4. Stage Two: Conversion Not Coercion

Stage Two is all about the continuation of building immense trust with your prospects (which we’ve started in Stage One). In this stage, we take someone who has shown interest in your products or services and attempt to move them from prospect to customer. We don’t do this with manipulation and cult-like persuasion techniques—far from it. If you think about traditional sales, that process is more about ringing the bell every time someone closes a new deal, and less about doing what’s right for the customer to start building a long-term relationship. When you put “closing the sale” on a pedestal, you leave no room for nurturing the client, and that’s a fact. It’s also one of the most damaging beliefs that inhibit a company’s ability to maximize customer value and build actually profitable customer relationships. And the most harmful thing of all, your customers smell it a mile away. Think of it this way: Stage One is all about showing what makes your products, your services, and your experience remarkable, exciting, and different. Stage Two is about converting the prospect into a sale, but continuing to build on the expectations of what’s to come by delivering a remarkable and memorable buying—and interaction—experience each and every step of the way.

As I mentioned when introducing the loop, more often than not, customers can move through stages rapidly. The customer can move through both Stages One and Two so quickly that it seems like they didn’t really happen at all. Sometimes, we have a customer who is simply ready to buy. I’ve had people show up on my website and just purchase. I’ve had people call me and spend substantial amounts of money without even really needing to talk to me. Inadvertently, these early stages of the loop have still happened; they’re just not as overt as the other stages. After all, the customer heard about you somewhere. They got to your website somehow. They picked up the phone and called to place their order for some reason.

Here’s a good way to think about it: Imagine a guy entering a store who needs some flowers before a hot date. In the first stage, the prospect feels like he needs to get the gift, and he sees the store as he’s on his way to pick up his date. In the second stage (where we’re at now), the prospect has now entered the store and is ready to buy the flowers. In this stage, the prospect must be able to find the flowers he thinks are appropriate, both quickly and easily. They must be priced accordingly, and the service representative must be knowledgeable enough to answer any questions he might have about the various kinds of flowers on sale. In essence, we’re bridging the gap between the initial interest in buying from you, to the making of an actual purchase. In this case, Stages One, Two, and Three are happening incredibly fast, and that’s okay.

Sales as an area of business improvement has often been treated as the “song and dance routine” between the buyer and seller. Each partner goes through a series of steps, with each reacting to each other’s move, and their tactics are used to counter the effects of each other’s moves. For example, “Did the prospect raise objections?” Sales training often says things like, “If so, then respond by saying one of these five things.” It’s tactical and focused on the wrong outcome. More important, this approach does not remove the natural resistance the customer feels in the first place, which makes it almost impossible to keep a customer coming back again and again. We’ll talk about that shortly. Meanwhile, the customer is skeptical and dubious and can feel like he or she is being “pitched” or “sold.”

These traditional sales approaches have gotten companies to this point, but the world has changed, and we’re living in a customer-driven economy. It doesn’t need to be treated like a competitive song and dance anymore, and more important, it doesn’t work that well anymore, either. Moreover, as more and more is written about cognitive neuroscience and how the mind really works, consumers will become even more educated about the communication process. It might well reach a point when a sales associate says to a customer something like, “You’d better buy these because we’re selling out of them fast,” and the customer replies, “Please don’t use the fear of loss bias on me.” Or a salesperson says to a potential customer, “You may have read about our new product in the paper,” and the prospect says, “I know all about the availability bias, and it’s not going to work.” More valuable, and increasingly necessary, is to treat the customer’s movement through this stage as one of fluidity by removing friction and resistance, and setting up the customer for the latter stages. And this is an important part of the Customer Loyalty Loop as a whole. Fluidity is the key. Each stage is fluid. And the fluidity is okay, provided you understand what you might still need to do in the latter stages. Here’s what I mean: If a customer picks up the phone and very quickly buys, in some cases you haven’t had the chance to build trust, or to set expectations, or to do your early-stage marketing. But keep thinking fluidity. How fluid is the movement through your company’s process?

When you get a lead, how quickly are they moved through the sales process and asked to buy? Do you quickly rush them through and cut to the chase and try to close the sale, or do you take a more consultative selling approach? Do you slow down the process if needed?

Cementing Trust

Stage Two is all about cementing trust and influencing the action. If you think back to the initial stage, there’s already been a lot of trust building done in our early marketing efforts. We’re continuing to build on that now. That’s the fluidity of the loyalty loop in action. In this stage, you need to remove all aspects of friction and resistance in the sales process and move the prospect to action. This brings up an important point, and that’s the common disconnect between sales and marketing. The disconnect is that there really shouldn’t be one anymore, but there almost always is. Marketing departments are responsible for creating the messaging that happens in Stage One, and in Stage Two you have an entirely different group of people looking to continue the relationship and trust-building process. Another way to think about it is like this: Marketing in Stage One gets people to raise their hands, and sales, in Stage Two, gets people to open their wallets and take some action. That action doesn’t have to be transactional. For example, nonprofits might work to get people to donate in Stage Two. A politician seeks a vote in Stage Two. These are all signs of action. There’s obviously an incredibly important connection between sales and marketing. If that’s the case, how can there ever be a disconnect between these two stages of the loyalty loop? It turns out there almost always is. One of the first things we need to do is remove those barriers and understand the fluidity and connectedness of the two stages. Creating the action in Stage Two is an incredibly important part of the customer’s experience that ties directly to Stage One, and equally to the latter stages.

When I talk about the entire customer experience and the whole customer experience, this is one of the most important and often overlooked areas of focus. If you think about the first time you pick up the phone and call a business, the experience doesn’t start once you pick up the phone or once you eventually get down to the store to make your purchase. The experience starts once you pick up the phone. Think about that for a minute. The experience starts when you pick up the phone, right then and there. Even then, we can argue the experience started earlier than that. At this point, the prospect has made a decision to pick up the phone and call this particular business and now your customer’s experience has started. The prospect has already entered your sales process whether they realize it or not—whether you know it or not. Think about all the elements related to the customer experience that are happening the moment the customer picks up the phone for the first time. Here are a few things that come to mind:

• How many times did the phone ring before someone picked up on the other end?

• Did someone pick up at all?

• How quickly can they expect to be called back?

• Did they get a voicemail recording?

• Was the mailbox full?

• Did an automated voice system pick up asking them to select their choice? “Press 1 for support. Press 2 for sales. Press 3.... ” Why don’t you just tell me the movie you want to see? (Seinfeld fans will get the joke.)

