CRM Follow-Up Tactics That Actually Work For Contractors

Aaron Watters 0:00
Right, chickadee, check it out. Number two is muted.

Dennis Ayotte 0:07
That's you go pee, and I didn't want you to hear me pee. Oh,

Aaron Watters 0:10
well, is it back? Yeah, are we back? Check, yep, we're back. And better than yesterday, we're

Dennis Ayotte 0:17
back, baby, we have been off for a little bit. Yeah, let's talk vacations.

Welcome to the podcast today. We're talking about surface Titan, air bros, bankruptcy and some other industry news. What are

Aaron Watters 0:40
we talking about today?

Dennis Ayotte 0:43
Alright, y'all welcome to another episode of Talk of the trades. We are full head of steam now. We're like, what? Six episodes deep, 006, alright, beautiful. We're veterans. Now I'm going to just call it. So today on the show, we have a 2025, breakdown of the suicide and trades report that they release. So every year they do a report where they talk about the trends. I'm going to talk about the air pros, bankruptcy. Well, we're not experts. Hot topic in the news. March is broad core update for Google. Some stuff on geo tagging, and then we also had some stuff in here about potentially a new llms txt file. So big news for SEO side. Cool. So let's jump into it. Aaron, first topic the service Titan study. So what are your just thoughts overall, on on the study in general? I know you kind of looked at it at a high level. And what are some things that stuck out? Well,

Aaron Watters 1:43
I mean, you made a really good point about, like, how many people they actually looked at? I think it was 1000 contractors. What I love is that they got non service Titan people as well. It wasn't just service Titan users, because I think that can be an echo chamber the industries and the verticalization was also really interesting. And there's some synergy there. There are some industries that are just kind of stable, but for me, it was the big focus on communication with the customer. And it's easy to at least sustain. It's easier as long as you have a house called Pro, a service Titan, some kind of CRM that has your communications in it. That's the key for me, from from the first touch all the way till six years from now, so that you're storing equipment, info and everything there. That's going to help you be a sustainable business where, you know, we get leads all the time and talk to clients that aren't on a CRM, and you'd be surprised this size like talk to a two and a half million dollar contractor that doesn't have a CRM the other day. Yeah, and it's wild, but I think the main thing really is the communication and touch point and making sure that in service Titan, you're using the chats properly and you're giving people multiple ways to communicate with you. Because I said for a long time, chat sucks. People don't want to use it. Even online booking is kind of tough, because you've got to qualify that lead, yeah, but I think now everything is kind of caught up. People don't want to talk on the phone as much, which is key and clear. And I think just staying on top of it with the drip sequences. People were more on top of that as well, yeah.

Dennis Ayotte 3:24
One of the highlights out of there, they said over half. So 54% of successful contractors are doing certain engagement strategies. Sorry, I was looking at the wrong point, but the communication channel 64% was Yeah. Communication channel, yeah. So 64% are contractors. Still rely on phone calls, which was interesting, but are increasingly adopting online booking forms and text messaging and all that. So all that to say, there's still, like a long way to come on some of that other stuff, and you bring up, like an interesting thought, like when you talk about service Titan in general. Because one thing I didn't really, you know, realize, being new to the trades, I mean, there's a CRM, but then there's also an FSM right field service management tool, and then now, you know, what is your CRM supposed to do in terms of, like, nurturing right because, you know, we've seen the service titans of the world that kind of are able to do it all, from like a FSM to also like nurturing the client, but also now you see like new companies, maybe not new, but there's tools like hatch, right that we've talked to before about using in other areas. So just a side tangent on that, that like, you know, if you are a business that is not using any form of CRM or FSM. Really be thinking about like, how do you manage those pieces of your business? How do you manage the client profile and all the information there? How do you manage what's happening in the field and your inventory and your pricing and all that stuff, and then how are you managing, like, the nurture sequence, right? How are you going. Back in front of people, because we know from our experience and the unsold estimate campaigns we've run, I've seen those campaigns generate up to $3 million for water softener companies, right, even more for foundation companies, to the point where it becomes, you know, eight to 10% of their revenue just on unsold estimates. So partly to do with the report, because it's important, you know, I think they also talked about, like, the people who are, you know, following up regularly with clients, are winning more? Yeah,

Aaron Watters 5:32
let's, let's talk like, specific tactics, right? I'm, I'm typically Dennis does this, but like, I'm typically testing at least one thing, whether it's AI or automation that in every department that we have, I like to kind of test, and a lot of it comes back to data in the CRM and so specifically, something that we've been looking at a lot is like Google Local Service leads, one of the big pet peeves for us. There are a bunch of them, but if you're using like a call center outside of your office, or even your CSRS, when you get a lead in and you miss it, it happens. It happens to everybody, but oftentimes, what we see is about 20% of those aren't even in your CRM to begin with. And what happens is you weren't calling them back, or they're calling them back from a cell phone and not logging that call and service Titan. So I believe phones Pro is probably the best way to go on that, depending on company size, but if you're calling people back, but we have no connection in service Titan, like we as an agency, can't support the client because we don't know if this lead that called about a foundation repair issue or about a roofing issue. We don't know if they got called back or not. So for us, we have to report to Google. Hey, that was, that was a good lead at this point. It was on the contractor. So you may have paid 50 to 100 bucks for that GLS lead when, if your team called them back through service Titan and logged as, oh, they were looking for an apartment complex, yeah, you could get that $100 back. And when we try to give that information to a contractor, especially when you're using third party answering services, yeah, try to get them integrated into your service Titans, so that they at least are adding that customer data. So there's a there's a log there, so it can be reported on, yeah.

