Customer testimonials are perhaps one of most adaptable marketing tools a company has in its promotions arsenal. If you write them correctly and effectively you can post them on your website, turn them into sell sheets, include them as references when bidding on new projects, and publish highlights from them in your company’s brochures and other promotional literature. Another bonus to producing a strong testimonial is its extended shelf life – words of satisfaction and praise can last for months, even years.

The trick to writing an effective customer success story is to tell an engaging story that will hook your new and potential customers and keep them reading until very end. You must answer all-important question that’s on mind of every single one of your customers: “What’s in it for me?” A good testimonial will not only answer that question in three-dimensional detail, it will also help your new and potential customers relate to your existing customers in a much more personal way through an exchange of shared ideas about your products and services. Whereas paid advertisements are broadcast to a wider audience that includes your target customers, testimonials are personalized stories that speak directly to your customers, enabling them to visualize benefits of owning your products or benefiting from your services through a story told by someone with whom they can relate and share similar experiences.

INCOMPAS can assist you in writing and producing your own effective testimonials, or we can edit your existing customer success stories and offer constructive feedback on how you can strengthen them to better showcase your company. To get you started, we’ve developed a step-by-step guide to assist you in producing a winning testimonial.

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Step-by-Step Plan for Stellar Customer Testimonials

1. Seek Permission. Before you do anything else, request approval from your customer to develop and publish a testimonial based on their recent experience with you – as soon as possible after deal is final and while experience remains fresh in everyone’s mind. Your customer will be far more open to this idea if you explain to them that their organization will receive additional exposure through publication and distribution of testimonial; you can also assure your customer that they will have ample opportunity to review finished article and make whatever changes they feel are necessary before you post it on your website or otherwise broadcast article. 2. Conduct a Professional Interview. Many companies have realized advantages of arranging for a separate interview with your customer to be conducted by someone outside your company. This independent approach will enable your customer to answer any questions candidly without feeling unduly pressured to overdo their praise or gloss over important details. Remember, a good testimonial mirrors real life: even best customer experiences include unforeseen challenges that must be solved in course of doing business. Your testimonial will ring much truer if it contains honest comments from your customers about how you dealt with any problems that arose during delivery of your company’s goods and services. The person conducting interview must be professional in both appearance and conduct; he or she must also be familiar with your company and your products and services, and also with your customer’s business. Your interviewer should not only pose questions about quality of products and level of customer service that they enjoyed from your company, he or she should also ask questions about any problems or glitches that arose and required resolution. Even if you don’t use these anecdotes in your finished testimonial, honest feedback from your customer can only help improve quality of your products and services in future.

Indeed, excitement that an RFP generates is often quickly tempered by dawning realization of immense amount of toil that goes into competing for – and winning – that coveted government or private-sector contract. As always, it’s when stakes are highest that everyone on your team must shine their brightest and produce their best work.

You can help by breaking down proposal into manageable parts, by assigning specific sections to appropriate individuals on your team, by establishing a series of realistic deadlines that allow for producing a polished looking proposal, and by ensuring that finished proposal contains both a strong call to action and all required information specified in RFP.

INCOMPAS can assist you in all phases of this process, or you can call us in at very end, to assist you in editing and final presentation of your proposal. To get you started, we’ve developed a point-by-point plan to assist you in preparing a winning proposal.

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Proposal Preparation Plan

Be Informed:

· Read RFP carefully, all way through, at least three times, so that everyone in your organization has a thorough grasp of all requirements and expectations. The information that is crucial to your proposal will likely be scattered throughout RFP.

· Recognize and understand proposal for what it is: a plan that identifies a need or problem, followed by effective strategies that meet need or solve problem, a list of anticipated costs and an explanation of how strategies’ progress and resulting benefits will be measured. Your proposal must contain a strong call to action, and it must be organized and concise, including all required information.

· Focus on proposal evaluation criteria and subsequent weight given to each proposal section. It is here that you will learn where to focus your efforts during preparation of your proposal.

Be Organized:

· Develop a proposal schedule by working backwards from due date, and stick to it. Establish separate due dates for financial information, allowing sufficient time to acquire more information and refine existing information. Hold regular meetings with your proposal teams to discuss strategies, progress and any roadblocks that are encountered along way. Make sure you factor in plenty of time for copying, binding and delivery of your proposal. Set aside additional time for distributing your proposal to your entire team, and make sure there is a qualified person on hand to proof-read final document before it leaves your organization.

· Delegate and inform. In each section of RFP, specify individual who will be preparing information for that section, and provide them with a guideline word or page count as well as a bulleted list of points to be covered in that section. Post important instructions, so that your team has easy access to information such as proposal due date, number of required copies, delivery instructions, etc. Don’t complicate your team’s job by making them hunt for this information.