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Did you know that mastering Social Proof doesn’t have to be complex?

To show you, we’ve interviewed three Social Proof experts to give you their opinion and viewpoint on how to be successful with Social Proof.

From scaling to fine tuning, we hope you enjoy this deep dive.

Subscribe to BoostSauce to learn even more marketing and sales knowledge, faster…

When it comes to Social Proof, there are only a few people we turn to for amazing advice that works across the board for different goals.

Whether you’re in SaaS, eCommerce, or lead gen, you’ll be excited to learn that the recipes this expert will share will all help you hit your goals faster.

In Order Of The Guests Below:

Dave Rogenmoser– CEO & Co-Founder @ Proof

Dave is the CEO and Co-founder of Proof. Proof is a Y-combinator backed startup that helps B2B companies create amazingly personalized website experiences.

Nuggets Dropped x33

“When in doubt, just fall back to social proof”

Joel Klettke– Conversion Copywriter & CRO Consultant  @ Business Casual Copywriting Ltd.

Joel Klettke is the shoulder B2B and SaaS companies cry on before he helps them fill Olympic-sized swimming pools full of cash and perform stunning synchronized swim routines in them. Because he hates free time, he also runs Case Study Buddy: a world-class team that helps brands tell amazing customer success stories.

Nuggets Dropped x80

“It comes out of experience with your brand, not opinion of it”

Talia Wolf– Founder & Chief Optimizer @ GetUplift

As founder of GetUplift, Talia and her team provide conversion optimization services for high-growth companies using customer-centric methods, emotional targeting strategies and data-driven analysis. Talia has been invited to teach conversion optimization on hundreds of stages such as Google, MozCon, Call To Action Conference, SearchLove, and many more and was recently listed as one of the most influential experts in conversion optimization.

Nuggets Dropped x43

“Address specific roadblocks of your prospects”

Social Proof Mastery With David Rogenmoser

Johnathan: All right, everyone, I actually can now say I have a personal friend on the other side of this call, somebody who has helped us tremendously with our own processes, met him in person, he’s about seven foot nine, he’s a very, very tall human being, knows good barbecue, is out of Austin, Texas, David Rogenmoser, the CEO at Proof. That’s your title, right?

David: That’s it, man.

Johnathan: All right, thank you for being here. We’re going to be talking about social proof, and based off of your own product, your platform, your company, UseProof.com. Where should people even start when they consider using social proof in their business today?

David: By the way, real quick, am I your tallest podcast guest ever?

Johnathan: I usually don’t have a qualifier around height, but I have to imagine so, seven foot nine is massively tall.

David: It’s gotta be me, it’s gotta be me. No, that’s awesome. Yeah, man, no, thanks for having me on. So I’ve thought a lot about social proof over the last five years, and starting Proof, and even just in my personal life, I love it, I’m always obsessed with restaurant reviews and all of that.

And for me, I love marketing, and I love learning how to copyright, and do all this cool stuff, but it still comes down to, the easiest way, I think, to increase conversions, is just to add social proof, and just share what other people are saying about you, which kind of kills me, as a marketer, ’cause I don’t get to use all my cool stuff.

But literally, when I’m writing the sales page, or creating a new landing page, the easiest thing to do to increase conversions is just add logos, add testimonials, add screenshots of other people, add videos of other people.

It cuts through the noise in a big way, and so, I think, anywhere you’re doing marketing, you should always stop and think, how can I add more social proof to this? And it almost always works.

Johnathan: Yeah, no, absolutely, I agree, and the earliest version of your company, your product, and tell me if I’m wrong too, but I’ve seen it so many times before I even talked to you the first time, was that little widget in the corner that says, this person from this location just bought X, Y, Z, or just downloaded it, or whatever the conversion action was, is that how you guys started?

David: Yeah, it was just that little thing. And I was booking a trip to South Africa, and I was gonna do this safari, and I was on, I think it was Booking.com, or one of those sites, and I saw a little thing slide out that said, somebody just bought two minutes ago, book soon.