• If someone answered, was the person on the other end both courteous and knowledgeable? Does that person know where to direct the customer to the next step of the sales process? You’d be shocked how many businesses direct leads to people either answering the phones or managing the e-mail that have absolutely no clue about what happens next in the process! That’s just crazy.

Just a side note: You’ll have to use your imagination to apply this to the various types of businesses throughout the book, because I don’t have space in the book to give specific examples for every one of them; but I’ll try to make it as transparent as possible as we move along. Let’s continue with a few more examples:

• Is contacting you through your website a simple process?

• How quickly can they expect a response? I once e-mailed a website through their contact form, and they responded four months later. I’m not kidding. In the reply, they answered my question with another question. I’m still waiting for the next response!

• When landing on your website, is the next step clear as day, or does the customer feel like they’re being dumped into a messy closet?¹

• Is it easy for the customer to pay you? You may or may not be surprised by how many companies make it almost impossible to give them any money.

As you can see, we’re already knee-deep into the customer’s experience at this point. Most companies don’t consider this stage as part of the customer experience because the customer isn’t really a customer yet, but why? The potential customer is “experiencing” through every part of the sales process, and every interaction with your company. Your company has a goal to turn potential customers into customers, so why wouldn’t you treat this with the same level of gravitas you treat the latest Snapchat campaign? It seems only logical that we would treat this as part of the entire customer experience. Just like our single, dating man buying flowers as he sets out looking for true love, the experience starts the moment he pulls into the parking lot.

Do you think about the whole customer experience?

Let’s talk more about what’s happening in this stage and how to ensure you’re allowing the customer to move quickly to the third stage with as little friction and resistance as possible. So let’s back up by starting at the beginning of Stage Two and assume our business now has a lead.

Great! Success! Stage One worked!

But uh-oh, I’ve got news for you.

Leads Are Worthless

Every business wants more leads. In the traditional world of sales and marketing, leads are everything. Here’s some counterintuitive thinking for you: leads are worthless. They’re not worth the paper they’re written on. Everyone says they need more leads, more leads, and more leads! Give me the Glengarry² leads! It’s like we’re feeding some frenzied drug addiction, but leads are worthless unless you know how to move leads from this stage to the next, and then into happily ever after, after that. More so, the very act of getting a lead is a giant waste of time and money if you haven’t carefully thought through this stage of the buyer’s journey and the stages that follow. As mentioned a few pages back, go ahead and drive leads to your front desk, but do you know how many leads aren’t being followed up on?

Do you know how many leads receive a single call back, but no more?

Do you know what happened to the Internet leads that came in last week, or last month? How many of those leads resulted in business?

I can think of many client examples where I started looking into this and found that sometimes more than 80 percent of leads weren’t even receiving a call back.

Now before you say, “Those idiots! That’s ridiculous!” let me tell you that this is never that surprising to me; in fact, it’s almost the norm. Most companies do a terrible job with leads and have a poor understanding of what it takes to move a lead to conversion, let alone the next stage. Leads are worthless.

Creating Gravitational Pull

Leads come in two ways: inbound and outbound. With inbound marketing, the leads come to you. They’re attracted to you through your sales and marketing efforts, and they reach a point where they raise their hands and say, “I’m interested.” With outbound marketing, you find leads and create opportunities through traditional sales efforts like direct mail and cold calling.

There’s outbound sales and marketing efforts, and then there’s gravitational pull. If you get the Customer Loyalty Loop right, the gravitational pull is far more likely to occur.

Depending on the business type, every type of lead needs to be treated differently. For example, a traditional brick-and-mortar business has a lead the moment a customer walks into the store. For a hospitality business, a lead happens when someone comes into a restaurant to review the menu before making a decision for lunch.

How many companies track their lead-to-sale ratio? I can tell you—hardly any. Here’s a tip if you’re in a more traditional type of brick-and-mortar business: start tracking how many people walk in the door, and how many leave with or without making a purchase. Even larger retailers need to be tracking lead-to-conversion ratio. This data will allow you to tweak, tailor, and improve this part of the customer experience.

For an online retailer, a lead might be someone who makes their way onto a website with the intent of buying and fills out a form for more information. As you see, leads come in a couple of different forms. Leads, however, are entirely worthless unless we’re able to attract them in the first place, persuade them to raise their hands, and get them to trust us enough to convert to a customer. Then, we have to deliver a remarkable customer experience, and bring them back to do business with us again and turn them into an advocate for our respective businesses. Without doing all of those things, a lead is worthless. The point here is that a lead is useless unless you take them to a place of happily ever after. To bring them happily ever after, you need to understand Stage Two, which focuses primarily on your salespeople, front-line customer-facing staff, and the sales process. Everything that happens right now has the potential to impact what happens later on.

The customer is the single-most expensive thing for a business to acquire and the only real true asset a business has. For some businesses, even getting the customer to Stage Two is a huge hurdle and a massive expense. If a company wants to maximize growth, then it needs to understand the value of a lead versus a long-time relationship with a customer. Historically, companies have believed that revenue growth was simply about driving as many new customers to the business as possible and converting as many sales as they could, but it’s a lousy way to do business. Every organization needs to understand the new requirements in the second stage and treat the sales process as an integral part of the customer experience.

Breaking the Loop in Stage Two

A moment ago, I mentioned the importance of the sales process. It’s so foolish not to treat this as part of the customer experience. Through Stage One, you’ve created a mental image in the mind of the client. If we think back to the original and traditional customer lifecycle, then we’ve successfully created awareness. Both your advertising and marketing efforts have led the customer to this point, or maybe they’ve gotten here through referral or word of mouth; it doesn’t matter, although not all referrals and word-of-mouth customers are necessarily good, and we’ll talk about that later. Either way, think about this for a minute: Imagine the incongruence if back in the 1920s you would had read one of Hopkins’ famous purity ads only to travel to the Schlitz factory and find it filthy and dirty, with bags upon bags of garbage piled outside the front door? Imagine a stream of sludge outside where you expected to find a crystal-clear basin of water flowing into the lake. There’s a significant incongruity of the mental image you initially had expected between what you’re experiencing. When this happens, the loop is broken. As we move into the conversion stage or the “business environment” your prospects find themselves in, we need to understand this is very much a part of the customer experience. This includes everything from the actual environment (this can be offline or online), to the people they deal with and how they’re treated, and information they get from other sources.

There’s one thing that can break down the entire loop. It’s really scary because you can do so well right up until even after the customer has done business with you the first time, and yet you can close the casket, ensuring they’ll never do business with you again. It’s hard to imagine that the process can be broken any step of the way by this one thing, but it’s there. And that one thing is incongruence. In other words, something that doesn’t fit the overall experience, or that doesn’t make sense. The piles and piles of garbage outside the Schlitz factory are incongruent, and they break down all the hard work we’ve done to get the prospect to that point. Let me share a brief story to illustrate my point.

