Some products hand you a number on a plate. Revenue up, hours saved, tickets closed — the customer feels the win as a metric and the testimonial writes itself. Plenty of products are not like that. If you sell security, compliance, monitoring, backup, insurance-shaped peace of mind, or anything whose main job is to make sure a bad thing does not happen, your best outcome is often invisible. The customer's day did not get measurably faster. It just did not blow up. That is real value, and it is genuinely hard to put a number on.
This creates a specific testimonial trap. When you ask a happy customer of a hard-to-quantify product for a testimonial, they either freeze ("what would I even say?") or reach for a metric that does not exist and produce something vague and unbelievable ("it's been great, highly recommend"). The wrong fix is to pressure them into a number they never tracked, which reads as invented and undermines the credibility you were trying to build. The right fix is to stop chasing a metric and instead capture the specific, concrete situation your product handled — because a real scenario, told plainly, is more persuasive than a fabricated statistic.
Why the "what results did you see?" ask backfires here
The default testimonial prompt — "what results have you seen since using us?" — assumes the customer measured a before-and-after. For a hard-to-quantify product, that assumption is false, and the ask quietly punishes an honest customer.
- The best outcome is a non-event. If your product prevented an outage, blocked a breach, or caught an error before it shipped, the "result" is that nothing happened. There is no dashboard line that went up, so the customer has nothing to point at even though they are genuinely relieved.
- Asking for a number invites a made-up one. A customer who wants to help but has no metric will either guess ("saved us, I don't know, a lot of time?") or default to filler. Neither is credible, and a prospect can tell the difference between a lived number and a polite one.
- The real value lives in a moment, not a trend. For these products, the memorable value is usually a specific incident: the night the backup actually mattered, the audit that passed because the records were already clean. That moment is your testimonial gold, and the metrics-first ask walks right past it.
Ask for the scenario, not the statistic
The move that unlocks these testimonials is to replace "what results?" with "tell me about a time." You are not asking the customer to quantify a trend they never tracked. You are asking them to recall one concrete situation where your product did its job. Specificity, not arithmetic, is what makes a testimonial believable.
- Prompt for the moment it mattered. "Was there a specific time you were glad you had this in place?" almost always surfaces a story — the failed deploy that got caught, the compliance request that was answered in an hour instead of a week. A named incident is inherently credible because it obviously happened.
- Capture the counterfactual in their words. The value of a hard-to-quantify product is the bad thing that did not occur, so let the customer say it: "Without this, we would have found out about the outage from our customers instead of from the alert." That sentence carries more weight than any invented percentage.
- Let emotion do work a number cannot. "I sleep better knowing it's running" is a legitimate, powerful testimonial for a monitoring or backup product. Confidence and calm are real purchased outcomes; when the benefit genuinely is peace of mind, an honest emotional line beats a hollow statistic. If what comes back is still too thin to persuade, the recovery steps in what to do when a customer gives you a vague testimonial apply directly.
Give them a prompt that presupposes a story
Because the value is a moment rather than a metric, the blank-page request is even deadlier than usual — you are asking the customer both to write from scratch and to figure out how to describe something they experience as an absence. Remove both obstacles by handing them a narrow prompt that already has the shape of the answer built in.
Instead of "could you write a testimonial about your results?", ask one pointed question:
"Thinking back over the last year, was there a specific moment where you were relieved to have this running — a close call it caught, or a request it made easy? In a sentence or two, what happened?"
This works because it presupposes a scenario and asks the customer only to fill in details they already remember. Their two-sentence reply — the incident, and how your product handled it — is your testimonial, in their voice, grounded in something that actually occurred. If you want the mechanics of polishing a short reply into a clean published quote, the approach in how to turn a customer survey response into a testimonial transfers straight over.
Frame the published quote so the value is obvious
A scenario-based testimonial needs the right surroundings to land, because the prospect has to recognize their own risk in the customer's story. Context does the work that a headline number would have done for a quantifiable product.
- Place it next to the specific fear it answers. A quote about a breach that got caught belongs on your security page, under a headline about the exact threat it prevented — not on a generic homepage carousel where the incident loses its meaning.
- Add a one-line situational caption. "On the night a bad deploy nearly reached production:" ahead of the quote frames the stakes so the reader feels the weight of the non-event without the customer having to spell it out.
- Do not bolt on a number the customer never gave. The credibility of a hard-to-quantify testimonial is its honesty. A specific, unembellished story reads as true; a story with a suspiciously round statistic stapled to the end reads as marketing. When you genuinely need a metrics-forward proof point, that is a job for a full case study rather than a testimonial, built with numbers the customer actually measured.
The reframe that makes this easy
Stop trying to force a number out of a product whose value is a bad thing that did not happen. You will either get silence or a hollow statistic that undercuts your credibility. Ask instead for the one moment your product mattered, capture the customer's own counterfactual, and let the specificity carry the persuasion. A prospect weighing the same risk does not need your customer's ROI spreadsheet — they need to hear that when it counted, the thing worked. A true story of a disaster avoided is worth more than any metric you could have invented.