Dennis Ayotte 7:14
And I think the overarching kind of idea there is like, what does your intake process look like for all of your customers, but do you have a script when maybe they don't, aren't fully aligned? And then, why is it important? Is because your in intake process is in essence, building this customer's profile. So for instance, you know somebody calls in and we know they want a replacement, and that's noted on their on their file, and then we go in and we replace their system, right? Because our guy knew that going in, but now we know that client has had a replacement on let's just say, you know, April of 2025, so when we create future nurture audiences, we're not going to try to sell them replacements. We're going to try to sell them tune ups, and we're going to try to sell them, but one is the right time to sell a tune up on a brand new system, right? Maybe we're trying to sell them a membership down the road, as opposed if we have somebody call in and the attribute of their profile is that they just need a tune up. And maybe we label their system as 10 years old, so maybe the next, you know, few months, we're going to let them know, Hey, we have a replacement offer, right? So that's why the intake process builds the attributes around your customers, and then we can use those attributes from a marketing perspective down the road to remarket and retarget with the exact right message we need, right so cool, yeah. And the other just point was, there was a big point in the service Titan study that I'm seeing now that they were saying that, you know, 40, nearly half of contractors with average revenues exceeding 10 million, the due, diligent follow ups, they see anywhere from 11 to 15% additional revenue. So let's just say you're a ten million shop. That's 1.1 to $1.5 million that's that's like real money, just by making sure that process is dialed in. So super interesting there.

Aaron Watters 9:01
And from from my perspective as a customer like I unfortunately have to get my pool redone, and I have a $25,000 estimate that's been sitting out there, and I understand, like this business that I'm talking to is probably more of a new construction. They don't want to resurface whatever. $25,000 project seems like a pretty good project to me, right? Yeah, I've been following up with the sales guy, and I know the owner. We know the owner, but I'm trying not to, like, undermine his sale. Oh, yeah. Like, do you want this job or not? Like, all I got to do is pick a color for the cool decking with me. And it just fascinates me the amount of, or the lack thereof, of follow up within, within the industry. And hey, yeah, even here, like we will go through our HubSpot. Oh, yeah, when's the last record? All right, we haven't talked to him in 72 hours. Yeah, if we're not talking to him, You better believe scorpion is, you better believe somebody else is, is hitting them up. So yeah, just thinking about it that way.

Dennis Ayotte 9:58
And I have an exact. Story just like that. And I actually went through one of our own clients for a project that I needed on my house. And, you know, they came out, gave me an estimate. I didn't hear for I still haven't heard from them, but I told them in our monthly meeting, you know, I was nervous too, because you're having to, like now, shed light, but I was basically, in essence, like a secret shopper, right? And so all that to say, like, I encourage you as a business owner to secret shop your own business and see what your experience looks like. You get so far away from it, and we want to trust people to manage it well. But sometimes things happen, like you uncover that you don't really have a great process, or that we get away from our process, right? That's what practice is about, getting back to stuff. So all that to say is, if you don't know what your customer kind of journey or follow up looks like, try to go through it yourself, or maybe have a friend go through it just to, just to see, right? Because if the team knows it's you, obviously they're going to give you like top tier service and be following up. Because this also goes into, like, buyer personas, right? It's like, you need to get your pool resurface right? For many reasons, but because you're a busy professional, you don't really have time to, like, slow down. And so sometimes people are like, Oh, well, I don't want to bother them or pester them. Sometimes we need to be bothered, like, I need the follow up to get this thing fixed at my house, because my wife is asking me every single week, and I still haven't got it done. And I just wish, like, God, I wish there was just like, I'm a lay down buyer at this point. I'm just like, How much is it? What do I need to do? And let's just get it done, right? So, as opposed to, sometimes you might get what are considered like tire kickers, right? And that happens, right? And maybe they're not going to appreciate the drip sequence or whatever, but you never know who you're dealing with. Is kind of the point of the story. And never assume that you know we shouldn't be doing something. And

Aaron Watters 11:54
I think this all tracks back to what we talked about earlier, of if you're not tracking something in service Titan, if you're not doing the outbound call, then you're never going to nail it. And for example, like in my situation with the pool, I have access to their HubSpot, and I know they don't track the remodels and the resurfacing in their HubSpot. They only track new builds. And so I know I'm not even a customer record in there. Yeah. So then the owner has no oversight of the individual, so it's you can't really optimize off of what you're not tracking, yeah? So huge props to service Titan. We know that they're pushing all of those capabilities and making sure that you stay on top of people.

