Find Out How to Have Your Clients Sell For You

Dec 16, by Tanya Alvarez

How to Create Testimonials Effortlessly in Less Than 15 Minutes

Testimonials are defacto extension of your sales team. Nobody disputes the value of testimonials, but until recently creating them was an expensive and time-consuming task. But it now takes less than 15 minutes to record a testimonial, so there’s no need to wait around for your client to draft the perfect testimonial.

Since the video testimonial is quick, people are able to share their feelings faster than they would in writing, so they’re more likely to do it. You also get to ask questions that you might not include in the testimonial, so you get a lot of marketing mileage out of a video testimonial.

At OwnersUp, which helps small business owners grow their businesses through peer groups, coaching, and other resources, we wanted to collect our own testimonials. To do that, we developed a system that takes us less than 15minutes.

Follow our step by step and learn how to collect your own testimonials.

First, schedule appointments. If you’ve been in business for a few years, you should have satisfied customers who will be willing to spend a few minutes of their time to answer questions about your business and their experience with it. We scheduled our appointment through https://bookme.name/ownersup/testimonials

Next, develop a list of questions specific for your business to generate quote-worthy advertising copy and to understand the pain your clients felt before using your service. Provide your testimonial-givers with the questions in advance, and give them some guidelines. For instance, we asked them to spend no more than 90 seconds on each question. Here are some questions we came up with:

1 Can you give us some background about your business? (We recommended that people introduce themselves by saying something along these lines: “Hi, I’m (first name), and I’m the {job title, such as founder or CEO) of (business name}, which is a business that (explain what the business does).”)

2 What kind of issues did you face with your business before becoming an OwnersUP member?

3 How did you feel when you were going through those issues?

4 What do you think would have happened if things had stayed the same in your business?

5 So what was going through your head when you came across OwnersUP?

6 What was your biggest stumbling block to joining OwnersUP? What finally laid your fears to rest and made you move forward?

7-10 Most people are apprehensive when they start something new like this. What was your initial reaction to OwnersUP? Then, once you got used to it, what happened next in your business? How did you find it helped your approach to business and what were the results?

11 How did you feel when you started seeing those results?

12 How much of your success would you attribute to the value OwnersUP provides? What kind of ROI do you estimate OwnersUP provides?

13 If OwnersUP didn’t exist, what other marketplace alternatives would you consider? (It doesn’t have to be a direct competitor.)

14 If you were to recommend OwnersUP to a business owner, what would you say?

15 What surprised you the most or made you the happiest about joining OwnersUP?

A happy customer will have no trouble answering those kinds of hard-hitting questions, but one who isn’t convinced of the value your company provides will have trouble. We also didn’t avoid asking about competitors.

Those questions are real, and they’re on people’s minds. That’s part of the value of testimonials. Prospective customers know that you have to be confident to ask those kinds of questions. If your customers can readily answer them, prospects begin to envision how they would answer those questions.

Tools We Use

To wrap up the testimonial-collecting process, here are some technical details about capturing the testimonials on video. We record the video calls using Zoom. Then we upload the unedited version to YouTube and get it transcribed using the audio transcription service Temi.com, which cost ten cents per audio minute. Using a video editor from the Philippines, we then edit the transcript and video, removing the um’s, er’s, you know’s, and other unnecessary filler words so the testimonial has maximum impact. The video editor costs less than $30/video.

Final Product

Here’s an example of a finished product: https://bit.ly/2S5CuSf  Our targeted runtime is less than two minutes, but this one is longer because we plan to chop it up. In this example, Rebecca explains how she doubled her income and now works only two days a week since joining OwnersUP.

The value of these testimonials goes beyond video. We also use them as written testimonials, and take quotes from them for sales and marketing materials and messaging. We plan to repurpose this content for Facebook ads, Instagram, and even articles about the members.

If you haven’t created any testimonials, follow our process and begin letting your clients sell for you.  Once you experience the unique impact testimonials can have on your business, you’ll be eager to collect more.