Make More Sales, Deals, and Money with Guarantees (Part One)

Your guarantee removes risk, instills trust, and gives a consumer one final push towards a purchase. A powerful guarantee that protects your customer’s interests is a very effective closing tool and should be used to make the offer even more appealing.

In tradition sales messages guarantees are found after the bonus. (The other elements are preheadline, headline, body copy, benefit-oriented bulletpoints, testimonials, bonus, guarantee, call to action, urgent close, postscript)

Types of Guarantees

There’s more than one way to ‘skin’ the guarantee cat. In fact, there are many ways you can remove risk and offer reward:

• Lifetime Guarantee
• Specific Time Guarantee
• 100% Money Back Guarantee
• Replacement Guarantee
• Specific Performance Guarantee
• 100% Value on Trade-in Guarantee

Your guarantee should be totally risk free and the business owner should assume full responsibility and full risk. This makes it much easier for a prospect to make a decision.

Many businesses offer a trial period of only a few days or weeks before a product can no longer be returned. Could you offer a 60-day, 90-day, or a whole year money back guarantee? Give the customer two or three times the needed review period to make the purchase non-threatening and non-intimidating.

This is called risk transfer. The seller takes the entire risk instead of leaving it to the customer.

Most business owners are fearful that having a long guarantee will increase their returns when actually the opposite is true. This is something taht the direct marketing industry has studied this for years. Millionaire marketers found that you get fewer returns with a longer the guarantee.

Another trick is to include a just-for-trying-us bonus that has a perceived value that is worth more than the price of the product they are buying. Let the customer know they can even keep the bonus even if they ask for their money back. In many cases this will triple response.

However, it's always important to test to see if this works for you with your prospects.

Companies that have adopted a better than risk-free guarantee have found that it is a profit center in and of itself. They have found that more revenue is generated because of the guarantee than lost because of returns.

Story Time I was working with a manufacturing company that charged a fee up front to help a customer develop their product. This fee would start at $50,000 and go up from there. Before anything was done or any money changed hands, all of the expectations were laid out in the form of specifications and agreements. The bad news was that the manufacturing company did not have any guarantee in writing, so we put one together.The president of the company saw it and asked me to come in to talk about it. He told me that he didn’t like it and didn’t want to use it. So I asked him a few questions. "Has there ever been a customer that was unhappy and requested their money back?" "No," he said. "If someone was very unhappy with your work and the CEO of the company was on the phone threatening to sue you what would you do?” “I would give them their money back”, he said. "Isn’t that your guarantee?” We kept the written guarantee.

What was the CEO afraid of? The company had been in business for over twenty years and they had never had someone ask for their money back. They had a great guarantee it just wasn’t in writing. After our discussion, sales reps starting using the guarantee in their presentations and got very positive reactions from high level decision makers that they were calling on.

I'm not saying you won’t get people asking for refunds. You will, but you already do, don't you? Even if it appears initially that people are taking advantage of the guarantee, over time you’ll learn that more people buy because of the guarantee than those who take advantage of it.

You'll make money on this marketing tool over time. It will enhance your stature and credibility in your industry.

Need help writing your guarantee? Check out Part 2 of this article.