Most testimonial programs treat the NPS survey as a filter with two exits. Promoters — the 9s and 10s — get routed to a review request. Detractors — anyone 6 or below — get a recovery call. And the passives, the customers who scored you a 7 or an 8, fall straight through the middle and are never contacted at all. That is a mistake, because the passive is usually your single largest segment, and the testimonial they can give is more believable than anything a 10 will hand you. A quote from someone who was genuinely impressed but not evangelical reads like the truth, because it is. Here is how to turn a lukewarm score into a testimonial worth publishing.
Why passives are the segment worth mining
A passive is not an unhappy customer. A 7 or an 8 means "this works and I would probably buy it again, but I am not going to write you a love letter about it." That measured tone is exactly what makes their testimonial valuable. Prospects have learned to discount the ecstatic five-star quote — they assume it was cherry-picked, incentivized, or written by the vendor's biggest fan. A quote that says "it does what it says and it saved me a few hours a week" carries none of that suspicion. It sounds like a coworker's offhand recommendation rather than a marketing asset, and that is a higher bar of credibility, not a lower one.
There is also simple math. In most B2B products the passives outnumber the promoters, often by a wide margin. If your testimonial pipeline only ever touches promoters, you are fishing in the smallest pond available while the largest one goes untouched. The passives are persuadable, present in volume, and — because nobody ever asks them — flattered to be asked at all.
Read the comment, not just the number
The number alone will not tell you which passives to approach. The 7 that came with the comment "great tool, wish the reporting were faster" is a different customer from the 7 that came with no comment at all. The first is a passive with a specific, nameable reason for holding back a point or two — and that reason is a gift, because it tells you exactly what they value and exactly what they would say if you asked. The second is disengaged and probably not worth the outreach yet.
Sort your passives by whether they left a comment, and start with the ones who did. Their words are the raw material of the testimonial. A customer who wrote "solid, does the job, onboarding was smoother than I expected" has already drafted their own quote — your job is just to ask permission to use a cleaned-up version of it.
Ask about the specific thing they liked, not the overall experience
The wrong move with a passive is to ask for a glowing summary. If you email a 7-scorer "would you write us a testimonial?", you will either get silence or a flat two-line quote that adds nothing. A passive does not have a sweeping endorsement in them, and asking for one puts them in the awkward position of manufacturing enthusiasm they do not feel.
Instead, anchor the ask to the one concrete thing their survey comment revealed they valued. "You mentioned onboarding went smoother than you expected — could I quote you on that specifically?" is a request they can say yes to without exaggerating, because it asks them to confirm something they already believe. The resulting testimonial is narrow, specific, and true, which is precisely the combination that persuades. One honest sentence about a real benefit outperforms a paragraph of borrowed superlatives every time.
Don't try to convert the score — harvest it
There is a temptation, when you see a 7, to treat the conversation as a chance to win the extra points and turn the passive into a promoter. Resist it. Chasing the score change turns a light, low-pressure interaction into a sales motion, and the customer feels it. You are far more likely to get a usable testimonial by accepting the 7 for what it is and asking only about the part they were already happy with. The upgrade to a 9 may come later, on its own, precisely because you did not push for it. For related situations where the customer's enthusiasm is muted, see gathering testimonials from silent happy customers and how to turn an NPS comment into a testimonial.
Make it a standing step in the survey follow-up
The reason passives get ignored is not that teams decided they were worthless — it is that the survey workflow simply has no branch for them. Promoters trigger a review request, detractors trigger an alert, and the 7s and 8s trigger nothing. The fix is to add the missing branch: when a passive leaves a comment naming something they liked, that comment should route to whoever owns testimonials, with a templated ask ready to send. Done consistently, this turns the middle of your NPS distribution — the part every other company throws away — into a steady source of the most credible social proof you can publish. A tool like ProofShow makes that branch automatic, so every measured, believable 7-and-8 comment becomes a candidate quote instead of a line in a spreadsheet nobody reads.