Dennis Ayotte 12:32
Yeah? And in terms of, you know, the CRM FSM, nurture thing, I think they're way ahead of the game. And opposed to most, I think maybe the next closest might be, like a work ease in my experience, I know house call pros come like a long way, and those are probably usually the top three kind of CRMs that we ship, but there's always, like, you know, you could always, you know, couple, like a house call pro with, what's the one we've been talking about. Like, go high level. Go high level, and,

Aaron Watters 12:59
even HubSpot, depending on your size, like, if you do content marketing, you know, HubSpot is a really great CRM. They're just getting very expensive. Yeah, pay. They make you pay for anything and everything, but it just depends on on your business. House Call Pro is making huge steps. Their inbox is is really clunky. And I think, honestly, their main issue right now is documentation and onboarding. And service Titan has done a great job of getting their APIs out there, having strategic partners rolling their stuff in, and house call Pro is is still a good option for

Dennis Ayotte 13:35
Yeah, in terms of value, like in what you pay, I don't think you can beat it right now. Honestly, I mean, the like, service Titan is like the luxury it's like the Gucci of, you know, CRM, FSM, whatever you want to call it, while house call Pro is, like, just your steady, solid, like they're Wrangler Jeans. You know what I mean, like, it is

Aaron Watters 13:55
it can't compete for the bigger brands. Though, once you get data, it's kind of like, it's kind of like we talked about with ads optimization, like, once you have enough data, it really can take off, yeah, but if you're not feeding it enough data with then I'm talking about, like, our algorithms, or Google ads and things like that. It's really very there's small things for it to optimize off of, and so house call Pro is not nearly as good when it gets to those larger businesses, yeah, but, but yeah, it's, it's a fun, it's a fun, fun time, and you really can't get over bad data tracking and bad data input. Yeah, that's what we want to stress overall,

Dennis Ayotte 14:34
for sure. Alright, next topic we had was the air pros bankruptcy, right? So we are not like PE experts, guys. So just want to let you know. But this is, like, one of the more buzzier topics that I've been, you know, seeing this week. And it was interesting. You hadn't heard about it yet. Um, Aaron, but in essence, the story is that, you know, this air pros, they were, you know, bought by private equity, right? And this is, I guess, one of the more recent stories of a PE group not being successful in the trades. And everything we've been, you know, hearing is like, like, the trades can't fail. And, you know, these big PE groups are having a lot of, you know, success, but it seems like they have filed chapter 11 bankruptcy. So that's that's huge, also saying that they already have some purchase agreements in place totaling 156 million. And then we learned this new term, stocking horse. Did you ever look

Aaron Watters 15:33
that up? Yeah, just the the lead buyers, and so they're got stocking S, T, a, l, K, I, N, G, like going in and watching it. And so they're the people that have been, you know, in the news. And understanding Apex was one

Dennis Ayotte 15:49
of them. Yeah, the other two were any hour group. Columbia home services were all linked to that, potentially. So, which is interesting. And I think they're saying, like the cause was because they expanded too fast and had operational challenges. So apparently, it was founded in 2007 they expanded rapidly through acquisitions, establishing a presence in eight states, over 700 employees and 600 trucks. Holy smokes. But you know they're saying that they just couldn't scale it. And, you know, obviously now they're, they're going, they said debt was like two 50 million, which is crazy to think about, also, so I don't know what's your overall hot take on it all. Yeah, yeah. I

Aaron Watters 16:33
think it was 2017 is what I saw here. Oh yeah. I hadn't heard of them specifically. But you know, our experiences with with private equity is absolutely that, like, get it when money's cheap, take the big note and just pay off the interest and and grow. But we've also experienced things like, when you're purchased, because we've had a lot of clients get acquired. We've helped people acquire a lot of clients. You've got the whole brand DNA that that's there. You've got the culture killers coming in, but also you've got some people that are really good at it that say, Hey, you're doing great. I'm just going to beat the financial arm. And I think money was cheap. I think it was a really aggressive strategy, clearly, but it just goes to show like, when, when things get tough, it gets tough for everybody. I don't think this will be the first one. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see more. But this is the new play by the private equities that are that are in trouble. But, I mean, we've seen even things like a tuck in gets derailed because you have a general manager that goes rogue and redoes the logo and puts it out there, and all of a sudden you've got like, brand confusion, or you may have some strategies. They'll buy, like, five groups in a city and then tuck them under one. Well, out of those five groups, you may have strengths. You may also have a lot of drama between them and the management team alone just coming in and bringing a new manager, like you've got to hire and develop? Well, yeah, so it's beyond me. It's, it's definitely interesting, though, and I hope it doesn't become a trend. But in my Yeah,

