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AI summary
A good testimonial lets a prospect picture themselves in the situation by providing a specific before‑and‑after story, a named person with a relevant job title, and a measurable result; enthusiasm alone or vague praise without context should be omitted, and the four‑question filter (who, what was wrong, what changed, the result) helps identify and collect effective quotes.
Title
What is a good testimonial?
Date
Jul 21, 2023
Description
What is a good testimonial? One a stranger can step into. Specificity, a named before, and a job title do the work — how to judge the ones you already have.
Status
Current Column
Sanketee
Person
Writer
Sanketee
What is a good testimonial?
You have a folder of them.
Half say "great to work with." A few name a person. One has a number.
You are trying to decide which ones go on the site.
A good testimonial is one a stranger can place themselves inside. Specificity beats enthusiasm. A named before beats praise. A job title does more work than a star rating.
That is the quality bar. The rest of this page is how to apply it to words you already have — not how to write a testimonial for someone else.
Asking, collecting, placing, and refreshing sit in the whole testimonial pipeline. This page is the filter you run before anything is published.
The one-line test
Read the quote. Ask three things:
- Can a prospect tell who this is?
- Can they see what was going wrong before?
- Can they see what is different now?
If the answer is only "this person liked us," it is a compliment. Keep compliments. Do not put them next to a pricing button.
A star rating answers none of the three. Five stars from "Sarah" tells a stranger nothing they can use.
Specificity beats enthusiasm
This is the one I would sort on first.
"Working with them was a great experience. They offer good customer service."
That is a teaching example, not a real quote. It could sit on any site in the category. A prospect has already read it, with different nouns, twelve times that week.
Compare it to a line that names a task:
"Before we switched, I spent Monday mornings exporting a CSV and emailing it to three people. I have not sent that email since March."
Still a teaching example. No invented percentage. A picture, and a thing that stopped. The second one works because a reader who still sends that email recognises themselves. The first one gives them nothing to recognise.
Enthusiasm is cheap. Every happy customer can produce it. Specificity is expensive, which is why it persuades.
What to look for when you scan a draft:
- A noun you can picture. A spreadsheet, a Monday, a call they used to dread. Not "inefficiencies."
- A number they actually have. Hours, a date, a conversion rate they measured. Not a round figure you suggested.
- A task that stopped, or a routine that changed. "It's so much easier now" is enthusiasm wearing a work shirt.
Kissmetrics published this one on their customer-success page. Spencer Mann, then VP of Growth at Lucidchart: "Insights from Kissmetrics drove a 30% lift in our conversions." That 30% is their published quote, not ours.
Look at what the line is doing. A named person. A job title a growth lead can match. A company a SaaS buyer has heard of. A result with a number. The sentence is short because it does not need adjectives. The identity and the number carry it.
I would put that next to a pricing table. I would not put "great customer service" there, no matter how sincere it was.
Where this breaks. You cannot invent the specific after the fact. If they wrote "great to work with," you do not punch it up into a metric they never gave you. That is how you get a testimonial that reads better than the person who signed it — and those stop working the moment a prospect notices. You go back and ask one concrete question, or you leave it off the page.
A named before beats praise
The shape we use across this cluster is four beats:
- Who you are
- What was annoying
- What it looks like now
- The result
Same four as the video testimonial script. On this page they are a filter, not a questionnaire. You are judging words that have already arrived.
Who you are. A name, a role, a kind of company. Without it the rest is a stranger being pleased.
What was annoying. The before-scene. Not "we had challenges." The Monday. The tool they were copying between. The thing they almost built themselves.
This is the beat most published testimonials skip, and it is the one that does the most work. A prospect is not shopping for praise. They are checking whether this person had their problem.
What it looks like now. The new routine, not a compliment. What they send. What they no longer open. What they stopped scheduling.
The result. A number if one exists. If it does not, a specific thing that stopped happening on a date they can name. "It has saved us a ton of time" is praise with a clock in it. It does not survive a sceptical reader.
Praise-only fails this test on arrival. "They were a pleasure to work with and I would recommend them to anyone" has no before, no now, and no result. It is a thank-you note. Thank-you notes belong in a drawer.
Here is the same person, two versions. Both are real. Both are already published.
The short pull quote on Justin Welsh's video for us:
"For the small price I pay, it's 3X'd conversions with such a massive ROI!"
