Offering a guarantee of some sort on your products and services is a proven way of driving sales, but it’s one that fills many small business owners with a certain amount of dread and foreboding.
Let’s take a quick look at some solid reasons why you should embrace the possibilities of explicitly standing behind your offerings, and why offering a guarantee can be one of the smartest moves you’ll ever make.
Guarantees Build Instant Trust
A guarantee instantly establishes that you’re at least potentially prepared to put your money where your mouth is and back your own ability to knock it out of the park for customers. It’s an incredibly powerful trust indicator you can leverage across your entire suite of marketing efforts.
Guarantees Remove Barriers To Purchase
Every time a customer is teetering on the brink of committing to a purchase there’s a certain amount of associated fear they’re grappling with.
Is this the right product or service? What if something goes wrong? Can I really afford this?
A carefully considered guarantee gives you an organic, ethical way of addressing these concerns directly – and helps customers beat a path to your door with no regrets.
Guarantees Help You Stand Out From The Crowd
There are very few products or services in the world that are truly unique. Half the battle for most small businesses is simply somehow differentiating their offering from local competition.
Offering a guarantee of any kind is often enough to immediately stand out from the herd. Start getting creative with the types of guarantees you offer and you can make a real name for yourself in a record amount of time.
Guarantees Weed Out Problem Customers
Assuming you’ve worded your guarantee carefully enough to avoid egregious abuse of your terms, it can also be an excellent way of elegantly flagging less than desirable customers nice and quickly.
Particularly in the context of a small business, problem clients can suck up a truly horrendous amount of time, money, and emotional energy. A satisfaction guarantee gives you an elegant way of cutting these people from your life early, and forces you to tackle the situation head-on.
You might face a little short-term pain, but you’re building an invaluable base of truly satisfied customers who will fuel your business growth over the long-term through their own repeat business and recommendations to others.
Guarantees Enforce Internal Quality
Everybody pays lip service to the idea of maintaining the highest standards of execution and customer service but, in the real-world cauldron of small business survival, standards can occasionally slip. Offering a guarantee forces you to walk the walk and follow through on your promises every single time. No exceptions, no excuses.
The benefits we’ve outlined above have hopefully convinced you to at least consider introducing guarantees into the mix. It can admittedly be a nerve-wracking step for small businesses to take but remember – you don’t have to jump in on an all-or-nothing basis. Start thinking about a particular aspect of your product or service where you can trial a guarantee offer and you’ll soon start seeing the real-world results it can deliver for both you and your customers!
