88% of buyers are influenced in their buying decision by reviews and online comments (Zendesk). If you’re a business owner you need to know to get reviews from your clients because it builds trust, credibility and ultimately influences whether people buy from you.
By listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:
Enjoy!
Resources:
If you’d like to work together with me as your 1:1 business and marketing consultant, book a call here.
88% of buyers are influenced in their buying decision by reviews and online comments (Zendesk). If you’re a business owner you need to know to get reviews from your clients because it builds trust, credibility and ultimately influences whether people buy from you.
By listening [and taking notes], you’ll learn:
Enjoy!
Resources:
If you’d like to work together with me as your 1:1 business and marketing consultant, book a call here.
Welcome to the podcast.
Shannon Stone:I'm super excited to jump into this episode today. Today we are talking about steps to getting reviews from clients, so I've got four steps for you here today. The first two are some tools and the second two is more of how to do this. So you will definitely need pen and paper for this one. And, just on that note, I have heard from a lot of people lately who have been listening to the podcast, who take a lot of notes and then actually put it into work. So I love hearing that and that's what I definitely encourage. So you know, especially in your business, your time is so precious. So if you are going to listen, definitely take a few minutes to think about how you're going to apply this, and that's what often the action step at the end, or steps is there to help you. So I love hearing that people are taking notes and they are taking action from this.
Shannon Stone:So let's get into this episode. So we're talking all about reviews. There's actually a lot of things we can talk about when it comes to getting reviews from your clients. We know reviews are important your Facebook reviews, your Google reviews. If you use LinkedIn, even your endorsements over there are really great. You might even have some industry reviews in real estate, for example, realestatecom, or getting reviews on Rate my Agent, that type of thing. So you might have some industry specific platforms that are valuable to have reviews. And then you've also got your testimonials, so things that clients will send you. They over email, but it's not visible on any kind of platform. So possibly what you want to do with that is add it to your website, add it to some landing pages, grab that copy and use it in other places.
Shannon Stone:Now we won't dive into all the bits and pieces around where you can leave reviews and because it really is a big topic, but what I did want to share before we hop into the four steps is I popped into chat GPT, as you do. I wanted to do some research ahead of this episode, and Google's great as well, but chat GPT brought a really good list and I wanted to share the importance of reviews and share some different statistics and things and what this actually does for your business. And I know chat GPT is it completely accurate? Well, I guess I'm going to be that person to vet it for us here today. So it brought up seven different things.
Shannon Stone:The first is that it says reviews build consumer trust. So it builds more trust with your clients, which obviously you don't need me or any kind of expert or professional to tell you that. You know that when you see reviews from a business, it builds more trust. And there are a lot of stats there. One of them says 91% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. And you know, when you hear these kind of things, I think the best way is to think well, how do I buy, how do I approach things and do I believe that? Do I trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation from someone? For some people, you might trust the online reviews even more because it's someone who's actually purchased from that business. So it builds consumer trust. It influences the purchase decision 100 and 1 million percent. So when someone is going to buy from you, they are definitely looking at your reviews and that really influences not just the purchase decision but whether someone even goes ahead and books a call with you. So in that sales process, the reviews are really, really important. It's not just about getting a customer or a client, it's also about getting a lead. It's about getting someone booking into your calendar and having a conversation with you. A few other things chat GPT brought up is that SEO, invisibility, brand credibility, user generated content. So you can definitely use your reviews in content, sharing what people are saying, matching it with your services and that kind of thing.
Shannon Stone:The last couple that it's got in there is competitive advantage. I think reviews definitely add a competitive advantage, especially when they are specific. I think, especially when they are up to date and consistent. You're regularly getting new reviews onto the places that matter on Facebook, on Google and if your business is a low volume business, as in you work with a smaller number of probably bigger clients, you're not going to have reviews every single day of the week or even every week out of the month. You might have one a month or two a month, and even that is going to be a strong competitive advantage. Remember, if you think about and we don't like to focus too much on competitors, but it is important to acknowledge that when people are looking for using your services, it's very likely they're reading your reviews and it's very likely they're reading your competitors' reviews ahead of booking a call with either you or them, or both of you. So you do have a competitive advantage when your reviews up there having them be specific, having them be as current as possible and new ones coming in as well.
Shannon Stone:The final thing chat GPT popped in there around insights, around reviews was having feedback for improvement, and I think you would probably gather feedback ahead of a review. But what I do find with reviews is you really get to see what your clients really valued, and it might be things that you weren't even sure of. You thought they got. The certain results is the thing they really appreciated. But when they leave a review or a testimonial, you pick up on the things that, oh, I didn't know that meant as much to them as it did. So it does give you that feedback and it gives you what people are actually looking for from your services. So there are a few things that shows why reviews are important.