And I didn’t know the person, but it gave me confidence to go put down like five grand on this safari. And that’s when I was like, man, this is really cool, we need this for our funnel, ’cause we were selling courses at the time, but it didn’t exist.

And so we just kind of built it real quickly in a weekend and thought, hey, let’s throw it up there and see what happens. And we saw over a 50% increase on our order floor when adding just a little notification like that. That was gonna be startup proof.

Johnathan: Yeah, and you guys have since obviously expanded to much wider of a product offering. We did some beta testing with you guys on, now, I don’t want to say it because I don’t know if you decided on what you want to call it yet, but personalization is what we did, and we used a lot of things that were just really impressive.

I guess you can call it social proof, sort of. You know, this may be the most effective, shortest conversation ever on the show.

Because just, obviously, putting logos and testimonials and videos and pictures and things like that, while it’s a good idea, how do we unpack that even for the people who want to use Proof, which is literally the website, UseProof.com, that they can go and actually sign up for it and start using it right away?

But in addition to that, what other things have you learned across your own marketer’s background and the platform that you guys have now? What are some other tactical things that people can use?

David: Yeah, so I think, even outside of the tool, there’s a few things that we always make sure that we do when adding social proof to our site. So, I think, first of all, add logos to your site, “as seen on”, or just customer logos.  We’ve tested that a lot, and just adding those, adds between probably five and 15% conversion lift, on average, from what we’ll see there. 

Johnathan: Yeah.

David: So it’s a really easy way, most people don’t miss that, and they add that there, but just make sure it’s across all the different pages to kind of supercharge that.

What we’re doing with you guys right now with our new tool is, depending on which industry someone is in, we show them a different set of logos. So this is like personalized social proof. And so, I don’t know, we don’t necessarily need to get into it, the, kind of, how we pull all that off, but–

We identify people when they come to the site, show them a different set of logos–

Johnathan: Yeah, I was gonna say, let’s do that.

David: If they’re staff, they’re going to see staff logos, if they’re E-commerce, they’ll see E-commerce logos.

Johnathan: Yeah, let’s do that real quick. So just so you guys listening know–

David: Yeah, so I mean, essentially what we’re doing is, people come to the site.

Johnathan: Go ahead, Dave, I think there’s a lag. Tell us how we do it.

David: Yeah, yeah, no worries. Yeah, so people come to the site, we take their IP address, and then we send that to a company called Clearbit, and they’ve got a sort of a crib reveal that tells us which company is attached to that IP address.

All of a sudden we know, if someone’s at the office, we know which company they’re probably working for. From that, we also kind of group that company into different industries. So, I think, on your guys’ site, we’ve got E-commerce, enterprise, B2B companies, startup, and sass companies, I think, are the five categories that we’re running there.

And we then use our new tool, which, I think it’s called Proof Experiences, but we’ll know in a month, kind of, what exactly we land on there. Our tool will then change out the actual website content based on that, and so we’ve got a few different headlines, and a different set of logos. And I don’t think we have your test results back yet–

Johnathan: Not yet, no.

David: But from ours, on our staff audience, for example, we saw over a 300% lift. 

Johnathan: Wow.

David: In staff companies. And the same thing for our startup audience as well. And so, that’s a really, really easy way to go get some big lift using social proof.

Johnathan: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. And, and for people listening, it’s not just enough to just throw some logos on there, for example. Let’s say that, for us as an agency, we have clients, if we put a lot of logos that people have no idea what kind of company they are, it might not have the same impact as some bigger logos.

What we’ve also found out is that the bigger logos might actually make the smaller companies afraid. Even though the goal from our side is to say, hey, if we can work with these big companies and they trust us, you should trust us too.

But then what we’ve heard in feedback, it’s more anecdotal, ’cause we haven’t really gotten it fully figured out yet, of getting that feedback purely. But from talking to a lot of prospects, they’re like, yeah, we think that you guys charge a lot of money, and so, therefore, I didn’t wanna reach out to you, because I assumed you only worked with these big companies.

