How Reviews Impact Revenue More Than Rankings
How Reviews Impact Revenue More Than Rankings
Digital Marketing for Contractors, Episode 4.17
When home improvement contractors hear the word “reviews,” most of them immediately think about Google Business Profile setup: claiming the listing, filling out the categories, keeping the name and phone number consistent. Those mechanics matter, and the show has covered them in previous episodes. But in Episode 4.17, hosts Meredith Medlin and Caitlin Noble of FatCat Strategies set the setup conversation aside entirely.
Instead, they treat reviews as a revenue conversation. Not an SEO conversation. Their focus is on the specific moments when a homeowner checks up on a contractor, and how those moments show up in numbers replacement contractors already track in their CRM: set rate, cancel prior to issue, and close rate.
To make that connection practical, the hosts introduced a framework built from a pattern they kept seeing with clients. They call it the Proof Path.
Why Owners Are So Fixated on Rankings
Before getting into the framework, Meredith made a point of defending the owners who check their rankings every morning. The habit is not irrational. An owner cannot audit a PPC account at 7:00 a.m. from the truck, and nobody is checking technical SEO from a job site. But anyone can type “bath remodel” plus their city into Google and see where they land. Ranking feels like a scoreboard because it is the one number an owner can check personally.
The problem, Caitlin explained, is that the check is not reliable. Search results depend on the exact words typed, the device used, whether the person was signed in, and where they were physically located when they searched. Two people in the same office can search the same term and see different results.
Meredith shared the story of an owner who called her genuinely upset because he had dropped out of the map pack. It turned out he was searching from a job site 40 minutes outside his service area. Google was doing exactly what it was designed to do, but in the moment it felt like a betrayal.
Rank Is an Input. Revenue Is the Output.
The core idea of the episode is simple. Rank is upstream. It is one of many factors that affect whether a homeowner ever sees a company’s name, but it is not the result an owner actually cares about. The result is issued appointments, signed contracts, and ultimately revenue.
Between showing up in a search result and money in the bank, there is an enormous gap. The homeowner makes a series of decisions inside that gap, and almost all of them happen without ever talking to the contractor. The Proof Path is an attempt to name those decisions so contractors can do something about them.
The Proof Path: Four Checkpoints
According to the hosts, a homeowner independently verifies a contractor four separate times before the contractor gets paid:
1. The map pack glance. The homeowner scans search results and decides who is even worth clicking on.
2. The pre-call scan. They have narrowed the field and are reading about the company before calling or filling out a form.
3. The confirmation gut check. They already booked an appointment, and in the days before it, some of them search the company again.
4. The kitchen table search. The sales rep is in the living room giving the presentation, and someone in the house is looking the company up on their phone.
The line Meredith wanted every listener to remember: contractors get audited four times, and SEO only helps with the first one. Reviews show up at all four.
Checkpoint One: The Map Pack Glance
Caitlin described what is actually on the screen at this stage: a company name, a star rating, a review count in parentheses, maybe a category, and a call button. There is no field for ranking and no badge for SEO investment.
This is where the hosts believe many contractors lose money without realizing it. They have seen plenty of situations where a company in position three with a strong rating and a large number of reviews gets more clicks than the company in position one with a thinner profile. Caitlin was careful to frame this as what the team observes with clients rather than a formal study, but it happens often enough that they now look for it.
Meredith added that review count works as a size signal. A homeowner seeing a roofer with a handful of reviews will not consciously think “small company,” but one with hundreds of reviews reads as established, busy, and likely to be around when the warranty matters. For replacement contractors installing 30 to 80 jobs a month, that is an advantage many are not using. They have the raw material for a large review base. They just are not collecting it.
Recency matters too. Reviews feel like a banked asset, but they are time-stamped. If the most recent review is 18 months old, the profile reads like a company that used to be busy. A steady drip of new reviews signals a going concern, and in Caitlin’s view that matters more than the exact star average.
Checkpoint Two: The Pre-Call Scan
At this stage, the homeowner usually has the company open in one tab and two competitors in the others. It is a comparison, not a solo evaluation. And what do they read first? The bad reviews, every time.
That is not cynicism, Meredith noted. It is how people shop for anything expensive. Five-star reviews are pleasant background noise. The one-star review shows the risk, and more importantly, it shows how the company handled it. Readers are not really evaluating the complaint. They are evaluating the response. An unanswered one-star review, Caitlin said, is the loudest thing on a profile.
The hosts see owners go wrong in one of two ways: they either stay silent or go to war. The war response, a two-paragraph rebuttal with dates and contract numbers, is often factually correct. But a homeowner reading it six months later does not see a company that was wronged. They see a company that argues with customers.
