Claim your proof from the data

1. Find what your winners share

One business saw its ad costs double and had four hours to find out why before a meeting. Going through five years of ads, thousands of them, one by one, was hopeless. The advice that worked:

• Start from your record of your best-performing ads.
• Compare them with the ads running now, and find the differences.
• To go further, sort the best performers into buckets. Then you have more than a list of one-offs. You have a framework for making top performers whenever you want.

The review produced a top-50 list of ads out of thousands. Sorted by performance and then by theme, the ads fell into these buckets: ads built on the offer, testimonials with high production (music, lighting, storyline and so on), testimonials with low production, videos of full gyms, educational ads, and humor ads with high production.

Once they were sorted, one thing separated the top performers from the bottom ones: proof. Of that business's winning ads, 80%:

• had no educational content;
• did not focus on the offer;
• did not put the owner center stage;
• told one story: this product works.

The thousands of weak ads had cost millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours to make. They were not about proof. They were about the business, its services, its "unique mechanism." They talked about the business, not the customer.

2. Why proof, not a promise

Big and established or small and new, every business faces the same obstacle to a sale: risk. The risk that what you sell will not work for the buyer, the way they want, in the time they want. They have already tried everything else. Why would yours be better?

• An established business has to fight the label newcomers give it: old and dusty.
• A newcomer has to fight the label the established ones give it: too small to be legit.

Whatever your place in the market, overwhelming proof can grow the business.

Picture a prospect who is certain that buying will get them the result they want, fast, easily, and at a price that is right for them. Would they buy? Of course. The job of marketing and sales is to bring people as near that point as they can. More proof, and more skill at putting it in front of people, brings them closer.

3. Two words, defined

• Proof is data that supports your advertising claims. Say you sell weight loss, and a woman you work with loses weight from one week to the next. That data is a proof point: it supports your weight-loss claims.
• An advertising claim is anything you say about what you sell that has happened, might happen or will happen.

The most compelling claims tend to point to better results, sooner, for modest effort. But the more compelling the claim, the more the quantity and quality of the proof behind it matter.

Your claims, what you promise, probably will not set you apart from competitors. Even if they did, others would copy you and make the same promise. Anyone can copy a claim. No one can produce your exact results to prove it. So however crowded your market, proof cuts through the noise and makes you stand out. For a newcomer, proof is the biggest weapon there is.

4. Belief comes in degrees

There are many ways to back up a claim, and some work better than others. Take a product that whitens teeth. Saying "this will make your teeth sparkling white" does little. Instead:

• Take a photo of the prospect's teeth.
• Put it next to a whiter shade they could have.
• Hand them a free sample.

They would probably try it. If they rinse with it on the spot and the next photo shows whiter teeth, you have a winner. They may ask a few questions. But if they believe it will work for them, the hard part is done.

Belief is not all or nothing. The question is not whether they believe. It is how much. Every way you back up a claim, or fail to, moves a buyer toward belief or away from it. The closer your proof brings the prospect to full certainty, the more compelling it is.

5. Claim your proof

Most marketers look for proof to back the claims they want to make. It is much easier to work the other way round:

• Collect your data first.
• Then see which claims it already supports.
• Make those claims.

Do not try to prove your claim. Claim your proof. Your promise does not set you apart. Your proof does.

If the proof is weak, fix reality. When your proof is not compelling, fix reality:

• Give away free services.
• Keep working at your craft or your product until the truth is compelling.

Then you have no need for the pointless claim wars, where people promise bigger and bigger things they cannot back up. For your data: if it is poor, fix your product until it is good. No one ever got worse by learning more.

6. Collect the data

• Collect all the customer milestone data you can: key milestones, sign-up, onboarding, and 30, 60 and 90 days into the customer's time with you.
• Either automate the collection or do it by hand.
• Review the data. It shows you more about your customers, and ways to improve.
• Collect it regularly, so you can tell people what has happened in the past and they can make an informed decision about their future.

This may be one of the most profitable things you ever do. One buyer of businesses does it in every company it buys.

