VMP 303: How To Get Your Veterinary Practice Twice As Many Reviews As Your Competition

Brandon Breshears 00:00:02  Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, we have an interview all about reviews, how to get more reviews, and we're interviewing Daniel Vivarelli from Star Loop Com. The concept that he's developed with his company is really, really awesome. There's a bunch of great takeaways, and reviews are one of the things that I think you need to be focused on. If you want more clients coming in the door, if you want better quality clients. Reviews are incredibly important. They help with SEO, they help with social proof, and it's one of the things that feels kind of awkward for a lot of CSRs to ask for. And so. Com has a really unique way of getting more reviews and making it feel like the person that's giving the review is doing something that actually matters. And so I really love Daniel's concept on how he created his business, the purpose of it, and I think you're going to really love it. It's really unique. Hopefully it gives you a lot of great ideas. And he shares the secret phrase that helps you to get even more reviews than you've ever experienced.

Brandon Breshears 00:01:08  And I think it's it's really, really great. So if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. But without further ado, here's my interview with Daniel. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Daniel, can you just give us a quick, brief overview of who you are and how you got started with with what you're doing with Star Loop, and I'm sure we're going to jump into. I mean, it's very, very unique. And I'm excited to talk to you because I think that vet med could use some of the like there's a lot of features around what you do that is really cool. So can you tell us who you are and how you got started with it? Because it's super interesting.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:01:45  Yeah. You bet. I mean, thanks for having me. My name is Daniel and I'm the founder of Star Loop Com. We created software that helps local businesses, including veterinarians, to build strong online reputations By getting more five star reviews, and the way that we help them get maximum reviews is actually by planting a tree.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:02:05  So back in 2016, I pioneered this concept of one tree planted per review, and that was a way to apply some tasteful, friendly pressure on the clients to take some time out of their day and actually say some good things about the veterinarian. And, yeah, so we've been at it since 2016. So far, we've managed to win over 100,005 star reviews for our clients and plant over 100,000 trees.

Brandon Breshears 00:02:35  Amazing. So there's a lot of things I like about it, but tell me just a brief overview of how we'll work and then I mean how it works. And then we'll kind of jump into some of the the principles around it. And then I have some ideas too, that I wanted to talk about, because there's a few industries where like within niche within the, the veterinary industry where it's hard to ask for reviews. And so I think this is actually a really good way to kind of get get over that. So I'll tell you I'll tell you about that in just a second for sure.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:03:01  For sure. So to answer how it works, I think it's worth exploring why it's valuable and the challenges. So the reviews these days, we live in a world where basically more reviews, beats, less reviews. And in a way, there's a five star gold rush going on from every veterinarian who's paying attention to the marketplace, which is, hey, if I have a higher rating and significantly more reviews then the veterinarian down the road, well then chances are I'm going to get the call first. The thing is, though, is that even though that opportunity is there, it's challenging to get the reviews because nobody wakes up excited wanting to write a review for their local veterinary clinic. You know, we're all what I like to call busy, lazy people as adults. You know, from the time we wake up in the morning, we're busy taking care of our own priorities. And at some point in the evening, we switched our lazy mode because it's time to chill out. We've had a busy day, so there's really no opportune moment to ask a client for a review if they're in busy mode.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:04:00  They're going to be like, leave me alone. I'm busy. If I try to engage them when they're in lazy mode, they're going to leave me alone. I had a busy day. I'm trying to watch oranges, the New Black or whatever, so there's a massive opportunity there. But that's the challenge to basically break through the sort of apathy and the low priority that people think about. Writing reviews. We essentially developed a automated system that allows the veterinarians to basically serve their community as best as they possibly can, and when they're done, to automatically reach out to that client and engage them using some better language. And we can talk about the scripts that we use a little bit later. If you like to invoke the law of reciprocity with the tree planting, basically saying, hey, for every review we get, a tree gets planted, and then to use the tech to really just start to take care of some of that boring grunt work and make sure the important but boring things get taken care of, such as reminders going out at the right time.

