Testimonial editing

What testimonial editing is

Testimonial editing takes the praise you already have — in emails, on review sites, on feedback forms, in the thank-you note pinned above the desk — and turns each usable piece of it into a short quote that says something specific. Then it goes back to the person who said it, in the edited form, and nothing is used until they confirm that wording is theirs.

The job is mostly subtraction and one question. “They were great to work with, really professional, would definitely recommend” contains no information. Behind it is the actual reason that person recommends you, and one email usually finds it.

This is not a testimonial page, which is a whole page sequenced around the doubts a buyer arrives with. Editing is the work on the quotes themselves, and they then go wherever you need them: a page, a proposal, a slide, the back of a sales sheet. It is also not writing testimonials. I do not draft a quote for a client to approve, and I will not put words in anyone's mouth.

When you need it

You need it when you have plenty of goodwill and none of it is doing any work. Fifteen quotes all saying the team was professional and the service excellent persuade nobody, because the reader has seen the same sentences on every competitor's site and assumes some were written in-house.

You need it before a rebuild or a new sales sheet, because that is when someone otherwise pastes the old quotes across unchanged and loses another three years to them.

You do not need this if nobody has said anything about you yet, or if the people who have will not be named. Anonymous praise is worth nothing and editing it makes it worse. The honest start there is a set of recorded conversations with your customers, which produces quotes worth editing. If a client turns out to have a whole story rather than a sentence, that is a short written account of the engagement instead.

What I do to a quote

Each quote gets the same treatment, and the order matters.

• Cut the throat-clearing. Most quotes take two sentences to start. The useful part sits in the middle and stands alone once the preamble goes.
• Find the specific claim inside the general one. “Very responsive” often sits next to a detail the person gave and nobody kept: the callback on a Friday evening, the question answered before the invoice. That detail is the quote.
• Remove the words that do no work. Excellent, amazing, top-notch, absolutely. These read as padding and their removal never changes what the person meant.
• Ask the one question that fills the gap. Where a quote is warm and empty, the person gets a short email asking what they had in mind. Many answer in two lines, and those two lines are better than anything that could be written for them.
• Attribute it properly. Name, role, business or town, and the date. A quote with no name on it should not be published, and I will say so.

The rule underneath all of it: nothing is added that the person did not say or has not since confirmed. Words can be removed and sentences can be shortened. Detail can be added only when the customer supplies it themselves.

What you get

The edited quotes. Each in three lengths where the source allows: two or three sentences, a single sentence, and a fragment of a few words for a headline or a slide. One file, with the attribution beside each.

The approval record. For every quote, the exact wording the person signed off, the date and the channel it was agreed on. This is the point of the service. An edited quote that has not been approved by the person who said it does not get published, and I will not hand one over as though it had been.

The unusable list. Every quote that could not be cleared, with the reason: the person could not be reached, declined to elaborate, or was never named. Quotes left exactly as they were because the person preferred them that way are marked as such.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An Ottawa bookkeeping firm has fourteen testimonials collected over six years, and twelve are some arrangement of the words professional, responsive and friendly. The owner wants them reused on a new site and a new sales sheet.

Six are worth the effort. Each of those six gets a short email: here is what you wrote, here is the tighter version, and one question. One replies with the afternoon a letter from the tax authority was answered before he had finished reading it, which becomes the strongest quote the firm owns. Two approve the tighter version with no new detail, which is a fair outcome. Two decline to add anything, so their original wording stays as it was. One has left the company and cannot be reached, so that quote comes down. The firm ends with seven usable quotes instead of fourteen unusable ones, and a record of what each person agreed to.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you already hold, where it came from, and where the quotes are going. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. The number of quotes and who does the chasing, agreed before anything starts.
3. The gathering. You send everything: emails, review screenshots, feedback forms, notes. I sort it and mark what is already publishable.
4. The edits and the questions. Within five working days you get the proposed wording for each quote and the one question I would ask each person, for you to approve before anyone is contacted.
5. The approvals. The messages go out, from your address or from me with your introduction, and I track every reply. Two follow-ups, then the quote goes on the unusable list.
6. Delivery. The approved quotes in three lengths, the approval record, and the unusable list.

Two to three weeks for ten to fifteen quotes is typical, nearly all of it waiting for replies.

What it costs

This is not one of the published bands on the pricing page, so it is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call. What moves the number is how many quotes there are, whether permission already exists for any of them, and whether your office chases the approvals or I do. The chasing is most of the work, not the editing, and I will say honestly which way is cheaper for you.

What happens next

Approved quotes usually want a home, which means a page that puts each one against the doubt it answers. Where a quote turns out to be the tip of a longer story, that customer is worth a full written account of the engagement. And a firm that has run out of usable praise books conversations with its customers, so next year's quotes arrive specific instead of needing rescue. None of that is assumed. Edited, approved quotes are a finished piece of work you can use anywhere.