Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. Got a question from Alex Hartan or Hartan, and he asks, do you have any tips for getting testimonials in a way that is relevant for future prospects of working branding and web design? Yeah, I absolutely do. I'll describe it here, but you can go to jonathanstark.com slash building the perfect testimonial or Google for that and it'll come up. And I've got a six question framework that you can use, well, actually a whole sort of email series of emails that you could send to past clients and then questions to ask them. And it's a resource that I've kind of cobbled together from a few really smart people like Sean D'Souza and Amy Hoy, I think Eric Davis. It's a format, it's a plan that you can follow to reach back out to past clients and say, basically in the first email, you say something like, hey, Bob, listen, I'm redoing my website and I'd love to maybe get some feedback on the project that we did together and maybe get a testimonial. If that sounds okay, just shoot back a yes or thumbs up, or you can ask for the no and be like, it's fine if you don't have time to do that, but I'd really appreciate it. If you could do it, just hit reply with a yes or a thumbs up and I'll send across a few questions to help you get started. Then if they say yes, which they almost always will, assuming that it's a happy customer, but they almost always will, then you send them great thanks. Here are six questions. You can write whatever you want, but these are the six questions that'll keep you from getting writer's block. I know it's hard to write these sorts of things. And the six questions are very, very specific. So I won't mentally or audibly, vocally go through them now from memory. But if you go to that building the perfect testimonial, there's six questions there that, the first one's probably the most important one, which is like, what would have prevented you from buying this service? It's kind of like, what were the doubts that you had in your mind before you decided to work with me? That one is critically important. And then the next one is something like, what are the biggest benefit that you got out of this? And what the questions do is they encourage the client, the past client, to talk about business outcomes and the benefits of what you did on their business instead of stuff like, Alex is a great guy. He responded to my emails right away. Never made me feel like a jerk, whatever. Those are just normal, Alex is a professional kind of testimonials. And that's great to have. It's better than nothing. But when someone new is coming to your site, you want testimonials there that resonate with the anonymous reader. So if it starts off with, I was really afraid, before I hired Alex, I was nervous that someone outside of my industry wouldn't understand what it was like to do branding for pizza places. And then the next question is, but what benefit did you get from the service after you decided to buy? But it turned out that his, whatever, his outside perspective was exactly what we needed and it tripled revenue or something. So it's exactly the kind of testimonial that it's going to take an anonymous reader. It's going to click with them and say, oh yeah, I'm having the same fears about hiring Alex or someone like Alex. And wow, look at the benefits that this past client got when they got over that fear, actually took action, paid the money and got this result. And then the next question is like, what are three other side benefits that you got and so on and so forth. So that's what I would say. Works like a charm. I have all my students do it. Whenever my students need to get testimonials, that's the form that they use and it works great. The testimonials that come out of it are amazing. So I would recommend they do that. I think I said the URL enough. It's building the perfect testimonial. So just Google for Jonathan Stark building the perfect testimonial. Okay, I'll shut up. I'm Jonathan Stark. If you have a question for me, you can hashtag ask Jonathan on YouTube, LinkedIn, or Twitter, and we'll add it to the queue and I'll get to it as soon as I can. Bye. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the pricing seminar. Pre-registration starts soon and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call?

or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to JonathanStark.com slash call. C-A-L-L. That URL again is JonathanStark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.