MBA2207 How To Automate Getting Testimonials & Case Studies + Free Ride Friday

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100mb show. Powerful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co or you can win it for free. Just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you want it's that easy. We announce this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's lesson you will learn how to automate Getting Testimonials and Case Studies Every great website or product or sales page has great testimonials. This is called Social Proof. This shows your visitors that you are not the only person that says you're awesome. No seriously, testimonials. Case studies are really important because when a visitor hits your page, whatever you're selling Whatever you're offering, they really want to understand what it's like to be a customer already before they buy, they want to know if this is actually worth it, that they're not going to be ripped off. And the easiest way to calm their nerves and show them that this product is amazing is to show what other people have said about their experience working with you. But many people ask me, Omar, I'm not really sure how to gather testimonials, how to get them in the first place so I can display them on my website. You might be running courses, webinars, live training, even one on one coaching sessions, but you have no system to gather testimonials and case studies so you can show them off to your potential customers and close more sales. So I'm going to share with you an easy way to automate this system so you don't have to even think about it anymore. So you just get to tons of testimonials and case studies sent to you automatically. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Okay. Does this happen to anybody else? You sit down with a juicy QPC, some McNuggets and those golden fries from McDonald's. Then you take a long sip of your Sprite because you can still hear your mama saying, don't fill up on that drink before you eat your food. But you're grown now, so you do what you want. Share and share alike with the 20.

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The thing I love about automation is that once you set it up, you don't really need to do anything afterwards. It serves you for the rest of eternity. But the key thing here is to make sure you set it up. Otherwise it just never happens. Secondly, if you don't set it up now, if you keep procrastinating, you're losing out on potential testimonies and case studies that you can use. Now, first of all, let's talk about the difference between a testimonial and a case study. A testimonial is a brief statement from a customer or somebody who's worked with you, or somebody who has consumed your product or services or have gotten some sort of value. This is sort of like a review or a rating. A case study, on the other hand, is a little bit more in depth. This is where the reader understands a little bit more about the situation, the person themselves that's giving the case study their circumstances and how you Help them. Now, I believe that testimonials are great for closing sales. So having a lot of testimonials, when I say a lot, I mean more than a few. So 4, 5, 6, 10 testimonials that you can use on your sales pages can really help close those sales, quell the fears, and give people confidence to buy. I have found that pages with testimonials on our site convert up to 70% better than ones without. So you better believe I love testimonials. Case studies, on the other hand, are more like short blog posts about how you've helped the customer. And it's just good content to have on your website, especially for those who are not ready to buy yet, but want to learn a little bit more what it's like to be a customer of yours. So as you can see, they work hand in hand. Case studies can be great on your website to kind of get people closer to the buy line where they're about to buy. And then when they're ready to buy, they'll go to your sales page, they'll see your testimonials, and that will close the sale for you. So how do you automate all this? Well, it's actually quite simple. This is what's so brilliant about today's lesson. When I share this with people, their mind just gets blown. They're like, oh, wow, that is a lot easier than I thought. Too many people complicate this. They think they have to email each customer, get on a call with them, all kinds of complicated stuff. No, you don't actually need to sync up live with anybody to get a great testimonial or case study. It all starts with a Google form, which is free. You can create a Google form which is free so that you can gather testimonials. And what I like to do is make it easy, easier for our clients. Don't worry, we're going to get to the part where we send this to the client in an automated fashion. But right now, let's make it easy for us to gather this testimonial. So with testimonials, what I like to do is ask three main questions, and with those answers, I can create a great testimonial. What are those three questions? What was your life or business like before you started working with me or using my product? That's the first question. Second question is, what is your life or business like now? What's the after picture? And the third question is, what's your favorite thing about working with me or using my product? That's it. They answer three questions and that should be enough for me to put together a great testimonial. For example, the answers to these questions could be My life before I took the $100 MBA program was quite overwhelming. I didn't know where to start. I didn't know which order to do these things to build a great business, where to focus my time and energy. Where I was in analysis paralysis mode after taking the $100 MBA program, I had laser focus. I knew exactly what to do. I launched my business and got my first client. My favorite thing about the $100 MBA, how practical and step by step it is, as well as how supportive the community is. So there you have it. They answer those three questions on the form. I can put together a testimonial and I'll actually put on the form. Would you mind me using your answers to create a testimonial to use on our website? And they just tick a box that says yes. That way I have their consent. I'll also ask them to upload an image of themselves and provide their full name, title and website so I can give them a shout out. Now the reason why I asked them to upload an image of themselves is because I don't have to scour the Internet to find their image. Plus they might have a preferred image they want to use that goes along with their testimonial that will be displayed on your website. This form is quite short, it's five or six kind of fields and it's a done deal. And you can create something similar for case studies as well. Now that I have a Google form that I can send to my customers to get testimonials, I don't have to do this piecemeal. I don't have to do this individually. What I do is I create an automation. I go into my email marketing Software, we use ConvertKit and I create an automation based on time. So for example, I will set an automation to send an email to invite them to complete the form, the Google form I just created. And I'll time this email to go out after the program is over, like if we have a live course. So when that program is over or after they had time to consume the training. So maybe you have an on demand training and you know it takes about six weeks to finish that training. So after six weeks send this email and that's it. I just write a very brief email with a very short subject line to ask for their feedback and there you go. That's how I get a bank of testimonials. What's awesome about Google Forms is that you can convert a form into a Google sheet and you have a spreadsheet of all your amazing testimonials. Now, if you want to get really nifty, after I send my first automated email, after they have consumed my product or service, I then wait one week to send another automated email. What is this automated email? Well, it's a reminder to complete the form. Now, I don't send this to everybody who have completed the course because they could have already completed the form. I don't want to annoy them. So what I do is I go and do a zap over at Zapier. This is an automation software that connects apps so that you can automate things like this. So what am I automating? Well, with Zapier, I will link two apps together. So I will link my Google form app and my ConvertKit email marketing software. Basically I tell Zapier, hey, if somebody has completed this form, tag them with a tag. And I have a tag that's called completed testimonial form. And now they get tagged in ConvertKit that they've completed the form. So then I can exclude people that have that tag in my next automation. So one week later I will send another email and just say, hey, exclude the people that have the tag completed testimonial form. And that way only people that I know for sure that did not complete it yet get the reminder. Pretty cool, right?

