"The guy with 1000 testimonials will get more customers." In this episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how much proof of your product or service will drive sales. He breaks down a checklist for good proof to optimize formats, structure, and volume of your testimonials
Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
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In this podcast, I wanna talk about getting your first proof and making it as compelling as possible on a consistent basis in your business to sell more people. Enjoy. Proof over promise. So what a lot of beginners do and they read, you know, $100 million offers and they're like, I have a grand slam offer. And so because of that, I've got this big thing with all these bonuses and the stack and these guarantees and I've got a premium price and yet no one's buying it. So what I wanna do is walk you through a hypothetical. Let's say on one extreme, we've got somebody who has an amazing, crazy, awesome offer for whatever. They promise you the world and beyond. On this extreme, same core product or core service as the first guy, except he has no crazy offer. He just has 1,000 testimonials. Who is going to get the most customers? This guy. And so your proof is going to do more selling than any promise can possibly do because the promises all function as an approximation of the likelihood that they're going to get a result. And proof is always gonna be more compelling. And so when you're starting out, you wanna capture as much proof as humanly possible. Now I have a huge amount of stuff on proof because I'm obsessed with it, but I'll give you four very good things that you can do to make your proof more compelling. Number one, recent proof is better than delayed proof. So if proof was five years old, proof that's from last week is gonna be more compelling. Second is you want it to be as visual as possible. So just a bunch of words on a screen is less compelling than a screenshot of someone's bank account after they made money. Or someone's saying, "Hey, I lost 20 pounds," is not as compelling as the picture of them losing 20 pounds, which is also less compelling than a video of them weighing in and then a video of them weighing out. The third component for proof that I'll give you is you want high volume. And the nice thing is that most businesses actually have a lot more proof than they know they do. They just never capture it. And so one of the things that I did in our brick and mortar chains that we'd had with all of the gyms I do across all our brick and mortars is if you look at Yelp, you look at Google, you look at Facebook, all of these have reviews for your business. And so for me, and if you're digital, then you have Facebook reviews on your Facebook page and things like that. And so I would go into the stars, you click into it and there's like a hundred of them. And then you just screenshot each one of them. So if you have a hundred five-door reviews on Yelp, that's like a mediocre Yelp account, right? But if I screenshot a hundred of those and then I frame them and I put them on my lobby wall from floor to ceiling, it's overwhelming, the amount of proof that is. And so most businesses have way more proof than they think they do, they just don't leverage it. And so one of the easiest things you can do, take the screenshots of all review sites across all platforms, show them individually and show them as your new wallpaper. And the fourth element of proof is that you want to capture pain. And so let me explain by this. So I've been able to look at a zillion ads across all companies where they have testimonial ads from customers or user-generated content to be fancy, right? The thing is, is the content that begins with pain converts significantly higher. And so this is my theory around this, which is that the pain relates to the customer or prospect where they're currently at. If they start with the promise, it's too far disconnected. But if you start with pain, they relate to the person and then you can take them through the story of them getting the result. But if you start with the end result, it's too disjoint, it's too far away, it becomes less believable. So if you had to pick between proof or promise, double down on proof. And that's also the reason that I tell everyone to start with giving stuff away for free because it's the easiest and fastest way to get tons of it. Best time to ask someone for testimonials at the moment of greatest satisfaction. All right, so that's also, by the way, different from the best time to sell. Because you want to sell at the moment of greatest pain. You want to get a testimonial at the moment of greatest satisfaction. So think about this way. If I were to say, hey, you have a steak dinner and you have a steak and you're starving and you're like, oh, this is great, blah, blah, blah. The moment to sell you the steak is right before you've had the steak. And then you eat the steak. Now, after you have the steak, is that the moment that I say, would you like another steak? Not really, because you're like, I'm full, I'm good. So that's the point of greatest satisfaction. Not the point of greatest deprivation. Now, after I've had the steak, if I say, hey, would you mind looking in the camera and say how great the steak was? People are like, oh my God, it was amazing. It was so great, you guys should definitely check this place out, it's awesome, right? And so, point of greatest deprivation is when you make your sale, point of greatest satisfaction is when you collect your proof. Always start for free, always. And I know, and I don't usually use explicit, 100% black and white language, but I have yet to see a time where starting for free has not made me more money. So let me explain. So when I started my fitness business way back when, I started with free. I wanted to get people results and I said, I don't have any experience. So please, let me just train you for free. And because of that, I have lower stakes because they didn't pay me money. They're still paying in other ways. They're still paying time, they're paying inconvenience. All the other things that a customer has to do, those costs are still there. By the way, those hidden costs are the things that you wanna decrease as much as you can in your product so that you can charge more money because you'll find over time that the most expensive thing about your product often isn't the price. It's everything else you require a customer to do as a result of the purchase, which is what things do they have to give up that they like doing as a result of the purchase? And what are the things that they have to start doing that they hate doing as a result of the purchase? And this happens with everything. And when I say like and hate, I use those as extremes. But fundamentally, there's some sort of friction, there's some sort of inconvenience. Like when I buy a car, I have to now get gas. That is now an inconvenience in my life. Now, compared to all other cars, maybe all cars that have that inconvenience until they have an electric car. And all of a sudden, that inconvenience has been removed because I can plug the car in at night.
