4 Questions You Need to Ask to Get Better Testimonials

If you want to build trust with your audience, you could do a lot worse than relying on testimonials. These accounts, straight from the mouths of your previously satisfied customers and clients, can easily bear much more weight than many—arguably most—other marketing efforts. After all, they are first-hand accounts of what someone can expect from working with you. That said, there are still ways that you can and should coax the best, highest-quality testimonials from your happy clientele. Let’s go over the four questions you should always ask while collecting customer accounts to accomplish just that.

First and Foremost, How You Ask Matters

The key to a good testimonial is the number of details you can include. The more details you provide, the more convincing and believable your testimonial will be.

For instance, let’s say a new ice cream shop opened up in town. Which account would you find more convincing?

“It was really good!”

…or…

“They make all their stuff—like, the ice cream, cones, and toppings—in-house, so everything was super fresh-tasting… especially the ice cream, I’ve never had any so rich and creamy before. It was really good!”

When all is said and done, both say the same thing—that the new ice cream shop is good—but the details of why the new ice cream shop is good make the latter testimonial more engaging and, as a result, more memorable and impactful.

When collecting your testimonials, it pays to ask more open-ended questions that can’t so easily be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Frame your questions in a way that requires more details to be shared in a more engaging way—“how” and “why” over “if.” It is always better to have a testimonial be too long and need to be trimmed than to have it be too short to be used.

You Need to Ask for Permission

It’s one thing to have someone say something nice about your business. It’s quite another to use what they say as an official testimonial, publicly associating them with that opinion.

To do the latter, you need to obtain their express permission to use that person’s identity and company’s brand in your marketing materials, in addition to the testimony they provided… and it never hurts to get this permission in writing or documented in some other way.

On a related note, you should also run your completed testimonial by the person who provided it to be sure their opinion is accurately represented. That way, you aren’t misquoting them or putting words in their mouth, and you can also reinforce their trust in you to do right by them for a bit of bonus reputation building.

So, despite customarily being one of the last questions you ask in an interaction where you may be collecting a testimonial, this is one of the most important ones to ask.

Your Questions Need to Help Shape the Testimonial

Again, while your questions should be relatively open-ended, it is important to use them to gently drive the testimonial toward the desired outcome—namely, a testimonial that paints your business and its services in as positive a light as possible. This is why it is also important to ask the right questions and do so in the right way.

What Four Questions Should You Ask for a Better Testimonial?

These questions (or some variation) can be considered the blueprint for a compelling testimonial… whether that testimonial is a brief blurb or expanded into a full case study.

1. What was your experience/what problems were you experiencing before working with us, our products, and/or our services?

This is important to ask, as it gives a baseline, the “before” for your readers to compare the “after” to, as your testimonial resolves itself. Without this comparison, there’s no reference for your audience to gauge the difference.

Let’s look at a few more examples:

“We sold 100 units of widgets by the end of the month.”

…as compared to…

“We sold 100 units of widgets by the end of the month, five times what we sold the month before.”

See the difference? One states a fact without any context, while the other provides the perspective needed to comprehend the scale of an accomplishment. If you can ensure that your testimonials are made specifically enough, this perspective will remain consistent.

2. What almost stopped you from working with us, our products, or our services?

While this might seem counterintuitive, and openly counterproductive, to share in a testimonial, it can help show one of your testimonial’s readers that some concerns your client had (some of which your reader may also feel) were ultimately unwarranted.

So, let’s say that your client/customer needed to make a relatively expensive purchase for their business that another prospective client of yours would also need to make. Highlighting your existing client’s initial hesitation and—crucially—their happiness about the outcome helps your prospect put themselves in the shoes of your client for the entire journey.

As a result, they may take the plunge a little more quickly, saving you time and money in your marketing efforts.

3. What convinced you to try working with us, our products, or our services?
Similarly, a testimonial is a great place to highlight what would make someone want to work with your business, taking a selling point and again adding the perspective of someone who has benefitted from your business’ involvement. Asking this question allows you to identify why someone decided to work with you, showing this benefit to your testimonial’s readers and also informing you of potential avenues for your marketing to follow.

This is true whether you offer the best price, the best support, or the best of anything else. If there was anything that stood out as a positive, try to have your testimonial giver mention it.

4. What would you tell someone interested in working with us, our products, or our services?
When all is said and done, this is really the meat and potatoes of the testimonial, as you’re able to condense every selling point alongside the real-world impacts that these benefits have made to a business, as experienced by those working in that business. We’ve already established how valuable the firsthand impression of one of your clients can be to a prospect in the midst of making a decision, so it stands to reason that advice or tips directed specifically to them will help the rest of what you have to say be welcomed by the relevant decision makers.

Put Together Better Testimonials, Get Better Opportunities

We can help. We deliver managed IT service providers with the marketing services and resources they need to promote their services and share their value with their audience. Give us a call at 888-546-4384 to find out more about what we can do.