Caitlin’s rule is to respond the way the owner would talk to that person standing in their driveway. Keep it short, acknowledge the issue, say what the company would like to do about it, give a name and direct contact, and stop. The goal is not to win the argument. The goal is for the next reader to conclude that if something goes sideways, this company will pick up the phone.
Checkpoint Three: The Confirmation Gut Check
This is the checkpoint the hosts say gets the most pushback, until owners think about it for a week. The call center did its job. The homeowner called Tuesday and booked for Saturday. Now they have four days to sit with the fact that they agreed to let a stranger into their home for two hours to sell them something that costs as much as a car.
Some of them search the company again, not to find it, but to reassure themselves. Caitlin mentioned recently reviewing Google Business Profile calls for a newer client and hearing multiple homeowners call just to confirm their appointment time. People are stewing on the decision.
If what they find is a thin profile or an unanswered nasty review, they rarely cancel because of the review. They say something came up. That lands in the CRM as a cancel prior to issue, and the owner never learns the real reason.
The fix is inexpensive. Add one line to the confirmation call inviting the homeowner to see what neighbors have said about working with the company, and include the review link in the confirmation text or email. Contractors cannot stop the search, but they can steer it.
To illustrate, the hosts used Copperline Bath, a fictional company. Copperline’s lead volume and set rate are healthy, but the owner is bothered by cancel prior to issue and assumes the call center needs retraining. Before spending money on that, he looks at his own profile the way a homeowner would and finds three unanswered complaints at the top. He answers them and adds one line to the confirmation script. In this fictional example, the cancel number improves. The lesson is not a specific figure. It is that he was about to solve the wrong problem.
Checkpoint Four: The Kitchen Table Search
The presentation runs 90 minutes to two hours, and the call center has made sure both homeowners are present. One is usually engaged with the rep. The other may be on their phone searching the company name plus “complaints,” “BBB,” or “scam.”
What makes this checkpoint brutal is that the rep never finds out. The second homeowner gets quiet, and at the end the answer is “we want to think about it.” That gets logged as a demo, no sell, and when the rep debriefs, the stated objection is price, because price is the only objection anyone says out loud. Meanwhile, the sales manager is running price objection role-plays while the actual problem happened on a phone in the next chair.
The answer is to get in front of it. Caitlin recommends putting reviews into the sales deck, the leave-behind, and the proposal. Meredith added that reps can address it directly by inviting homeowners to look the company up and offering a QR code to the reviews. That handles the search on the company’s terms and signals it has nothing to hide.
Collecting More Reviews
All four checkpoints run on the same fuel, and most contractors are wildly under-collecting relative to the jobs they complete.
Who asks: the installer at the final walkthrough, not the office three weeks later. At the walkthrough, the customer is standing in a brand new bathroom and genuinely happy. That is the easiest ask there is. It should be one memorized sentence every crew uses.
Where to send them: Google first for most contractors, since that is where the map pack glance and pre-call scan happen, then whichever secondary platform matters most locally. Spreading across eight platforms with six reviews each helps no one.
Volume over perfection: a perfect 5.0 with 12 reviews looks fake. A 4.7 with hundreds of reviews is believable because homeowners know things occasionally go wrong at volume.
Do not gate reviews. Gating means surveying customers first and routing only happy ones to public review sites. Vendors sell it, it violates platform policy, and the penalty lands on the contractor, not the vendor.
Agency Horror Story: Tidewater Exteriors
The episode’s horror story featured Tidewater Exteriors, a fictional composite siding and gutter company. Tidewater hired a reputation management vendor that handled everything. Reviews came in, the average climbed, and everyone was happy. What the owner did not know was that the vendor had set up a gate, sending unhappy customers to a private form nobody read.
The profile looked flawless, suspiciously so. Eventually the pattern was flagged and a large share of the reviews were removed, right before busy season. Years of real goodwill vanished, and the unhappy customers were never handled either. A review profile is an asset that cannot be bought quickly, and it has to be treated like one.
Five Action Items
1. Pull the company’s review count and star average, plus the same numbers for three closest competitors, on one page. That is what the homeowner sees.
2. Read every review under four stars from the last 12 months and respond to any without a reply. Short, human, signed by a real person.
3. Add one line to the appointment confirmation script pointing to reviews, and put the link in the confirmation text or email.
4. Write one sentence for installers to use at the final walkthrough, and decide who owns follow-up when a customer agrees but does not post.
5. Record the current cancel prior to issue rate as a baseline, then check it again in 90 days.
As Caitlin summed it up: rankings put a contractor in the room, but reviews get the signature.