Brandon Breshears 00:04:59  Definitely. I think that's just incredibly smart for a few reasons. first off, most people just are too busy and your average client, especially ones that have, you know, jobs and families and things like that, you're going to get like probably two extremes are going to be your most common reviews, will be your people so irate at you that they feel like they want to take action, which is not one like that's a serious motivator. But like if if you're listening to this, thinking about a bad experience that you had, like you feel highly motivated to let other people know. So that's one end. But if you think about a good experience that you had. Chances are you didn't leave a review for it just because it's it's not on your radar. You're like, you know, expressing appreciation at the time of receiving the service. But it's super rare to be like the person who's going to just go over and above to say, you know, I'm going to give everybody who I get great experience with in five star review.

Brandon Breshears 00:05:59  And so I think.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:06:02  That's a good point. That's a really good point that people who have an axe to grind are the ones who are most naturally motivated to actually leave. What is going to be a negative review because some expectation wasn't met. And the people who are mostly satisfied, which is the middle of the bell curve, right? They're the people that are like, they would gladly leave a five star review if they just were engaged the right way and had a good reason to do so. But most of the time they're not engaged in the right way, they're not provided a good reason to do so. And so that good feeling that they have for the service that they just got from the veterinarian and their team, they just something that stays within them and they move on with their day. And unfortunately, the clinic misses out on another opportunity to basically have somebody singing their praises for them online in the form of another five star rating.

Brandon Breshears 00:06:53  Yeah, absolutely. And, the other thing too. So not only like better social proof, but it's very, very important for your ranking to not only have a high number of reviews, but also consistency of reviews.

Brandon Breshears 00:07:06  So if you got like 101 month and then you never got them again, that's also not as strong as if you're getting like 15 to 20 per month, you know, every single month consistently. So that velocity has a big, big, big impact to you. Because I don't think a lot of people know that.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:07:22  Yeah. No, that's a good point. And that just shows like how long you've been in the game and the level of sophistication that you think about because you're an expert in this field, technically speaking. And that's something I think that perhaps people who are new to the subject don't appreciate, which is that consistency. Like you said, it provides velocity for boosting, you know, that Google Business profile to hopefully trigger and gain more visibility and compete for those valuable search terms. And also to like the consistency is is sort of dovetailed with recency. Right. The and the recency is valuable from a technical perspective for those same velocity reasons. But it's also the recency is important from the perspective of the humans who are now typing best veterinarian in my area.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:08:13  They got three choices under the map there. Perhaps there's no clear market leader. There's nobody who's got 2 or 3 x times reviews than anybody else. So now it's a little bit fuzzy as well. Who who should I call for my appointment for Rover? So they start digging in and when they see a veterinarian who their last review was six months ago. Doesn't carry as much weight or authority than the veterinarian who got a five star review yesterday. I like to say that us humans. Brandon, we like our reviews, like we like our baking, which is as fresh as possible.

Brandon Breshears 00:08:51  Absolutely. And that also has big implications too, because like a lot of the practices are being purchased by corporate groups and there's a lot of changing of ownership and things like that. And so I see a lot of opportunity for practices that when when somebody goes in down the road and it's a corporate group and they buy it, and then you're hearing that the standard of care went down, like we were talking about Seth Godin because he was on podcast, and he was actually saying that his practice that he took his dog to his rescue dog was purchased by a corporate.

Brandon Breshears 00:09:22  And then all of the cool things that he liked about it had gone away, because now it was a VCA hospital. and not to say that VCA is not good, but it was not the same private practice, that he loved. And so I think if people especially are trying to make a decision from switching vets, which is pretty common, they'll look to for more recency just because they're like, you know, I just it was great. And now I want something new. So they're looking for that recency there as well.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:09:52  That's true. And if I remember correctly part of that interview Seth was also talking about that from the perspective of not having to compete on price. Right.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:00  Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. So if you're if you're trying to not commoditized yourself, having a unique selling proposition of like, everybody loves us, that's a really good, unique selling proposition because it's social proof. And you can see that you're, you know, three times more than the average practice. There's there's actually a practice group that's called veg.