So be aware and be mindful that it can work against you as you go along there too. And so, have a reasoning as to why you put up these logos, and what you can think and foresee that might maybe even hurt you, that you don’t know about. 

David: Yep, no, that’s a great point, that’s a really great point.

There’s a second thing that we do with social proof that a lot of people aren’t thinking about, and this is on our Facebook ads. So we aren’t running a ton of Facebook ads right now, but in the past, we’ve spent millions on it.

And we will usually start our ads off by trying to optimize for engagement, so we can get a bunch of likes, a bunch of comments, and we’ll run the first set of ads at our warmest audiences, our customers, so that we’re getting all the comments, we’re getting all the reactions on there.

And then what we’ll do is we will always use that ad, so we’ll just copy that ad ID, and we will forever use that ad. And even though there’s probably gains we could get from changing out headlines and changing out and split testing a bunch of stuff, the social proof tends to just outperform all that for us.

And so, always, when you’re running ads, make sure you’re running ads that have comments on ’em, and try to keep reusing ads instead of restarting them from scratch all the time.  

Go run, if you see one of our ads in the wild, there’s a good chance it’s gonna have hundreds of comments on it, and it’s gonna at least make you stop and be like, wow, this thing’s really getting talked about, this is a, this could be a really interesting ad.

And I don’t even care if it’s negative or angry people, whatever, just any conversations, I think, are good on ads, and any number of reactions, and it’s just, it just shows that this is a relevant company in the market, and it’s not just some nobody running their first-time ad.

Johnathan: That’s really, really interesting you said that, because there’s a way to almost game-ify that, that we’ve talked about before, is, you can take an ad that’s an unpublished page post, or what other people call dark posting. Meaning that, when you use that ad across other audiences within Facebook or other ad sets.

Usually, if you don’t do dark posting, or if you don’t do an unpublished page post, it loses all that social proof that’s gathered through one audience or one ad set.

Once you do that unpublished page post, you can accumulate all that, basically, that social proof, the likes, the comments, the shares, whether good or bad, over time, and you can actually take, and this is what a lot of, I would say, the more GrowthHack-y marketers are doing too, the ones that actually sell courses that try to make themselves look way better than they actually really are.

And a whole other side story, there’s an Instagram account called BallerBusters that you guys should follow because it’s really funny. It actually calls out and shows proof that a lot of these people scam other people, and a lot of it’s done on Instagram and Facebook. So anyways, not to go off track.

The way that you then do it is that you can take that unpublished page post, you can get a link for that, and you can actually share it with friends or colleagues or other people in your network, and you can ask them, can you actually like this? Can you write a couple comments?  

So you’re framing that ad for positivity and social proof before it goes out in the wild, and it actually will lead to, most of the time, higher engagement because people have already started that, versus an ad that just is completely bare, and doesn’t have any traction or whatever.

So you can use that ad for almost an eternity, until Facebook decides to make a change, of course, and you can’t do that. But that’s something that we’ve seen work really, really well.

And a flip side of that is, if you guys remember, that press juicer that basically, was that, do you remember that, Dave? That juicer that was like Silicon Valley-backed, that New York Times article came out, do you remember that? Juicero.

David: Yeah, they raised, like, I think, Juicero, they raised like 100 million dollars to squeeze juice out of a bag.

Johnathan: Yeah, so, what happened, and I had an example, ’cause I was speaking at the GrowthHackers conference in L.A. some years ago.

And what I basically was mentioning to them was like, hey, there’s this hack you can do about pre-framing your Facebook ad with positive social proof, versus the Juicero, which even if they did, they probably wouldn’t have been able to save themselves.

But a New York Times article came out that basically said, you can actually hand-squeeze these prepackaged packages faster than the Juicero machine does, and you don’t have to have the Juicero machine. And they were like, crap. It was like the demise of their company, it was like all downhill from there.

