How to Swat Fence-Sitters on the Behind with Your Guarantee

The other week in the middle of The Great Spring Sales Slump of 2016, my business partner John Sonmez IMs me:

“Ooof. Refund request—from last November.”

Brilliant, as the Brits would say.

So why are we entertaining refund requests from 6-month-old purchases, anyway?

It’s all my fault, really.

Last October when I was putting together the launch for this product, I asked John what he had in mind for a guarantee.

He suggested the typical 30-day guarantee—seems like plenty of time for the customer to test drive the product and decide whether to keep it.

Well that wasn’t good enough for me. So I badgered John into letting me extend the guarantee for a full 12 months.

Here’s why I insisted on this.

The people who really pay attention to your guarantee are 97% of the way convinced.

So the #1 purpose of your guarantee is to give those “fence sitters” and “think-it-overs” the friendly swat on the behind they need to take action NOW.

They’re looking for that last bit of assurance that they won’t end up wasting their money…

Or looking foolish when they explain to their spouse how they just blew $100 on a .zip file full of useless crap.

In other words, they’re weighing the *risk*.

And at this stage, anything you can do to reduce their risk will help you win more sales.

The guarantee is so important, in fact, that whenever I’m launching a new product, I always devote at least a couple of hours thinking of ways I can make the guarantee as generous as possible.

For instance… With our flagship course, I actually convinced John to do a “2X your investment” guarantee.

This particular product helps software developers to increase their income, and we’re confident that if the customer does even 10% of what John recommends, they’ll easily earn back the $299 many times over.

In the guarantee, I explain this and tell the customer that if they follow a few of the recommendations and document their progress, and they DON’T see their income grow as a result, we’ll refund the purchase price and give them an extra $300 for their trouble.

The math makes this a no-brainer.

The number of fence-sitters that you’ll win over with your guarantee FAR outnumber the number of people who will refund on you.

It’s definitely painful to refund Mr. 6 Months Later, but you have to keep it in perspective.

Our refund rate is below 1% on our products, and so far only 2 people have waited a few months before requesting a refund.

Bottom line on this:

If you have a quality product, anything you can do to show that you stand behind it will make far more sales than the extra refunds it generates.

How can you take YOUR guarantee up a notch?