7. Present the numbers

People find it hard to argue with numbers that are easy to understand and laid out plainly, and with good reason.

• Say how and when you collected the data.
• Hold nothing back: give the facts, and tell the truth.
• Show the numbers, do not just list them. Charts and graphs make them more compelling, and the right graph can beat a page of numbers. Even a simple drawing works.

The worked pair below sets a claim beside the proof that matches it. The figure was pulled at the time shown, July 2024, and matches a claim its own business makes.

Claim	Proof	When pulled
We help gym owners run more profitable businesses.	In their first complete year, the average client adds over $100,000 in profit to their gym.	July 2024

Data matters.

8. Where proof works, and what it changes

Proof is like a wild animal. It may be there for only a moment, so you have to catch it. Many buying decisions rely on proof in some way, so be proactive and capture it in many forms. It works at every step of a business:

• to get people to click on an ad;
• to get them to opt in on a page;
• to get them to buy during a presentation, recorded or live;
• after they buy, to convince them they made the best decision, so they keep trying.

It is one of the rare things in business you can never have too much of. It lifts conversion at every step, from the click, to the close, to keeping the customer.

Done right, you:

• get a better return on marketing spend, so customers cost less to win;
• get more clicks, and better ones, on your ads, content and outreach;
• turn more traffic into leads;
• turn more leads into sales, and so win more customers;
• close at higher prices for the same thing, and so make more profit;
• get people to buy more in each purchase, so you sell more upsells;
• sell products faster, so less stock expires or sits on shelves;
• get people to buy more over time, so lifetime value rises;
• improve cash flow, leaving more cash to reinvest or keep;
• win a bigger slice of the market, with the advantages of a market leader;
• get more out of your team, because they see the effect of their work;
• hire better people as the company grows, because they know they work for a company that helps;
• make the company worth more, since every investor wants to know a business does good;
• move into new products or markets more easily, because proof bridges the gap;
• win more customers by word of mouth, which compounds the business over time.

Done wrong, you:

• ride a roller coaster of lumpy, uneven sales, where good proof would keep sales steady;
• risk people copying your offers and services, though they cannot copy your proof;
• waste money on ads that do not work;
• lose customers to competitors who convert a higher share of visitors;
• miss rational customers, most of them, who would have bought with better proof;
• lose upsells and cross-sells, because customers do not believe you can help when you can;
• get stuck with unsold products;
• lose unhappy employees, because they do not see the results their work produces;
• struggle to hire good candidates, because they do not see how your company helps;
• fall behind on new technology, because you lack the cash to reinvest;
• have trouble launching new products;
• fail to build a loyal customer base;
• miss word-of-mouth referrals;
• struggle to compete on price, because trust is low;
• have trouble scaling the business;
• struggle to hold profit margins;
• lose market share over time;
• fail to build a strong, lasting business.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• The tools for collecting the data, and who collects it. Not established on this page.
• How much to give away free. Free services are named as a way to fix reality. This page gives no figure for how much, or for how long.
• Whether the worked figures still hold. They were pulled in July 2024. This page gives no figure for any later date.
• Whether the 80% share holds for other businesses. It comes from one business's review of its own ads. Not established on this page.

10. The checklist

Step	What you do
Find what wins	Compare your best ads with the ones running now; sort the winners into buckets
Define	Proof is data that backs a claim; a claim is anything you say about what you sell
Collect	Milestone data: sign-up, onboarding, 30, 60 and 90 days; automated or by hand
Claim	Make the claims the data already supports
Weak proof	Fix reality: give services away, improve the product
Present	Say how and when; hold nothing back; chart it
Capture	Proof may only be there for a moment; capture it in many forms

11. What this page does not cover

Making each piece of proof more compelling is SOP 109 — Check proof against the thirteen comparisons. SOP 87 — Lift a show rate with incentives uses proof to bring leads to their appointments. Building a brand and authority are SOP 92 to SOP 95. Standing proof streams are SOP 123 — Run the standing proof streams, and testimonial competitions are SOP 126 — Run a testimonial competition judged as an ad.