But the best part, well, not the best part, but the point that I was making is that the people knew about that, that saw the ad on Facebook, and they just ripped nonstop on that ad. And so it was like, what? There was never going to be anybody buying the actual juicer when all the social proof was that bad, in advance. 

So think about that as you go out, and obviously, use, Dave, your example, which was amazing as well. So that’s super cool. What else haven’t we talked about?

David: That’s a nugget, man.

Johnathan: Thank you, I’ll put that in there.

David: You gotta hit the little rooster, that was a nugget.

Johnathan: All right, I’ll hit a few, thank you. Sometimes I need that confidence.

David: That’s good, okay, the third one is, okay, the third one is, I really, really like showing raw social proof.

And so I think a lot of people that take a quote from one of their customers or clients, they pretty it up, and they put it on their website, and it just looks beautiful. But also, you kind of think, this could be anybody.

And so I really think it’s powerful if you’ve got screenshots of text messages from customers saying, this is awesome, or Slack messages, or Facebook posts or just these raw format, or maybe a tweet, and showing those on your website. It feels more genuine, it feels more authentic, it just, people can identify with that.

Recently, on my sales calls for Proof Experiences, I’ve been using a screenshot with one of our customers, Chris Nolan, Head of Growth at ShipBob, he just Slacked us over some stats and was like, this is awesome. And I just show that on every one of my sales calls now, in its raw form. It’s more powerful and tested, to just see the inside of our Slack channel together.

Johnathan: Yeah.

David: And so I realized that you don’t have to pretty ’em up, just take screenshots, put ’em on your site, and it’s really, really powerful doing it that way. 

Johnathan:  ‘Cause yeah, it removes a sense of, you faked this social proof, or, this isn’t true. Even though, of course, you can Photoshop anything that you want, but it just is like, the person thinking about it, that’s trying to be convinced, is like, did you really go to those lengths to impress me? And people are like, no, this looks more real than, like you just said, cool. What’s the–

David: And it’s way easier.

Johnathan: Go ahead, yeah, true, true, absolutely.

David: Well, the last one, I would say, the last one, I would just say, is testimonial videos. Just get videos. And this isn’t my, I think you guys do really well. You guys have, I don’t know, maybe 10 testimonial videos of your customers that are well done.

And here’s the thing, I have never actually watched a testimonial video all the way through, even though they’re only like two minutes long. But when I was starting to work with you guys, and I saw that you had a video from Segment, I watched the first five seconds of it, and then I was like, done, you guys are awesome. I like Segment, you guys are working with Segment, I’m in.

Johnathan: Yeah.

David: And I just think it’s really, really powerful to have that, and have your customers out there selling for you.

Johnathan: Yeah.

David: And so I just recommend, get testimonial videos. They don’t even have to be nice, just have your customers pull out their camera and just film a little horizontal video. And I usually, when I’m doing that, I’ll send them a little script, kind of like a, hey, say something before Proof, say something after Proof, who do you recommend Proof for? Kind of a three-part script.

I tell them, hey, hold it horizontal, put it, you know, be in a quiet place, and I give them little directions when I’m doing that. And we’ve collected hundreds of testimonial videos through that, that’s really, really powerful.

Johnathan: yeah, I believe it. It’s like your own version of Cameo, but not with celebrities, if you know that platform. Have you heard about that?

David: Yes, and I have been, I’ve actually been looking at how we can do it to you guys in Slack. I’m gonna, I’ve got something coming for you guys, so just you wait. But I’m gonna start using Cameo with our customers.

Johnathan: I love it, I love it, cool. Anything else, Dave, before we wrap up? This has been super, super enlightening, and also exciting too.

David: Yeah, those are the big ones. And I think, again, social proof’s just the easy way. I’m not smart enough to figure out all the most sweet conversion rate optimization things, but when in doubt, just fall back to social proof, and throw it on the page, and just, it’s almost guaranteed to work. 