Last year, I held an event for clients in Toronto. The night before the event I booked two rooms at the gorgeous Shangri-La Hotel, one for me and one for a good friend of mine and guest speaker at the event, Shawn Veltman. The check-in experience was incredible. I was whisked away from my car, which was driven off quickly by the valet parking attendants, and inside I was warmly (and magically) greeted by name. It was like they knew I would be walking in at that very moment, and everything was happening just for me. “Good evening, Mr. Fleming; it’s great to have you staying with us.” From there, I was given a small cup of hot Japanese oolong tea, and a hot face and hand wash cloth as the front desk attendant swiped my credit card, and finally I was escorted to my room. I turned around looking for my bags, with a slight moment of panic, only to be told my bags had already been sent up to my room. Shawn’s experience was no different. He was amazed at the attention to detail throughout the entire experience thus far.

A few hours later, I met with Shawn, and he asked me a very peculiar question. He asked, “Did you notice anything distinct about the bathroom?” I pondered the question and responded, “Well, it had a TV!” Shawn said, “You’re right! It had a TV, but what else?” I kept inquisitively pointing out all the distinct and interesting things I had noticed, but it seemed like I just wasn’t getting it right. Finally, Shawn gave me another clue. “Noah, did you sit down to use the toilet?” I thought about it for a moment, and said, “Yeah, I did.” “Great!” said Shawn. “Did you notice anything then?” I thought for a moment and then finally he blurted it out: “One-ply toilet paper.” I thought about it again, and he was right. Here we were in Toronto to put on the first-ever Evergreen Summit the next day, which was all about ensuring your experiences are congruent with the story you want to tell and the things you want customers to remember about your business. The hotel had spared no expense up until this point, but then cheapened out on one small area. Let’s be honest with each other here; nobody uses one-ply. It’s terrible. In fact, a football team recently traveled overseas with two-ply because they were warned their hotel only carried one-ply.³ Since I’ve talked about this, I’ve ruffled a lot of feathers. I’ve gotten numerous e-mails from people who claim that maybe the hotel was being eco-friendly, or people don’t care about such trivial things, but they’re both wrong. It’s a small detail, but it’s a detail that matters. The key questions to be asking yourself in this situation are these:

• Which areas of your business are you cutting costs on that might be impacting the overall customer experience and feelings your customers have?

• Where are the incongruities in your business?

I’ve done this work with many of my clients in the process called the Evergreen Experience Audit. We engage in many specific exercises to learn where the incongruities might be impacting the overall customer experience. We don’t just look for one-ply toilet paper. We look at the whole experience and each stage of the Customer Loyalty Loop. Now the story I just shared really should be in the next chapter, after the prospect has converted to a customer and the experience has begun, but it illustrates such a valuable point for Stage Two. This is the first time major incongruities start cropping up between what you say and what you do. This is primarily true in the sales process.

Understanding Your Sales Process

When I ask many potential clients about their sales process, they sometimes look at me like I’m crazy. They say things like they don’t have a defined sales process nor do they see the need for one. They say things like, “But our business is different.” Here’s the thing: everyone in business has a sales process. The only difference is that there are those businesses who have clearly defined each step of their sales process and those which have not. I’m not suggesting that you must have five rigid steps that are meticulously followed each and every time a new lead comes in or a person enters your business, but what I am suggesting is that your customers follow a process to the point of conversion. Moreover, you’re foolish not to be aware of that process and to be continuously asking yourself the question, “How will we improve the overall customer experience at this stage?” It’s all part of the whole customer experience, and this is one of the best opportunities to create added value for your customers. This value adds fuel to the fire that the customer will continue to move through the loop, resulting in sustainable long-term growth and profitability. It doesn’t matter if you’re a local restaurant, a freelancer, a major retail store like the Apple Store, or a complex B2B manufacturer—you still have a sales process. This chapter is called “Conversion Without Coercion” for a reason. Traditional books on sales and marketing and the psychology of influence often deal with coercion. The tools of influence are presented as tactics, and we’re told that the tactics can be used throughout the sales process to coerce the prospect into buying. The Customer Loyalty Loop is focused on conversion without coercion, and we do this by making each stage of the customer experience so good that potential customers can’t help but do business with us. Tools and tactics have a place in the various stages of the loop to help us move customers through each stage of the buying cycle, of course, but they’re not the primary tools to move customers and prospects from one stage to the next. I look at the tools and tactics as merely a bit of added effectiveness to simply doing what you need to do to allow the customer to move freely through the whole experience. Conversion isn’t really about the persuasion tactics to sell; it’s more about understanding how the buyer buys and allowing them to get their own their own. In the rest of this chapter, I’ll delve a bit deeper into the science of the experience in Stage Two, and we’ll develop a better understanding of what the customer is feeling at this point. More important, I’ll provide you with the tools to equip your salespeople and front-line staff to seamlessly move the customer through this stage to the point of conversion.

Creating an Experience-Driven Sales Process

Let’s continue to think about the sales process. What are the most important parts of the experience for a potential customer in Stage Two for your business? Suppose marketing has done their job and the new lead has come in. Your salesperson’s phone is ringing, or there’s a new list of leads that have come in through your website. What are all the key stages, conversation points, and hurdles you must cross to get the customer to the point of conversion? How can you reduce friction, increase desire, but at the same time maintain fluidity? There was a time and place where the answer to these questions might have been pretty cut and dried, but the times have changed. Today’s buyer is equipped with more research, there’s more competition, and the customers have higher expectations. The sales process in most organizations hasn’t been fully adapted to this new business environment. Thankfully, I can bring your organization up to speed relatively quickly. Think of this like the choreography of a Broadway show without the typical “song and dance” we just discussed. Each stage of the process should be carefully choreographed, so everyone dealing with customers hits their marks, but continues to build trust to show the customers that we have their best interests in mind. That’s the difference between the conversion through manipulation and persuasion tactics, and simply allowing the customer to convert without being coerced.

If we think about our earlier discussions, including everything from cognitive biases to the formation of false memories, or stoking the imagination through the power of anticipated memories, what’s left to do here? It turns out quite a bit. The experience at this stage will be remembered based on the cumulative experience of the entire sales process from start to finish. It will be recalled based on how seamless and engaging your salespeople are, or how the phones are answered (which is a soft and straightforward metric), or to how much value your salespeople bring by asking the right questions. Obviously, there are dozens of other factors. However, the more exciting thing is that if you get this stage right, it sets the foundation for long-term growth. This stage has a profound business impact on many key areas like increased revenue and customer loyalty, but only if you get it right. Achieving those results is almost impossible without a clearly defined sales process as it relates to the customer’s experience. Customer loyalty isn’t something that starts after the sale is made. It begins long in advance of that.

