25 Frankly, Mr Shankly: testimonials

Indie business club with Barfield and McKinney

Today’s episode is all about testimonials. But just before we get into it… we’re incredibly excited about this 👇

We’re doing a Marketing Meetup webinar with Michelle L P Boland all about how to grow your marketing freelance / consultancy business in 2025. Doing a TMM webinar is major #Goals so please help us make it a success by coming along! 😄

We’ll talk all about how we’ve each built our businesses and give allll the indie business intel and tips. It’s not until 17th June but you can sign up here to get it in your calendar :)

Testimonials

Now. Onto the episode. It’s all about testimonials, which seem to be a sore point for lots of people. Do you…ask for them? get them? use them?

Full disclosure, we’re not exactly great at asking clients for them. This is one of our “do as we say, not as we do” situations..! It sometimes feels a bit icky. And then time just dribbles by and before you know it, two years have gone by. Bit late by then.

I asked people’s opinions on LinkedIn and got some great tips. Several people noted how it’s useful to be ultra specific about what you’re asking for. So if you want to highlight your organisation skills / communication / professionalism / slick onboarding process etc. (delete as appropriate) then tell your client that when you ask for a testimonial.

Others try and grab natural comments as they go along. There’s a “Wall of Remembrance” on the Copy Or Die homepage (scroll down a bit to see it) thanks to a plug-in called testimonial.to (I think we might have said i o on the episode sorryyyyy).

Voicenoted

Luckily, we have the Peter Pan of graphic design Dave Officer as today’s voicenoter to give us a steer. He made us ponder why it feels gross to ask for testimonials and talks about how he approaches asking for them. It was an epic feature-length voicenote, so we’ve had our sound guy (and sound guy) Ant weave Dave in and out of the whole episode.

Your friends and mine

The YFAMs from this episode are everyone we mention in this episode!Gemma Strang, Jodie Newman, Leigh James, Jo Shock, Stacey Eleczko, Eddie Shleyner, Dave Harland (again!), Adrian Elton, Amy Hawthorne, Jeremy Freeman, Gemma Champ, Lou Major, Erin Buck, Samantha Harman and Ruth Sedar.

We didn’t have time to cover everyone’s testimonials tips so we will revisit the topic in future. Email us on [email protected] if you have any comments and we’ll try and include them in our testies part two.

One last wang

Okay, it probably won’t be the absolute last time I wang on about this but we’re so proud of our live episode. We’d love you to listen to it if you haven’t already. We had a jolly old time making it, as you can see. Please give it a listen 😉 Thanks again to Mark Masters and the team at FOUNDRY Poole.

And one last ask

While we’re on the topic of asking for testimonials, can you leave us one please? 🙏 You email us ([email protected]) or leave one on our individual LinkedIn pages here for Mel and here for Ben. Or you can leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank yooou!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit indiebusinessclub.substack.com