← Stay Paid Podcast
Stay Paid Podcast
AI, Reviews & Trust - The Future of Sales Is Here
00:14:36
Trust has a new currency—and it’s reviews 🚀 In this episode of Stay Paid, Luke & Josh sit down with Jonas Roeser, award-winning international marketer and CEO/CMO of AgentReview.net, to uncover why reviews are the future of...
Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:04]
B
Welcome to Stay Paid, the podcast where we turn lessons from top performers and entrepreneurs into real world strategies you can use to close more deals and grow your business. But only if you take action. Today, my name is Joshua Stike, Chief marketing officer here at Reminder Media, joined by Luke Acre, president of Reminder Media and our co host. Joining us as always, Cody Smith and Stephen Acree of the Acree Brothers Realty team. And our special guest today is Jonas Roser. Jonas is an award winning international marketer and the current CEO and CMO of Agent Review, a digital platform connecting consumers with trusted insurance and financial professionals. Through his leadership in direct marketing and long term care awareness, Jonas is shaping the industry, the insurance industry, through innovation, advocacy and bold marketing. Jonas, welcome to Stay Paid.
- [00:52]
A
Hey, thank you for having me.
- [00:54]
C
Jonas, man, great to have you on. I'm excited to talk about reviews. I see reviews as critical. We got screwed at Reminder Media. We focused all of our attention. This was a mistake. We focused all of our attention on getting Facebook reviews early on and got hundreds and hundreds of them. And then the crypto bots got a hold of us. And I don't know why, I don't know if it was a cyber attack or just the nature, but if you go to our Facebook Reminder Media, it is just full of these crypto people that have rated us five stars, saying things about crypto never seen before. We've tried to get Facebook to take it down. We tried to. They won't take it down. The only way they told us is basically to mark them as bad or something like that, like individually, and it's still not down. So it's like we put all of our eggs in that basket. We realized that was a huge mistake. Now we've gone to Google and, you know, getting our Google reviews up and all that good stuff. But I'm curious, like, you know, what got you into reviews for agents? And why do you believe agent review is a good business right now to be in? Because it feels like there's so many review sites. So why do you feel like Agent Review, starting this company and doing all that is is critical right now?
- [02:04]
A
Well, I mean, to take a quick step back, we actually started 10 years ago and we were in it for about 15 months and then we took a massive long pause. Like.
- [02:13]
C
Like that's a pretty long pause, brother.
- [02:16]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, honestly, like, we came out the gate strong. We are innovative product of the year in the insurance industry.
- [02:23]
C
I didn't realize that. Okay.
- [02:24]
A
Yeah, we had people signing up and, you know, it just Happened to be a critical, horrible time in my life where I hate to bring it up, but I was served divorce papers. And coming from being, you know, fairly successful and with a massive income earlier in the insurance industry to going to startup CEO salary and you know, going into what ended up being a trial, we had to put on pause. I couldn't run the company and take care of these financial situations and then we couldn't raise capital because I actually had a divorce trial. So it just put everything on hold. And curious that you mentioned AI.
- [03:06]
D
Right.
- [03:07]
A
Because it is the main reason that we are back today. My co founder, we got together and said, what are we doing here? It's been six, seven years, you know, we're paying to keep this on life support. And he said, what if we rebuild the site with AI? And that's what we did. And we've recently just launched 60, 90 days ago, soft launch, but we're coming on strong. And you know what, reviews is the future for the salesperson right now.
- [03:35]
D
Right.
- [03:35]
A
If you don't have a number of reviews up, it doesn't matter what kind of traffic in my opinion you have going to your site, you need to.
- [03:44]
C
Have just because of credibility. Is that because it's just basically you're non credible. I'm curious, just for my own interests, it's like, what do you mean build it by AI? Like what, what does that actually mean in practicality is that the sorting of it is that you literally built the site by having AI code it. Like what does it actually mean?
- [04:03]
A
Well, so we have functions in the site that support aspects in the site. So for example, there's a sorting functionality, there's a bunch of different features in there that support the consumer writing a better review or using AI to write that. But at the end of the day with the way that reviews are, reviews are like fuel for AI.
- [04:27]
D
Right.
- [04:27]
A
AI is built off of tone, it's built off of natural language.
- [04:32]
D
Right.
