How to Prove That Company's Claim
Table of Contents
Introduction
This essay was written by me, emsenn, and is released for the benefit of the public under the terms included in the "License" supplement. It was made possible with financial contributions from humans like you. Please direct comments to my public inbox or, if necessary, my personal email.
How to Prove That Company's Claim
There's a number of small companies out there that offer consultancy or other services that are fairly "soft:" the work they do - and the results they get - can be hard to track.
And these companies might not be tracked by the Better Business Bureau or Yelp, so it can be hard to find out what people truly think of them: you're left reading testimonials that they've chosen to highlight, and we all know how much those can stretch the truth.
A lot of businesses supplement their testimonials with concrete claims that "prove" their business experience. And these can be even harder to find evidence for than testimonials! At least with testimonials, you (usually) have a name you could use to find the testimonial-giver, and reach out to them for candid feedback.
So how can you check if a business is actually living up to their claims?
One way I've found that is fairly accurate is:
Use LinkedIn. Find out employee names from the company's website or some other means of Internet sleuthing, and look them up.
If the company is claiming, "our sales team gets a 35% close rate," look up their salespeople on LinkedIn. If they're actually getting that sort of rate, they'll probably mention it in their profile.
If a company claims their market "will increase your revenue from $800k to $3.4m," look up their marketing officers. Are they making similar claims?
If a business's employees aren't making the same claims about their work as their employer, they might just be bad at LinkedIn - make sure it's an active profile.
But if it's active, and doesn't line up with what the business claims about itself, that's usually an indication the business doesn't live up to them.
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