Brandon Breshears 00:10:22  And I always talk about them with my clients because, anytime they open a new practice, they go out and they get hundreds of reviews and I don't know what their system is for it, but I would love to talk to them. If anybody is doing marketing for veg and listening, then I would love to talk to you because they have something figured out. But you can see how much market share they're able to take just because they are quickly able to acquire a bunch of reviews, and then they keep them coming in. And that's for a segment that's pretty difficult to get good reviews because it's emergency. And so it's never usually a good situation. It's also very expensive. And so it's definitely part of their business plan. They have a very intentional way of getting hundreds of reviews within like 30 days of opening, which is pretty amazing.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:11:10  Wow. Okay.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:11  That's I don't know how they do it, by the way.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:12  It's a mystery, but.

Brandon Breshears 00:11:13  They haven't figured out.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:11:15  Yeah. Look, I don't know the company, but sometimes that kind of review acquisition speed can be a little bit suspicious.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:11:22  And, the thing is to, like, looking under the hood with certain software can reveal basically what the company's been up to. for sure. I'm not saying that these guys are up to no good, but, there is definitely a huge black market for, fake online reviews, AI generated reviews. Yeah, and the thing that I think is perhaps not top of mind for some business owners, and this is no judgment here. I understand how valuable the reviews are and that they can make or break a business. And so there's a very high demand for them, which is why there is an actual black market for five star reviews, and that roughly between 10 to 20% of the reviews that we see on any given platform are fake. But I think the thing that is, perhaps not well known amongst business owners who are willing to go to the dark side is that in August of last year, the FTC passed a law making fake reviews illegal and subject to pretty heavy fines. Something like 45 to $50,000 fine per fake reviews adds up to a lot of financial and legal liability for folks that are playing at loose with their online reputation.

Brandon Breshears 00:12:43  Definitely. And there's other things too. And I would bet that they're getting I'm I'm pretty sure because I go through and I look at the reviews of the people that have done it and they they seem like they're all real people, which is good. so I don't think they're buying fake reviews, but I do think they're probably doing something that's not along the terms of service, for sure. Like here's a discount if.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:04  You give kind.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:13:05  Of.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:05  Incentive of it. Yeah. Yeah sure. Something like that.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:08  But yeah super common.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:11  But you know by the way and.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:13  I didn't I don't know for sure I have no idea what they're doing, but they're super effective and it's pretty remarkable.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:13:21  and, and I'll bookend it by saying this to that. Yeah. By all means. Like, there are teams out there who, like us, have drilled into what it actually takes to solve this problem of engagement and conversion. For all we know, these guys have just figured out a really smart strategy that is completely above board to convert at a level that's, you know, way above average.

Brandon Breshears 00:13:46  Yeah, totally. Well, and I think that it has long term impact and value too, because, I mean Google do you and I didn't, research this, but just started work with other platforms or just particularly Google.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:14:03  Right. So good question. We when we built Star Loop, went through the process of applying for and getting approved for basically API access through Google Places and Facebook as well. So we integrate officially, we're not doing any kind of, you know, scraping or like, trying to fake integration, you know, which is common in our, in our field.

Brandon Breshears 00:14:26  Super.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:14:27  Actually handshaking with those two pieces of software, in the most genuine and earnest way possible. so for the time being, Star Loop is working with both Google and Facebook. We're looking to add other third party sites in the future. I think, though, that for us, what we find over and over again is there's very few of our our members here at Star Loop who are like, we want to get Facebook recommendations.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:14:53  If they do. They basically want to do it as a little bit of window dressing, you know, just to get a bit of activity there. But really, the strategic focus is maximum five star reviews on Google with the strategic goal of establishing market leadership, which is a minimum of 2 to 3 x more reviews than your next closest competitor. Right? So if you're if the John down the road has 300 reviews and the goal should be to have at least 900, because at that point you're the market leader in the clear choice for sure. That's what most clinics use us for, is to establish that kind of market leadership so that they can attract more clients and grow revenue.

