Easy Way to Get Quotes and Testimonials
Everyone loves seeing quotes and testimonials – they are a great way to get prospects more comfortable with your business. But a lot of people have trouble coming up with a good quote, so they put off giving you one. Here’s how to make it easier for them…
The easiest way to get good quotes and testimonials is to ask customers to spend 10 minutes on the phone with you, talking about the product or service.
Record the call (with their permission) or take notes.
Then you draft a quote based on what they said and send it to them for them to edit.
That’s all!
The trick, of course, is that you do the work for them. The bonus is that you will get a better quote, since you can work in the points you want most to make.
Here are some other tips for crafting the quote:
- Make sure you include the company or product name.
- Use the customer’s phrasing, not yours. This can actually give you some great keywords.
- Keep it short! Most people won’t read a long quote. If they gave you a long list of wonderful compliments and you want to use them all, create several quotes.
Here is a sample email asking for permission to have that call:
[Name] suggested that I contact you to see if you would be willing to give us a quote about your experiences with [product/company].
Would you be willing to give us a quote we can use on our website?
The way we usually do it is that we schedule a call and spend about 10 minutes on the phone. You just talk to me about your experiences and I’ll take notes. Then I’ll draft a quote or two and send it to you for you to edit.
If that would be OK with you, is there a good time for me to call?
Here are questions to ask during the call:
- How did you first hear about [product/company]?
- What problem were you having at that time?
- Did you look at other products or solutions too?
- What made you decide to go with [product/company]?
- How did things go?
- Was there anything that particularly impressed you about the company or the people you worked with?
- What kind of results did you get?
- Are you planning to do more with the [product/company] in the future?
Here is a sample email to send with the quotes you have drafted:
Thank you so much for spending the time on the phone with me today! I really appreciate it. You gave me some excellent information.
Here are the quotes I have drafted for your approval. Please let me know which you are comfortable having us use – feel free to edit them as much as you like.
Could you please confirm how you would like your name, title and company name to appear with the quote?
To get extra leverage from the quote, ask if they would be willing to post the quote as a recommendation on LinkedIn or share it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or another social site.
3 Best Questions to Ask Marketing Freelancers
If you are short on time, here are 3 questions that give you the fastest way to identify whether you are talking to someone who really knows what they are doing.
1. What process do you use when you work with clients?
In other words, what are the steps they are going to go through when they work with you?
Marketing freelancers who have a lot of experience typically have a pretty well-defined system. They are going to need certain information from you, they are going to go through specific steps, they are going to give you certain reports, etc.
The more clearly they can articulate the process, the better. Read more
Topgrading your marketing team
I just finished reading a classic and highly recommended book, Topgrading, by Bradford D. Smart, PhD.
It was full of wonderful advice on how to make sure you hire all “A”s (as opposed to “B”s or “C”s) – in other words, the very best people.
The problem is that Topgrading is a very heavyweight process – 3-hour interviews that start with the candidates’ college days and go through every single job they have ever held with a fine-toothed comb.
I can see where it makes sense to do this for a full-time job. But most companies now outsource at least part of their marketing, and no one – not you and not any marketing freelancer I know - is going to have the patience to do this for a short-term gig.
Yet choosing the right person is important – you need the best freelancers just as much as you need the best full-time staff.
And I love the approach he takes to doing the interviews. Read more
3 Ways to Use Interviews on Your Website
Looking for ways to add depth and dimension to your website?
Consider adding some interviews.
If you want to, you can work with someone to do a “real” interview. You can record it and post the link to the audio or video on your website or blog.
Hint: You don’t have to pay $3000 or more to have a news personality do a formal interview. You can have one person in your company interview someone else. For example, you can have your marketing director interview your CEO.
If you decide to do a video, the easiest way to make it more professional is to do the filming yourself and then hire someone to edit it, adding a professional intro and conclusion. We worked with Pixability recently to do this and they did a great job for an affordable price.
You can also do the interview with webcams via Skype, if you want something very informal and inexpensive.
If you want only audio you can use Audio Acrobat (which is what we use) or one of the many similar services. Just do the interview over the phone, record it, and post the link to the recording.
But you can make it even easier…
Here’s how…
Just do a written interview. Write down the questions you want to answer, then answer them. Write it so it looks like a back-and-forth with an interviewer.
Here’s an example from one of our clients (I’m the Judy who did the interview):
Upgrading to iMIS 15: What Associations Need to Know
Can you see how easy that is?
And it has a lot of value. It has useful information, so it has value to web visitors. It’s keyword-rich, so it does well with the search engines, which helps bring people to the website.
Anyone can do interviews like this.
Here are 3 ways to use them:
1. Explain why your product or service matters
Lots of times, websites use formal language. They are written like a brochure, talking about what the company does, what the products do.
But that doesn’t tell you why people actually become customers.
You can explain that in an interview.
You can talk about how people use your products and services in an informal, casual way – what’s really cool about them, what kind of results they get, why they really buy – the way you would explain it to a friend or family member.
It’s a great way to add commentary to your website, to make points you can’t really make any other way, and to tell people what really matters.
2. Share your opinion on a hot topic
If you’ve got thoughts about a hot topic in the industry (and you’re not already blogging – or even if you are), this is a great way to get your opinions out there.
This is also a very useful way to bring traffic to your website, because there are probably a lot of searches on this topic. Just make sure you use the relevant keywords repeatedly throughout the interview.
3. Talk about what’s new
I bet you’ve got a new product or service that you introduced recently.
Do an interview about why you created that product or service. Talk about what’s great about it, why people need it. Share your excitement – let people see how much you care about this.
This is a good way to keep your website up-to-date. It also helps round out a launch and make it more interesting.
And it’s a good way to engage prospects and customers and bring them to your website – you can send them an email with a link to the interview and ask them to check it out.
So find a topic that would work for you and get an interview up on your site this month.
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