- [04:33]
A
And it's based off of trust.
- [04:35]
C
That's a great.
- [04:35]
A
So there's nothing better than a review moving forward with a 25 drop off on search on Google in 2026. Because people are using platforms like perplexity or chat GPT for search.
- [04:50]
D
Right.
- [04:50]
A
Like I use chat, I think a lot of people do, right. And they may use it to make something more polished and sound better. But I guarantee you 90% of the people on this call that are in sales, whether it's insurance, real estate, financial advisor, whatever it is, I doubt they've gone into ChatGPT and said who's the number one life insurance agent in Seattle, Washington.
- [05:16]
D
Right.
- [05:16]
A
They don't use it as a front end search. And you know what's going to happen the minute you do that? It's going to spool, it's going to say, it's hard to figure out who the number one person is or agent is or salesperson. And then automatically it's going to start showing you Joe Jones has five star ratings and 600 reviews and the next person so many ratings, 350 reviews. Because what it's doing is it's looking for performance ratings, it's looking for reviews, it's using that as its fuel and it's scanning what the public was saying. Because you know what, reviews are the new trust currency right now. You know, back in the day, a great hack.
- [05:58]
C
Do you remember the Jason Pantana hack, like what he talked about and like he did exactly what you're saying, Jonas. But then he like went through and basically asked Chat GPT how it came up with its answer.
- [06:10]
A
Yeah.
- [06:11]
C
And then essentially like he basically it was, it was an incredible thought of like, hey, I'm going to search best real estate agents in Lynchburg, Virginia or best life insurance in Seattle, Washington. And then it comes up with the names. It goes, why did you choose those people? And then it will tell you why it found them and chose them. And then it's like you can then even get deeper and go, well, what sites did you use to to make your decision? And then boom, that's your action item of going, okay, how do I get on those sites? Like how do I get in? I think reviews, Google business profile reviews, agent review sites like yours. Yeah, that is one of the main.
- [06:48]
B
I actually had things to make me a Checklist of the 10 things that we needed to do to optimize our site and our Google profile to be recommended by ChatGPT.
- [06:59]
C
Now here's the question, Josh, have you taken action in any of those top ten things? Nine.
- [07:03]
B
Nine and a half.
- [07:04]
C
Nine and a half of them. Yeah. So, okay, Jonas, so then, you know, I think the struggle for most people is they all buy in. Everybody gets it. You got to get reviews. The question is, and this is what you have found, Stephen and Cody is like how do you actually get them? Like how do you get your clients fear people to actually go to agent review.com and in literally put in a review or go to Google and put in a review. So what's the best solicitation of reviews strategies that you see?
- [07:33]
A
So this is a two part question and again Like I love your ass. You're asking me this because I have the answers and they're actually pretty simple, right? It just takes doing so like asking for reviews. It's almost like an insurance term activity of daily living. You got to make it an activity that you do and the best time to do it, think about the timing that you're doing it. Obviously the best time to ask a review is after you've had a positive experience with a client, right? So. Or in insurance, you know, after the policy is delivered, you don't want to ask for a review. If you're selling life insurance and they don't get it due to health or something along those lines, right. They're not going to give you a great review. But that being said, it's timing and sometimes make it about someone else other than yourself, right? When you say writing this review not only helps me, it helps others realize why they need to have this type of policy to protect their family or why they need to be working with an agent on agent review or something along these lines. But sometimes it seems self serving. And honestly, make sure you're using a platform that's frictionless. You know, I, I'm gonna, I don't want to talk about agent review too much, but you brought up Google Reviews, right? It's massive, right? Everyone thinks of Google Reviews, but it's got friction for sure. You can't leave a review unless you have a Gmail, right? Not everyone uses Gmail. It's a massive friction place. And if I bought a policy that's like, let's say it's long term care insurance. So you may not know about this, but you've probably only bought, you buy it once, right? Because it ages up. Every day you get older, every day you get unhealthier, costs more money. So when you buy it, you don't ever cancel it. So you never deal with that person again. Am I, if I don't have a Gmail, am I going to go open a Gmail account or leave one review for someone that spent an hour with me to buy a policy? Absolutely not. So for example, it's one of the main things that we did at agent review, we gave everyone a personal review link, right? So whether if they're on their profile they can click to leave or review doesn't matter, you just leave it, submit it or you, they, the agent's able to, you know, have their link stored or just go to their profile or the portal, take it, click it and use it in an email. Say it's wonderful meeting with you. I'm happy your policy was delivered Tuesday at 2. Would love a review, something like that, right?