Brandon Breshears 00:15:33  That totally makes sense. The reason I was asking is I think with with all of the different things that are coming out, especially with AI. SEO is changing very quickly. And so a lot of the tactics and tools that are out there for SEO in particular are just not I don't think they have a long term shelf life, but, you know, GPT and grok and like, you know, all of the AI tools that are out there, they don't have a review element built into it.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:03  And I think it'd be very difficult for it to manage it. And you can see, too, that it can use the internet like a person. And so it can go out and look for Google reviews and that that is a component of how it recommends local businesses to like. We know that for sure.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:16  And so I think that, yeah, this.

Brandon Breshears 00:16:18  Has a really long term benefit with even the AI changes that are coming.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:16:23  For real. Can we unpack that a little bit?

Brandon Breshears 00:16:25  Because I think.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:16:26  Like one of the most exciting opportunities actually, for clinics who are not only paying attention to consumer behavior, which is more than 80% of people will seek out reviews before they pick up the phone to call the veterinary clinic, but also that we're in the beginning of a technological like, once in a lifetime technological revolution with AI. And I think to when we think about, like the search habits of human beings, you know, traditionally we've searched with our fingers, we type and then we get the results with our with our eyeballs.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:16:57  We're reading those results, and more and more people are searching with their voice. Hey, Siri, hey Google, find me the best veterinarian in town and then getting the results with their ears. So I think that's a really fundamental shift in the way that we search for stuff also too, though, and I think this is the part that's a massive opportunity for veterinarians that are paying attention, is that when we ask AI, which is essentially a computer or an algorithm to quantify best, it has to try to do that somehow. And quantifying something is typically numeric, right.

Brandon Breshears 00:17:32  Yeah.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:17:33  So if I say find me the best veterinarian in town. If I say find me the best veterinarian in town, then the AI is going to have to head on to the web. And how is it going to quantify this? Well, it's going to do some kind of calculation between the rating and the number of reviews. It might do a very quick sentiment analysis to, to try to get a gauge of like what the reviews are saying and basically say, hey, I found you the best one.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:18:00  Would you like the others? Would you like the second best and the third best? And nobody's like, hey, find me the sixth best veterinarian in town. It's everybody's looking for the best. Best?

Brandon Breshears 00:18:12  Definitely. And, I think to the the Google business listings, there's like, actual utility to that. And so I don't think that these AI tools have anything kind of similar because you can see physically where it is, you can actually read the reviews. So in thinking through the types of things that people are going to continue using. Like at some point they'll probably get comfortable enough with ChatGPT, you know, knowing where your house is, how close it is to you, and taking all of that into consideration for you. But at the same time, if they.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:44  Go.

Brandon Breshears 00:18:45  To the Google business profile, I mean, they're going to still get a lot of value out of doing that search there. And so I think kind of weighing that, that cost benefit from the consumer standpoint of like, how much time does it take for me to search in Google versus searching in ChatGPT? I do think people are still going to Google quite a bit, just like looking for those reviews there.

Brandon Breshears 00:19:06  And the other thing too, is that the data that that we see from clients that are been very lucky to see some really sophisticated practices that have incredible tracking in place, we can see exactly where the clients are coming from, how much they're spending to acquire, and they're doing everything really well. They're doing their SEO social, they're doing like anything you can think of to try to scale client acquisition and yeah, Google My Business and Google ads. Those two things drive a huge number of new client acquisition. And so I was looking it was like 40% of new clients were coming from Google, my business, in a practice that was spending, you know, several hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in ad spend, which is crazy. and just the the value of that traffic was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if you compare it to, you know, Google ads and things. And so it's a really, really high value traffic source. I don't think it's.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:07  Going.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:07  Away with ChatGPT either.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:09  So like this is something that in the next 5 to 7 years, which is forever in the current internet, time is still going to be important, you know.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:16  And who knows what's gonna come out in.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:18  Seven years.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:18  But, you know, for at least the next five.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:20  Years, I think it's solid.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:20:22  I love that you put it that way. You know, we have a joke here at Charlotte that, you know, internet years are like double dog years. It's like one year is 14 years or whatever.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:31  Exactly.

