What is Your Business’s Guarantee?
Customers want to trust you. They need to be convinced. That’s the job of your guarantee.
One marketing strategy element you’ll tackle as you put together the Vision Traction Organizer (VTO) is your organization’s guarantee. You’ve spent time digging deep into visualizing your target customers, and you’ve identified the three things that make you unique. You’ve likely also documented a proven process of how you’ve successfully delivered your product or service to customers.
There’s another step before your marketing strategy is complete. What will you say to prospects to proactively reduce the risk of working with you? This is your guarantee.
It’s got to be meaningful. Approach it as an action.
Beyond money back
Let’s examine what a guarantee represents from a psychological standpoint. There’s a game of tug-of-war in your prospective customer’s mind. Your marketing strategy attracts them, but natural skepticism and doubt are pulling them in the other direction. They want to trust you, but they need to be convinced.
You can help them win that game of tug-of-war by removing the perceived risk of doing business with you. Offering to give them their money back is a step towards convincing them, but it’s still a risk. If they’re not satisfied with your performance, or if you fail to deliver what’s promised, their problem still isn’t solved. And they’ve got to start all over again.
Managing expectations
Money back guarantees have always been an effective way to reduce risk and increase customer confidence. They are not the only way to ease concerns, however, and money-back guarantees should stand out by being specific and powerful. Think of the ancillary frustrations attached to having to start all over again. Time was wasted; it’s a ding to somebody’s reputation, and commitments made to others might not be kept.
A successful guarantee which separates you from competitors can be far more powerful when it is specifically related to the value proposition you offer. Create a promise of performance that tips the risk balance in the customers’ favor by transforming it into the statement that sets expectations – and explains why and how you can remove risk.
Our guarantee is an example of this active approach. We guarantee Provident’s Strategic Blueprint will find five times what a client pays for it in tax savings in the first year. We identify these savings in the plan of action we create for you, which is the blueprint. Our clients don’t have to figure out how we’ll live up to our value proposition – and therefore, our guarantee has authority.
This guarantee is synced with the “Three Uniques” on our Vision Traction Organizer. Because we are proactive and holistic with our business advice, offering concierge level service and a customized membership model, we’re confident in our ability to return five times the value invested in a Strategic Blueprint. And we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is.
Back up a step
Where do you find more elements to back up a guarantee and inspire confidence? You’ve already got them – that is if you’ve successfully created the proven process portion of your marketing strategy.
This is a powerful sales and marketing tool. It communicates the customer experience, taking them on a highly detailed journey that tells the story of what’s going to happen while setting expectations along the way, from start to finish.
Being able to demonstrate this journey, documented by the experiences of previous customers, allows you to build a high level of trust and certainty before the sale is completed. If you master the creation of your proven process, your guarantee will be the item that ensures that they’ll get what they signed up for. The proven process says, “This is the way we do business. Should you engage with us in an activity, this is what it would look like.”
The guarantee instills authority and confidence in this process – and in your business.
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