Dennis Ayotte 18:11
it's like, I wonder if this is like, going to be depend, like, where the economy is now. Is it going to be a trend towards we see, like, fewer, larger groups that are still being successful, or will we see a lot more smaller groups that will be, like, successful, you know, because, like, our client the other day revealed that he was in, like, private equity, right? And so I immediately thought, like, well, what's the scale there? And like, what is what is that? Because even, you know, one of our business partners, he is involved in a portfolio of businesses as well. Like, what do you think, do you based on, like, economy and like this news, is there any like, are you feeling that it's going to go either way? Like, are we just going to have, like, the big five, you know, pe groups? Are we going to have like, you know, still kind of the big players, but a bunch of little guys around. I think life

Aaron Watters 18:58
is cyclical. Business is definitely cyclical, I think. And I'm not a forward thinker as much. I'm in the weeds historical data person, which is why I talk about history. But like, I think we're going to get that. We're going to get more of a monopoly of we're going to get kind of the big five. There's going to be consolidation within the big five. They're going to they're going to grab these up. But then what's going to be beautiful about after that is you're going to get the bro equity. Is what we've started talking about. Of the locals, like our partner that is grabbing maybe four or five, maybe not trying to conquer the world out of accumulating debt and getting a big note, but making smart acquisitions and coming up with different kind of tactics for the owners. So it's not just hey, you're in, you're out. It's more of like, hey, we want to grow this big thing together. There will always be friction. When somebody's acquired it's it's gonna happen of all sizes, however. You're gonna get the smaller ones competing in there, and then I think over time, you'll see equipment issues there. Who. It's the equipment first, and then I think you're going to make another run at it. So I think they're going to have some smaller platform companies and some some bro equities that are starting to grow, and then some of them are going to get some gas behind them, probably in the next five years, six years. But there's a lot going on in our economy with generative AI, with the tariffs. So right now there's a lot of confusion and fear in

Dennis Ayotte 20:20
the market. It's going to be interesting. I think you're right. It's probably going to be a hybrid that we are going to see, like the big 345, or whatever. But I think the amount of money that, like some of these folks get, you know, through their payouts, and then they're, you know, non compete goes up, and they're the ones that built the business, right, and they know how to do it, and those that know how to do it and could do it at scale. You know, I think Ken Goodridge is probably one of the best examples on how he started and then just built. Now he's got an empire, and he's like the man, and then you're seeing guys like Tommy Mello and other folks like form these equity groups. Like, I forget the one we saw the other day, but with Tommy or without, I think it was Tommy, Chris, you know, like there was like a few, I mean, ish might have been involved. I don't know I could be speaking wrong, but there was like five of them that were basically creating, like, this kind of, I think it was a capital group to be able to help others as well. So interesting, see what we where it goes there. So yeah,

Aaron Watters 21:21
what's going to be fun? Fun for me, the pessimist mindset, too. Of sometimes you get over your skis, and if you try to grow too fast, you're going to see some things like this as well. But, you know, I can be a little conservative, but for sure, wild times,

Dennis Ayotte 21:39
and I'm more of the big, broad taker. That's why I asked her in that question. I'm like, what is it going to look like? Yeah, you know, because you know better than I, and you've been part of the business more, but Ben would probably have a good perspective on it too. So cool. So more kind of industry news that affects you guys from a marketing standpoint is the Google broad core update. So quick highlights on that. It started on March 13, and it commenced on March 27 so, you know, obviously it's a global impact, so affecting all regions. The nature of the update just said, unlike a penalty, this update aimed to promote or reward high quality web pages, refining Google's core systems to better surface pertinent and satisfying content. So it sounds like more the eat stuff. So I don't know. Do you know any other specifics on this? Or what were you kind of tracking on it?

Aaron Watters 22:41
You know, we really pay attention more to the local updates, because that has a higher impact on the trades. Yeah, this is more of a deep content type, type of an update. You know, I went over it with our SEO lead yesterday. We had a one on one, and we had a very small amount of clients that were negatively affected. We had, you know, typically we'll have a couple clients that have huge growth, and I think there were some that had huge, like seven, 7% variance in growth and impression share. And then we had, I think our worst one went down to, like, 4.2 but then the number two was like a negative 1.8 and so the gap between the worst one and the others was pretty large. So this one was really not one that impacted the trades. If it did impact the trades or your website and your trades company, there's probably something wrong with your backlink structure and maybe some orphaned content, some like in depth content there. But as far as as far as our clients go. We didn't really see anything too bad, and it did take about 13 days for it to roll out.

Dennis Ayotte 23:44
Gotcha, yeah? Cool, yeah. I haven't been in the loop on it, but I'm sure we'll have some more news. Katie's been doing a great job of providing you updates and stuff like this, probably because

Aaron Watters 23:55
we didn't have a lot of bad fires. So didn't, yeah, didn't get to you. Yeah?

