The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible pdfdrive com

Use Testimonial Letters
One of the most powerful of all sales tools is the testimonial letter. When you
say that your product is excellent and a good choice for the prospect, he
immediately discounts your words because, after all, you are a salesperson. But
when someone else who has purchased your product says that it is “good,” the
customer believes and accepts this assessment.
Some years ago, when I was building one of my businesses, I was continually
struggling with prospects because I was relatively new in the market. Yet
everyone I had worked with was happy with my services. So I took a solid week
and visited each of my previous customers. I asked them if they would write me

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and visited each of my previous customers. I asked them if they would write me
a nice letter telling me how much they liked my services and recommending
them to other people.
Most of them agreed immediately. I followed up continuously until I had a
three-ring binder full of testimonial letters in plastic page protectors. This
changed my sales career.
My Winning Strategy
From then on, when I would meet with a prospect, one of the first things that I
would say is, “Before we begin, let me show you some letters that I am
particularly proud of, from some of my customers.”
I would then hand my binder to the prospect and let him read through the
letters. I found that people love to read testimonial letters. It is sort of like
reading other people’s mail. Later, I took a yellow highlighter and highlighted
the very best sentences in each of the letters so that they jumped out when the
prospect read the pages.
It was amazing! Very often the prospect would look up from reading through
the testimonial letters and say, “I’m sold. How soon can we get started?” My
sales doubled, tripled, and quadrupled. In the first two months after I started
using testimonial letters, I made more sales than I had in the previous year.
Many people will write you a testimonial letter if you ask for it. But
sometimes they are so busy that they don’t get around to it. In this case, offer to
write the letter yourself and ask them to type it onto their own letterhead and
sign it. It is amazing how many customers will do this if you ask.