Social proof claims

We continue the section on proof claims, which are pieces of evidence you include in your prospecting conversations to demonstrate results in an attempt to convince prospects of the value of your products.

Social proof claims leverage the opinions of customers to justify the quality of the products or services offered.

There are satisfaction statistics (99% of our customers show high satisfaction). This indicator is good because it captures and summarizes the opinion of all your customers. It is problematic, though, if the data collection is imperfect or biased. If you get your data soliciting a response from customers, highly satisfied customers are statistically more likely to reply than mildly satisfied or even mildly dissatisfied ones. This distorts the answers and makes them appear better than they really are. Sometimes companies are selective in the solicitation of feedback from customers and avoid contacting those they might expect will give a bad review. The survey itself might be biased and make it easier to give a high score. The company can then influence scores by putting some pressure to give a good rating (“I would appreciate it if you give us a 5-star” instead of “Could you rate us?”).Publicly available scores on online platforms could be distorted. Overall, satisfaction statistics are good, but only when you provide clear information on the process through which they were collected. Even if buyers don’t go and read the description of how you collect the data, you show that you care to be transparent, and that builds trust on your numbers.

There are testimonial quotes, in which you report a verbatim sentence from a satisfied customer. They are nice because they bring a genuine touch using the actual words clients used to praise your work. Indeed, the problem here is that companies will only select the quotes they like the most, avoiding negative quotes, so the data is not representative. The expectation that the quote will be used to help the supplier also biases the content of the comment by the customer, who might not want to disappoint a supplier if they care to keep the relationship.

There are customer case studies, in which you provide an insightful and detailed analysis of how the product was implemented by a client with measurable results. Case studies are the most powerful and possibly the most reliable. However, there might be limits on the information customers allow you to use and share with other companies. They are well utilized in sales presentation but it is more difficult to use them in earlier phases of the sales conversation. There can still be a selection bias, effect so that you choose to report an exemplary case of success which does not reflect the normal situation of customers.

Which one is best? The beauty of social proof claims is that they neutralize each other's weaknesses once you use them all. So a combination of the three approaches can offer a powerful social proof.

Then, have a link to a document, a resource, a page on your website in which the prospects can verify the methods you utilized to collect and analyze the data. Prospects will rarely click, but it gives the impression you have nothing to hide, and, therefore, it builds trust. And if they click on the link provided, you have them in your website and they might gather more information that gets them interested.

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