Dennis Ayotte 23:59
So good. Glad talking about a local SEO, as you mentioned. So there's been this big kind of, maybe not maybe, just in our minds. It's been a big like, debate on whether, like, geo tagging images in your Google business profile actually matters specifically, like on reviews, right? And so there's been back and forth. There's companies out there like pin parrot, who, you know, they specialize in just doing that, right? And so there's been, I guess, thoughts in the industry that if you do that, it will have an impact on your local SEO. Well, there was a recent study that was done by Search Engine Land, and they basically said that, no, it doesn't really have any impact, so you should need to geotag your images. Yeah, based

Aaron Watters 24:51
on the data they did, you know, there was no growth, no increase or enhancement. What it is because, like Google, when you upload an. Image. It codes, it strips kind of the geo tags and the metadata, because that's that's just extra database storage that they don't need. I think the value, though, is getting those photos and getting videos from the customers onto your reviews. You know, one of our clients asked me because, because he hit us up about it. Does that mean we shouldn't ask them for photos? Like, still ask, yeah, videos are the best because it's the most authentic, also making sure that if they upload it, putting it into your service agreement, that any uploaded content from the client can be used in marketing efforts. Like, yes, that's user generated content. As we get into maybe we talk next time about GPT is update, and as we get into more AI video and images like getting content from your customers is key, and even the small guys can do it. So that's king. But also getting activity on your Google business profile is incredibly important. But the whole process, and this is near and dear to me, because I spent a lot of time with our automation service that we have. So we've got a Google Business Profile automation service and optimization service that we built and I specifically dug into, well, how can we automate geo tagging images? Right? Maybe it was a little deceptive, because I was going to like fake geo tag and add, add geo tags to images where it wasn't actually from that location, but the steps between that, like stock photos, the steps between that, were so consuming with time then that I was thankful. After I did research and talked to three of the people that were in this Search Engine Land, I actually reached out to and talked to about, okay, cool. And I slid into the DMS and and they validated what I was talking about. They're like, geo tagging is a flaw. The way Google uploads photos, it removes that metadata, yeah? But it's an, it's a sexy, unique selling position if you're if you're trying to push a piece of of solid, yeah.

Dennis Ayotte 27:00
And I think part of like, SEO is like, it's always been so competitive. And sometimes we get like, we want something to be true so we can do it and like, do better for our clients, right? But in this case, sometimes it's like, you know, Google just comes out and they like, ran on your parade and say, Actually, what you've been doing, not really, you know? Because I think there's, I think it's like the maybe, maybe it's not, maybe it's definitive now, but like, the frequency of Google posting, like, what should that look like, and what's the impact there? You know, I think that would be a great study, because I think we did something like that back in, like, 2022 when we had a lot of those private equity brands, and we're able to do it like at scale across those and we didn't see but I think recently, you've been seeing opposite impacts on other Google properties, not necessarily the GBP, right? Specifically like GLS, so interesting. But I think all that to say is, like, You got to be cautious on some of this SEO stuff, and whether it's good or not. I mean, the, you know, benefit of being like a trailblazer and a Pioneer is like, you do it, and if it works, then awesome. You're ahead of the game. But if you don't have the bandwidth to do it, sometimes it's okay not to be an early adopter. And I think this is one of those cases where you potentially could have, like, saved yourself a bunch of time and stuff, but credit to Search Engine Land for for doing that study and letting us know. So interesting to see what's going to happen some of these companies who've built their, you know, business around that. But the point you were making earlier is it still is super important for my customer experience standpoint, right? While you might not get like the, you know, black and white technical SEO benefits, there are benefits to it, right? Like you want to have a good presence online, and reviews are one thing. But if you're anything like me, when I'm like, looking at reviews on Amazon, sometimes I want to see, like, the actual product in real life, as opposed just to the product photos. And a lot of times we have, like, very polished, you know, stuff on my GBP, but this user generated content gives, like, you know, a really honest depiction of kind of what's happening. So all that to say is, like, while you're not going to see a lot of benefit from SEO, there still is benefit to it, right? Yeah, there

Aaron Watters 29:25
is. And I'll I want to add two things. One's a tin foil hat. The first is, it's accountability. It's in the same way that, if you know that something's going to be tracked in your CRM, yeah, then people are going to fall in line your CSRS are going to take a little bit more time. They're going to put more notes in there, because you're tracking that in the same way, if your texts know in the field that there's a requirement for images, or they will be asking the customers via email sequences or anything along those lines, to get photos, there's an accountability of cleaning up your workspace, not leaving nails in the yard, making sure that the garage door. Is clean, like there's a lot more there, from an accountability standpoint,

Dennis Ayotte 30:04
yeah, man, I didn't even think about that. That's 100% true.