Contractors who want help finding where their reputation may be quietly costing them appointments can reach FatCat Strategies at fatcatstrategies.com or 919-341-4190.
Audio only version of the podcast here.
Podcast Transcript
Intro: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let’s get started.
Meredith: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors. I’m Meredith Medlin.
Caitlin: And I’m Caitlin Noble. This is the show brought to you by Fat Cat Strategies, where we work with replacement contractors on roofing, windows, siding, gutters, doors, baths, and more all over the country.
Meredith: And today, we are talking about reviews, and I want to be really clear about what this episode is not, because I think a lot of people hear the word reviews, and their brain immediately goes to Google Business Profile setup.
Caitlin: Right, and we did a whole 700 episodes Google Business Profile. If you want the mechanics, how to claim it, how to fill it out, and how to keep your information consistent, go back and listen to those. It is in the feed.
Meredith: Yeah, so that is not what today is. Today, we’re treating reviews as a revenue
Caitlin: Ooh, ooh
Meredith: not an SEO conversion.
Caitlin: Conversation
Meredith: conversation, not an SEO conversation. We are going to have a conversation.
Caitlin: It would be an SEO conversion.
Meredith: It would be if they filled
Caitlin: And paid
Meredith: and paid, yes. But today we are gonna talk about the specific moments where a homeowner checks up on you, and how those moments show up in numbers that you already track in your CRM. We’re talking set rate, cancel prior to issue, and close rate.
Caitlin: Ooh, I love those words. And we built a framework for it because we kept seeing the same pattern with clients. We are calling it the proof path.
Meredith: All right, so
Caitlin: love how we just name things
Meredith: we, I
Caitlin: And then
Meredith: copyright,
Caitlin: Yeah
Meredith: whatever it is that we wanna call it.
Caitlin: The proof path.
Meredith: The proof path by Fat Cat Strategies. Sorry before we get into the framework, though, I want to talk about why owners are so fixated on ranking in the first place because I don’t think it’s irrational. I think
Caitlin: at all
Meredith: real reason for it.
Caitlin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is the number one… It is the one number and the number one number that can check yourself. Man, when we record these, it doesn’t matter. It
Meredith: doesn’t
Caitlin: it can be the first thing in the morning. It can be in the middle of the afternoon.
Meredith: Me make words good.
Caitlin: Hard, talking hard, but that is the whole reason, that it is the number one reason that you check yourself.
Meredith: Yeah. It’s easy. You
Caitlin: We’re not starting
Meredith: ahead and look it up yourself.
Caitlin: We’re just gonna keep rolling with it.
Meredith: So you can’t audit your own PPC account at 7:00 in the morning from your truck. You can’t check your own technical SEO, but you can type your company name into Google, or type bath remodel plus your city name and see where you land. So it feels like a scoreboard for you.
Caitlin: Yes, 100%, and I’ve definitely had clients, prospects email
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlin: at 7:00 in the morning and say, “Hey, I’m Googling.”
Meredith: Yeah. Am I showing up? Why am I not showing up?
Caitlin: Exactly. But what I want to say, the thing we have we always say here, because it matters, in all seriousness, that check is not reliable. What you see depends on the exact words you typed, the device you were holding, whether you were signed in, and where you were physically standing or sitting when you searched it. Two people in the same office can search the same term and get different results. Say it louder.
Meredith: Yeah. I’ve had an owner call me genuinely upset because he dropped off the map pack, and it turned out he was searching from a job site 40 minutes outside of his regular service area.
Caitlin: That’s the best case scenario.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlin: Which is exactly what Google is supposed to do, but it feels like a betrayal in the moment.
Meredith: Yeah, so here’s the framework. Think about it like this. Rank is an input. It is upstream. It is one of many things that affects whether a homeowner ever lays eyes on your name, but it is not the output. The output is issued appointments. It’s signed contracts.
Caitlin: Mm.
Meredith: And the output at the end of the day is revenue.
Caitlin: Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. All right, and the gap between those two things, between showing up in a search result and money in the bank, is enormous. There are a bunch of decisions that the homeowner makes in that gap, and they make almost all of them without ever talking to you.
Meredith: That really is the point today, is what is the homeowner actually evaluating in that gap? Because if we can name those moments, we can do something about them.
Caitlin: Mm. So here is the proof path. Four checkpoints, four separate times a homeowner independently verifies you before you get paid.
Meredith: Checkpoint one is the map pack glance. I’m saying map pack. That’s hard to say back and, back to back. Map
Caitlin: glad you are.
Meredith: They are scanning results, deciding who is even worth clicking on.
Caitlin: Checkpoint two, the pre-call scan. They have narrowed it down, and now they are reading about you before they dial or fill out your form.