The traditional idea of selling is broken. Today’s customer has so much choice that companies need to differentiate themselves from the competition. We can do that by treating the sales process as a definitive part of the customer experience. That’s the problem with treating the sales process as a place where persuasion tactics can overcome what’s desperately needed: value that sticks. At this stage, prospects only want to know one particular thing. They want to know that you have their best interest in mind and that you’re looking to satisfy them and improve their condition. Let’s talk about what that means and how we do that.

Watch Your Language

“Do you want fries with that?” The classic line that many of us heard many (too many times to admit!) before. This is part of the McDonald’s script that dramatically increased the fast-food chain’s business. My mentor and business coach, Dr. Alan Weiss, often says, “Language is everything. Language controls the discussion. The discussion controls the relationship. Relations controls the sale.” He explains that language is one of the most important yet often overlooked aspects of running a business.

At the time of writing this section, I was at the Detroit Airport preparing to visit a client. Arriving a couple hours early, I had time to have lunch so I decided to visit a new P.F. Chang restaurant. P.F. Chang is a chain, and I’ve eaten at many of them before, but on this particular visit, at this particular location, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before and that was the incredible use of language and scripting. Every customer that sat down at the bar, the server said the same thing, “Hey, how’s it going? I’m Janice; what’s your name?” I responded and told her my name and then every time she came back, she addressed me by name. This might seem like a small thing, but I watched as nearly half a dozen customers immediately introduced themselves. Maybe it was just Janice doing this herself, but then I watched another server introduce herself in a similar fashion. It’s part of their script, and it matters as part of the customer experience. It’s not identical corporate language that must be followed meticulously like robots, but the intent is there. Disney Vacation Club members are greeted with the language, “Welcome home!” And when we return to the Jasmine Porch at the Sanctuary Hotel on Kiawah Island for our yearly visit, they always say, “And welcome back, Mr. Fleming.” It’s part of the script, part of the language, and part of the customer experience. Language and intent in the customer experience is everything. If you have three people explaining the same thing in three different ways, eventually you’ll have nobody to explain it to.

Never mind the specifics, there’s immense importance in talking in the language and lingo of your customer base. Starbucks created a vocabulary that their clients embraced, and Tim Horton’s in Canada embraced the vocabulary their customers created for them. How well-versed are your employees to speak the language of your target market or in a language that resonates with your core customers?

I covered this in great detail in Evergreen, but language is incredibly important to the overall customer experience as it allows you speak to your customers in a way that resonates with them.

How about the personality of your organization? Are your front-facing people representative of the image you portray? Does the actual language used when speaking to your customers match the language used on your website, advertisements, or business communications?

One of the greatest compliments I received when writing my first book was from a well-known business book publication that said reading my book was a lot like sitting down and having a beer with me. I hope this book is the same, but you must write like you talk. And you must communicate with customers like you write.

Building Trust Through Language

In Stage Two, our goal is to cultivate trust and reduce both friction and resistance to allow the conversion process to happen without coercion. In that stage, language is everything. Just as it’s important to carefully shut up and listen at this stage, it’s also important to ask the right questions. Websites frequently have a section for FAQs (frequently asked questions), where the answers for the most frequently asked questions are laid out. Unfortunately, too many organizations don’t properly train their people with the right language to answer those questions in personal conversations. The key focus of those initial discussions is almost always focused on what the company can do for the prospect, when it should be the complete opposite. Those initial sales encounters in Stage Two should be all about the prospect. Keep your focus on the prospect and you’ll do fine. You don’t have to treat this as a battle to be had amongst your potential customers.

I’m reminded of a story I heard once about a disarming sales tactic used in the jewelry and automotive sales industry. The salesperson would always start the conversion with the language, “Before we get started, do you mind if I share....” The reason to share something “before we get started” is because this presumes there’s a stage before the typical persuasion song and dance, and the typical tactical persuasion efforts. The sales experts taught us that we were about to go into battle and therefore saying something “before we get started” allowed us to frame the discussion in a certain way. It’s just another tactic used to circumvent resistance, instead of removing it entirely. Alas, it’s still a neat little language technique that the old-school sales guys have up their sleeves.

Language is important throughout the entire customer experience, but especially important in Stage Two. Remember, prospective customers don’t need to be slid down the greased chute through various persuasion tactics and techniques. Instead, we need to remove resistance and language is one of the most important tools in our arsenal to do that. What is the real purpose of an FAQ? Done right, it’s to remove resistance and handle objections before they arise.

Your salespeople should be talking to customers regularly, hopefully more often than your service people, and your service people more often than your marketing people. However, I’m making an assumption that everyone is talking to customers on a regular basis. You should be starting to see how these exercises all build upon one another to create a memorable customer experience.

“Surprise, Surprise!” is a small training exercise that was developed when working with a billion-dollar manufacturing client. The goal was simple: to better understand the language prospects were using and the responses people were giving. This is not about having the perfect response to every objective, but to ensure consistency and congruency across the experience.

Here’s how it worked. This team would do a weekly call where each person would share the most surprising and interesting thing they heard from a customer or prospective client over the past week. Each person would share how they responded or if they responded at all. Sometimes there wasn’t that much interesting to share. Other times there were minor arguments over the right response. But more often than not, there were major “ah-ha” moments discovered and skeletons that not one sales rep had considered. There was also a glaring incongruence of typical responses to a question or concern. On more than one occasion, this has caused a problem by one person saying something to one prospect, another to a different prospect, and those prospects both eventually talking to each other.

Test, Test, and Test Again!

One of the cardinal sins of all sales and marketing efforts is people don’t test new ways of doing things. Some of the greatest breakthroughs with clients have come from testing. I was working once with a manufacturing client with two co-owners. I had suggested we try something and the one owner thought the idea was fabulous. The other thought it was a ridiculous waste of our time. He didn’t even want to discuss it. He said they tried everything and what I was suggesting was sure to be a colossal failure. I convinced them we should test the idea. Guess what happened? We doubled (yes, doubled) the profits of the company in one year. That’s pretty remarkable. The only thing I suggested was we test an idea. The cardinal rule of all sales and marketing is to continually test everything. When it comes to the four stages of the loyalty loop, there are plenty of things to be testing and constantly improving. Test your marketing efforts in Stage One. For example, run variations on your preemptive marketing. In Stage Two, test your sales efforts. For example, if you typically just respond to an RFQ as fast as possible, consider slowing down the process. If you usually send a sales rep to see the customer, test having them come to you. If you usually wait to talk to a new lead before sending them any materials, consider immediately FedEx-ing them a package of testimonials and case studies. Consider including any additional valuable information that creates your preeminent position in the customer’s mind as the one and only source for their needs.