Shannon Stone:Not that I need to twist your arm in any kind of way, but let's get into the four steps. So the first one and, like I said, the first two are some tools. These are some tools that you need to develop in your business and literally they'll take you five minutes. The first one will take a little bit longer than the second one. The first one is to have a template for reviews. So, however you're asking people for reviews, I would turn this into a template. So a template, an email that you can send to people. Obviously, when you do send it, you can personalize it, you can make it specific to that person, but generally you're going to be asking the same thing of all your clients. So create a template for asking for those reviews and in that template you want to definitely include the links to where you want them to leave those reviews, so it's really easy for someone to go ahead and leave that review for you. So that's the first thing you want to develop and make it really easy for you to create and really easy for that person as well.
Shannon Stone:Something short, something to the point, asking for that review, and definitely have a link to where you want them to have that review. A little tip on this is asking them would you have two minutes to write a quick review? You're not expecting them to write a lengthy paragraph upon paragraph of what it was like to work with you, even just saying do you have two minutes to write a quick review for me? Here's a link. Obviously, you want to fluff up the email and make it sound a little bit nicer and more personalized, but asking them if they have two minutes to write a quick review, and what you will find is it's easier for them to sit down and write the review and then they actually will write it in much more detail than they would have even thought and much more detail that you were expecting as well. So almost like just making it super simple for them. Do you have two minutes to write a quick review? Obviously, personalize it, add any other things in there that you would like, but create a template for asking for reviews and have that as an SOP in your business.
Shannon Stone:Standard operating procedure is in SOP. That's number one. Number two is you want to have a review tracker. So this would be a spreadsheet, very simple, and I'll tell you the four columns that you want to have on it. So number one, first column is your client names. And now you might have some kind of tracker in your business already, so you could just latch this on or create a new tab already, but this could be a standalone tracker if you don't have one. So the first column is your client names, all down the list, all down that left column. The next column is I would have it as checkboxes or you can color code it if you want to and this is whether you've asked them for a review. So, client Sarah, I've asked her for a review. The next column is following up the review.
Shannon Stone:So, yes, not everyone leaves the review the first time that you ask them to leave it. So have a secondary column dedicated to following up with asking them to leave a review, just so you know your efforts are going somewhere, you're not just asking them one time. And then the final column is where they've left the review. So this is them having left the review. So have they left it on Facebook? Have you left it on Google? And this could also depend on your initial template. When you ask for a review, are you just asking for them to leave it in one place and maybe six months later you want to ask them to leave it also on another platform? That's completely up to you, but it just gives you an opportunity to capture where people or who has left a review, where they've left it and the fact that they've done that as well. So you've got this system to be able to follow up, to check to see that Yep, I followed through, made sure that client has left a review.
Shannon Stone:I can use all of this in my marketing. It's like dotting all the I's crossing all the T's, no stone unturned. So they're the two tools that you need. The first one is to have a template for your reviews. The second one is to have some kind of simple spreadsheet to track the reviews.
Shannon Stone:Now step three and four are turning all of this into action. So whenever I ask clients I guess not to leave a review for me, but when I'm advising them to gather reviews in their business, there's two ways I ask them to go about it, and they're going to be the two ways. I suggest that you can go about it as well. The first way is to treat this as a project, which is step three, and the second way is to treat this as a system, which is step four. Now, ultimately, you will build generating reviews in your business as a system, but we have to start with where you're at at the moment. So I'll walk you through what it means to approach it as a project base.
Shannon Stone:So I would imagine you've worked with a bunch of clients up until now and some of them have left a review, but not all of them, and possibly it's maybe happened on a whim or a little bit sporadically, or you might have just mentioned, hey, can you leave a review? Or they've asked to leave a review. It's kind of like happened in that kind of way Now. So you've kind of got to go back to all your past clients and ask them to leave a review, not just all your future clients. So this is why I treat this as a project, so you can use that review tracker spreadsheet that you set up and put down all your past client names on there, and what you want to do is start to work through that list bit by bit, asking people to leave you a review.
Shannon Stone:You don't want to or this is my advice I wouldn't send. Say you had 100 clients, I wouldn't be emailing all 100 clients in a blanket statement to say you know, our business, you know, really thrives on having reviews. Like you don't want, like a very something that really does look like a template, that you haven't personalized in any kind of way and you're not sending it hand holding in a way to each of your clients, at least the way a lot of my clients work. They rather personally ask for that review from someone rather than popping it into their database and sending it out to everyone, especially in service-based businesses as well. If you really want the conversion of getting the review as many as possible, I would be doing it in a personalized way. So have that spreadsheet list, all your clients in there, and start to go work that list.
Shannon Stone:Basically go through that list bit by bit and ask for reviews and, like I said, it's important to follow up with people after you've asked them to leave a review If they didn't leave it the first time. Don't just work your way down the list until you get to the bottom. Go through it incrementally, person one, ask them to leave a review, follow up if they haven't, and you can do this, obviously like 10 at a time or 5 at a time or 20 at a time is completely up to you, but make sure you do it where you're going for quality over quantity. You're not just trying to speed your way through asking all your past clients to leave a review and only I don't know 20% of them leave it like. Ultimately, we want 100% of them to leave your review, so we can use that as the ideal. Let's go for quality over quantity. Make sure that you're incrementally going through, person by person and working back through that list.