Meredith: Checkpoint three is the confirmation gut check. They already booked an appointment. Now they have a few days to sit with that decision, and some of them go back and search you again.
Caitlin: I’ve seen it happen.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlin: And checkpoint four, the kitchen table search. Your rep is in the living room doing the presentation, and somebody in that house is on their phone looking you up while he talks.
Meredith: So these four checkpoints are four audits, and here is the line that I want everybody listening to remember.
Caitlin: Not me singing hallelujah?
Meredith: You can if you want.
Caitlin: Okay.
Meredith: But you get audited four times, and SEO only helps you with the first one.
Caitlin: Mm. Yes, that is it. That is the whole episode. Reviews are the thing that shows up at all four checkpoints. Your ranking shows up at one.
Meredith: All right, so let’s take these one at a time. So we’ll start with checkpoint one, homeowner searches. Results come up, and they are deciding who is gonna get a click.
Caitlin: Picture what is actually on that screen: company name, a star rating, a number of reviews in parentheses, maybe a category, and a phone button. That is close to all of it.
Meredith: There’s no field for your ranking there. There’s no badge that says, “This company clearly invested in SEO.”
Caitlin: Mm. And this is where I think a lot of contractors lose money without ever knowing it. We have seen plenty of situations where a company sitting in position three with a strong star average and a big pile of reviews gets more clicks than the company in position one with a much thinner profile. I wanna be careful here. That is what we observe with clients. It is not a study, I am quoting you. But it happens often enough that we look for it now.
Meredith: Yeah, the review count is doing something specific in the homeowner’s head, too. It’s a size signal, honestly.
Caitlin: Say more about that.
Meredith: So if I’m a homeowner and I see a roofing company with a handful of reviews, I’m not gonna think consciously about it, like, “Oh, this company must be small.” I think, “Okay, cool,” and I move on. But if I see one with hundreds or over a thousand reviews, I am… subconsciously, my brain is also gonna read
Caitlin: Mm
Meredith: as an established business. It’s been around, it’s done a lot of work, and it’s probably not going to disappear before my warranty ends.
Caitlin: That’s good point.
Meredith: You know?
Caitlin: Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes, which for our clients is a real advantage they are often not using. If you are doing 30 to 80 jobs a month, that’s fabulous, you have the raw material for a very large review base. You are just not collecting it.
Meredith: And then there’s recency, which is one that people forget entirely all the time, because reviews feel like an asset. You earned them and they’re banked.
Caitlin: Except they are time-stamped.
Meredith: Right. If your most recent review is from 18 months
Caitlin: Mm
Meredith: that profile does not read as established. It reads as a company that used to be busy, something happened there. That’s not the impression that you wanna make on somebody who’s about to spend, I don’t know, thousands, $20,000, whatever it on their project with you.
Caitlin: Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. So a steady drip of new reviews says, “This is a going concern,” and that matters more than the exact star average, in my opinion.
Meredith: All right.
Caitlin: Does that make sense?
Meredith: I think so. It was your opinion.
Caitlin: I don’t know. As I was saying it, it didn’t make sense. thank you
Meredith: moral of that story
Caitlin: Thank you
Meredith: a drip, a steady drip of reviews more recently is better
Caitlin: Thank you
Meredith: a ton of reviews from eight months ago.
Caitlin: Yes. Correct.
Meredith: Number two.
Caitlin: Thank you.
Meredith: Okay, so checkpoint number two, they clicked and now they’re reading.
Caitlin: Mm, and they usually have you open in a tab, and two of your competitors in the others. This is a comparison, not a solo evaluation.
Meredith: Okay, so what do you think they read first?
Caitlin: The bad ones, every time. That’s so fun.
Meredith: Every single time. People sort for the one-star reviews on purpose. I know I do as well. That’s not cynicism, it’s just how people shop for anything, especially if it’s expensive.
Caitlin: Especially.
Meredith: The five-star reviews are pleasant background noise, and it’s some validation, but the one-star review is the one that tells them, “Here’s what your risk is,” and they also get to see, how did the company handle it?
Caitlin: I completely agree, and this is the part I wish more owners understood. They are not really reading the complaint. Oh, Meredith, you just said it.
Meredith: Oops.
Caitlin: They are reading your response to the complaint, but we’ll say it again.
Meredith: Yeah, and this is free advertising to every future reader forever.
Caitlin: Respond to those angry, crazy people.
Meredith: Exactly. It’s… The response is yes, it’s for the angry customer, but honestly, for the future leads that could be coming your
Caitlin: Yes
Meredith: customers, it’s for them. The response is for the two to, I mean, I don’t know, hundreds of people that are gonna be reading reviews later to decide whether to go with you or not. How you responded to that negative review is for them.