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Here are a few more bonus tips for you. When it comes to case studies, I like to treat it like an interview. Like I'm going to interview them for a show, learn a little bit more about their backstory, and instead of having them jump on a call with me and sync calendars, I just ask the interview questions in a Google form and they just fill them out. I can then take those great answers and turn them into a great case study or blog post. Now back to the testimonials. Another optional field I have in the testimonial form is a video submission. I simply say, would you like to submit a video testimonial that will be featured on our site and on our social pages. Of course, we'll give you a shout out to your website and we literally just say you could take one minute to shoot a video of yourself. It could be selfie video, literally answering the questions that are on this form. Now, not everybody does a video, but you might find 1 out of 5, 2 out of 5 send you a video. And this is great stuff to post on your website to use on your social profiles, to use as ads. Just make sure that you include when you ask them, hey, would you mind me sharing this testimonial on my site or on our social profiles or with ads include everywhere you you might possibly use this testimonial. Most people have no problem with it because they're proud of their business and what they've accomplished. But video is very powerful because people see a face, a name, a voice, somebody they can relate to before they buy. We use a lot of video testimonials for Webinar Ninja. It's a great, great way to show people, hey, somebody just like you bought my software, bought my product, bought my course, bought my book, got something out of it, and so will you. So go ahead and buy. Lastly, one of the things you may want to consider when people send you a testimonial is to send them a little gift. Now, you don't have to say this beforehand like we'll give you a gift, you give us a testimonial. Most people are happy to do that without a bribe, but it's nice to kind of give somebody a gift afterwards. You'll win a lot of goodwill from your customers who become repeat customers, people that love your products and services and will buy again. It doesn't have to even be something that expensive. It could be some stickers. It could be a gift card from Starbucks. It can even just be a quick video thank you message from you. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe. Hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is. Kevin Ian Allen. Kevin Ian Allen says diverse bite size value 5 stars with such a diverse range of topics, the $100 MBA show delivers a great deal of value. Thank you, Kevin, for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can make sure to hook you up with the lifetime membership to EZcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course over at easycourse co. It retails for $500 but Kevin just won it for free. If you want to win a free ride to one of our programs, get go ahead and leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday just like right now to see if you want it's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Setting this up, like putting your testimonial form together, creating the automation, writing the emails inside the automation. It's going to take maybe an hour or two max, but once you do it, you're going to reap so much from it. The return on investment is incredible. So put two hours in the calendar right now, I mean right now to get this done. This is simple. This is easy. Even if you just get started with something very simple on your form. A simple automation. Even if you don't do that follow up automation I talked about, don't worry about that with the Zapier Zap. Just get it started and then you can improve it later. Because every day that goes by is another day you are not getting testimonials. So get it done and dusted so that you can start getting those juicy testimonials and case studies for your business. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 lumber show. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.