faceless quotes can pack a punch

"I love the sarcastic quotes!"

In 2024, David Baum held 200+ demo calls for Relato. After he hired me to do their new homepage, I asked for a handful of the most representative ones.

He sent me some good ones, then never really stopped — not until the page was approved. Which was handy, but the total time of all demo calls I listened to for the homepage was 10+ hours.

That helped me solve a BIG problem of pre-release homepages — how on earth can you get social proof for a product that hasn't fully launched yet?

So, instead of trying to fish for a good line in a modest alpha testers pool, I listened back to the demo call recordings and pulled some of the most emotionally-charged quotes from the people who fit Relato's ICP the most.

And instead of putting people's names and faces next to the quotes—which you have to do with testimonials—I opted for more colorful descriptions of the people speaking:

💬 “I've never seen anything like this before, and it's blowing my mind” — a head of content drowning in Google Sheets

💬 “we do this manually now and sometimes it's months until we notice that person still has access” — an overwhelmed writing team manager

💬 “if you have an editor and a writer and then the creative director... they can all stay within the same workspace” — a content manager with Asana PTSD

💬 “other tools make you build everything from the ground up — I don't want to do that work” — a creative director with other things to do

This let us do quite a few things, all at once:

• use emotional VOC as social proof

• anchor the problem AND the solution in the VOC quotes

• reinforce the homepage messaging with colorful bylines

• avoid needing the approval from the authors

• frame quotes in a nuanced way, which their job titles couldn't fully do

• cover—or at least hint at—a WIDE spectrum of product features

• call out different angles of how our ICP thinks about the problem

...all in 4 short quotes, pulled straight from the demo calls.

I did have to do some convincing until David was open to using these anonymous quotes instead of getting permission from people to use their names and photos — including him showing the homepage wireframe to at least a couple of ICP.

Their reaction? — "I love the sarcastic quotes!"

If you want people to buy into your way of thinking, you may want to give them a mirror, not someone's photo.

Of course, this was used—and could only have worked—out of necessity. The product wasn’t yet released or established properly, so leaning into faceless quotes worked better than most testimonials could within these constraints.

For a more mature product, going with a set of faceless quotes wouldn’t work — can you imagine HubSpot leading with quotes from “frustrated sales leader” instead of the hundreds of case studies? Yeah.

Can you relate to this post? ^{(Minus the nazi flair.)}

You buyers sure can. And even though January has given us a deluge of ✨agentic✨ messaging angles, another buzzword is probably not the answer for your product.

Clarity and messaging alignment, on the other hand, prove to be extremely helpful — for your team AND your buyers. Here’s what a client from a few months ago told me last week:

“Align ad copy to landing page copy” is a fundamental commandment I remember from my PPC days (iPhone 4 was all the rage then). Fifteen years later, we’re still sending ad traffic to the homepage.

Even though homepages are my bread and butter, you shouldn’t do that. You should, however, do your best to ALIGN your messaging across all touchpoints — what people see in the ads should match the website, which should ideally match what they hear from sales, and so on.

Last week, another client launched their first LinkedIn ad campaign in a while, and they made two very good decisions:

1. Use the language from our messaging canvas in ad copy and video scripts.

2. Send ad clicks to the pages with the new messaging.

It’s still too early for conversion data, but the ICP’s reactions are essentially “they’re saying what we’re all thinking!”

Someone recently told me they felt “sales and marketing aren’t even working at the same company.” If you’re feeling this way, too, you want to align your messaging across sales and marketing. (Because your buyers definitely notice.)