Selling Smarter With Testimonials

Testimonials are extremely powerful persuaders. When my friend prepared to move out of state, the first thing she did was ask me which moving company I used when Mary and I moved, and whether or not they were any good.

Doing business with a company you know nothing about is scary business. Hearing friends or family talk positively about their experience is encouraging and promotes action. The same is true with your prospects. Whether you are selling fixed annuities or cosmetic dentistry, personal injury litigation or plumbing, potential customers find it hard to trust a company or its representative when there is little or no experience to guide them forward.

How can you get them to feel comfortable enough to take the risk? How can you call them to action without spending so much time in the sales cycle that you're earning minimum wages?

The answer is customer testimonials.

The reason customer testimonials work so well, says Robert Cialdini, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, is that "When faced with a choice, people often look around to see what others have done to guide their experience."

In advertising we call this the "slice of life" endorsement, when the viewer of a television commercial, for example, is allowed to eavesdrop on a conversation between two homemakers discussing Tide, or two men in hardhats driving trucks "Built Ford Tough."

In the throws of the great depression, W. Clement Stone, a self-made millionaire, used customer endorsements to build his insurance sales empire from the ground up. Using a standard pitch book presentation, agents of the Combined Insurance Company of America began their sales presentations by flipping through page after page of satisfied clients who bought their insurance programs.

If you're not doing this, you're shooting yourself in the foot with your prospect's gun. If you're walking away from sales without getting customer testimonials, you're leaving money on the table.

Here's what I want you to do starting today. No excuses.

Go out and buy a digital camera if you don't already have one. No matter what business you're in, from now on, take a snapshot of your satisfied customers - the happy couple holding up their new annuity policy, the giddy college graduate standing in front of her new car, the teenager with the knockout smile on the day you remove his braces.

Plaster them in the front pages of your presentation book and let the collection grow over the years. Cover your office or waiting room from top to bottom, side to side, for all who enter to see. Don't worry about coaxing clients for written testimonials. Just remember to have them say "Cheeese" before you snap the picture. It's worth a thousand words, you know.

"Well Patrick, this is all just peachy-wonderful," you retort. But I don't have time to grow my little photo album over the years. I don't need the polite smiles of my prospects brushing over total strangers. Besides, don't you know, I'm the very person the gods have chosen to become the next multi-zillionaire 'Phenom' in my profession."

Then you'll want to check out an amazingly quick, simple and inexpensive formula to get TOP CELEBRITY endorsements for your product, service or, most importantly, yourself. Imagine having powerful celebrity names and faces gracing your sales book or office, with stark raving personalized messages to you for your excellent service. Would this raise eyebrows?

This may put your business over the top.

Wishing you outrageous success,

Patrick Bruns
InsuranStar Marketing

P.S. Looking for killer closing techniques? Would you like to know how to overcome any objection a client could possibly throw at you? My friend Bob Firestone has the answer. Click Here!