Caitlin: An unanswered one-star review is the loudest thing on your profile. I wish you could see, my hands are up in the air.
Meredith: She’s taking us to church.
Caitlin: It reads as either you did not care or you had nothing to say for yourself.
Meredith: Yeah, so let us talk about tone, because we see this go wrong constantly. Owners get one of two ways when it comes to these negative reviews. They either go silent or
Caitlin: Battle
Meredith: pull out the weapons, battle ready, and they go to war.
Caitlin: We have talked about this in many episodes. I know I said at the top we’ve done a bunch of episodes on Google business profile. I’m gonna keep saying it because y’all, please don’t go to war. Those are so painful. You get a two-paragraph rebuttal with dates and a contract number and an explanation of why the customer was actually wrong.
Meredith: And you’re usually right, and that’s the tragedy of it, because the owner is factually correct in their response, but it doesn’t
Caitlin: Mm-mm
Meredith: because the homeowner reading it six months down the road doesn’t see a company that was wronged. They see a company that just wants to argue with their customers.
Caitlin: 100%. So my rule is respond the way you would talk to that person standing in their driveway. Short, acknowledge it, say what you would like to do about it, give a name and a way to reach you directly, then stop.
Meredith: Because the goal here is not to win the argument. The goal is for the next reader of the review to think, “Okay, well, if something goes sideways, these people are gonna pick up the phone, and they’re gonna take the time to make it better.”
Caitlin: Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Checkpoint three, and Meredith, I think this is the one nobody has thought about.
Meredith: Yeah, this is the one that I feel like we get the most pushback on when we bring it up, and then about a week later, somebody back and says, “Oh, no.”
Caitlin: So set it up, sis.
Meredith: Okay, here’s the situation: your call center did their Homeowner called in on a Tuesday, appointment is set for Saturday morning. Great. Everything feels good, right?
Caitlin: Right. But now the homeowner has four days.
Meredith: Four days
Caitlin: Ugh
Meredith: think about the fact that they just agreed
Caitlin: By heaven
Meredith: a stranger into their house for two hours to sell them something that costs as much as a car. And some percentage of those homeowners are gonna go back and search your name again, dig deeper. They’re not doing it to find you. They already found you. They’re doing it to reassure themselves.
Caitlin: Pause. God’s honest truth, I was just reviewing in my free spare time So, all of the free and spare time that I have, I was reviewing some of recent GBP calls for one of our newer clients, just to check in to see how things were going. And I swear to you, they had two calls of people who had booked appointments just calling to confirm the appointment time.
Meredith: Yep.
Caitlin: So, like, literally this is what people are sitting around. They’re stewing, they’re thinking. They’re excited. They’re nervous.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlin: So, yes, they want that reassurance. So if what they find is a thin profile or a nasty review, “Nobody answered,” they do not usually call and cancel because of the review. They call and say something came up.
Meredith: Yikes.
Caitlin: Mm-hmm
Meredith: that’s gonna land in your CRM as a cancel prior to issue, and you’re not gonna have any idea why they actually canceled.
Caitlin: This is why I love this checkpoint, because cancel prior to issue is a number our listeners already track. They look at it. I know our agency looks at it. They have a feel for whether it is high or low this month. They just have never connected to it to their reputation.
Meredith: And the fix here is not is not expensive. It’s just a script change. Your call center’s already making the confirmation call. If they’re not, they definitely should.
Caitlin: Please.
Meredith: And they are already sending a confirmation text.
Caitlin: I’m almost tempted to be like, “Send a countdown confirmation text.”
Meredith: Yeah. Send
Caitlin: “We’re gonna see you in-“
Meredith: minus one
Caitlin: Yeah Yeah
Meredith: come to your house.
Caitlin: Betty Jo, who called the an anonymous company that I was checking in on. I was like, sweet angel, she’s so excited.
Meredith: Oh.
Caitlin: So put your reviews in it.
Meredith: line in the confirmation call, something like, “And while you’re waiting, feel free to take a look at what your neighbors have said about
Caitlin: Yeah
Meredith: with us.” Then the confirmation text carries that link.
Caitlin: We do this via email as well
Meredith: Yes
Caitlin: a lot of our clients, ’cause I get annoyed by text sometimes, but I like an email at the end of the day that I can go back to.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlin: Yeah, but that’s just me, and I’m…
Meredith: You’re you.
Caitlin: I’m me.
Meredith: You’re you, baby.
