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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Relay, presented by lexameca, the leading attorney referral network. I'm your host, Gabriel Sterritz, co founder and CEO. The Relay is a show for leaders who use cutting edge technology and AI to enhance their for law firms. Our listeners are the owners and C suite at personal injury, mass tort and other plaintiff law firms. Joining me today is Andy Stickle, CMO and co owner of SMB Team. SMB Team helps lawyers live better lives by building a law firm that runs without them. Andy, it's great to have you on the show.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Gabriel. I appreciate it.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Andy, I have heard great things about you and about SMB Team over the years. You run an incredibly tight ship not only for your customers, but also internally. I love people who practice what they preach and are not selling shoes while they're running around barefoot. That's one of the things that I really appreciate about what y'all do and other people that I have on the show. So what we're, what we're gonna dive in today is something you've actually written about which, which is the importance of online reviews and your, your kind of, your external brand and social proof. So real excited to get into this. Today, our law firms that listen to the Relay are spending a lot of money on advertising. The average personal injury firm spends at least one third of their revenue on an annual basis. Marketing. And one of the best ways to destroy your marketing spend is to have a bad reputation online. So really excited to dive into this with you. I'll hand it over to you to talk about what you're of the high level, what you talk about and why this is so important.
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's not even, you know, it's a great way to destroy your reputation, have a bad reputation or no reputation. Right. Because you know, there's so many ways that social proof and specifically Google reviews will make you more money. And there's actually been studies out there. There was one from Bizarre Voice Network that they analyzed 50 million reviews and all the businesses that got those reviews. And what they found was that when a business, it doesn't matter the industry, but when a business gets 200 reviews or more, then you can expect that business's revenue to increase by 44%. Which is crazy, right? Because it's not that hard to get reviews. I know a lot of times people I talk to lawyers a lot and they say, well, I've asked and I've asked my clients that they'll leave me reviews and then they go home and they just don't do it. Right. So the secret to getting a lot of reviews is there's actually a few ways to do it. We can kind of go into that. I'm not going to spoil the. Spoil that. That part of it yet. But the bottom line is that lawyers ask me all the time, how do I grow my law firm even if I don't have a big marketing budget? And the number one answer is, always get more reviews. You know, it. Just because I've never. I've been doing this since 2012. I've never met a law firm that's gone out and gotten a bunch of reviews and not made more money directly as a result of those reviews.
[00:02:51] Speaker A: I'll play devil's advocate here. I mean, do we know that it's causation, causative, not. Not correlative? In other words, it's like. Well, yeah, I mean, if you're pushing really hard on Google reviews, you probably doing a great job for your clients and you are out there spending more money on marketing. That I guess that is. There's probably an element of that. But you're saying that it directly contributes to your revenue growth.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so there's a couple ways. So, first of all, a lot of people don't realize that Google uses reviews to determine where you rank in the Google 3 pack. And the Google 3 pack is where phone calls come from. And I'm not going to go into why, but we've proven definitively over and over and over again with our clients that if you want phone calls, you have to appear in the Google 3 pack. So Google relies on three things when it determines where you rank in the Google 3 pack. And this is straight from Google's website. Like, this isn't speculation. The first is location. So proximity to the searcher. How close is your office to the person who is searching? It's kind of dumb that Google does it that way because lawyers aren't like pizzas. Like, if I want a pizza, I want the closest one to me. If I want a lawyer, I don't want to select my lawyer based on who's the closest to me. But that's beside the point.