Shannon Stone:So treating this as a project. This could take you a couple of months to complete and that is okay, because step four, where we treat this as more of a system, is where you don't have to do so much of this cleanup process or this project based process. You can go back through in a different kind of way, moving forward. But we don't just want to get reviews from clients from here on out. We want to make sure we go back to past clients and get reviews from them as well. That's why we treat it as a project to begin with. So that is the project based side of things and that is step three. Step four is the systems side of things.
Shannon Stone:So, when it comes to the system side of things, if you think about the clients that you're working with now, when should you be asking? Ideally, if you're looking at that client journey of them working with you, you want to pinpoint the times that you should actually be asking for a review. A lot of people will wait till the end of a project to ask their clients for a review. Now, this can work in a lot of cases, but I find the best time for people to ask for a review Is when something incredible has happened, when you've hit a milestone, when something great has happened. It doesn't have to be at the end of the project. And I tell this to people because, when it comes to other people reading your, your reviews, possible clients, you want them to see what it's like to work with you at varying stages of the process. You know you don't want every single review just to be the end and final product, because if we look at the whole client journey before we get to the end, before they even become a client of yours, there's other things that they're thinking about. They're not just looking for the dream thing right at the very end.
Shannon Stone:So the best time I find to ask for a review is when something incredible has happened, when they've hit a milestone, they signed a contract, they've got a contract. I don't know whatever the thing is in the case of your business, but pinpoint a couple of times in your business or when you're working with your clients, that would be the best time to ask for a review. And that becomes a system. So in your review tracker, every time a new client comes to work with you, you can add their name to the list. You can have client name, whether you've asked them for a review, you can follow up with them if you need to and where they've left it. So you've got all those same four columns and as you're working with your clients and something incredible happens, all you have to do is follow that same tracker, ask them for a review, follow up if you need to, and just note down where they've left that review. And so this is more of a system, because now this is something that happens from here on out.
Shannon Stone:Every single client that you work with, you pinpoint these are the times that I'm going to ask them for a review and I'm going to follow through with every single client moving forward, so you won't have to go back to past clients in a project basis to ask them for reviews, because from this point onwards you would do it client by client, and that is the best way when you're actively working with them rather than going back. But we do go back because why wouldn't you? It's like you've worked with them. They've probably had a really great experience, so I'd hate for that to go to waste. Let's share what it was like to work with you.
Shannon Stone:So step four is that systems basis. So even if you do decide that I still want to ask for reviews at the end of my process or you know, maybe you're a project-based business in some kind of way. You maybe build websites or you hand things over to people, whatever that may look like Maybe it is at that handover stages when you want to ask for a review, and that is perfectly okay. Just make it as a system. You might add that into the review tracker of when you need to actually ask them for that review and still follow up with them. So I do see a lot of people in their handover emails. They will pop in there. It was so great working with you If you've enjoyed the experience, please go ahead and leave a review and like no one leaves a review.
Shannon Stone:A couple of reasons why that happens. One is you're probably adding that in an email with a bunch of other things for them, and if you're handing something over to them, that is what they're actually focusing on. They're not focusing on leaving your review as much as they would love to. It's no offense to you in any kind of way, but there can be a lot of things going on. That's why I love one templated email, all focused on leaving a review. You're not asking them to do multiple things or bring multiple things to their attention. It's just like a one action type thing. So that's how I would do the system side of things. So choose when. Is that best time for you to ask for that review and start doing it with clients moving forward and go for quality over quantity. It's okay to ask them again if they didn't leave a review. Hey, by the way, did you end up leaving that review or just wanted to check and see? And again asking do you have two minutes to write a quick review? You might even prompt them of. I never like to put words in people's mouth, but if it's helpful to bullet point a couple of things they may want to put in there or show them a couple, like in an email that you sent to them.
Shannon Stone:Here's a couple of other client reviews, if you'd like inspiration as far as putting something quick together, make it really simple for them. So they are the four steps to helping you to get reviews from clients. So the first two were more of the tools. So number one was the template for reviews. The second is having a review tracker, a really simple spreadsheet. Number three is how you approach reviews, so in a project basis, to begin with, going back to all your past clients. And number four is a systems basis, which is how you're going to do things, moving forward in this ideal world, because now you've recognized reviews are important. I don't want to wait months and years later to ask for a review. I want to find the ideal time to do that, and that is what step four is that systems basis.
Shannon Stone:So that brings us to our action step for today. So the action step is almost like a challenge for you. I want you to get three reviews on your Facebook business page seven days from now. So whatever day it is that you're listening to this this same time. Next week is your deadline to get three reviews on your Facebook business page, and why this is so important is because if you aim to get three reviews on your business page, it forces you to follow through on everything we just said. It forces you to create the template, it forces you to create the review tracker and it gets you going on maybe the project basis approach or the systems basis approach, so it turns all of this into something out there in the other.
Shannon Stone:So I hope you found this useful. Very much a tactical episode for us here today, but I hope you enjoy it and I will chat to you very, very soon.