Caitlin: Feel free to disagree with me. You are not stopping them from searching. You cannot stop them. You are just making sure that when they look, they look at what you want to see, want them to see instead of whatever they stumble into.
Meredith: And let’s walk through an example, and I wanna say this clearly. This is a made-up company, not a client. Nothing here is real. It’s just an example. We’re gonna call them Copper Line Bath, I am using them to just illustrate a pattern that we’ve seen before.
Caitlin: Okay, cute. Copper Line Bath, very sweet name.
Meredith: Got it.
Caitlin: Got it. Fake
Meredith: this fake company, Copper Line they’re doing just fine on lead volume. Their set rate is healthy, but their cancel prior to issue number is bugging the owner. He assumes it’s a call center problem, and he starts thinking about, “Okay, do I need to retrain my call center? What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
Caitlin: Which is the natural conclusion.
Meredith: It is, but before he does that, he pulls up his own profile the way that a homeowner would see it, and there are three unanswered complaints sitting right at the top from
Caitlin: Yikes
Meredith: last few months. So instead of retraining the call center, he answers all three of those unanswered reviews, and he adds one line to the confirmation script pointing people at their reviews.
Caitlin: And in this fictional example, the cancel number improves.
Meredith: Bingo. So in this that is what happens.
Caitlin: If we haven’t emphasized this enough.
Meredith: We’re gonna take it home with this one.
Caitlin: Yeah.
Meredith: And again, this point is not a specific figure. The point is he was about to spend money and time trying to
Caitlin: The wrong problem
Meredith: the wrong problem.
Caitlin: Totally.
Meredith: was not the, the call center handling the calls incorrectly. He was just looking at the wrong place when he should have been looking at, okay, after somebody called the call center, made an appointment, what do they do after? They’re gonna go check out reviews and try to reassure themselves.
Caitlin: Yeah. So I think that’s a fantastic point. The checkpoint number four, I really like this one. I know we said the other one you may not think about, but I think this is a very valid one as well. The rep is in the house.
Meredith: The call is coming from inside the house.
Caitlin: The call is coming from inside the house.
Meredith: And so this presentation runs with your rep in the house, what, I mean, it depends on your company, 90 minutes, two hours. You know, it just, I mean, it varies, but they’re in there for a while.
Caitlin: Yeah, so in that range, yes.
Meredith: So think about who’s in that room. Usually, it’s both homeowners because your call center made sure when they confirmed, and then one of them is gonna be engaged with the rep, watching the demo, handling the sample, you know. They’re probably the
Caitlin: God, I’m kinda disagreeing with this because if John Noble was sitting there, I love you John Noble, my husband, and he was on his
Meredith: Oh, Jimmy’s getting it slapped out of his hand.
Caitlin: But so, okay, so but in this scenario, like, I’m sitting there. I’m touching the HardiePlank siding.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlin: Like, rubbing my face against it,
Meredith: Why else, what, what else would siding?
Caitlin: Yeah, exactly. Like, okay, this is lovely. No woodpecker’s gonna get through this.
Meredith: Right.
Caitlin: And then John sitting there on his phone?
Meredith: I mean, I can actually see, like, I
Caitlin: Like, doing math?
Meredith: I’m the introvert of the conversation when it comes to me and my husband.
Caitlin: Jimmy would be rubbing his head.
Meredith: Jimmy would be touching the talking to the rep probably too much.
Caitlin: Way too much.
Meredith: But I would be like, “Okay, I’m gonna be fact-checking what these people are saying.”
Caitlin: Okay, fair, fine.
Meredith: Let me jump on my phone.
Caitlin: Fine
Meredith: takes a village. We’re all different.
Caitlin: Fine.
Meredith: But somebody in this two-leg appointment could be on their phone, and they’re not just scrolling social media. They’re searching your company name plus the word complaints or BBB or scam. Like, I will 100% do that when I get
Caitlin: Fair
Meredith: about things.
Caitlin: Totally fair.
Meredith: But, like, I also wanna see what is the worst-case scenario if this is the decision I make. I wanna see examples.
Caitlin: Totally, totally, totally fair, and that’s especially if you’re about to sign a contract.
Meredith: Yeah, and this is what people do when they’re about to sign. You know, I’m just telling you, we’re all human beings, and if there’s a stranger in my house trying to ask me for thousands of dollars for a
Caitlin: Mm
Meredith: I’m gonna wanna check.
Caitlin: Totally, 100%, and here is why this checkpoint is so brutal. Your rep never finds out.
Meredith: Exactly, because what happens is the spouse gets quiet, AKA me in the situation, and then at the end, the answer is, “You know, we wanna think about it” because I probably pulled Jimmy’s shirt and was like, “Hey,
Caitlin: Yeah
Meredith: not commit right now.”