So we don't talk about that. I mean, because you're not going to move your office in most cases. The second thing that they rely on is. Is prominence. How prominent are you on the Internet? So do you have all your business listings completed? So, like AVO and Yelp and in law and Bing places and, you know, all these different files and a lot of CEO companies will call these citations local citations. The third thing is relevance. How relevant are you to the thing that the person searched for? So, for example, if someone searches plumber and you're a personal injury attorney, that's not relevant. You're not going to show up for that. Right. But if somebody searches car accident lawyer and you're a personal injury attorney, well, that's pretty relevant. You're probably going to show up. So how do they determine relevancy? Well, there's two ways. The first way is through the words and content that's on your website. And that for a long time was the main way that they determined relevancy. And then about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, they made this shift where they put more emphasis on reviews. So when words, phrases, keywords, synonyms that are relevant to what the person is searching for appear in your reviews, then you're going to appear higher, right? You're going to make sure you're going to show up higher. So that means that you're going to get more visibility and that means that you're going to get more phone calls, which means that you're going to get more business. Now the question is always, how do you get more words, phrases, keywords, synonyms in the Google reviews so that you rank higher? And Google's really smart, so you can't just say, hey, listen, client, will you leave me a review? And by the way, when you leave the review, will you use the word Orlando personal injury attorney 17 times, like Google's too smart for that. Right?
What I like doing is I like telling lawyers to give their clients prompts. And a prompt will do two things. First of all, it's going to make it much more likely that you're actually going to get the review. Because one of the reasons that people don't leave reviews is writer's block. They don't know what to say. So what I tell my clients to do is I say send an email that first of all links directly to where they need to leave the review. Because a lot of times people don't get reviews because of the fact that they're creating too many hurdles for somebody to leave a review. It's a lot of work to leave a review. Like you've got to figure out, you got to log in and then you got to find the place that you have to leave the review. So you might have to search for the correct business profile. And then you have to figure out, what do I write? And, you know, all these things, and yet they're Not a lot of. And it's not that hard. But for somebody without really anything in it for them, it's a lot of steps. And every time you click, you lose 50% of your audience. That's just a general marketing thing. Right. So what I tell our clients is make sure, first of all, that you send them an email that links directly to where they're going to leave the review. Or you can do a text message, or if they're in your office, you can have them scan a QR code, whatever it is you need to get them directly to where they need to leave the review. And then what I like to do is I like to give them a reason, because people are much more likely to comply if they actually have a reason. So option A is, hey, will you leave me a review? And the client says, yes. And you say option B is, hey, listen, when someone's looking for a lawyer, it can be one of the most important decisions of their life, and it can impact, really, the way the rest of their life plays out if they get the wrong lawyer. So if you wouldn't mind leaving a Google review, you'll really help a lot of people. Can I send you a link and leave a Google review? That's a lot better. And there's actually now a reason why they need the Google review. Right.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: I just want to pause right there, Andy, and say, like, we could do an entire series on. On that. That what you just did there, like, that in itself is an entire skill. It's a life skill. You should understand whenever you're trying to get anyone to do anything, explaining why giving someone a reason to do something, having a good story, like, I just want to work already. Yeah, it works great with kids. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. But I love that. That's. That's really smart.