Johnathan: That’s awesome. No, I completely agree. Everybody listening or watching, go to UseProof.com, check out their actual tool and platform.

If you’re in the B2B space, what we’re doing right now, so much positive feedback from our own prospects that we’re trying to close because we’re trying to be very aggressive with anything new coming out. That’s what the Proof team is doing.

I think there’s literally a testimonial page of me holding my dog, and a video, all the things that you just mentioned are actually on that page, so we can link to that too, in the notes.

But, Dave, thank you so much, and to your team, for being, we can have a whole other episode on how much I love you guys, but thank you.

David: Awesome, man, no, I appreciate you having me on. We’ll do it again here soon.

Johnathan: All right, talk soon, bye.

Social Proof Mastery With Joel Klettke

Johnathan: All right, everyone, I have a very, very good friend, a marketer that I adore and admire. I think he’s awesome. He’s helped ourselves internally at KlientBoost with our own conversion rate roadmap. Our focus on how we actually get better results for our clients.

There’s not a lot of people I allow in the door to mess with our own procedures. But he is one of them. We have Joel Klettke from Case Study Buddy, here talking about social proof. How are you, Joel?

Joel: Doing good. I’m excited. I want to make as many chicken noises as possible. I like the sound of that. Like a field of chickens. That’s the goal here.

Johnathan: We are so close to Thanksgiving. I know you’re in Canada right now, but we were thinking about actually swapping out for gobble-gobble. But we didn’t have enough time to do it prior to. So. People listening, we’ll do another one later on. Maybe we’ll get it in there.

But, Joel, what are your thoughts? I mean, everybody can talk very easily about social proof and say, yeah, you should have badges, you should have testimonials. You should have awards. There’s more science to that than just saying, do that. Can you tell us about your definition of social proof and how you approach that conversation with your clients?

Joel: Yes, I want to say everything that I think what you just described. The predominant thing that I think is killing social proof is that people treat it like icing. 

So they just collaborate everywhere, like some social proof here, some social proof there, and there’s no strategy behind it. And in fact, there’s no strategy that I’m seeing continually. Companies have absolutely no strategy for cultivating it. No checkpoints, no real road map for actually putting it your goal. 

So let’s start at the very beginning. Social proof is is essentially a third party, a credible third party, lending credence to something you’ve done, telling their story, basically offering some proof that what you’re promising or what you say you can do is true.

That takes a whole bunch of different forms. But essentially something to remember is that social proof is experiential. It comes out of somebody’s experience with your brand, not their opinion of your brand. That’s not all that important.

Social proof that amounts to just an accolade saying like, oh, that they’re really great. It was a wonderful time to work with them. Whatever. That’s really surface level social proof. That only has so much leg.

The best social proof is experiential, contingent the result that they’ve seen, what that actually looks like and what it meant for them. So you kind of mentioned a whole bunch of different types of social proof.

Sometimes it’s a testimonial. Sometimes it’s a badge. Sometimes it’s a full blown case study. Sometimes it’s a video. But social proof essentially has at its core one big job, and that’s to grease the wheels towards conversion.  It’s to give you the credibility to establish that trust and empathy so that a lead can see themselves working with you.

They can see themselves having the problem solved. They can envision that better future that you can provide. And they can believe it’s possible because there’s something outside of your own internal plan saying, we can do that. There’s something outside third party lending credence to that.

Johnathan: Got it. The detail you just gave versus the deep versus the shallow, super, super important thing for people to hear. When you go and figure out.

Let’s just take an approach of, you actually making a case study for your client, ’cause for all you listeners and watchers about this, Joel does a phenomenal job working on behalf of a company who has case study candidates actually forming together a really well stitched, well-thought through case study that actually helps, like you said, grease the wheel towards conversion or towards sale.

Let’s say that I was to approach you, Joel, and you find me as a good candidate. I’m just gonna say that, I don’t know if I am, but. And you’re like, let’s work together and you’re gonna help us build more case studies.

