Why Having Many Glowing Testimonials Is Usually Worthless

Any Expert Coach/Teacher Knows Testimonials Are Poor Guides to Quality

About the Author

Bryan Frances is the world’s only intellectual wisdom coach. He’s a former professor of philosophy & logic, doing research & teaching at universities in the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. He teaches you how to become the wisest thinker in the room—which is different from being the most knowledgeable or having the highest IQ. Contact for a free session.

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Virtually every coach, no matter what their area, boasts testimonials on their website. It’s almost always a key selling point for them. I do not. Here’s the reason:

• Any expert coach knows that testimonials are virtually worthless.

Not kidding.

If a coach says “Look at my great testimonials!”, that means one of three things, guaranteed: either they’re just an amateur who doesn’t know how to evaluate coaching, they do know how to do it but they’re just manipulating your emotions to get your business, or it’s a combination of the two.

Think about it.

Testimonials for coaches are strikingly like teaching evaluations for teachers. After all, coaches are teachers, just not for kids and not in a classroom. An amateur teacher might think that teaching evaluations are valuable … but no seasoned teacher does. Similarly, an amateur coach might think testimonials are valuable, but they’re not. Tons of research over many decades shows that evaluations are almost without any value.

There are several reasons for this.

First, mediocre and even quite poor teachers and coaches are going to have some stories of wildly successful teaching/coaching. Even the professors who are bad at teaching have dozens of great testimonials. I’ve known many of those professors. If you just do it long enough, everything will click with some clients/students and success will result. So, posting a dozen glowing testimonials on a website is amateur hour. Anyone can do that, no matter how poor or good they are.

When I started out teaching, and got some ego-boosting teaching evaluations, I was thrilled and wanted to put them in my portfolio for job applications. Then a professor schooled me on this issue, saying in no uncertain terms that every professor has those glowing evaluations, even when they are poor teachers.

Second, teaching, or coaching, that has real impact is mostly (not: entirely) up to the student or client—not the teacher or coach. The client has to be receptive, otherwise the coaching is not going to produce results. Hence, the success of coaching has more to do with the client than the coach. A lousy coach can occasionally get great results, if the client is super receptive; and the most brilliant coach can occasionally get no results at all, if the client isn’t genuinely ready to improve their life in a concrete way.

I suppose most teachers have experienced this. I recall teaching two sections of one course in a semester and having wildly different responses in the two classes despite the fact that I was doing the same thing in both classes, even down to the placement and delivery of jokes. One group thought I was a fantastic teacher and was leading a wonderfully stimulating class. The other group thought I was boring and the class was shit. I was doing the EXACT same thing for both classes. Lesson: both the high success and unfortunate failure had more to do with them than me. I don’t have to tell you how tempting it is for a teacher to focus on the successes and set aside the failures.

I’m not saying that testimonials or other evaluations are completely worthless. If a coach/teacher consistently gets a very high percentage (so, not just large numbers) of really bad or utterly fantastic evaluations, over many years, and evaluated over long stretches of time, then that’s evidence that they are comparative poor or good, respectively. But even then, the evidence is nowhere near conclusive:

• For teachers, it really depends on what you’re teaching. Some classes are easy to teach in such a way that the students enjoy them a great deal, and give glowing evaluations. Others are the opposite. Same for personal coaching.

• For coaches, it’s easy to manipulate the testimonials. For instance, one can ask the clients for testimonials when the clients are most happy, which is usually soon after the completion of the coaching. If you want much more illuminating and worthwhile evaluations, ask for testimonials several years later, when the clients can give a more sober and informative evaluation about the long-term worth of the coaching.

And then there are the coaches who brag that “I’ve had thousands of clients!” That’s even worse in my opinion, for two reasons.

First, it means they didn’t really work with their clients at all. It just means, in most cases, that thousands of people paid them for a short e-book or set of access-restricted videos, or an hour or so of video calls, or something similar. Very little interaction at all.

Second, even clearly lousy teachers have had thousands of students; that doesn’t mean they were any good at teaching. I have known many professors who have taught thousands of students—and they sucked at it.

So, don’t focus much on testimonials or numbers of clients. Even a mediocre coach can get them. Instead, look at their real credentials, regarding research and other, similar, endeavors.