[00:07:42] Speaker B: So.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, keep going.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Marketing is behavior. Behavioral psychology. I'm obsessed with behavioral psychology. One of the best books I've read ever is this book right here. It's called Alchemy. It's by a guy named Rory Sutherland. It's all about behavioral psychology. I love it.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: We'll link to that in the show notes. I love book recommendations.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's such a good book. Okay, so the prompt. Back to the prompt. Which is the start of this whole thing. Right. And with reviews, I can go a million different directions because there's so much to it. But basically what I'll do is, I'll say a lot of times people want to leave a review, but they're not exactly sure what to Say, we have found that the best reviews answer the following five questions. Question number one, what was the problem that you had before you came to our law firm? Question number two, why did you pick our firm over all the other firms in the market? Question number three, what do we do for you? Question number four, what were the results? And question number five, as a result, how does this or how did these results impact your life? And if you ask, if you tell them those questions, first of all, you're going to get more reviews because now they know what to talk about. But second, you're going to get better reviews because now what they're doing is they're telling a story. There's a beginning, a middle. You know, what was the problem? What did we do? What was the result? Right? Beginning, middle, end. And then the third thing is that those prompts are naturally going to get words, phrases, keywords, synonyms that are related to your practice area in the review. Right? And so, okay, so another way that these reviews are gonna make you more money is that one, they're gonna make you rank higher. So more visibility, more phone calls, more money. The second way is people, when they see their story, they believe that you're more likely to help them. So if you have a bunch of reviews that just say thanks or great job or really appreciate it or whatever and don't give any context, then it's good, it's better than nothing. But if there's a review that says, I was riding my motorcycle and I got t boned by a pickup truck and this happened and then the insurance company made me a low ball offer and I went to this firm and they took it to trial and blah, blah, blah, somebody that was actually on a motorcycle that got maybe hit by a pickup truck is going to be much more likely to believe that, that you can help them because you help somebody in their exact same situation. So, for example, if you're a personal injury, sorry, a criminal defense attorney and you represent dui, not victims, dui, people who've been accused of dui. If you have somebody that says, I took the breath test, I was pulled over, I took the breath test, and somebody sees that, that took the blood test, then they might be like, yeah, but they took the breath test, I took the blood test, it probably won't work for me. But if there's a review that says I took the breath test and there's someone else that says, I took the blood test and another person says, I took the roadside sobriety test, well, now you're checking all the boxes and people will see their stories and people believe that if their story is similar to someone else that you've helped, then you are more likely to be able to help them. Right. So you're going to get higher conversions that way as well. So those are just three of the ways that reviews make you more money. And I could go on and on.
[00:10:39] Speaker A: And on, but Andy, this is incredible. I mean I think everyone, if you're not doing this already a hundred percent, like if I go, and I'm just speaking from personal experience, if I go, there's two things I'm looking for to give a business legitimacy on Google. One is do they have a lot of reviews and they gotta be like over four and a half. And then the other one is I'll go spot check a couple of reviews because I'm like, okay, well maybe they're all bots, you know, but as soon as I see reviews like you're talking about, so you're saying not only are you going to get more, but you're going to get better reviews at the same time. And in the PI space, this is such a no brainer. We're spending so much money on marketing and this is something you don't have to spend money to do this. Like when I was running an employment firm, we, we went over 200 Google reviews just because it was something that we're always talking about internally, contests, who can, you know, who can get client reviews. There's a lot of ways that you probably talk about this in your book, but there's moments in the journey when you want to capture that because the client, they just signed up or they just got their check. And so you want these triggers because a good habit, it's always going to be a trigger point, right? You don't want to do it when it's been like two years and there's no updates and like you're not going to get a good review. But I love this, I love the structure that you're bringing to it to make, to bring it all the way to the client and say here it is. Like here's the narrative arc that you can bring to this Google review. I'm going to butcher the stat, but I read once that in Yelp even a, even a 1/10 of a star difference, so like a 5 to a 4.9 or a 4.9 to a 4.8 typically can represent 50% change in revenue for a business. 