Testimonials can sell the next intake of your coaching course for you if they’re strong enough. The trick is to get your coaching clients to say the right things. No, we’re not saying you should write fake testimonials or coerce your coaching clients to mention specific things. Here’s what to do.
Where Most Coaches Go Wrong
The most common mistake most coaches make is treating their testimonial request like a request for a review. They send their clients a link to Google reviews or ask them to leave a comment on their Facebook page and call it a day. What happens when you ask clients to leave a review?
They don’t know what to say.
Yes, they may have found your coaching extremely helpful, it may even have changed their lives. But you’ve put them on the spot and their brain just went blank. Let’s face it, no one is really going to agonise for hours over a review for your business. Chances are unless you get lucky, you’ll get a sentence or two of something along the lines of, “great working with them, would recommend.” Not exactly compelling stuff.
How to Ask For Testimonials
Instead of sending them to a link where they are left to free type whatever they want, give your coaching clients a prompt or ask them a small number of questions.
Your coaching clients will love it because they no longer have to wrack their brain for what to say, they just need to answer a question or follow a prompt. You get a testimonial that is more specific about what future coaching clients can expect from your course. Win-win.
It is up to you how you do this. You could send them an email or even send a Google Form for your coaching clients to fill out. Just help them with what kind of things they could talk about. You don’t even need to call it a testimonial, ask them for some feedback if you want and acknowledge on the form that you may use snippets of what they say for testimonials.
What Questions Should I Ask To Get Killer Testimonials?
Try and keep your questionnaires short and sweet. Sending your coaching clients to a form with a lot of questions is a great way to not get testimonials. They’ll take one look at the form and decide to do it later (and promptly forget) or just nope out entirely. So stick to a small number of questions. Ideally, around 3.
What you ask depends on what information would be most useful in selling your coaching course. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- What changes have you implemented in your life since you started this course?
- What goals have you achieved since starting this course?
- What are some surprising differences you have seen in your life?
- How has this coaching course changed how you approach X? (Insert pain point or even general coaching topic)
- How has this coaching course changed your outlook on the future?
- What did you like about X? (insert specific feature/module/extra material)
- How did X improve the value of the course? (insert specific feature/module/extra material)
- What did you like most about the course or working with me?
- If you could give 1 reason why you would recommend this course to a friend, what would it be?
- What results have you seen already from the coaching course?
You could even sneak in a question to get feedback to help you improve the course you offer.
- If I was creating this course specifically for you, what is one thing you would like to see improved?
- Is there anything about the way the course was run that stood out as making your life easier or providing a great customer experience?
- Having completed the course, what did you think of the price? (Take these responses with a grain of salt. We would all like to pay less for things if we can. These clients purchased your course at full-price so they saw the value. If you get a lot of responses, you could consider creating a book or a short intensive masterclass to offer a low-price option. It doesn’t mean you should lower the price of your course.)
If you are reading through the list and thinking you wish you could ask your coaching clients all of those questions, you can. Set up multiple testimonial questionnaires and send different coaching clients different versions. That way you get answers to a range of different questions without making your clients work through a ridiculously long questionnaire.
When Should I Ask For Testimonials?
It really depends on how you do things. If you do an offboarding call, you could ask for this feedback during the offboarding call. Bear in mind some people may feel uncomfortable giving feedback to your face and some people might like a little bit of time to think. You’ve worked with these clients for a few weeks, so you can always ask some during the offboarding call and tell the others that you will send them an email asking for some feedback.
If you do ask for feedback in the offboarding call, keep your questions short and to the point. You have the benefit of being able to ask for a little bit of clarification but try not to make the feedback portion of the call last more than a few minutes (2-5 minutes is all it should take.)
If you send an email. Send your feedback request during the email offboarding process. Don’t wait weeks after your course finishes to ask for feedback, send it while everything is still fresh in their minds.