With Brent Hershey, Agent & Insurance Agency Optimization Coach
Length: 7:00
In this episode, Coach Brent emphasizes the importance of Google reviews and referrals for businesses and shares two straightforward secrets to obtaining more of both. Brent shares a tactic he uses with his daughters at yard sales they visit on Saturday mornings, illustrating a point that is viable at both yard sales and in the agency.
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TRANSCRIPT
Lessons From a Yard Sale: How to Increase Your Agency’s Google Reviews
How many of you want more referrals? How many want more Google reviews?
I know as an agent, Google reviews are an important part of our business because it’s like an online referral, right? As people are looking for your agency, who are they going to do business with? That Google Review is a verbal referral to whoever reads it.
I’m going to give you the secret to getting more Google reviews and more referrals within your agency. Now listen, this is the secret sauce. It took a long time for our agency to truly figure this piece out, and I’m going to let you guys in on that secret with me today.
Now, if you’ve been around agency optimization for any amount of time, you may or may not have heard me use this phrase before, I would assume you have, because the secret sauce to getting more Google reviews and more referrals, just ask.
It’s that simple. Just ask. And guess what? If they don’t give you a referral or they don’t do the Google Review for you, you know what you’re supposed to do then?
Just ask again.
You’ve gotta get outside of yourself and quit holding in and kind of being timid around these things. And you’ve gotta start asking. That’s what you’ve gotta get into. You have to ask.
I’m going to tell you a quick thing with my daughters. So I call this Lessons From a Yard Sale.
And what do I mean by that is, I take my girls to yard sales throughout the summer. They love it. I love it. It gives my wife a little bit of time to go to the gym and get some things to herself. And on Saturday mornings while me and the girls are out doing this and taking my girls to yard sales.
They’re constantly asking me, “Dad, can I get this?,” “Dad, can I get this?” And usually, it’s a whole bunch of junk, right? That’s everything that’s at a yard sale.
But what I tell my girls, if it’s something I don’t mind them having, I ask them, “Well, how much is it?” And they’ll say, “It’s $2.”
And I’ll say, “That’s fantastic. If you want this, you need to go ask the person if you can have it for a dollar.” And my price that I make them ask is determined on how bad I really want them to have it. So if I don’t want them to have it all, they have to ask for like a quarter or something.
But my girls will go up – and I realize very quickly from my girls who are now eight and 12, and I’ve been doing this for three or four years with them – they realize quickly, do they truly want the item? They will make that decision in a heartbeat. They’ll look at me and say, “I don’t want to go ask that.” Well, it tells me that they really don’t want that item. That item is not that important to them.
I’m gonna flip it and say that Google Review or that referral is truly not that important to you if you’re not willing to ask for it. The things that my girls desperately hold onto and desperately want, if they really truly want it, they might be a little hesitant. A little reluctant, but they’re willing to walk up and say, okay, I’ll go ask. Now, they don’t even have to offer it to them for a lower price. I don’t care. I’ll pay the $2. But my girls have to ask because that tells me do they truly want it? Are they gonna get out of their own comfort zone to go get it?
You have to ask. Just ask. It’s easy and it’s simple.
I also kind of tell you this. I talked to my team about this about a year ago. So, we opened our second agency just over a year ago now, and one of the things that we have strived to do is to get really good with our Google reviews. We wanted to build that presence up in our Google reviews so that when people are seeing our agency from an Internet basis, it’s going to look like a referral. It’s going to be a referral from people that they may or may not know, but it’s people that are in their community that are telling them, go see Brent Hershey’s agency. Go see his team. I love it when a Google Review says something specifically about one of our team members and how amazing they were. And then they took care of them.
In the last year, between both of our agencies, we have increased our Google Review presence between about 150 and 200 Google reviews in the last 12 months. We’re averaging about 10 to 15 per month. And we do it by just asking.
I am going to give you one more little secret that helps us with our Google reviews.
Everybody has an email signature. Everybody down in their email signature, ’cause I get them from you guys and I see them in their email signature. Buried down there is a little Google review icon or a link, or give me a five-star Google Review, right down there buried in with your address, your phone number, and all those other things.
What I want you to do – and you’re gonna see success, and I don’t tell this to a lot of people – you’re going take that Google Review and you’re going to move it up above your name in the signature line. The way mine reads is it says: Would you take one minute of your time and leave us a five-star review? Here’s the link. There are two lines of spacing, and then there is the rest of my email signature.
When I sign off an email, it now looks like I specifically hand-typed that into the body of my email. It is now a specific call-out. It looks like I am asking that particular person that I’m emailing with to leave me a five-star Google Review.
Caveat: If it’s an email that’s not pleasant, delete that line. You don’t want them giving you a negative Google review.
But I promise, since my entire team has done this, we are adding four to five Google reviews a month just from the emails that we are sending out without ever asking a single person for a Google review. The other 10 that we’re getting, it’s because we’re asking on every positive interaction.
When we’re with somebody, we ask them, “Hey, can I send you a link? Would you leave me a five-star review, and would you tell others about how great this interaction was?”
This is how you grow.
It’s simple. Just ask. Don’t get so nervous or so inside yourself that you’re not willing to ask.