50% revenue for 1/10 of one star. And I think with law firms, so many of Them are leaving this value on the table. Like we, when we're looking at law firms to reach out to for Lexamica, we look at Google reviewed attorneys in every single state and almost there's. There's never more than three law firms in any given DMA direct marketing area that have over 200 Google reviews. They just don't. There's usually like one or maybe two firms that have hundreds, sometimes a thousand reviews. There's weird power law distribution on this. And then the next firm after will have like 45 and they'll have like a 4.2 and it's like, yeah, I can tell you kind of tried. But if you're saying that 200 reviews is this tipping point for businesses, the average cost of review, like all in on time, let's say it takes half an hour for someone to send the email out to the client once it's templated, which is absurd, right? You're saying Maybe it's like $10, $15 of time to get a Google review. This is definitely the highest ROI possible action you could be taking inside your law firm. I can't think of a single thing that's going to make you more money.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Well, think about it this way, right? So let's say your firm does a million dollars a year, right? If your firm does a million dollars a year and getting 200 reviews is going to increase your revenue by 44%. That means that, that 200 reviews will make you an extra $440,000, right? So $440,000 divided by 200 is 2,200, I think. So that means that essentially every review that you get is worth $2,200 for your law firm. Now, it doesn't exactly work out that way in terms of every time you get a review, $2,200 gets deposited in your bank account. But if you think about it on those terms now, compensating a paralegal or an attorney or whoever, 50 bucks for review, A hundred bucks for review, whatever it is, doesn't seem that bad. In fact, that's a great investment. If I could give you $50, and every time I give you $50, you gave me $2,200 back. My next question is, okay, how much money can I give you? You know, like, and the other thing.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Is that Google reviews are evergreen. You can run that and then you have 200 reviews forever and then. Exactly. So if it's 40%, it's the lifetime value of that. You're talking about $2,000 per year forever. I Mean again, it's like you don't, you only do that one time. It's a, it's a great deal. And I love the framework that you laid out, which is make it incredibly easy to get to the place, give them the prompt to write it out, and then you bring them to the table for an even better Google review. You're already spending the money on the client experience, on the marketing. This is incredible. So we're at 16 minutes in. Andy, I'd love to, I'd love to let you talk about your book for a little bit. This is one of the most insightful pieces of content we've created so far. So what's the book? How can someone really dive in on this?
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah, so the book is called Five Star Attorney. And they can go, it's available on Amazon or you can go to getlawfirmreviews.com and get it. And this book, it teaches you not just how to get more reviews, but it teaches you how to, how to use those reviews to make more money. And not just five star reviews, it actually teaches you how to use one star reviews to make money with one star reviews. So many attorneys are afraid of one star reviews. And the truth is, is that if you don't have one star reviews, you're actually better off having a lot of five star reviews and a few one star reviews rather than having a bunch of five star reviews and no one star reviews. And people never believe me when I tell them that. But it's actually really interesting when you, when you kind of look at some of the stuff in there and do you want me to tell you real quick why that is?
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Yeah, give me the, give me the quick version of that.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: All right, so there's two reasons. One, they, Forrester did some research and they found that 82% of people do not believe that five star reviews are real if there are no one star reviews. The second piece is that there's a great book called Hug youg Haters. And in that book the author's name is Jay Baer says to get more five star reviews, you have to get more one star reviews. What that means is that if you don't get negative feedback, you will never find out what's wrong with your business so that you can improve it. You know, like only 5% of people will ever complain about a problem. So for every complaint that you get, if it's a legitimate complaint. And look, our businesses are, they're run by people, right? Especially employees that usually are not the owner. So maybe somebody on the maybe an attorney was rude, maybe a receptionist was rude, maybe somebody, you know, whatever the problem was, if you don't identify that problem, you can't fix it. And when you fix the problem, when you identify the problem, fix the problem, then that will create more five star reviews that will improve customer service and all that type of stuff. So one star reviews are not to be feared. They are actually beneficial in a few ways.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: I love that. I mean it makes me think of the to be to gain credibility you have to make damaging admissions. Hey, this product isn't for everyone. Or yeah, we have screwed up in the past when someone goes through those Google reviews and sees. Yeah, listen, you know they told me no and now I hate them. Like when we were running the employment firm, we had a 3% acceptance rate on our leads. So 97 people we were turning away. We got one star Google reviews and then like you said, we would respond to them kindly. Thank you so much for the feedback. Really appreciate that. Or yeah, I understand that that sucks and here's why. And I think that builds credibility. So you're the expert, but it certainly lines up with the experience that I've had. Andy, thank you so much for being on the show. Again, if you are interested in learning more about Google reviews or how to build a law firm that runs by itself, you should check out Andy Stickle SMB team. It's a great company. Andy, thanks so much for being on today.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