If you usually e-mail your proposals to your clients, test the process by couriering hard copies to them. Try new things always. Test everything, and test often.

Want to try and introduce a Remarkable Moment in Stage Three? Don’t just spend a boatload of cash without understanding what sort of impact it has on the customer. Instead, test something new, radical, and off the wall to see what your customers are saying.

Want to implement a new follow-up process to take advantage of recency and frequency in Stage Four? Test following up at different intervals and gauge the reaction. Test the appropriate reason and appropriate time. Discover when is the single best time to ask for a review, referral, or another sale.

The point is this: Just as we can test the response to an advertisement, we should be testing our business procedures throughout the loop and constantly be looking for ways to improve the customer’s experience to make it more meaningful, memorable, and valuable.

Case Study

One of my clients, Eastwood Guitars, sells to an industry that for a long time has relied on one specific model. The manufacturer makes a guitar, and the music stores sell the guitars. Eastwood, however, is also unique because it sells direct to consumer. For a long time, the small independent music stores fought against the idea of selling directly to consumers, but the tides have changed. Now some of the biggest guitar brands in the world are selling directly to their consumers.

Eastwood had spent years working to nurture and develop its customer base through remarkable customer service after the guitar had been sold from a retailer. The majority of its efforts was focused on providing useful and valuable information to its fans after the sale and continuing to build the relationship with its audience. It wanted to try something new that defied industry norms. We looked at the business model and its customer’s buying behavior. Many people would buy multiple guitars from Eastwood. But sometimes a guitar would be made and it would flop. So we decided to change the model by employing a crowdfunding model within the industry. Borrowing from the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, we created EastwoodCustoms.com. This way, we could gauge demand for a product before making it. The site has been a smashing success. Popular bands like Devo have partnered with Eastwood to release custom models of whacky, unique instruments. One of the first major successes for the custom shop was the La Baye 2x4 DEVO, which looks exactly like it sounds, a big 2x4 block of wood turned into a guitar. Before the Eastwood Custom Shop, CEO Mike Robinson said he might have manufactured a few dozen of the guitars and then worked hard to sell them. The Eastwood Custom presold over 250 of them before they even went into production. Not only is Eastwood selling more guitars, but they’re being paid for before they’re made. This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. Always be improving the customer experience, and always be looking for ways to flip the experience on its head. You never know what you’ll learn.

Building Trust and Removing Resistance

There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about the changing consumer landscape. With these new changes, there have been numerous new approaches to selling introduced from consultative selling methods to challenging the prospect as a method to show your expertise. Many of these approaches are novel and on the right track, but the key to remember is that selling is no longer a method of tactics and persuasion. Instead, it’s a two-way conversation and part of the whole customer experience. If you think about Stages One and Two of the loyalty loop, at this time, our sole job from a conversion point of view is to continue to build on the anticipated experience to come, continue to build on the expectations, and priming the customer to experience your products and services the right way. My mentor and business coach, Dr. Alan Weiss, often says that the consulting business is a relationship business. He’s right, and in today’s changing consumer landscape so many different types of businesses across various industries have had to embrace the sale as an exercise in relationship building. But when you think about it, every business is a relationship business.

When it comes to influence and persuasion, most people think of the esteemed Dr. Robert Cialdini, and for good reason. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had the pleasure of having dinner and spending a couple of days with Dr. Cialdini, and he is indeed brilliant. There’s no question his work has shaped the field. But there is a name that should be as recognized and as important, but is often overlooked by the same people who love Cialdini, and that’s Erik Knowles. Dr. Knowles is a professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas and the one of the world’s renowned experts on resistance and persuasion. Knowles, in my opinion, is best known for looking at persuasion in a new light. Knowles argues there are Alpha Persuasion strategies.⁴

These are traditional persuasion techniques that attempt to create action by doing a better job at explaining the features and benefits of something. But perhaps more compelling is what Knowles calls the Omega strategies. Omega strategies seek to identify the resistance people have to a particular offer and remove that resistance. Omega strategies are the key to unlocking the doors to an incredible second stage of the loyalty loop.

As with Cialdini, it’s important to remember that tactics cannot subsume strategy in this area. But an understanding of the work of both Cialdini and Knowles make it easy to identify jagged edges in a sales process, and make it easy to find ways to make the selling experience more natural, more comfortable, and more conducive for generating future business. To understand better, let’s understand the feeling and emotions going through the customer’s mind at this stage by looking closer at the work of Eric Knowles.

Removing Customer Resistance

Knowles’ basic premise is simple. There are two types of persuasion. The first seeks to increase your desire for something by using the tactics of persuasion. Consider, for example, the laws of influence from Cialdini. One of those is the principle of scarcity—scarcity, meaning something is in limited supply, and you better hurry, or you might miss out. We discussed a few examples of these in the earlier discussion on the various cognitive biases companies use to get us to buy. “You’d better hurry! Only six spaces left!” “We’re almost sold out.” These are the Alpha strategies. The second type of persuasion, the Omega strategies, seeks to reduce resistance to purchasing by allowing the customer to move seamlessly through the process.

What is resistance? It could take different forms, but at the root, it is about the opposition to an idea or a suggestion. This is a common problem when you are trying to get people to act in a particular way, whether that is to buy your goods or even change behavior for their good. Resistance is common when you are trying to change or influence behavior.

Milton Erickson was a famous psychotherapist who practiced in the latter half of the 20th century. He was known for his techniques to overcome or, better yet, circumvent the resistance his clients had to change. As psychotherapy was developing, he was a leading proponent of the idea that you don’t try to change people by giving them logical arguments and expecting them to follow your instructions just because you’re the therapist. Erickson realized that if you tackle people head-on, their defenses go up, and your chance to influence them goes down. He realized that you had to work with what the client gives you and find ways to get them to own the message rather than resist it. This requires subtle communication techniques, and Erickson was the master of them. He realized that any new narrative would have a much greater chance of success if it was consistent with the person’s already-existing views and stories.