Brandon Breshears 00:20:32  But like 100 years worth of time at least, right?

Daniel Vivarelli 00:20:36  Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's a that's a really strong point to and something that's fundamentally overlooked. Like, you know, Google for most searches you type something and they'll monetize that. Everything that's above the fault like it's PPC across the board didn't tell you. Scroll down then you're you know into the organic. And I think for local, the thing that's kind of fascinating is that for whatever reason, Google still finds it to be in their best, strategic, best interest to provide those Google business listings for free on the right hand side for a brand name search, and underneath the map for a contextual generic search.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:21:09  And that's a real opportunity like you just described for a clinic who's getting 40% of their clicks, calls, and clients. If I could put it that way from a.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:21  Free from their.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:22  Position. Yeah, we could see who which which clients were coming from there. 40% were coming from Google my business. And for practice, I'd say for most practices it's higher than that just because they're not doing social. You don't have a real SEO plan in place. And so it's primarily Google My business for practices that are just not being super proactive. I'd say it's it's much higher than that.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:21:43  For real, I think this is a like an amazing opportunity and one that's quite often overlooked as a way to significantly reduce client acquisition costs is by basically over indexing for reviews and Google My business.

Brandon Breshears 00:21:59  The other thing, too, is that if you're running like on the max placement maps is a performance max placement that you can run, and it does pull like a native organic listing. So it's going to pull your reviews.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:12  And so if it's a sponsored so instead of a three map pack, now you have a four with the ad placement. But if you have one that has two reviews and then the one right below it has, you know, 450, it's going to look unnatural. And so It's first page results. I think you're going to get better results for Max. it's, you know, highly local. So if you're if you're trying to target maybe just a little bit outside of your, your normal organic ranking areas, and you want to be showing up with ads there, which we do a lot like we'll run local Falken reports and see where we're ranking organically because we don't want to cannibalize that. But if we're trying to target outside of there, we're going to do much better. If you have more reviews too. And so.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:54  makes sense.

Brandon Breshears 00:22:55  I think I think there's just a ton of benefits around that. So, maybe, maybe we can get into how how does it work? How do you. It seems like it's really complicated.

Brandon Breshears 00:23:05  So how does Star Loop work in getting trees planted?

Daniel Vivarelli 00:23:10  Yeah, yeah for sure. So I guess, the easiest way I could do is maybe describe like the, the, like a typical client journey.

Brandon Breshears 00:23:19  And that'd be great. Yeah.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:23:21  Paint a good picture. So let's say Ronda brings her dog Rover into the clinic. She has a good appointment. And then at that point, she's basically at the receptionist. It's time to basically pay the bill. How was your appointment? It was great. Thank you very much. All right. Enjoy. Have a nice day. So the clinic can basically have their practice management software integrated with Star Loop via our API. And essentially now there's an automated workflow that says Ronda just left. Send Ronda's first name, email address, and or cell phone number to our star loop. At that point, Star Loop receives those data points, and it'll send Ronda an email and or a text messages and a text message. Sorry to engage her. And it'll say something like, hey, Ronda, Onda.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:24:22  It's Sebastian here from Happy Tails Veterinary Clinic, inviting you to leave us some online feedback, by the way. A tree gets planted for every review that we get. Now there's two magic words there. The first one is invite when we extend an invitation to somebody. It has themes of warmth, friendliness and inclusion. And the word feedback is a nice neutral word, and it's permission based too. It's kind of like saying to Rwanda, hey, how did we do? You know, we'd love your thoughts. We'd love your input. So you'll you'll notice that we didn't actually ask her for a review, which seems counterintuitive. But when we first launched Charlie Brown and I, actually there was a guy from Forbes that wanted to interview me. He was a customer service expert, and he found out that I'd taken 26 months to split test different words and phrases. So this is arguably one of the biggest takeaways that your listeners can get from this interview, which is this, this script that we split tested exhaustively.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:25:17  So I'll repeat it. Dear Rwanda, can we invite you to leave us some online feedback? A tree gets planted for every review that we get. All right, so the second part is now introducing the idea of a review. And it's also invoking the law of reciprocity. A tree gets planted and the law of reciprocity is very powerful. It's this idea that if we venture to do something nice, such as plant a tree in this case, well, then people will be far more likely to do to reciprocate and do something nice for us, such as leave an online review. And so at that point, Rwanda has been engaged. We've said the right thing at the right time. I won't get into the timing, but basically behind the software is an algorithm that's looking basically for optimal times to send out the messages and the reminders. And so we've we've used a great script to say the right thing at the right time. We've motivated her with the tree planting. And at that point she's going to be like, you know what? I did have a great experience at Happy Tails.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:26:17  I love the idea of a tree getting planted. You got me. Let's do this. And next thing you know, she's clicking through to Google. Writing a five star review.

