Sales Management: Increase Close Rates and Customer Retention by Adding Quantified Impact Information to Testimonials

by Alan Rigg

Customer testimonials can be tremendous sales closing aids. If the testimonials include specific quantified impacts, they are even more effective in helping salespeople close business.

What is a Testimonial?

A testimonial a written statement from a customer that explains how one of your company's salespeople, your company's products or services, and/or other company resources delivered value to the customer's business. These statements may be as brief as a single sentence or as lengthy as a multi-page case study.

Testimonials may be general statements of satisfaction, or they may be very explicit, step-by-step descriptions of how value was provided. The best testimonials also include quantified business impacts that directly resulted from the customer using your company's products or services.

What is a Quantified Impact?

A quantified impact is a dollar value or percentage with an associated time frame that can be assigned to one or more specific business problems. Here are two examples of quantified impacts:

$47,000 per hour
A 26% increase in revenue in just four months

Quantified impacts are an invaluable aid to closing sales. How? If the quantified impact of a business problem exceeds the investment required to fix the problem, a buying decision is easy to justify. The larger the difference between the quantified impact and the required investment, the easier it becomes to close the sale. If the quantified impact is a multiple of the required investment (for example, a quantified impact of millions of dollars versus a required investment of tens of thousands of dollars), the buying decision becomes "a no-brainer."

How do quantified impacts improve Customer Retention?

Helping customers calculate and document quantified business impacts has value beyond possible use in testimonials. This practice can also help your company keep customers.

Remember, circumstances change. Businesses see upturns and downturns in revenues and profits. Companies can be acquired by other companies, which can lead to significant changes in management teams. Individuals get promoted, leave companies to pursue other opportunities, and have health problems. All of these circumstances impact whether your customers continue buying from you, and how much they buy from you.

What would happen to your company's revenue if a key customer's business "got soft", or if their company was acquired by another company, or if your company's most vocal champion was reassigned or left to pursue another opportunity? If your company has not helped this customer document quantified business impacts, the result may be a sudden drop in your company's sales. Why? Because the first things that get cut during business downturns or management changes are those things that management does not understand.

If your customers have thorough documentation on hand that clearly explains the quantified impacts of your company's products and services, the risk of a sudden drop in your company's sales volume is dramatically reduced. If a customer asks, "Why are we buying this?" your salespeople can review the quantified business impact documents with them. Once the customer sees how your company's products and services generate value, they will usually focus their cost-cutting attention elsewhere.

What is the value of a Centralized Testimonial Repository?

While salespeople should make every effort to secure testimonials from their own customers, they can also benefit from leveraging testimonials that have been secured by other salespeople. Your company can facilitate this practice by investing the time and resources required to build a centralized testimonial repository.

The testimonials contained in this repository should be coded to enable rapid sorting by industry, business problem, product or service, etc. This makes it easy for salespeople to quickly find testimonials that are pertinent to specific prospect circumstances. It is also useful to document whether customers are willing to speak to potential prospects. If the answer is "yes", any requests for such conversations should be routed through the salesperson that owns the customer relationship.

The quality of a centralized testimonial repository will correlate directly with the amount of effort and resources your company invests in creating and maintaining it. If your company wants to make testimonial selling a key pillar of its sales culture, you and your fellow managers should consider creating a "SWAT team" to help salespeople and customers identify and document quantified business impacts. Plus, one or more individuals could be assigned the responsibility of occasionally purging "aged" testimonials. (Ideally, all of the testimonials in the repository should be less than two years old.)

Finally, your company should take steps to ensure that testimonials are still valid. In other words, someone should ensure that customer satisfaction phone calls or written surveys are completed on a regular (quarterly or semi-annual) basis. This will minimize the chances of salespeople being embarrassed by using testimonials from companies that are presently unhappy, or are no longer customers.

Conclusion

If you would like to help your salespeople increase close rates and customer retention, implement the following steps:

Hold your salespeople accountable for securing customer testimonials on a regular basis.
Provide your salespeople with tools and other assistance to help them quantify the impacts of your company's products and/or services. Include quantified impact information in as many testimonials as possible.
Invest the time and resources necessary to build and maintain a centralized repository of current, valid testimonials.

About the Author

Sales performance expert Alan Rigg is the author of How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Sales Team Performance: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building and Managing Top-Performing Sales Teams, and the companion book, How to Beat the 80/20 Rule in Selling: A Step-By-Step Guide to Achieving Top Sales Performance. His 80/20 Selling System™ helps business owners, executives, and managers end the frustration of 80/20 sales team performance, where 20% of salespeople produce 80% of sales. For more information and more FREE sales and sales management tips, visit http://www.8020salesperformance.com.

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