There are many examples of Ericksonian wisdom in Jay Haley’s book Uncommon Therapy: The Psychiatric Techniques of Milton H. Erickson.⁵ For example, a woman in her twenties came to consult with Erickson about a major problem. The woman was frigid, and the idea of sex brought on a ton of anxiety. Erickson discovered that the client’s mother had told her that sex was evil, dirty, and forbidden. Mom, unfortunately, died when the client was a preteen, and now she continued to cherish her mother’s memory, which meant holding on to her edicts about sex.

The first inclination in a situation like this is to explain that the client’s mother clearly had a problem and was giving very inappropriate messages about this critical part of life and personal development. However, Erickson knew that wasn’t going to work because such a message was inconsistent with the client’s positive views about her mother. She was very unlikely to accept such a narrative, even if any objective person could see that it was the truth. Remember, we’re dealing with the mind here, and emotions are way more important than the facts. Erickson knew that he had to construct a narrative that was consistent with her mom being seen in an almost perfect light. How did he do that?

“Your mom was right,” he said. “Sex is evil, dirty, and forbidden—when you’re 12. Unfortunately, your mom didn’t live long enough to give the 15-year-old message about sex and the 20-year-old message about sex and the 25-year-old message about sex.”

Erickson then explained that he was sure that the client’s wise mother would have changed the message as her daughter reached maturity. You can imagine Erickson explaining what the different messages were and concluding that her mother would surely have told her that by the time the client reached her current age, her mom would be encouraging her to have a healthy sex life. Apparently the client was able to accept this message and begin to develop a healthier attitude toward sex.

What Erickson was able to do here was to circumvent the resistance by presenting the information in such a way that the client was able not just to own the message but want to believe it. He was the master of Omega strategies.

Most companies, salespeople, and most sales training focus almost exclusively on the Alpha persuasion tactics as opposed to removing friction by embracing the Omega strategies. For example, there’s a certain subset of marketers and salespeople who think of it as a greased chute. They believe, “My job is to create an experience by using all the sales persuasion techniques in my arsenal that selling is so seamless, it’s like a greased chute that the customer flies down, eventually coming out at the bottom and throwing their credit card at my feet.” Seamless is key, sure, but not like this. Not surprisingly, organizations that utilize these kinds of salespeople can often find difficulties in retaining those clients after the initial sale. Why is that? Well, it’s quite simple. You have not reduced the friction or resistance to being sold. You’ve merely bypassed it, which is fine if you want one sale, but not fine if you want multiple sales and dramatically increased revenue.

Most companies will tell you that they don’t do this sort of thing, they find it reprehensible, and that their professional sales staff is far above such things. They’ll tell you that they focus heavily on building “value” and giving more and more value. But those same companies have sales compensation structures that all but ensure that’s the behavior they’re getting. My mentor, Alan Weiss, often talks about the two types of belief systems in an organization—expressed views and beliefs in action. Expressed beliefs are what you tell people you believe, what you put in your mission statements, what your PR people tell the world. Beliefs in action are how you act on a day-to-day basis. Weiss often tells a story of watching a VP scream at an employee for a minor transgression while standing within two feet of the bronze mission statement on the wall, which promised respect to all employees. This kind of disconnect is depressingly common and can be seen in many departments, but rarely is it so destructive as in a sales department.

This is because though organizations often talk about wanting full collaboration between departments, and talk about wanting to create long-term customer satisfaction and value, the reality is that the sales department is often rewarded based on their hunting ability—the ability to close a new deal, meet aggressive quotas, get more new clients. We’ve all seen the stereotypical image of a salesperson “ringing the bell” after getting a new deal in pop culture, and many of us have seen it in our offices, but how often have you seen the alarm that goes off when a customer leaves? Not very often, I’d guess. In fact, most businesses aren’t even listening for that alarm. Their ears have been trained only to hear the ding of the bell. More important, how often have you seen bonuses rescinded when a new customer never comes back? If the compensation structure is geared toward new customer acquisition, then you’ve told your team in no uncertain terms that customer acquisition is the most important thing happening in your business. Sad, but true. Let’s continue to focus on reducing friction and resistance by treating this part of the buying experience in the context of the whole customer experience.

When someone moves from Stage One to Stage Two, they’re still not entirely convinced. They are intrigued, sure, but they’re not totally sold or ready to move forward. Stage Two, as mentioned, is about continuing to build trust and remove resistance. Knowles’ work in influence and persuasion is perhaps far stronger than that of Cialdini’s these days because you remove resistance not just during the sale, but after the sale as well. Consider again, the customer who has slid down the greased chute with all the powerful persuasion techniques of the stereotypical salesperson. What’s the first thing a customer feels after purchase? Almost always, they feel buyer’s remorse. In much of my work with clients, we have to work reactively because they have retention problems, and the retention problems stem from the expectations gap to the greased chute, to the use of the wrong persuasion techniques. When reducing resistance and friction early, we remove almost all of the buyer’s remorse that crops up. When you drive a customer without conscious thought about what happens on Stage Two, then you’ve missed a lot of important steps that cause more problems later. The customer is convinced that they’re making the right choice and companies are no longer left dealing with the proverbial questions of “Why are our customers leaving us, and what can we do about it?”

Customers don’t spend all their time thinking about opening up their wallets for our companies. The problem with only using the tactical persuasion techniques is that though we might move a customer to the third stage and create the action or the intended conversion, we don’t remove all reluctance, indecision, and upcoming remorse. It’s almost impossible to create customers for life, or even happy, delightful, raving fans if you’re not carefully considering that in this stage.

Three Types of Resistance

Knowles argues that there are three types of resistance. The first, he says, is reactance. Reactance is the resistance against the persuasion process itself. People aren’t idiots. They know when they’re being sold and pitched, and they resist it. They react by essentially saying, “Look, I understand what you’re trying to do here, and I don’t like it! Leave me alone.”

If you think about today’s digitally connected world, is it any surprise that this might be the single largest driver of customer resistance? Think of the last time you stepped foot on a new car lot. You see the salesman from outside; he narrows in on you like an eagle stalking its prey, and he starts walking toward you. Furniture stores are incredibly guilty of this. You walk in, and you’re swarmed by a hungry seller hoping for a small bump in commissions on her next paycheck.

We’ve all felt this type resistance to the sales experience, and we react to it. It’s only more amplified today, and you need to be aware of it if you are interested in increasing customer loyalty. Contrast that to Elon Musk and Tesla, who have removed almost all friction from the buying process, by effectively letting you build your car online and press the checkout button without ever having to talk to a salesperson. This is what I’m talking about when we talk about the science of the customer experience. How much reactance–resistance are your selling efforts creating? Is your sales process built on the tactics of persuasion to move the customer to action, or do you work to remove the resistance early?