Caitlin: Yeah. Or, like, John, like, stomped on my foot under the table.
Meredith: Or that.
Caitlin: Yeah, violent.
Meredith: Or that.
Caitlin: He doesn’t actually do that.
Meredith: No.
Caitlin: But that gets logged as a demo, no sell. And when the rep debriefs on Monday, what does he say the objection was?
Meredith: He’s gonna say price. It’s always gonna be price because that’s the only objection anybody will say out loud.
Caitlin: Always. And so you have a sales manager working on a price objection, handling, running role-plays or financing, when the actual problem happened on a phone in the chair next to, like, just right
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlin: front of him.
Meredith: So what are you gonna do about it? You can’t stop them from searching.
Caitlin: You can’t. I mean, I guess you could, like…
Meredith: Put
Caitlin: Put phones in a box
Meredith: wifi blocker around the… Yeah.
Caitlin: Okay, sorry, y’all. No, in all honesty, you get in front of it. Give your rep something. And I absolutely agree with this. We have built sales decks for many, many, many clients and we’ve created leave-behinds for many, many clients. You have to put your reviews in that sales deck, in that leave behind, in your proposal.
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlin: Something that puts, like, digitally, your reviews are constantly in front of them. So it’s, it’s, they’re not having to go search for it. Your BBE rating, you name it.
Meredith: And so if you have that, your rep can go ahead and name that out loud, something like, “Hey, while we’re going through this, feel free to look us up. Here’s the QR code where you can go actually check out our reviews.” That’s gonna do two things. It handles the search on your terms while you’re there and you’re you’re the one bringing it up. You don’t have anything to hide. And, you know, it gives you the opportunity to say your piece and make sure they know that you’re a professional who isn’t
Caitlin: Love it
Meredith: get angry and go to battle with somebody over the reviews on your GBP,
Caitlin: Love it. it
Meredith: it’s win-win.
Caitlin: I love it. I think that’s a good point.
Meredith: All right, so all four checkpoints, they all run on the same fuel. Let us talk about actually getting reviews because we’ve just talked a bunch about reviews, but most contractors are wildly under-collecting reviews relative to how many jobs they actually do.
Caitlin: First question, who ask?
Meredith: The installer on the last day or at the walkthrough.
Caitlin: Not at the office three weeks later.
Meredith: Yeah, not at the office three weeks later. By then, the customer has moved on emotionally, and it just feels like homework. The installer at the walkthrough is standing in the bathroom that looks brand new. The customer is genuinely happy, and that customer would do almost anything to say thank you in that moment, so why not ask now?
Caitlin: That is the peak. That is when you have to ask. It’s the easiest ask.
Meredith: Yeah, and it should be one sentence memorized that every crew uses, not a policy document. Simple, honest, casual sentence.
Caitlin: Okay, so where do you send them?
Meredith: So prioritize where your buyers actually look. For most of our clients, that means Google first.
Caitlin: Mm.
Meredith: But that’s because that’s where the map pack glance and the pre-call scan are happening. Then whatever secondary platform matters the most in your particular market.
Caitlin: Definitely. That could be Nextdoor, or recently we’ve seen, gosh
Meredith: Yelp
Caitlin: Yelp.
Meredith: House.
Caitlin: Yeah, ugh.
Meredith: Mm-hmm.
Caitlin: okay, anyways, do not spread yourself across eight platforms and end up with six reviews on each.
Meredith: Right, and on volume versus perfection, I will say that something surprises people when we talk about this, and a perfect 5.0 average with 12 reviews looks fake.
Caitlin: Oh, completely.
Meredith: It just does.
Caitlin: It absolutely, but a 4.7 with real, real maybe hundreds of
Meredith: Yeah
Caitlin: that’s fabulous.
Meredith: Yeah, ’cause a homeowner knows that that company’s doing a good volume of work, and things are gonna go wrong sometimes. You know, you can’t please everybody. We’re all humans, and the imperfection of it is actually what makes it believable to everybody.
Caitlin: 100%. So one warning before we move on, and this one is serious. Do not gate reviews. That’s another thing we continue to bring up whenever we talk about GBP.
Meredith: Okay, so what does that mean?
Caitlin: Gating is when you survey the when you survey the customer first, and only the happy ones get routed to the public review site while the unhappy ones get sent to a private feedback forum. Vendors sell this, I see it all the time, and it’s absolutely against the platform policy.
Meredith: Yeah, and the penalty does not land on the vendor that sold it to you.
Caitlin: It lands on you, y’all.
Meredith: Yeah.
Caitlin: You are in trouble, which brings us to today’s horror story.
