Mitchell Blackmon

Built & sold 2 companies. Currently growing a cleaning business. Coaching business owners to build success however they define it.

DMs open

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

I got quite a bit of new followers over the last few weeks

So if you're new here, here are a few tweets I've written to give you an idea of what to expect:

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Have you ever wondered if it's worth hiring someone to answer calls

Or even overflow calls?

Let's do some math to find out

Here's what you'll need first:
1. Your lead conversion from the 1st phone call
2. Your average ticket price
3. Avg missed calls/week

🧵Follow along

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

How to Get Google Reviews for Your Business
Over the past 6 years I’ve struggled to consistently get reviews for my businesses

Lots of testing, headaches, and failures

Then, I decided to combine it all into a cadence that ACTUALLY started generating reviews for my business

Here’s my 5 step process & sample scripts and tools you can use to get more reviews now

First, let’s talk about a few things with reviews.

✨Getting Reviews = Sales
Asking your customers to leave a review puts them into a new sales cadence

You’re trying to convince your customer to leave a review. It seems like a situation where only you win

But they do too. They want to help you succeed. It feels good to leave a review.

Although, it does require some convincing

77% of customers would be willing to leave a review if they were asked. But just because they’re willing doesn’t mean they will

Treat this like a new sales cycle. You follow up with your estimates, right? Follow up with your review requests too

Most people need to be reminded several times before taking action, so keep asking

And keep changing up HOW you’re asking.

✨Getting Reviews = Marketing
If you're growing your business, you need reviews on your Google page. It needs to be a pretty big focus for you

Getting reviews on Google is directly related with Map rankings.

A study by @semrush said that getting positive reviews on a consistent basis will have a positive effect on your company’s ability to rank

Interestingly, your average rating seems to matter less than the number of reviews you actually get

That said, don’t disregard providing excellent service so that your customers leave positive reviews

✨Getting Reviews = Social Proof
Social proof is one of Rober Cialdini’s principles of influence

Social proof is basically saying that when we don’t know what is correct, we’ll look to other people to find out what is correct

Most people aren’t searching for a specific company when they go to look for the services you provide

They search “House cleaners near me” or “Plumbers in [CITY]”

98% of people read reviews online and 93% of people say that online reviews impact their purchase decisions

Finally, here are 5 simple steps that you can take to skyrocket your reviews in no time

1⃣ Ask at the job site
Have your technicians ask on site. Right after they wrap up the job

Your customers are more likely to leave a review if your technician asks. They want to review the person not the company
Nice & easy. No pressure.

If you do this, you should find ways that encourage your employees to ask for reviews.

Perhaps provide bonuses and other incentives if they do, but don't mention it to the customers

We provide $30 to our team lead when they get new, verified reviews on Google

2⃣ Use a leave behind that includes a QR Code
This doesn’t work all the time. And it shouldn’t stop there. To get the customer to leave a review, have your tech hand the customer a leave behind that asks for a review

Keep it casual and not all about the reviews. I put mine in the section about the cleaning service policy

Doing this has helped a ton. If you don’t want to use a QR code, I suggest that you use a simple URL, not the spammy URL from Google

Use “reviews” as your subdomain that redirects to your Google Business page. Something like

reviews.[YOURWEBSITE].com

3⃣ Follow up call the next day (also helps with sales)
Some companies call this the “happy call” but it’s really just a follow up call. The goal is to truly ask how things went.

If they’re recurring, you can ask them how things are going and you don’t need to call them every time, especially if it's weekly

When you get them on the phone and you can remind them about how great the service is

Plus you are showing that your team really cares about the feedback, you’re bringing the review back to the top of mind.

Here’s a script that we use after first time services:
When I was in the chimney industry and our techs were giving quotes in the field, we’d always ask if the customer had questions about their estimate

Felt really organic and helped a lot with our closing

4⃣ Use something like NiceJob to ask again
Most of the reviews software out there is going to help but my favorite so far is NiceJob

The thing I love about NiceJob is that they follow up with the customers when they don’t leave a review. Most reviews software I’ve seen stop trying after the first message

The most successful step comes from the last message

The customization is pretty cool too

5⃣ Send a thank you letter with SendJim
When all else fails, your last ditch effort is to send a letter or a post card

You can do this manually and actually write your own letters. Or you can use something like Send Jim to make this quick and easy

I haven’t figured out a good way to automate this entirely (haven’t really looked much either)

But you can send handwritten letters that look really good with a click of a few buttons
If none of this works, move on. That customer’s not leaving a review!