How do you begin that? Because that case study,I’m assuming, there’s a lot of pieces of when that case study is done that we can take and use as social proof in different ways. We can put it on our landing page. We can put it in our website, on our ads, you know, things like that, too. Is that is that a correct assumption?

Joel: That’s a very correct assumption and it’s also a rare assumption. So most companies falsely assume the only place you can use social proof, the only function for a case study is at the bottom of the funnel. And that’s not true at all.

A case study can be used at the top of the funnel to attract leads, used in the middle of the funnel to nurture those leads.

And so a lot of people would think, okay, you come in and say, let’s do some case studies. And the first thing I’d say is, look, all right, let’s get some of your clients on the phone. Who’s happy? But no, that’s not where you should start.

The place that companies should start, but don’t start is what’s your strategy? And there’s two sides of that that you have to consider. So what are your business goals? Where are you trying to grow? What marketing are you trying to move into? 

Maybe there’s a part of your service you’re trying to emphasize. Maybe there’s a particular niche or industry you’re trying to grow into. Maybe there’s a particular part of your staff solution or whatever. But you want to pause and think, okay, where are we trying to grow? Because the problem is that the stories you tell will be the stories you attract. 

So let’s say that you guys had a client who was a yoga instructor and you got a really great result for them, but you never want to work with a yoga instructor again. You don’t love solving that problem.

But even though it’s got a great result, that might not be the story you want to tell, if that’s not the direction you’re going. So first, you want to consider your business goals, your potential use cases. How is it you want the case study to help you?

If you want to support a campaign? Do you want it to be a sales asset? Do you want to use it in email nurturing? You want to kind of define your use cases. Then you want to flip the coin to the other side and say, okay, those are our goals.

But let’s stop and say, for the people we know, we’ve defined. We want to tell a story. Basically, the formula is you want to tell a story that says, hey, a person like you with the problem you have, took action you’re debating and got the result you want. That’s the formula. That’s what makes a great study. 

Johnathan: I freakin’ love that.

Joel: So now, you’ve defined your own business goals. Now you want to turn around and say, okay, who is the person? Who is it that we need to talk to? 

What’s the role and what’s the problem they have? What’s actually behind their motivation to come to us? What problem did we solve for them? What action did they need to take? Was it a demo? Was it a call? Was it a consult? What is somebody debating?

And not only that, but what might keep them from taking action? See, one of the things that a lot of case studies, lots of social proofs get wrong, is it sugar coats everything and everything’s just magical land of yesses where nothing went wrong and everybody was agreeable. 

In the real world, stuff breaks, stuff goes wrong. It’s just as valuable to talk about why they hesitated or why they were concerned or even where a campaign didn’t work out, and you’ve turned it around and got that great results ’cause that’s real life. that shows that you solve problems.

And then, of course, naturally we want to talk about results, but not just the results. So another place a lot of social proof falls on its face is, yeah, it’s really great if KlientBoost can put out a case study saying, you know what we saw?

We saw 200% conversion lift for our client. That’s great. But what’s even more impressive or makes it even more real is what did that mean for the customer? Did it mean they didn’t have to hire another staff member? Did it mean they could enter a new market? Did it mean that they could roll off a new product or service?

And there’s always underpinning the big result. There’s always some other meaningful impact that makes it real. 

So to make it tangible, for example, like accounting software. One of the things we’re working with a client and one of the things we got back from the secretary because of this accounting software was saying, I don’t have to chase people around the office anymore. They didn’t have to write a paycheck. That’s a real feeling. That’s human emotion.

And so we have to remember, these are customer success stories. They’re people success stories. They’re not you success stories. They’re not all about you and how great you are. They’re customer success stories. So you need to tell the story of the customer and bring that human emotion in. Bring in those factors.

