Sunday, October 04, 2026
A 1 percent price increase lifts operating profit by an average of 11 percent, McKinsey's Global 1200 research found, far more than an equivalent rise in volume. Here's how to raise prices without losing your best customers.
Every SME's marketing says roughly the same thing: quality product, great service, trusted by customers. None of it moves anyone, because a prospect has no reason to believe a business's claims about itself. What they will believe is another customer.
"We're the best in the category" is marketing noise — every competitor says a version of it, and prospects have learned to filter it out entirely. The line doesn't fail because it's untrue. It fails because it's unverifiable and self-interested by definition. A claim only starts to work once it comes from someone with nothing to gain by saying it — which is precisely what your own copy can never be.
Vague testimonials — "great service, would recommend" — do almost nothing, because they're as generic as the claims they're meant to replace. What converts is specific, verifiable, and time-stamped proof: a named customer describing a specific result, a before-and-after number, a retailer explaining why they kept the listing after the trial period, a repeat-purchase pattern you can actually show. For an FMCG brand, a buyer at a regional chain saying "this was our fastest-moving new SKU in the category last quarter" outperforms any tagline you could write, because it's a claim your own marketing has no authority to make on its own.
Most SMEs treat testimonials as something that happens to arrive, usually months after a project or a listing succeeds, if at all. Build it into the process instead: a fixed point in the customer journey — thirty days after delivery, the week after a reorder, the end of a retail trial period — where you ask for the specific result, not a generic compliment. One well-timed question, asked consistently, produces more usable proof in a quarter than a year of hoping happy customers mention you unprompted.
This matters most when the budget is tight, because proof is nearly free to produce and disproportionately effective against paid claims. A single strong customer story, placed where your actual prospect will see it — on the product page, in the sales deck, on the shelf-talker — will usually outperform another round of paid impressions saying the same thing about yourself that everyone already ignores.
Want a system for turning customer results into proof that actually sells? Building the proof engine — not just the campaign — is core to the Marketing and Communications work inside the Simple-Growth System™. Get in touch with Kevin D'Ambros-Smith.
…and you become the owner whose customers do the selling for you.