Social proof is critical to selling software—helping prospects understand who your customers are, why they chose you, why they recommend you, what their experience has been like with you as a company. Getting a testimonial is one of the best ways to give a prospect or an existing customer social proof that you’re delivering on your promises.

Marketing in general can be distrusted. A lot of terms, phrases, or concepts can be abused in terms of whether the company actually delivers on those things. Or terms may not be well defined—“artificial intelligence” is a perfect example and something that we struggle with at Evisort. And being able to have a real customer vouch for your technology is a great way to cut through that bullcrap. Artificial intelligence has a broad spectrum of maturity and functionality. In its simplest form, it can just be a couple rules, if/then statements, and it’s still considered smart or artificial as it is—applying some condition and then taking an action. But we’ve been doing that since World War II. So artificial intelligence today, when a lot of new functionality comes out, whether it’s natural language processing, real machine learning, new data that it’s constantly learning from, it can be hard to understand what it’s doing differently from somebody who just has an if/then system. And so unless you’re a really sophisticated buyer, have a background in computer science, it’s hard to understand without somebody explaining it on your terms. So that’s why having a testimonial is so critical. Somebody who might be a director of IT can just cut through the crap and tell it like it is.

Turn up your sales cycle to 11

Buying software can be scary for a couple of reasons. One, you’re changing processes. Two, you’re going to impact other people with the decision. Three, it can be expensive. So your reputation is at risk. And a lot of times, software is still being developed. A lot of tech companies out there have been around for three, four, or five years. An old company is 10 years at this point. Really old companies, 20 years. So you don’t know what the full feature set is and how it’s really going to apply to your use cases until you get in and start using it.

And that’s a scary notion, which is why trials are so important, which is why getting social proof is so important. Finding somebody like you who’s purchased it before and what their experience was, it’s the easiest way to make the decision. You can spend hours, months, years doing an RFP and really digging in and trying to make that right decision. But a quicker approach is just to talk to somebody who’s already done it.

Testimonials help accelerate the decision making process for prospects. Rather than doing an RFP that’s going to take months or maybe even a year, you can have somebody who’s similar to that prospect, that type of industry or type of role, and they can say, “Hey, you know what, we went through this, it met our needs, it’ll meet your needs.”

With TeraLeap, remove all the obstacles

The obstacle to video testimonials is one word: resources. That means time, money, experience. A lot of companies want to have testimonial videos. Go to any website and it’s one of the first things you’ll see on the homepage. But unless you have a video team in-house for the experience, it can be a huge lift. And they’re expensive in terms of your time. You have to write the script, you have to find the right customer. There’s back and forth, there’s editing. It’s never just as simple as, “Oh, we’ll do something over Zoom.” For some folks who aren’t as attuned to the video creation process, it can seem easy to do. It is not. People don’t want a rough Zoom interview. They want to edit it nicely. They want intros and outros, bumpers, they want some nice music, product overlays. There’s a lot of little things that most people don’t realize go into videos that make them feel professional. And you want something professional on your homepage, you don’t want a crappy Zoom call. So unless you have that in-house team, or your marketing team or design team has video production experience, you’re going to have to pay somebody to do it. And a lot of times, it’s really expensive. Because you send out a video crew on site, you might be contracting with a creative agency that does really high-value video productions that are made for a Hollywood film, that’s not really what you need. You need something that’s simple, has a tight script around the value of your company and why the customer recommends you. And you know, shorter is better. And a lot of times, people don’t have time for a 10 minute video, they want something that’s 30 seconds or a minute.

Trifling cost, tremendous gain

 I had OKRs, objectives, key results from which I ungraded on per quarter. And one of the things we wanted to do was get more customer stories. We’ve been doing stuff in slides. We had a lean budget in terms of marketing. But video is something that our sales team was pushing for. I researched other agencies that have a hefty price tag. And for doing one or two videos, it just doesn’t make sense. For the price that TeraLeap offers, it is risk free in terms of what the quality was. Buying software, you don’t know if it’s going to be good or bad, you don’t know how good the video production team is going to be. I don’t know how good the editing is going to be, or the film quality, or the video quality. And for the price TeraLeap is offering, it’s like, “If we do one, and it’s not great, it’s really not a big loss. But if it is great, it’s a hell of a deal.” And what it’s turned out to be is incredible value across the board. You cannot on your own, or with a larger production company, create a testimonial video in two to three weeks for the full product, from doing the interview to getting the video edited, giving feedback, and then getting a final copy. The turnaround time is insane. I have never worked with anybody who can do it faster. And at that level of quality, the pricing is insanely reasonable, you should probably be charging more for this, but walk us in for the price that we have. You pay basically $1,000 a pop, and you get an unbelievable testimonial that you put on your website. And if you get one lead off of that, it more than pays for itself. So the the ROI on these things is a no-brainer. And then the quality is super high. So the total cost of ownership is insanely low.

Record your hit song, play it over and over and over

I’ve shared it with the marketing team, our executives, our sales team, and everybody, without a doubt, loves it. We haven’t certainly had a stable of these testimonial videos before, so there’s certainly enthusiasm for having those—but the quality, the metrics, the quotes that we’re getting in these videos from high profile customers is unbelievable. And it’s really helpful for our sales team. They have more content they can share as part of the sales cycle, or the marketing team can use it to help generate leads. And internally, it’s a great morale booster for our company to understand how our customers are using the product and why they love us so much.

Order more with a mouse click

We crushed our OKRs as a result of using TeraLeap. We had targeted to do one testimonial video, and we ended up doing three because it was so easy. And not just from a production standpoint, but from a purchase and customer experience between episode and TeraLeap, if you want to do another video, it’s as simple as emailing your account team, and they set everything up. Invoicing is super easy. There’s no complicated hoops or negotiation to go through. It’s as simple as hitting a button on your mouse. Before learning about TeraLeap, I couldn’t imagine doing that in a world where I would have to go to a production company, map out the script, write the questions—everything is already baked into the expertise with TeraLeap. You don’t have to do any of the dirty work. It’s all taken care of for you. And so you just crank through this stuff. We’re a Series B company and so we’re just starting to get a lot of our customer success stories told and put into case studies or slides. And we just didn’t have any on our website and this totally changed that in a matter of less than a quarter, and that’s an unbelievable outcome. I would 110% absolutely recommend TeraLeap to any marketer, any company looking to do customer testimonial videos. You would be foolish not to use TeraLeap. You’re wasting your money if you’re not using TeraLeap, and you’re probably taking way too long to develop customer testimonials that you can share with prospects, investors, internally at your company. You need to get started yesterday with TeraLeap.