Johnathan: Yeah. No, it’s amazing. Just the sheer fact that you mentioned, like you have a yoga instructor and you don’t want to attract anymore. Like, we literally just had Instagram, the official Instagram for business do a case on our clients called Yoga International.

But it’s like a peloton. Like the stationary bike at home, but for yoga. And so. But you’re right. It probably wouldn’t be great using that case study to attract individual yoga instructors because they might not have the budget or be ideal clients. So that’s a really, really smart, awesome point.

The other part that’s coming full circle to me very quickly is that people listening to this segment within the episode, I think it’s really well known that social proof works. But what nobody ever talks about is the depths of how you can make it work better for you. And that’s what we’re unpacking here today.

So use your badges, use your testimonials, your ratings and all that kind of stuff. That’s great. But understand how you can connect. And what I think is really really important that we’re gonna be getting into is the FAQs. You mentioned this early.

What prevents people from doing the demo, doing the consultation, things like that? Those are things that can be easily highlighted or talked about. So when you go out and on behalf of your clients to talk to their customers that are happy, Do you guide the conversation around what a main sticking point is that is preventing other prospects to convert and tackle that first?

Like, how do you go about that? Because obviously you don’t want to say, here’s what you wrote or we wrote the testimonial for you. Are you okay with this? Like, how does that operate?

Joel: Yeah, so we at first, we’ll talk to our client and we get the story from their side. Because we always want to mine what intelligence we can. We want to go in, ’cause you really only, if you’re doing it right, you only get one shot at the customer interviews. So you want to nail it.

And you do have to get the customer on the phone. Yes, you can send them a survey. Yes, you can get them to send you video responses. It’s a little bit more clunky. It can work. We find repeatedly the best way to get a detailed answer, a usable sound bite, some really rich contextual value added stuff is by talking to the person on the phone.

So we’ll talk to our client first, okay. You kinda define, okay, what do they know? What do they know about this customer and their story? And then we’ll go back to the customer.

We always structure the interview in a very specific way because your job as the interviewer is not to rattle off a list of questions. In fact, it’s not even to do that much talking. It’s to ask intelligent questions. Listen intently for where you need to press in or follow up and have a conversation.

Your biggest job, though, is to turn the interviewee into a storyteller. That’s your role, to get them telling a story, not sharing opinions, not answering questions, telling a story. So how do you do that? You structured the interview in a BDA format. Before, during, after. 

And we’ve seen this kind of model in infomercials, right. What was life like before you had the solution? What was life like during the experience of having the solution? And now what’s life like after?

So when you structure it that way and when you can take control of the call, then you can say hey, and ask them what was going on in your business or in the case of B to C, what was going on in your life, and since you’re looking for a solution like this.

And that one question is so packed that you instantly they start saying, well, we’re dealing with this issue. And then you can follow up. And what you want to make sure you do is if you don’t get the information, you either ask the same question a slightly different way or ask the question like, oh, well, what made that so frustrating or what made that’s so important to solve?

So if all you’re doing is robotically reading off a list of questions and this is why often companies shouldn’t do their own customer interviews because they have no expertise in doing anything but rambling off questions.

And they’re so close to it, like it’s not a bad idea to have a third party, whether it’s self or consultant, whoever, run the interview, because they can have the boldness to ask questions without the awkwardness. Like, asking a client to sing your praises on a call, it’s super awkward.

Johnathan: Yeah, I can imagine.

Joel: Buy anyways. Asking them about the before. Totally. And then during. So, what surprised you about the experience? What in your opinion, was the most, was the biggest value that in the case of this own service provider, like KlientBoost, what was the biggest value that KlientBoost has brought to the table? Why was that so valuable for you? What did that mean for you throughout the course of solving the problem?

And it’s important to remember too, to ask questions not just about the positive, but also where things can be improved. Because while you’ve got a customer on the phone, this is a bizdev opportunity and a way to make your company better.

So, ask them what didn’t go as expected? How did they handle that? That can still add some of that realism, that authenticity in the story. And then that after piece, just remembering one of the big – I’m gonna call this a nugget because it’s made a big difference for us.