Aaron Watters 30:07
Then tin foil hat, which we might need to put one here, nice and just speaking from like a the way software is developed, more importantly than the image having metadata on it, what I would say is, is user profiles within Google. Because you have to have a user profile in Google to be able to leave a Google review, right, right? So Google typically has our location data anyway, and so I would lean on the localization of images being uploaded, more on the user's profile information and going off of that. So, like, if you're in an area called stone oak, like here in San Antonio, the frequency of reviewers in that area, uploading images is going to be more relevant, from my perspective, than them all taking photos that are geo tagged and uploaded. And so that's, that's where I've done zero research on that, but logically, it makes sense to me. So let's

Dennis Ayotte 31:06
say, if that was a like, that was a thing, right? And you want to, like, prioritize that. Like, some things that jump out to me is like, how do you then get more of those types of reviews? And is it like, spiffing your guys? Like, hey, you get $5 per review, but you get another 10 bucks if they leave an image with it, right? And if you do it in the stone oak area or XYZ area, you get another $2 you know, is that, like, a wise strategy? Maybe not those dollar amounts, but I'm just saying, like, that whole model, and if, if it is awesome. But what else do you think could we do? Yeah,

Aaron Watters 31:43
we've seen so a lot of people do that. It's been successful. I think the spiffing is more successful for outbound callers to get jobs. What is more successful is just knowing the scoreboard. So if you're on podium, or if you're on service Titan or wherever, having a scoreboard of reviews by employee or by technician, yeah, like, okay, plumber, a Joe got 50 reviews and he ran 60 calls last month, but Frankie ran 60 calls and got 10 reviews last month. Okay, what's going on with that got you that level of accountability, and knowing that that's a part of their their grading of how they're doing at your brand, I think, is really important the other, the other tidbit, or a tip here, like in service Titan, you know, one of the things I like about podium is a follow up sequencing on reviews, where you'll send out the review request. You can hammer that person multiple times in their sequencing via SMS and email with service Titan native. I see a lot of clients have it turned off, where it's just a one shot one kill. Said I was gonna stop saying that one shot one kill. There is a toggle though, where you can turn on to send a follow up, so at least sending two and then making sure that you're doing SMS and email outreach for these reviews. And so just a couple of tweaks within your service Titan setup that can help lift it.

Dennis Ayotte 33:01
What is your So, real quick, this is strictly for Katie or SEO. She would love that. I'm about to say this is that you cannot incentivize people to leave your reviews, so don't do that. And we're not saying that. I think you can incentivize your people to, like get reviews and let people know that they can leave a review, but we don't want to incentivize anybody. So footnote there, which I totally forgot what I was just going to counter and ask you about in terms of

Aaron Watters 33:28
follow up, sequencing on reviews. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dennis Ayotte 33:31
So what do you? What is your like, sweet kind of spot for like touches, because I like the like, or what should the cadence be before you stop? I like the three touches in like, seven days, right? So one right after the job, or, you know, has closed and it's completed, and it starts with, you know, the technician, you know, asking for it, and then an automated touch. And then from that point we have another one, like, in three days, another one in four days, and then we're done. What do you think in terms of cadence? Someone's out there thinking like, well, how many times should I ask after the review? It

Aaron Watters 34:11
depends on job type. In my opinion, I don't go I would go three. I love your three and seven if it's a repair. So HVAC, repair, softener, needed service, something along those lines. Gotcha, if it's a new install, if it's a if it's an HVAC unit, that's a little different. I would still do five to seven times for an HVAC unit, but I would layer it out over a longer sequence. So hey, 30 days later, we still haven't gotten a review. I think it's totally okay. We want to hear about our feedback. Like, how's it working now that you've had 30 days with your new unit? Because, yeah, getting a new unit and then telling somebody one day later, you know, sending them them feedback is different if you're installing as an electrician, like, car charging stations. Like, that's a cool, sexy. Like, nice thing that they're happy about, or a generator, like, that's something you can ask specifically for photos on and say, We want to see how it looks like, brag about it. I think those are okay to layer out five to seven times, but just lengthen the process and ask a little bit more unique questions on the fifth, sixth and seventh. Touch, gotcha. But those are just, you know, something cool that service Titan does is you are able to filter by job type, yeah, and so you can have different setups based on job type. Very cool. And one more thing, I'm so sorry, one thing a lot of, especially water softening companies, they don't want to do, is the maintenance request. Oh, yeah. Like, your highest frequency is maintaining commercial water softeners or getting into the home on a regular basis. Yeah, and a lot of them want to reject asking for reviews from those people. However, you can ask every single time and and then you can turn it off once they've left you a review. Right? Those the easiest ones and should be the easiest ones that you see every single day.

Dennis Ayotte 36:02
Yeah? Because, yeah, sometimes like each new visit, if they haven't left a review, it's another opportunity for us to ask. The other thing I've found compelling too. You know, when you're really talking about reviews and trying to get as many as you can, is, you know, we've, we've known some companies, they don't even actually do work for the client, but they're still asking a review based on how you know, they felt in with the call center handling their call, right? They didn't pick us our estimate. But how do they feel about the entire customer journey? Because you can leave a review that says, hey, like, I didn't actually use them, but they were super fair. They were super transparent. I just chose the other company because of whatever, you know. And so I think that is like the next level black belt of probably getting reviews because, you know, it doesn't say anywhere like they must be a customer have done business with you. I mean, technically, they're still like interacting and doing business with you regardless, you know, and so they could be leaving a review on whether it's finished work or how the customer service representative treated them, because we all value like different things, I think so something to consider, you know, from that standpoint. So cool. Um, Alright, one last quick topic, this, because we always got to talk about AI is the whole idea of this LLM dot txt file. So to get really nerdy, you want to talk about kind of what a robots txt file is right now, and how it relates to SEO. And then, what could llms do? Yeah?