Brandon Breshears 00:26:24  It's that is, incredibly important in the way that you phrased that, and I it might sound silly that two sentences are difficult to come up with, but like the simplicity of that, you don't have anything extra in there. And I'm sure it did take a long time. And it said it. It sounds amazing. it reminds me of I used to work at a, a loan telemarketing center, and we had this closing phrase that was just super simple. It was very similar. Not important what it was, but like, it was, it would get a yes, like 97% of the time.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:26:59  And what was the phrase? Do you remember.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:02  This?

Brandon Breshears 00:27:04  So the phrase was, so you would go through the pitch and then so the next question would be like you'd present the options and then you wouldn't ask them which one they want.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:17  But she'd say, would you like me to describe the process of moving forward and what that looks like? And that was the question. And then they would say, sure, because why wouldn't they want to know how it moves forward? And so they'd say. And I'd say, okay. By the way, which option were you leaning towards? And then they would say the option that they were leaning towards and say, great. So our next steps are and then your future pacing, what we'll do is send you this. It's really simple. It takes this much time. We take all the paper. We already collect it all the data.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:43  So, you know, like.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:44  It was really easy.

Brandon Breshears 00:27:45  But then the close rate was great.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:27:47  That's that's almost like a sophisticated version of what most parents will know. You know that when it's like bedtime, it's not, hey, when you have young ones, it's not like, hey, kids, get your jammies on. It's hey, kid. It's like, do you want to wear your red jammies or your blue jammies? It's exactly a sophisticated version of that.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:04  That's cool.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:05  Yeah, I totally see why that works. so then I think the thing, too is that in Vet med in particular, and I love the industry. The people are amazing. They're super compassionate. They're not good at sales at all. And I don't think they're going to be offended in hearing that. But anytime they ask for something, they feel like they're selling, and so they feel a lot of awkwardness around asking for reviews. And it's like.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:28  Nervous.

Brandon Breshears 00:28:29  And so they feel like they're bugging people. And anytime there's some type of an ask like the clinic is averse to doing that in general. And so asking the team to ask for reviews is difficult. And I think this also gives a mission to the team of like, hey, we're doing this thing, and if we get reviews, they plant a tree and that's positive. And so the team will be excited about it too, and it gives them something to talk about. That's not just and I wouldn't want to ruin the script that you have, but like, it'd probably be pretty easy to say the exact same thing to the client as they're leaving instead of, you know, could you leave us review, which is awkward.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:05  And you're like, you know, standing there staring at each other and.