Johnathan: I’m gonna get ready.

Joel: But it’s so, so easy to overlook. I get complaints. Okay, here it is. People complain all the time. We can’t get metrics from our customer. We can’t get metrics from our customer. There’s two big reasons that happens.

The first is it’s your job to talk about tracking how they’ll track the success of your relationship from the outset. If you’re not doing that, why are you surprised when they have no metric to report after that?

But the second thing and this is so simple. Is give a bit of lead time and tell them what metrics you hope to ask them about, that they can go pull them. It’s a hedge smackingly simple thing, but nobody does it. Just giving your lead a little bit of lead time.

Giving your customer a little bit of lead time to pull those metrics means that this won’t happen on the call. So what sort of lift in sales did you see? You know what? I don’t have that data, but I’ll talk to so-and-so, and go get it for you. And they literally never will do that. If that happens, congratulations, you’ve won the lottery. 

Johnathan: Same chance.

Joel: But that’s not a common scenario. Nine times out of ten, you are not hearing back from that person again. So you want to make sure you give them some prep time. And also that takes a lot of the fear out of the equation. 

So when somebody has an idea of what they’re gonna be asked about, when they have a sense of how it’s gonna be used, when they have a sampler idea of what the end output might look like, that can all help disarm people and get them to be willing to be involved in a case study in the first place. 

Johnathan: Yeah, yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. Thank you for putting it together in such a tangible way and tactical way. You’re talking at the beginning of this episode, that you’re like gonna have a hard time doing that. That’s like the opposite. I can’t hit this button enough ’cause I, nobody would be able to hear you talk if I kept doing it.

So you get all this information. I’m sure a ton of this stuff is also eye opening for the client, whether they use it in other parts of their business beyond just for social proof, like equipping their sales team with better insight because they know which objections are to come more often, actually making it more black and white.

Like I’m assuming like there’s non-stop of like good things to come from this, no.

Joel: There’s a ton. So it’s a two way conversation between whoever is playing. Usually it’s marketing. Marketing putting the case studies together and sales. And sales should be involved because sales is on the frontline.

They’re gonna know, for example, what hesitation they’re facing and they wish that had ammunition to combat. They’re gonna know, like one of the most wonderful things you can start doing in your interviews and in your social proof is asking them who else they considered, and why they ultimately chose you.

That is like a sales orgasm for the sales team, ’cause now they have a tangible example of someone who’s considering an alternative and went a different road, went with you. But it doesn’t just come down to sales.

So I mentioned, there’s lots of ways to use this. The one of my favorites that nobody really seems to think about is cold outreach.

So, there is a study by HipLead, and what they found is that mentioning a famous customer or mentioning of prominent customers of someone known in the nation in your cold outreach triple, tripled the number of people who responded in the affirmative saying, yes, I’m interested in it.

So if you can imagine, just mentioning them as a customer has that impact, imagine being able to send over a little, slide deck of what you did for them and what their opinion was. That’s huge.

Another way that people don’t really think about using them is to win back dead or cold leads. So let’s say somebody went back. Yeah. Dead leads or people who have kind of cycled out.

So let’s say someone came in, they’re super interested. You know, it’s been a few months. You want a natural way to reach back out.

Sending a simple email saying, hey, are you still interested in solving X problem? Here’s a quick little story of someone that was like you was debating doing this and the result that they got. You know, let me know if you’re interested in reopening the conversation. That’s a really easy, low pressure way to reopen the conversation and send over a tangible asset. 

Another way that you can put these to work and, let’s talk the CRO side of things, ’cause we kind of danced around this at the beginning. And I mentioned people tend to just slather social proof on like icing words like should we have it in the hero? Should we have it by the CPA?

Johnathan: Everywhere.

Joel: Where could it go? And so we just kinda, yeah. We like, oftentimes just gets peppered in there ’cause we feel obligated. Well, we sho