Aaron Watters 37:37
Yeah, absolutely. So robots dot txt file, you know, we talk about even on the writing content, writing content for users, or writing it for the robots, because that's how Google elevates rankings. This whole ranking shift that we talked about, or that rollout, is basically their bots going out, crawling the web, coming back, and then identifying what needs to be ranked where. So there's a robots dot txt file. It strips a lot of the visual elements that humans have to go through on a website, so it makes it real clean. It's just source code showing, hey, this is what's on this page. This is what's on this page. Part of an SEO and technical SEO job is making that file as clean as possible so there's not extra noise for the robots to go through. Yeah, what we're seeing with llms, they all have their own crawlers. If you're using, we're a client of Sim rush, they have their own crawler to go see in the web. Ahrefs, all these SEO tools have crawlers. Well, llms have crawlers. There's a bunch of funny memes about, you know, deep seek, stealing, GPT data stealing like they're going out there and they're stealing basically our website content data, but the llms are reading as if they are Google's bots, right? And so there have been strategies, and I talked to some SEO people that focus on like, big travel websites and very large directories where they actually tell and they write files specifically for the llms, and then they spam the heck out of it. They remove all the other stuff, because it's the wild west right now. If you can write a website that says, AC repair Baltimore, AC repair Baltimore, we're the best AC repair Baltimore. Here's a bunch of fake reviews. Put it into an LLM, like, only chat GPT is reading this, this JavaScript file. Yeah, that's that's something that I think can be really, really abused. And I think at the smaller level, like a contractor, 10 million and under, it's not really, not really something that's happening. But I think at the bigger level, it's something to pay attention, oh,

Dennis Ayotte 39:39
yeah, the more resources you have. And goes back to that, like, early adoption. And can you, like, do you have the resources to do something like that? So super interesting to just stay on top of that. Because I think, like you said, very much wild wild west right now. And like, how do we fine tune some of that stuff? And Google went through the same stuff early on, right? Like one of the you know, kind of black hat tactics back in the day was like all this white text on, you know, pages and stuff, right? And so, well, maybe we're not at that level with some of the things that you were talking about on these travel websites. But I think it leaves the door open for that with when we start seeing people get really creative, and how can you, like, manipulate the system, and eventually we're going to need some sort of baseline, because let's like, you know, everybody is taking everybody's information and everybody's data, you know, maybe deep seek did it to chat GBT. But chat GBT did it to, like, all of us, you know, and all these people who've been publishing their, you know, information and expertise and thought leadership. So at the end of the day, like, we just need to all like, share the content, but let's like, Let's protect us all right, because we're going to be the ones consuming it. And then if we have a level playing field on how we rank for that stuff, then even better. And now we can all follow, like, a certain process. And here, here's

Aaron Watters 40:59
a clip coming from my conversation again yesterday with our SEO Leads. So Bianca clip this, unless I mess it up, our clients want to know how often am I coming up in LLM searches? Yes. The simple answer is we don't know. The reason we don't know is there's no analytic tracking in the LLM models. And so while we can put some tools into GTM, your Google Tag Manager and into Google Analytics, we can track how many times the chat GPT bot hits our website, we can do that, what we cannot do is discern whether that bot is actually pulling your data because a user asked for it, or if it's crawling so that it can can expand its database. And so like right now, we've got a site that Katie and I were talking about that maybe it's like 5000 total visits from unique users on a monthly basis. It got 1200 visits from llms in the same time frame that if you have 5000 unique visits, that doesn't mean anyway, it's just, it's one of those scenarios like the math doesn't matter. Yeah, so they have to be using it. And also they may be using your website's content to answer something, but the source could be other people, so we don't even know. They might be in a chat GPT thread listing 10 sources that they use to come up with an answer, yeah. That may they may not have used just those 10. They may have used those 10 plus 20 others. Yeah. So it's just not clear yet. How

Dennis Ayotte 42:34
are we able to see where these LLM searches are coming from? Is there a source in like, medium for them now? Or do you think that's coming? Or

Aaron Watters 42:41
it's, yeah, she's putting a listener into our Google Tag Manager. And so we're then creating not key events, but like micro events that pushes based on the crawler source. And so people are trying to learn that. I think, you know, I don't want to invest a ton of time into that yet, because the second that we that that's up and running, yeah, GPT is going to say, integrate your Google Analytics with us now, or whatever. And so funny, it's one of those cost benefit analysis of, yeah, we can go and try to figure it out aggressively. Or would you like for us to just try to get you more leads, yeah, and so.

