One of the things about marketing or about selling is that every buyer has a resistance to buying from you. The story I’m about to share with you is one that has worked not just in this particular industry, but in many different industries. But I’m going to share a particular circumstance where I worked with a company who did what they call bath resurfacing and what we did was, we came up with a guarantee.
What this guarantee was, it reversed the risk out of buying from that company, and made it more comfortable for the end user or the consumer to make the decision to make the purchase. Now this can work in just about any business. I’m not saying guarantees are the be-all and end-all for any business. What I’m saying is that you certainly need to contemplate whether or not there are things that are frustrating your marketplace that are maybe stopping people from making the decision of buying from you, and come up with a way to overcome those fears.
Quite often that can be done with a guarantee.
Overcoming the fear of being ripped off
Now, when I say, “You need a guarantee,” or “You need to have some sort of guarantee,” will quite often say, “What about the people who are going to rip me off?” The reality is it’s very rare, and your guarantee doesn’t have to be, “I”m going to give you your money back.” There doesn’t even need to be anything attached to the guarantee as to what you’re going to do if you don’t follow through on the guarantee. Obviously it’s better if there’s some sort of a reward, but it doesn’t have to exist. We’ve seen many, many businesses where they do this, where they had a guarantee. In fact, you’ve probably seen people selling exercise equipment on the television late at night, and they have these 30-day money back guarantee. The reason they do that at these companies is that it really does work.
Anyone can come up with a Guarantee
Now this company that I worked with, they were not trained in sales, in fact, they were all tradespeople. They were doing this bathroom resurfacing. So they would spray this polyurethane, some sort of coating right over the top of existing tiles and vanities and baths and showers, etc. So if you had an outdated bathroom that was like, orange or something and you wanted to make it white, rather than replace the entire bathroom for a fraction of the cost, you could get it resurfaced.
Now it was interesting because if you look at the frustration of that industry, the frustration is there’s a lot of people, because it’s not regulated, you don’t actually have to be a spray painter or a tradesperson to do that particular kind of work, and it’s not regulated, anybody can do it. So what that meant was in the industry there was a lot of different people that were doing this work that were not qualified or taught or trained properly that would do a job that was not at the standard the customer would expect. That would get the customer things like runs in the spray work or it would be patchy or discolored or something.
What we did was we came up with a guarantee
I remember saying to these guys, “We need to come up with a guarantee,” and they said, “We’ve got one.” I said, “Can you show it to me?” And they gave me this bit of paper and it was full of all these words. I said, “What is this?” They said, “It’s the guarantee.” I said, “Where did you get this guarantee from?” They said, “We got it off the label on a mattress.” I said, “Well come on guys, we’ve got to come up with something that’s going to answer the frustrations of your customers.” So that’s what we did. We said if you’re not happy with the job that we’ve done, we’ll re-do it again for free until you are. That became the guarantee.
The Guarantee worked!
Now that guarantee doubled their conversion rate because they could say to the prospect, “Hey, when you’re shopping around ask this question: Do they guarantee that you’ll be 100% happy with the job or we’ll do it again for free?” Now the reality is that if you’re in spray paint by any chance you’ll understand this, but it didn’t mean that we did the whole bathroom again, it just meant that we fixed the flaws. So if there was a hair stuck in it, there was a run, there was a bit or discolouration, there was a patch, they just went back in there and they repaired it. That then led them to training their team to do the job properly. And very rarely did they ever get called back, because every time they did, it cost them money which then incentivized them to systemize the whole process.
How do you come up with a great guarantee?
It’s a good question but it’s quite simple. What I want you to do is come up with the three biggest frustrations someone dealing with your industry might come across. For example, if you’re in an industry with tradespeople, you might find that people in your industry don’t turn up on time, they overcharge, and they make a mess. You could make a guarantee that those things aren’t going to happen. You might be a sign writer, I worked with a sign company once, and we guaranteed to have your quote back to you within 48 hours or your sign was free. That did two things. It made sure the sign company got the quote back in a timely manner, but it also got it back before anybody else got their quote back. We found that most people that we were losing business to were just getting the quotes back faster than we were.
Recap
It gives you this opportunity to reverse all the risk, reduce all the frustrations your prospects may be feeling when dealing with your industry, and help you overcome those objections and of course then that increases your conversion rate. Increasing your conversion rate is something that is undervalued by so many people, because as soon as you double your conversion rate, you half your acquisition cost. That’s a whole other video. Maybe we’ll get to that next week or the week after.
All I want to do is encourage you to have a look at how you can guarantee to your customers you’re not going to do the things that frustrate the crap out of dealing with people in your industry. Good luck with that.
About the Author
Ben Fewtrell is a sought-after Business Coach, Keynote Speaker and trainer who has featured in Virgin’s Inflight Magazine and Entertainment Portal, SKY Business and “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”. He is also the host of the popular Business Brain Food Podcast where he interviews leading experts on anything and everything business.
