   
   "We developed the product in five months, three weeks ahead of schedule. That allowed us to get the media attention ahead of our competitors and we are already taking orders."
   
   VP Product Development of International medical device company with 3,500 employees in 12 countries
   
   The stronger your 'proof of person', the more believable and the compelling your testimonial.
   
   
5. Variety
   By having you write your own Dream Testimonials, I do not want to give you the impression that every single testimonial you collect should include all four components of a great testimonial, or that they should all be formatted the same way.
   
   Having that degree of consistency would work against you, it would smell 'fishy' to the reader.
   
   The purpose of having you write your Dream Testimonials is to give you a complete understanding of the components you could use in a testimonial, and sensitize your awareness so you could identify comments and bits of comments that your clients probably already give you all the time either verbally, in email, on voicemail or on feedback forms.
   
   As you build your library of testimonials, you want to have a reasonable degree of variety.
   
   Some testimonials may be long; others may be short. Some may include all four components; others may highlight one or two. Some may speak with a serious voice; others may sound light and fun. Some may refer to incredible end results; others may refer to small changes.
   
   The fact is, even though you want all your testimonials to strengthen and reinforce a consistent Essential Message, the way it can be expressed through individual voices is limitless.
   
   Variety. That's Believability Enhancer #5.

Action Steps to Take Now:

You now know what the four basic components of a complete testimonial are, and you brainstormed different possibilities for each one.

That's the content.

With the Believability Enhancers, you also know how to massage the components to make the testimonials more credible and compelling.

Now it's time to write sample testimonials that you'd like to receive.

Step 1.

Go back to what you wrote during Part 2, Anatomy of A Great Testimonial, and circle the best three statements that you listed in each of the four parts. 'Best' in this case means the ones that you feel strongest about. Trust your gut.

Step 2.

Refine each one using the Believability Enhancers you learned about in the previous section. Experiment and try different variations. Don't forget the attribution, if you already have great clients, then use real names and 'attach' them to the testimonial bits they go with; if the bits you have don't apply to your existing clients, make up names and describe the people they might come from.

Step 3.

On a piece of paper or in your word processing program, create a table with 4 columns:

1. skepticisms, 2. challenges, 3. hoped for results and 4. unexpected results. Copy the 'new and improved', Believability Enhanced testimonial bits into the table.

Step 4.
Now string your dream testimonial components into complete and coherent dream testimonials! Write (or print) each one out on a separate sheet of paper and post them on your wall where you can see them every day!

ABOUT OUR AUTHOR:

In the past 25 years, Michel Neray has been an award-winning copywriter, an Internet pioneer, a tradeshow pitchman and a senior sales and marketing executive.

He created The Essential Message to help companies and individuals discover their true differentiation and communicate it in the absolute, most compelling way. Thousands of coaches, consultants, salespeople, and advisor-based businesses have used The Essential Message to turn more people into prospects, and more prospects into sales. You can too.

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