The second type of resistance is skepticism. We’ve all felt skepticism about an offer. You’ve heard the line “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Clever marketers have used influence techniques to blast past the skepticism resistance, but you’ll never create a long-term loyal customer if that’s the case. They feel it. Deep within their souls, the feeling of skepticism will always linger. Skepticism isn’t always deceptive. Sometimes it’s simply the feeling that “You know, this product looks great, but I’m not sure it’s the right one for me.” Again, in Stage Two we have an excellent opportunity to deal with skepticism by understanding it’s there and building our customer experience and sales process to ensure it’s always dealt with before the sale, rather than after.

The third type of resistance is inertia. Knowles argues that this type of resistance isn’t caused by the persuader but by the prospect herself. Knowles says this is as disappointing for salespeople as it feels like their prospects are being rude, unresponsive, and so on. In those cases, it’s more likely that the other causes of resistance are the reason why they’re holding out. Salespeople that call too often and follow-up too much, for example, start to seem desperate. I’ve made this mistake numerous times in my career. I haven’t dealt with the reactance or skepticism, and I’ve lost the business because of it. Or, I’ve moved a customer through without dealing with it only to have to deal with it later. But in the case of inertia, it’s often the one being persuaded who is reluctant to change. It’s important to gauge for this early on. Don’t get me wrong. Time is money, and if someone has no plans on taking action or creating a chance, we can’t stick around forever. But even then, there’s an excellent opportunity to create an experience that’s engaging and memorable enough that when the prospect is ready, we’ll be top of mind. Remember, it’s all a relationship business now.

So here’s an important question: If our customers feel all this resistance as they move from Stage One to Stage Two, what’s the most efficient thing we can do to move to conversion without coercion? We’ve already established the importance of building trust, but another method of dealing with resistance is to acknowledge it in the first place. So many sales and marketing experts have been using these boardroom buzzwords of “authenticity” and “transparency” over the past couple of years, without actually telling us what they mean when they say that. Around the back door, I think what they’re trying to say is that people have become increasingly immune to tactical persuasion, and this is one way to overcome resistance—by simply speaking the truth.

Removing resistance is the key to Stage Two. Instead of asking ourselves how we can better persuade and convert tactically, we need to be asking how we can better provide value to the customer at this stage. What if you redefine the conversion process by stressing the importance of a long-term relationship with your customers early on?

For example, as a slight digression, here’s a “tactic” you can start using right in Stage Two. Consider this question often asked at many businesses at the time of conversion: “And how did you hear about us?” The reason they’re asking this question is pretty simplistic. They want to collect marketing data. It’s pretty straightforward Marketing 101. If 10 people told you they heard about you from a friend, and 90 people said they found out about you on Facebook, that’s pretty significant in terms of where to invest additional marketing dollars. But here’s the tactic you can use that continues to build on the fact that you not only think in terms of a long-term relationship but also that people refer you. Instead of asking, “And how did you hear about us?” change the language to “And do you mind if we ask who referred you to us?” If they give you someone’s name, you say, “That’s great! Thank you so much for letting us now. We’ll be sure to thank her.” But if they say, “Nobody. I saw your ad on Facebook,” here’s your opportunity for a slight reframe. You respond by saying, “Oh, that’s odd, because 90 percent of our business comes from word of mouth.” What you’re doing here is planting the seed for future referrals (that they’re somewhat expected and common). More important, you’re also implying that your customers must be so happy with your products and services that a long-term relationship with your firm is the norm and that you expect them to be so thrilled that they’ll be routinely telling others about you.

The Psychology of Guarantees

We’ll talk later about guarantees and the “risk-free for 30 days” types of offers that we’re all familiar with, but it’s important to take note of why these work specifically well in Stage Two to remove resistance and friction from the conversion process itself, and how you can make them even more appealing in your business. There have been lots of different types of guarantees used in business over the years. Everything from the money-back guarantee to the risk-free guarantee, to the satisfaction guarantee, to the lowest price possible guarantee and many more. In the past few years, we’ve seen more extreme examples of guarantees used with great success. For example, Zappos became best known for its massive 365-day return policy. Identity theft protection company LifeLock offered a $1 million guarantee to its customers in the event of identity theft. This guarantee in particular, however, was squashed when the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) decided it was deceptive in nature. LifeLock was sued by the FTC for $100 million, and the FTC won. Don’t let this scare you away, though. When used properly, guarantees are an especially powerful tool in the second stage of the loyalty loop, and I’ll show you how to do them right.

There’s only a few simple questions we need to answer about guarantees to build them for almost any business. And before you say, “We could never use guarantees in our business,” think again. I could make a case and provide examples of guarantees and risk reversal to be used in any type of business. To create an effective guarantee, you first need to find all the reasons your customers might not be buying, and then create guarantees to alleviate those concerns. The goal of risk reversal and guarantees is to give your prospects 100 percent certainty and assurance in their decision-making process.

Why Do They Work?

It’s really quite simple. You take nearly all the risk off the customer’s shoulders. Every time a prospect is faced with a buying decision, the mind almost instantly starts resisting.

In my consulting practice, I charge high fees for an incredible ROI. I also offer a strong guarantee. If we have not met the mutually agreed-upon objectives, I’ll consider working until we do. If we are still unable to meet the mutually agreed-upon objectives, I will refund your entire fee in full. By the way, if you’re reading this now and want to see how I can help your business, that’s a pretty remarkable guarantee! You’d be foolish not to put the book down and call or e-mail me right now...just saying.

But the guarantee removes all the risk from my potential client’s shoulders and puts it all on mine. Marshall Goldsmith is the most well-known CEO coach in the world. A coaching assignment costs over $250,000, but Marshall allows you to pay at the end of the assignment, only if positive change has occurred. The catch? The client being coached doesn’t decide if positive change has occurred, their key stakeholders do. This might include a wife, a spouse, coworkers, or others. Marshall is confident in his approach. I’m confident in my approach. How confident are you in your approach?

Guarantees work because they indicate that you’re incredibly confident in your products, your services, their performance and quality, and your ability to service and delight the customer. It’s not much more complicated than that. But if you also remove the investment risk, it makes things a heck of a lot easier for your prospective clients.

For example, the Lands’ End guarantee reads as follows:

GUARANTEED. PERIOD.^®

The Lands’ End guarantee has always been an unconditional one. It reads: “If you’re not satisfied with any item, simply return it to us at any time for an exchange or refund of its purchase price.”