Brandon Breshears 00:29:08  Seeing what they're going to say.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:29:10  Look, no, it's cool that you identified that. And I think I love the opportunity to unpack a little bit of that nuance, because for teams that actually have somebody at the front desk who's a little bit more extroverted and comfortable, that's exactly what we encourage them to do, which is run the script verbally. You can. It's like it's such a like we also encourage them like, you don't have to say it verbatim. It's a tight script and every single word there can justify its existence. There is no fluff, but if it feels strange, like saying the exact words as written, like just capture the spirit of the script and say what feels comfortable. And then also, I know for those of you that are watching on video, we see these kind of tabletop signs that we have or basically, you know, they can run the script and basically point to the sign or the QR code, and quite often is, a sort of physical gesture that can have an interesting kind of momentum in getting people to just go, oh, I understand what I'm being asked for.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:30:11  I love again, I love the idea of a tree getting planted. I got my phone here. I'll scan the code and write the review on this.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:17  That's awesome. Definitely. The other thing that I was thinking about is that there's a lot of categories that are kind of awkward, like an example is euthanasia. I have a lot of clients that do euthanasia, and so obviously the sequencing wouldn't be like on the way out there crying like, oh, by the way, if you leave this review, plant a tree. But it could really be tied into, you know, checking in, seeing how you're doing. I know this is a hard time. and then, like, leave us a review and we'll, like, I don't know, you could maybe think of something that would be like, here's another way to honor your pet's memory and we'll plant a tree for or, you know, something like that. but.

Brandon Breshears 00:30:53  Yeah, can I can.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:30:54  Still pack a little bit of that nuance? Absolutely too.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:30:57  Because because I think that's a really good point. One of the things that we provide in the API is the ability to have, like we call it the fuse, but it's essentially like a delay on when they want the invites to go out. So if there's sensitivity around the timing, they can actually say, well, don't send it for an hour or 6 hours or 24 hours or seven days if they want to delay it accordingly. And I think too, particularly around, so obviously losing a pet and getting a pet euthanized is for most people is going to be a pretty sad moment in their life. They're saying goodbye to a beloved friend. And I think that you what you mentioned is spot on. Like it's not just about what we say. The timing is important. So if that ask actually comes in with a tasteful amount of delay, then the whole premise of the tree planting, I think there's some real alignment with a pet who's no longer with us, who's on the other side, and then the symbolic idea of life and growth in the tree planting.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:32:02  I think those two things are actually really quite beautifully meshed together.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:07  Yeah.

Brandon Breshears 00:32:08  Definitely. And that's always been like, how do you ask? I feel like it's actually kind of inappropriate to ask for reviews after that. And so you only get the people that will typically, you know, have the really moving experience. And euthanasia is a hard one. And the people that do euthanasia are amazing. that I work with, but they just don't ever have a way to kind of get to that. That step of making the connection between helping other pets that had similar things. And then also, you know, there's just, I think a bunch of things there. But categories like that are difficult to get reviews typically. And, you know, you want to help more pet owners have a good experience versus, you know, just a bad end of life experience. And so I think especially for the good ones, it makes a big difference for sure.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:32:55  The other option that's available to the clinics too, is if they just hands down or like, no way.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:33:01  Like we're not engaging any of our clients for any reason, saying anything when it comes to euthanasia, then they can set up a filters on the POS that basically says, you know, if service performed equals euthanasia, do not pass data to strollers.

Brandon Breshears 00:33:17  That makes that makes sense. And I think for general practice, that would probably be you'd want to have a, a different, you know, if if the pet passed or, you know, things like that, you'd want it handled differently for sure. So that makes sense. And that's good to know that that can be that can be done because that is always a point of contention. The other thing, too, is that when like people are sending out emails and then the pet died and they just keep sending them specials and stuff, they get upset. But that's not with you. But we know that that happens where they're like, hey, this is insensitive. And so handling that in the right way makes a lot of sense. But because it's aligned with an A goal that is, you know, gives them status and there's, you know, altruism attached to it.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:03  It I think would lessen any mistakes that you made too. For sure.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:09  So yes.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:10  I think that's that's pretty cool. where are the trees planted? Like what? Where in the world are they planted? I think that might be something people are wondering just from a, like, out of.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:20  Curiosity.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:34:21  For sure. It's actually the most common question that we get, and I'm always delighted to answer, which is the the short answer is, Ethiopia, Madagascar and Nepal. And if anybody's interested in learning more, they can visit. Com hit the mission tab at the top of the main menu, and you can learn more about our reforestation partners and more information about the trees and where they're planted.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:45  Very cool. I actually have a client who grew up in Madagascar. and she was her family was like missionaries, and, that's pretty cool.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:54  So I.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:55  Didn't know anybody who had gone there, but she said she loved the place, and.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:58  She.