- [09:57]
E
Like, would you say you should target a bunch of different platforms as well? Like, so, like, we got Facebook, we got Zillow, know we're real estate agents, we got Zillow, we got Google reviews. Right. Would you say tackle all of those or would you be more specific to one platform? What's your thoughts on.
- [10:13]
A
On that? Tackle them all. You know, this is a digital landscape. You need as big of a digital footprint as possible. You know, that's my feeling on it. I mean, I've heard the extent of people like, hey, I don't only asking for reviews, I'm leaving reviews. Am I leaving them? I'm saying that I'm Seattle's number one life insurance agent in the review that I'm leaving for someone else. So it's just this full circle.
- [10:37]
D
Right?
- [10:37]
A
So because you got to imagine it's crawling, looking for content, so to say.
- [10:42]
D
Right?
- [10:42]
C
Wait, did I just. Did you say you're. When you're leaving reviews for others, you are putting keywords about yourself. I don't do it. I don't do it. So smart.
- [10:53]
A
It's exactly what I. It's exactly what I said.
- [10:56]
D
Right.
- [10:56]
A
I'm not selling, but, you know, I'm talking to hundreds of agents a day.
- [11:00]
C
You go, like, imagine Stephen, you go and review all the restaurants in Lynchburg and you go, you know, Stephen, with Acre Brothers Realty here, you know, we run the number one team in Lynchburg and I love this restaurant, all my clients.
- [11:18]
A
It's the truth.
- [11:19]
D
Right?
- [11:19]
A
Because again, if it's keywords, it's the.
- [11:22]
C
Data out there on the web for SEO.
- [11:24]
A
That's right. Well, well, yes and no.
- [11:26]
D
Right.
- [11:27]
A
It's. You need to think that way because that's how we were thinking yesterday. But moving forward, you need to think about how are you going to take your own personal keywords, your own. The tone of what the community is saying about you and everything that's positive, from performance ratings to actual reviews and making sure they're exposed as. As much as possible and then exposing what you're trying to brand yourself as. Right. You sell, you know? Yeah. Just figuring how to plug it. Do you think?
- [11:57]
E
I'm curious about this because I was just talking to a gentleman the other day. He's actually on the podcast and he has like 1600 reviews. Do you think there's a certain count of reviews that really matters to the consumer? Because like, we're trying to. We're the number one review team here in the area on Google. And I'm just curious, like psychology wise, when people choose you, like if they see 1600 reviews versus 360, of course there's a difference, but is there a difference between the competition that you need to see for organic lead flow to actually start flowing in?
- [12:34]
A
You know, it's a great question. I don't want to say that I have a definitive answer. I think a lot of it's based on some common sense of am I looking at one person that's an individual agent and they got a thousand plus reviews. Am I looking at a natural, you know, a nationwide business that does? Right, sure. It's all scalable and at the end of the day, it is a numbers game. You want to have as many reviews as possible and you want to have as many positive reviews, right? We haven't talked about negative reviews, right? So they're there. They happen to the best of us. And the challenge with that is how do you handle it? You know, how do you handle managing your reputation? Because reviews is reputation management. Really. It's really what it is, right? It is the digital way that referrals happen today, right? You used to call your neighbor up and say, who did you use this and that. Now when you go in and you search who's the number one roof fixer, you know, in Seattle, and I keep referencing kind of backdoor and base, but this, that's what you do, right? But now within doing that with reviews, because of how AI works and how it focuses on natural language, tone and all these things, it's, I mean, it's, it's AI's caviar and champagne, man.
- [13:56]
C
Let's go a little deeper on this negative reviews thing. Josh, can you talk about like, we have a lot of one star reviews. So we've been in business for 20 years. We've served over 150,000 small businesses at this point in time. So over the time span and over the amount of clients we've served, we have very little negative reviews. But because of, you know, just how reviews are and how they live for years and years and years, you know, let's say we, I don't know what it is. Let's say we have 31 star, 41 star reviews on Google versus, you know, 605 star type idea. But that still affects because people don't go and.