Why reviews and recommendations could be killing your business!

Have you gotten all of your reviews and recommendations from your past clients over the past year? If the answer is no, you're missing a huge opportunity because there's a young, aggressive, and strong agent that's rising rapidly and would like to capture your future clients.

These young agents are listening to podcasts, watching webinars, and they're learning about a secret weapon in the market — and they may be beating you without actually beating you.

Here's what I mean by that:

These young, aggressive agents are capturing reviews and recommendations. And they are hyper-conscious of getting five-star reviews from everyone and anyone who will give them to them. They're making sure that those reviews go on all the right places, which I'm going to outline for you. And what happens is you can have an agent that's only been in the business 2-3 years, but online, they look like they are super experienced because they've stacked up more reviews and recommendations than their competitors — even if their competitor has more experience and is a better agent all around than this young agent. But when you look at them online, the young agent looks more successful.

Don't get beat by one of these agents in the market that doesn't have the same degree of success as you. Or if you're a young agent, take advantage of exactly what I'm saying and stack up reviews and recommendations so you can beat the more experienced agents who are too lazy to go out and get reviews and recommendations.

The starting point for all of us has to look back at our last 12 months and ask if you've gotten all the reviews and recommendations I could have gotten? If the answer is no, here is a script to capture a few of those reviews and recommendations that you should have gotten.

You could say, "Hey, can you believe it's already been a year since you bought or sold your home? Crazy how time flies, right? I was hoping I could ask you to do me a huge favor. My business is built primarily on referrals and recommendations from my friends like you. And I'm hoping you would leave me a positive review on one or more more platforms that I'd love to share with you. Thanks in advance — this will mean the world to me."

You can use this script to capture those folks that should've already given you a referral. Now going forward, let's have a plan in place for where and how we're going to collect reviews recommendations. First of all, where do you want these recommendations to go?

Last year, I would have told you to get them on Zillow because that's the number one search site. But Zillow is trying to take your business away from you. They're entering every market with one goal: to take seller leads from you. And they're going to do that by offering to buy client's homes in your market. The truth is they're going to buy less than 1% of them but here is the secret - that's not their goal. Their goal is to take all of the leads they generated and sell them to agents in your market.

You see you're not competing with local real estate companies, you're only competing with Zillow for every buyer and seller lead in your market. We are at war with Zillow and we have to win "mind share" in order to win market share.

When people hear the words real estate, do they think of you, your company, or Zillow? To win "mind share," you've got to get in front of your clients and make sure you're the first point of contact for anything real estate.

So getting back to the five-star reviews. This year, I want them to go first on Google Business. And if you don't have a Google business page, build one. It'll help with search rankings, SEO, and several other things.

Second, is your Business Facebook page. Third is Realtor.com because they're not trying to steal our leads like Zillow is. And fourth is Zillow because you still have to be there. Fifth would be Yelp because Yelp has higher level clients. And last would be LinkedIn.

Now I'm going to outline a plan for you to get referrals and recommendations that's simple so you can start implementing it.

1. Talk about reviews and recommendations prior to closing.

2. Add a PS to your signature asking for reviews and recommendations.

3. Talk about reviews and recommendations at closing when they're on an emotional high.

4. Follow up a couple days later and ask them again if they forgot to do it. And ask for reviews consistently — and they'll quickly become your #1 marketing tactic.

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