That is a result line. It is also the version that drops the before. A sceptic files it with every other unprovable multiple they have seen that week.
The spoken version, on his customer story:
"Before I used testimonial.to my landing pages were pretty similar to other e-commerce landing pages in terms of conversion. I think they were converting anywhere from 1.2% to 1.6% of visitors that visited each landing page."
And later:
"...over the course of the last six months, my conversion rate has gone from that low-mid 1% up to about 3.6%. So it is literally almost 3X'd the conversion on my landing page."
Same claim. The second one lets you check the arithmetic. 1.2–1.6 up to about 3.6 is how you get to almost 3x. The before is what makes the multiple mean anything.
If you only have room for one sentence on a pricing page, pull the before and the number. Not the ROI adjective.
Where this breaks. Some customers cannot describe a before. They liked you from day one, or they never used the old way. No edit fixes that. Those quotes can still live on a wall as texture. They should not be the one you put under the feature a prospect is hesitating about.
And if you need the four questions that produce these beats on the next one you collect, that is the script page. This one stays on the words in front of you.
A job title does more work than a star rating
A prospect scanning your page is looking for someone who looks like them. Job title, company size, the kind of problem. They are not looking for a score.
"VP of Growth, Lucidchart" does that in five words. Five stars next to a first name does not.
I see pages that lead with a 4.9 and a row of avatars. That is a rating widget. It answers "are people generally happy." It does not answer "has anyone like me done this." Those are different jobs. If your buyer is a head of marketing at a fifty-person SaaS company, one quote from that person outperforms a grid of anonymous fives.
The photo and the logo help. They are not the thing. The identity is the thing. A quote with a role and a company still works when the person will not give you their face — and plenty will not. Ask separately for the name, the title, the company, and the photo. Do not throw out the words because the headshot never arrived.
Where this breaks. Enterprise contacts often cannot be named. Attribution by role — "VP of Engineering at a logistics company" — is often approvable when a named quote is not. That is still identity. "A Fortune 500 customer" is not. One is a person a prospect can place. The other is a press release.
A wall of nothing but logos has the same problem in the other direction. The logo does the recognition. The words do none of the three jobs. I would rather have the VP of Growth and no logo than the logo and "great partner."
What to send back — and what to leave off the page
You cannot retrofit a vague testimonial into a specific one by editing it.
Fix typos. Cut the throat-clearing at the start. Trim a rambling middle. Do not rewrite it into something punchier. If you have changed what it means, it goes back for approval anyway.
The useful move, when a quote fails the one-line test, is one follow-up question:
"What did that look like on a normal week?"
Or: "What were you doing before this?"
That is how to ask for a testimonial in one line — a specific question, not a request for "a better testimonial." If they already said yes once, do not reopen the whole assignment.
Leave these off the page:
- Praise with no before and no result. Texture for a wall, not a placement next to a decision.
- A number they did not give you. If you suggested the figure, it is your sentence.
- Anything that knocks a named competitor. Talk about what you do.
- Anything you do not have permission to publish. Get it in writing, and say where it will appear — site, social, and ads are different questions. The legal side of testimonials is the longer version. Check your own jurisdiction; this is not advice.
If the words are video rather than text, the filter does not change. A face does not rescue a clip that never names a before. Our guide to video testimonials is the recording-side version of this page.
Doing this with Testimonial
This is what we build, so weigh this section accordingly.
Nothing above requires a tool. You can run the one-line test in a spreadsheet.
What a collection page changes is what arrives next time. You set the four beats as questions on a Branded collection page, send a link, and they answer in text or on video. Submissions land in the Smart inbox to read, tag and approve. Approved ones go onto a Wall of Love or into a widget.
On the free plan you get 10 text testimonials and 2 video, total, plus the public testimonial page and the widgets. Enough to find out whether your customers will give you a before.
Where it does not help. The product cannot turn "great service" into a scene. If you already have twenty vague quotes, you still have to go back to the people, or leave them off. We save the next one. We do not repair the last one.
If you would rather send a fill-in-the-blank than four questions, testimonial templates has both, and says when I would pick which.
Wrapping up…
That is the quality bar: a person a prospect can place, a before they recognise, and a result you did not invent.
If you only do one thing with the folder you have, pull the three that pass the one-line test and put one of them next to the decision you actually need help with.
Stuck on a quote you are about to publish? Reply with it — I will tell you which of the three is missing.
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