Meredith: Ooh, I’m excited ’cause it’s almost Halloween. It’s spooky season.
Caitlin: Spooky.
Meredith: Same disclaimer with today’s agency horror story. It’s a fictional composite. I don’t know how many times have to say,
Caitlin: It’s… but it’s a cute little fake name.
Meredith: It’s a fake name.
Caitlin: I love these names today. Copper Line,
Meredith: Tidewater Exteriors.
Caitlin: Oh, that’s fun, so take it away.
Meredith: Mm-hmm. So Tidewater is a siding and gutter company. They’ve got good operation. They’re growing. They hire a vendor who pitches them on reputation management, which sounds great. They do the handoff. The vendor handles everything.
Caitlin: Which is exactly the pitch that should make you ask one more question.
Meredith: It is, but the owner’s busy, and reviews start coming in, and their average star rating goes up, and for a while, everybody’s happy. What the owner doesn’t know is that that vendor has actually set up a gate. Every customer gets a survey. Happy customers get routed to Google. Unhappy customers get quietly routed to a a private form that lands in a folder that really nobody at the company is reading.
Caitlin: Exactly, so the profile looks flawless.
Meredith: But it’s suspiciously flawless, spooky flawless, if you will.
Caitlin: Mm-hmm.
Meredith: And eventually, the pattern gets flagged, and a large chunk of those reviews are removed from the profile.
Caitlin: When?
Meredith: Well unfortunately, right before their busy season, of course.
Caitlin: Well, of course, ’cause Google is the worst. And you cannot rebuild any of that within a month.
Meredith: That is the whole lesson. Years of real customer goodwill can be gone because somebody took a shortcut, and here is the part that stings, and it’s that those unhappy customers were never never handled either. Nobody read where those negative reviews went, so they had complaints that never got to anybody at the company to handle, and no reviews to show for the ones that went well either ’cause they got removed.
Caitlin: Worst of both.
Meredith: So your review profile is an asset. You cannot quickly buy it, and you have to treat it like an asset.
Caitlin: Mm, completely agree. Horror story concluded. All right, y’all, tomorrow morning action items or whenever you get a second action items, grab a pen.
Meredith: right.
Caitlin: Five things. Number one.
Meredith: Number one, pull your review count and your star average, then pull the same two numbers for your three closest competitors. Put all six of those on one page. And that page is what the homeowner sees. And most owners have never actually looked at it that way, so give yourself a new vantage point.
Caitlin: Mm. Number two, read every review under four stars from the last 12 months, and respond to any that do not have a response. Short, human, and signed by a real person.
Meredith: Also, like, respond to any unresponded to reviews.
Caitlin: Just please respond.
Meredith: Yeah. Number three, add one line to your appointment confirmation script that points people
Caitlin: love
Meredith: your reviews, and get the link into your confirmation text or email as well.
Caitlin: I love that. I even on, like, thank you pages will have, like, will have a link to the
Meredith: Mm-hmm
Caitlin: after somebody submits a form. Okay, number four, write one sentence for your installers to use at the final walkthrough. One sentence. And decide today who owns the follow-up if the customer says yes but does not do it.
Meredith: All right, number five, last one, go look at your cancel prior to issue rate right
Caitlin: Mm-hmm
Meredith: and write it down. That is your baseline. Check it again in 90 days after you’ve done the other things that we just talked about, and see what happens.
Caitlin: Fabulous. Okay, so the proof path. Four checkpoints. The map pack glance, the pre-call scan.
Meredith: Glad it’s you.
Caitlin: Scan. Map pack glance, pre-call scan, the confirmation gut check, and the kitchen table search.
Meredith: And SEO only helps you with that first one. Reviews are working at all four of them.
Caitlin: Rankings put you in the room. Reviews get you in the signature.
Meredith: Bing, bang, boom. If you want help figuring out where your reputation is quietly costing you appointments, we would love to talk.
Caitlin: Would love.
Meredith: Go to fatcatstrategies.com or give us a call. Our phone number’s on the website. It’s on our Google business profile. You can look us up.
Caitlin: Fat Cat’s one word, by the way.
Meredith: Fat Cat well, the URL is one.
Caitlin: Well, I know, but was just letting people know, like if you were to Google Fat Cat
Meredith: Yes, Fat
Caitlin: you would still show up. Anyways, if this was useful, subscribe and send it to the owner or marketing director you know who checks every single one of their rankings in the morning.
Meredith: He knows who he is, but…
Caitlin: She does too.
Meredith: Thank you guys for listening.
Caitlin: Thanks, Have a great one.
Meredith: Bye.
Caitlin: Bye.
Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.
