Do you stand behind what you do?
Does your product or service deliver on your promise?
If so, then offering a guarantee is highly likely to increase conversion and therefore improve your sales performance, because it reduces or eliminates the risk of buying from you.
In fact, if your product or service is so good, you can even build your business around your guarantee.
To explain what I mean here’s a quick story…
Technifold is an innovative business that manufactures time and money-saving products for the printing industry. They are now leaders in their field.
But it wasn’t always like that.
They launched their business with a product called the ‘Tri-creaser’.
This was a product that solved an age-old problem for printers throughout the world.
The folding of any printed materials produces what’s known in the industry as ‘spine cracking’.
You’ll have seen it yourself, it’s the breaking of the material right down the spine. Typically the problem increases the thicker the material (huge problem with card)…
Until Technifold invented the Tri-creaser, printers would have to print the job and then send it to a ‘finishing’ house, either internally or externally to use sophisticated and very expensive machinery to ‘crease’ and then fold the material in a special way to prevent spine cracking.
It was an age-old problem since printing was invented by the Chinese thousands of years ago.
This process of course is time-consuming and costly, but commonly accepted as the ‘only’ way to do it.
But what makes the Tri-creaser special is that it quickly and easily fits on to the end of all the major manufacturers printing machines and perfectly creases every sheet in one pass.
What’s more. it producers a perfect crease, every time (again a big problem even with finishing houses is the consistency and quality of crease).
So fitting a Tri-creaser not only improves the quality of the fold, it also saves the printers time and money (because the material can be printed and creased all at the same time).
But in the early days Technifold faced a huge and what they thought an insurmountable problem…
The printing industry as a whole had accepted you print and then finish the printing job as two separate processes.
No one in the history of printing including the likes of Heidelberg (the world’s leader in manufacturing printing machines) had solved this age-old problem and were never likely to (in fact, it was a well-known fact in the industry that Heidelberg had a team of scientists commissioned to solve the problem, without any success!).
So when this ‘new kid on the block’ said they’d solved this massive problem, no-one believed them.
As a result sales were in short supply even though what they had created was a game-changing product for 80% of the world’s printing businesses.
Go figure?
But that’s human psychology.
The ‘belief’ is that ‘no-one can invent a product like that especially when the likes of Heidelberg couldn’t do it’.
So how did we break the false belief?
We created a guarantee and then built the business around it.
Within 2 years the company went from sales of £250,000 to over £2.5m and has grown steadily since, with distributers across the globe.
Here’s the guarantee (the wording hasn’t changed since the day we created it)…
The moment we created and deployed that guarantee, sales rushed in.
As you can see, it completely alleys the fears and RISK the owners of printing companies have about such a revolutionary product (it extends across Technifold’s entire product range now).
The good news is there is a science to creating powerful guarantees. We use this formula…
‘GP’ stands for guarantee the promise.
But only guarantee what you control.
This is really important.
There’s absolutely no reason why you should actually be taking on any risk with a guarantee.
But the only way you can do that is by not being reckless and only guarantee the parts of your promise that you control.
In the Technifold guarantee, it’s not practical (nor necessary) for Technifold to fit the products, so the printers have to do it.
Then if they want to activate the 12 month money-back part of the guarantee, they simply have to take a photo of the Tri-creaser on their machines.
Guarantee what you control or find a way to ‘control’ it (i.e. take photo) as we did with Technifold.
To reiterate, as long as you only guarantee the elements of your promise you control then you will never have to worry and your guarantee will still be very effective.
‘P’ stands for penalise the business if the promise is not delivered.
This is the magic ingredient.
A guarantee that doesn’t have this element is very weak.
For example, compare the Technifold guarantee with and without the ‘P’.
Without a penalty (refund in full), the guarantee is virtually non-existent and it wouldn’t have worked.
And once again, you shouldn’t worry about adding the ‘Penalty’ to your guarantee as long as you are only guaranteeing what you control.
And when you put those two elements together you create a fabulous sales converting guarantee.
It should also be no surprise to you that we offer a no-quibble 100% money-back guarantee to completely eliminate the risk of working with us.