We mean every word of it. Whatever. Whenever. Always. But to make sure this is perfectly clear, we’ve decided to simplify it further: Guaranteed. Period.^®

It’s more than a return policy. It’s a promise we’ve kept for over 50 years now, to stand behind every product we make and every service we deliver.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! The key objective here is simple. By taking away the risk of the transaction, you reduce resistance and make it easier for the prospective customer to say “yes.” That doesn’t mean you use risk reversal or guarantees in place of a remarkable customer experience. Creating value isn’t just about giving more; you create value by reducing resistance and buyer’s remorse for your client. I guarantee it.

Changing the Dynamic of the Relationship

You remove resistance from the sales process by shifting from sales persuasion to collaboration. There’s been a lot of talk of the consultative or challenging sales approach over the past few years, and rightfully so. Instead of presenting the sale as a jousting match, you approach it as a partnership. Your front-facing people need to become trusted advisors, consultants, and guides. Your goal is to guide the client to their desired outcome—one that improves the client’s condition. Here’s a better way to think about today’s customer and today’s marketplace. Customers have a better radar for techniques. They smell it, and it turns them off. But if you approach every relationship with one of real intent that you strive for long-term relationships, and you have their best interest in mind, they’ve got a radar for that too. Many salespeople have gotten a bad rap, but rightfully so.

I’m going to assume you’ve successfully removed all resistance (and don’t worry, in the third section of the book I’ll give you specific tools to build your sales process experience and actual language you can use), and the prospect has now officially converted to a customer. Now we’re going to move on to the third stage of the loyalty loop where we’re delivering your product or service.

In the overlap between sales and marketing, the balance needs to be struck between presenting your products in the most appealing way but also building a relationship with your customer. The binary brain once again rears its two-sided head and can make us believe that presenting your products and building a relationship are somehow two different activities. Ideally, they are not. When you are doing the former, you are doing that in the context of an ongoing interaction with the customer. And when you’re relationship building, the customer is typically mindful that this is a sales interaction. I’m reminded here of crowdfunding campaigns.

Anyone with knowledge of crowdfunding platforms knows that typically you can’t just put up a video of your product and expect people to donate to the cause, whatever it may be. What you’re trying to do, first and foremost, in a crowdfunding campaign is to gain fans. A crowd-funding platform is a place where you can showcase your stuff in a way that develops a fan base. Once someone is a fan, they are much more likely to reach into their pocket. So, in almost every business transaction, there’s a delicate balance between presenting your goods and developing a relationship—and that is what the Customer Loyalty Loop is all about.

The Psychology of Testimonials

Remember the lines repeated many times in this book. Logic makes people think, but their emotions make them buy. They buy on emotion but justify those decisions with logic. In Stages One and Two, we’re tapping deep into the customer’s emotions. Testimonials are one of the most powerful tools used to demonstrate your ability to provide value to your clients. It’s one thing for you to say it in your sales and marketing efforts, but it’s another for your customers to say it for you. In this brief section, we’ll look at how to obtain and create compelling testimonials, what a testimonial should include, and where to use it. The more trust you present in the earlier stages of the loop, the better job you’ll do at obliterating any resistance as the prospect moves to the third stage. As mentioned in Stage Four, the very act of gaining testimonials is part of that stage, but now I’ll show you how to get them. More important, I’ll show you to put a system into place to gather testimonials in a systematic manner and where to use them in your sales and marketing efforts. I can draw a direct correlation between specific testimonials and a lot of revenue in my own business. Let’s briefly discuss why testimonials work.

Why Do Testimonials Work?

When I wrote my first book, I realized I was entering a new phase of my business. For starters, my business had done well, but outside the client base and work I’d done in the previous years to attract business to me, I was now putting myself out there for people who had never heard of me. When you write a book, your publisher asks you to get endorsements. Endorsements are a lot like testimonials. After all, if this person is willing to vouch for this other person, or say their book is worth reading, then it must be worth reading. I decided to go right to the top of the business world and seek endorsements from one of the most influential people in business, and that was Seth Godin. Seth and I had met a few times at previous events, but beyond basic pleasantries that was about it. I attached my manuscript to an e-mail and hit “send,” sending to Seth. In less than an hour, I got a response from Seth. He explained that, as I could probably imagine, he gets a ton of books and would try to take a brief look in the coming weeks. Less than 24 hours later, I was driving when I saw a notification on my cell phone. It was a response from Seth. I pulled over and read the response. Not only had he read my book, but he had even disagreed with a few of my points and wrote very articulate reasons for why he disagreed. Then, he explained what he did agree with and at the end of the e-mail was an endorsement.

Gaining testimonials are incredibly important. They’re even more important when they come from influential companies. These are one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost business growth tools available to almost any business. I remember once speaking to another consultant who told me fascinating stories about the time she consulted with Apple. She told fantastic stories about working with the company and spending time in the boardroom. I asked her if she had a testimonial from them, and she did. I then looked at her website and found no Apple logo, no mention of her work with Apple, and no testimonial. Do you think this small tidbit of information might do a lot to alleviate resistance from prospects in the early stages of the loop? Of course it world. I asked her why she would do this and she said it felt a bit like gloating. She was also afraid people might not believe her. This is such nonsense. When I e-mailed Seth Godin, I figured the worst thing that could happen would be that he would say no. He said yes. Who are the exemplars in your business or industry that could provide you with a fabulous testimonial or endorsement?

How Many Testimonials Do You Need?

You should be soliciting them regularly so they’re new and fresh. If it’s 2016 and I’m looking to have you rebuild my web presence, the last thing I want to see is testimonials from 2004 when AOL was bombarding everyone’s mailbox with CDs. I’m all for quality over quantity, but it should be part of your post-customer follow-up to request a testimonial, a review, or specific feedback for your work and the experience they’ve had with you.

Where to Use Them?

You should be using them everywhere. There’s no bad place to use them as they have impact during each stage of the loyalty loop. In Stage One, they cause the prospect to pay more attention. In Stage Two, they make your sales process more believable. In Stage Three, they help solidify the prospect’s decision, making them more likely to enjoy the experience. And in Stage Four, the client is more likely to give one if they’ve seen many others. Use them on your websites. Use them in your outgoing customer communications like quotes and proposals. Use them on your brochures and in your advertising. Use them in your regular, nonpromotional material to clients. You get the idea. Don’t send anything out without a testimonial on it. The psychology of testimonials is really quite simple. Prospects are skeptical, cynical, and resistant to sales efforts. Testimonials work to break down those walls. I looked, but I can’t find a great business that isn’t using them (Apple, Zappos, Amazon, GE, etc.) but I easily found over 50 small business websites that were not.

I once heard a marketer say that 10 great testimonials will trump 100 years of positive business history. I believe it.

Acquire them, and use them.