Dennis Ayotte 43:18
And sometimes that's part of it, you know. And I will say, adding to his clip is, we've been very successful in getting our clients, I don't know, very successful, but we have gotten clients AI snippets at the top of pages, a lot Aaron's words and and we've done that, I think, mostly by following kind of like, the E, A, T, like, just tried and true method, and we've been, you know, honoring that, and we've been rewarded in many cases. But I think eventually there's going to need to be more layers to it so we understand how to truly do it. So exciting to see what's going to potentially happen there from an SEO perspective. So cool. Well, anything else on your mind?

Aaron Watters 44:04
Um, yeah. I mean, I think this has been a little bit of a longer and podcast. So, Dude,

Dennis Ayotte 44:10
I got the wife text already. Are you still recording?

Aaron Watters 44:14
Yes, yes, ma'am, we are proof, yeah. I mean, I want to talk about the team building, but just everything we did, we did a team building at the leadership team level this week. And it was one of those Lego skill set going into a Lego it's called bricks here in San Antonio, we're there for four hours. And, yeah, really cool takeaways. Oh yeah. What were some of your your quick top takeaways? Well,

Dennis Ayotte 44:41
number one, I was just like, relieved that it was impactful. Because, you know, it's, it seems a little like elementary it's like, you're going to play with Legos, basically. And in my mind, I'm like, how is this going to, like, relate to leadership? But I just trusted, and I was like, shout out to Ron, who was. Our instructor there at BRICS, and he was awesome just at navigating us through it. And it's so interesting how you can parallel like creating or building something potentially as a team or alone, and the leadership lessons that can come out of that, right, if it is, you know, orchestrating it accordingly. So my big takeaway was, like, there was just a ton of value that came from that type of exercise. And I think, you know, the biggest one for me was, like the communication one. So there was a part where I was, like, separated in a separate room, and then I had to come in and try to instruct the team on how to build something. But I had very specific like parameters where I could not, like, say certain colors or certain words or certain things. So I had a limited like vocabulary and things that I could tell the team. And they were getting frustrated, because what happened is, later, the instructor let somebody else come in and say all the full details. They were able to say colors and shapes and everything. So, yeah, so I'm sitting over here, like, WTF, dude, like this guy, and meanwhile, I'm, like, thinking the whole team hates me because they were like, Why didn't Dennis just tell us? Because what you guys were initially building happy essence you had, like, what I thought were wings or whatever, but ended up they were flippers. And I was, I was thinking it was a bird, but it was actually a dolphin. But I couldn't say any of that, but here comes Ryan. He's like, Yeah, it's a dolphin with flip flippers and a tail, and then, like, seeing the shape just totally changed to what it needed to be, yeah, was was really cool. So the communication part of it was super interesting. And just having perspective on that, it's nice. So what about you? What was your big takeaway?

Aaron Watters 46:44
I mean, for me, was the planning in the strategy and making sure that we see things, and we talk about it a lot when we get clients, it's like, okay, day one, I want leads. Great. We understand that. But yeah, are we set up to take these leads and and for us also, it's onboarding tasks and making sure that when we onboard tasks, we're asking the right questions, we're getting the right information, so the SEO team isn't running around trying to do all these audits without access or that we're just like, stuck. Well, nope, I need GSC access, or I need this or that. But like the fact that one of them, he said, Okay, I need you guys take 30 seconds. Yeah, look at it. And it made me question. I'm so confident in myself that when I get a task or I hear about something I'm working on, how often do I take a step back and plan, make sure I've got all the right tools necessary, and then go? Because I think once you get into it, it's like, okay, ready to go, yeah. And I just start working. And that was a really powerful move as well. Yeah.

Dennis Ayotte 47:43
Well, you know, what makes me think about that whole thing right now is, like you've been saying lately, like we win in the setup, right? Like we win when we have everything set up accordingly and expectations are set. And like, that final exercise we did together, we had to put 125 Lego pieces together in like, an unorthodox fashion, and no team had ever done it as fast as we had, according to Ron, yeah, or even complete it right? Which was, like, very flattering. And I think we had like, five minutes to spare, which was huge. But what do we do we want in the setup? Because we all because he said, take 30 seconds right before you go. And he said, a lot of times people just jump in. But we were like, now, let's do this. And you had an initial idea. Ryan had chimed in with his idea, because we don't have egos, and we all, you know, work together. We landed on the best plan, and then we got started. And then as we were going through, Ben had a great idea to make us more efficient and to protect, like, the final product, and then before you know it, dude, like, bam, we're done, and we're getting like, this great feedback. So all that to say, I think that plays right into your, your idea of when in the when in the setup. So, and maybe I'll, I'll tell the hot fries story next week. Yeah, you guys, tune in. I'll tell the hot fry story. So cool. Well, thank you guys for tuning into this episode. Appreciate it again. Like subscribe. Leave any comments. Check us out on Reddit. We have a new subreddit, right? We're trolling us. Yeah? I know there's one guy. He's just a real pill. Yeah. So, yeah, so let us know, guys, appreciate y'all watching later. Bye, sweet. Did that go long? I didn't have a timer. No, I just want to say it.

Aaron Watters 49:30
No, I.