👍 Bonus Tip 1: Always respond.

First, Google says that responding will help you improve your ranking

Second, responding to reviews provides even more consumer confidence. Here are some stats from a survey done by @brightlocal

- 88% of consumers are likely to use your business if they can see that you respond to all reviews
- 60% will use your company if you only respond to negative
- 50% will use your company if you only respond to positive
- 42% said it doesn’t matter that much

I’m not great at coming up with responses, so I use Bard to help me out. Here’s the prompt I use:

Respond to a Google Review for a housecleaning company.
- The review says: “[Paste Review]”

It literally doesn’t get easier than that.

👍 Bonus Tip 2 - Make it as easy as possible
One of my top rules for business is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to give you money

The same principle applies to leaving reviews. If you want your customer to leave you a review for a service you provided, make it stupid simple

No roadblocks

I gave a lot of options:
1. QR Codes
2. Simpler URLs
3. Email links
4. Text links

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

We have a 24 point attendance policy in both of my companies

If an EE gets 24 points in a calendar year and we let them go

It's written & communicated with all of them so they understand

Here's how you get points:

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

You never know how much time you're wasting until you do a time audit

I like to do a time audit a couple of times a year. Especially when I feel like I'm drowning in work

Here's how to do it:

Tip: Use a spreadsheet for this

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Starting a business isn’t that hard

Scaling it is incredibly difficult

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

You're wasting time in your business

You're doing tasks that could easily be automated or delegated

Here's a list of 10 things you should stop doing and how to automate or delegate

🧵

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

We broke a picture frame at a client’s house 2 days ago

I asked her to send the type of frame to replace it but it didn’t exist anymore

So I bought a similar one in a 2 pack + a $25 gift card to help fill the 2nd frame ($75 total)

She left a 5 ⭐️ review on GMB & FB!

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Google reviews are crucial to your business

They help improve search rankings AND provide needed social proof for leads

Unfortunately, Google tends to hide some of these reviews

Fortunately, I know how to get them back...

🧵bc I'm a non blue member

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Go Gators!

This time, I'm in Lexington cheering the Gators on

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Your #1 job as a business owner should be business development

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Your leads are 45% less likely to convert after the 6th call

But that's still higher than the 0% you'd get if you didn't follow up at all

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

The first hire you should make is someone to answer the phones

But the most powerful early hire you can make is a solid number 2 to handle the operations

Budget for an experienced hire

Build some systems

Sell your vision

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Don't let yourself, the owner, be the bottleneck in your business

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Follow up with your leads often and in multiple ways

People don't always pick up on the first try

And maybe you didn't reach them how they prefer

You have a 93% chance of contact after 6 attempts but you probably give up after only 3 tries

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Track the location of your leads to the zip codes

Then look at the conversion rates and ROIs of those zip code leads to find the area with the highest quality leads

Then spend time and money focusing your marketing to that area

Birds of a feather flock together

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Another benefit to having your team take pictures with their checklists:

You'll have a bunch of marketing assets.

Send the good pictures to your VA to create social media posts with ChatGPT

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

@hclaymyers It’s been on my list but I only recently discovered all the features beyond messaging

It’s going to be a game changer for us

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Project for the week:

Reimagining our communication flow with Slack

Instead of a bunch of emails for updates, I'll have our office manager submit a Slack workflow

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

@scottmondayCA Heck yeah! You can’t beat when a customer calls you a perfect company

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

77% of customers would be willing to leave a review if they were asked

But just because they're willing to, doesn't mean they will

Follow up on your review requests

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

We ask in multiple ways:

1. Our cleaners ask at the end of the clean when they’re done with the walk through and get the OK from the customer

2. We provide a QR code on the checklist that asks for a review

3. Our office calls the next day and asks how everything went and for a review.

4. We send follow up messages with NiceJob that asks for a review.

We look at it like a sales process so we follow up 7+ times

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

@OdysseyDaily Exactly! It’s hard to scale when you’re only thinking of yourself

[Mitchell Blackmon @Mitchblackmon]

Everything you do in your business is a system

The trick to scaling your systems is to get them out of your head