Technology Marketing Minute

Should You Guarantee What You Sell?

By Robin Robins, President, Technology Marketing Toolkit, Inc.
www.technologymarketingtoolkit.com

For the squeamish in the crowd who send me the occasional e-mail asking if they REALLY need to offer a guarantee on their services, here is my final position on the matter:

#1. If you cannot unconditionally guarantee what you sell, you need to go to work on improving your services or find something else to sell. Most of the fear of offering a guarantee has more to do with your own insecurity rather than substantiated fact.

If you are providing a good product or service that actually delivers the results you promise, then you should have no negative repercussions from offering a guarantee; as a matter of fact, it should make it infinitely easier to acquire new clients. However, the only way to know for sure whether or not a guarantee will help or hurt your business is to test it. Will you get the occasional unfair and unsubstantiated request from a customer who wants their money back? Of course, but it should not be the majority, and it should only be viewed as a cost of doing business, just like uncollected debts from the occasional deadbeat client.

#2. If you discover that a large percentage of the people you sell to abuse your guarantee, you need to do a better job in screening them out early, or you need to find a different crowd to sell to. And for the record, if you offer a guarantee, you better be prepared to fulfill on it.

If your products and services are everything you say they are, you should not have a problem; however, you have to realize there will be people who take you up on it that may be completely unjustified in their request. If you cannot take the unemotional viewpoint that this is simply a cost of doing business, then don’t offer a guarantee.

#3. NEVER guarantee something you cannot or will not deliver on. That’s not to say you have to go above and beyond your guarantee. If you guarantee a product or service for a year, you are not obligated to refund a client that comes back two years later. However, it may be worth re-reading #1 again and asking yourself, what do I need to do to be able to offer a big, bold, unbelievable guarantee?

Awhile back I did some consulting for an IT test prep company. My advice was simple: guarantee your customers will pass their exam on the first try or you’ll refund their money. The CEO almost passed out when I suggested that. He was positive that there would be massive refunds causing them to go out of business in a few short months; he wouldn’t even test the idea to see what would happen.

Long story short, his biggest competitor DID test the concept and then made it their standard offering. What guarantee did my client cling to? Buy our test prep software; if you fail the exam twice within 30 days, and send us the original receipt and proof of your failure, we’ll refund your money. This is NOT a good guarantee; there are too many hoops to jump through and conditions surrounding it.

Think about it from a customer’s perspective; if you needed to get certified, which company would you rather buy test preparation software from: Company A that requires you to take and fail an exam within 30 days to get your money back or Company B that unconditionally guarantees you will pass your exam on the first attempt or you’ll get your money back?

There are a few instances where it does not make sense to offer a guarantee; yet as I write that, I can’t help but refer back to item #1 and #2. I have always found that offering a guarantee on a GOOD product or service increases sales dramatically more than refunds. As with all marketing initiatives, you can always test small before setting it in stone.

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