Brandon Breshears 00:34:58  Took her husband over to visit where she grew up, which was kind of crazy, but.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:02  Very cool.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:35:02  And Disney, you know, Disney made the the place even more famous with this.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:08  Series, apparently. Well.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:10  So what? What do you think? in terms of realistic kind of review goals and things, what do you think is a good review goal? Let's say, for a practice that has two doctors and maybe they see I'm trying to think of how many appointment slots they're going to be seeing hugely. Let's say they have 70 clients a week coming in their practice. What kind of amount of reviews do you like to see for a practice that's seen that kind of volume?

Daniel Vivarelli 00:35:39  All right. So some quick I if it's okay I'll answer in percentages.

Brandon Breshears 00:35:45  Yeah definitely.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:35:46  So so that it could apply to to any clinic regardless of of clients and, and doctors. So I like to think of it this way. Excuse me. The more transactional quick first the experience, the lower the clinic will convert, all right. The more consultative, warm and potentially slower the experience is, the higher they'll convert.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:36:15  And why I put those speed variables in there as a variable for the percentage of reviews that they'll get, is because human beings are strange in the fact that the more time we spend with somebody or a place, the stronger our connection becomes, you know, and that that there's no shortcut for that. I don't know what the physiology is like. You and I have been hanging out for 40 minutes here, and we're getting to know each other. But if we hang out for four hours and 40 hours and we work together side by side every day like that bond, that friendship, that connection just gets stronger over time by default. And it's not like you and I are both like setting out and saying, hey, let's make our connection stronger. It's just a natural byproduct of time spent together. So what we tend to find is that clinics that convert on the lower side are going to convert somewhere between 5 and 10%. Our average is 14%. And for clinics that really want to adopt a culture shift and say, hey, we are reputation led.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:37:22  The end goal is not a happy client. The end goal is a five star review for those clinics, the conversion rate can be up as high between 30 and 35%. And at that point, like I just feel sorry for any competitors in the area because the velocity of review acquisition at that point is just they're heading for market leadership with the rockets on Turbo Boost and the nitrous.

Brandon Breshears 00:37:47  Well, I'm even though at 5% on the low end, I mean that would be dramatically higher than most practices are getting. I think most practices, maybe some of my clients are going to be upset with me because they're like, I'm doing much better than that. But I would say the average practice is getting 1 to 10 reviews a month at most, and sometimes zero, and that unless it's bad reviews.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:12  And sure.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:13  They'll come in no problem.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:15  yeah.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:16  But the difference between even, you know, one review a week versus 5% of your clients leaving reviews. I mean, that that would be a massive shift.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:27  And I would expect, too, that most practices like they'll say that, you know, our clients really like us. We don't try to rush through exams. We're educational, collaborative, and they're really trying to perform quality medicine. And so anytime they can do something like this, I would bet that the majority of people listening to the podcast would be at the higher range of that. just because it gives, gives people a reason to take action that's just above and beyond, you know, leaving a five star review. so.

Brandon Breshears 00:38:58  Yeah.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:38:58  And we've we find that so much, Brandon, is that these teams that are waking up to genuinely serve their local community as best as they possibly can, and not because they're fishing for a five star review, just because that's been part of their DNA since day one. Yeah, but when they bolt on an effective review acquisition strategy like we teach here at Charlotte, that the results are just dynamite. It's it's just a natural byproduct of having the this good feeling that their clients have every time they've walked out of their office, but now they're being engaged, saying the right thing at the right time with the right motivator.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:39:38  It's just an amazing recipe for revenue growth, more clients and serving more of the people that they seek to serve in the way that, you know, Seth would say.

Brandon Breshears 00:39:48  Absolutely.

Brandon Breshears 00:39:49  That that all makes a ton of sense. And to I think, just like you mentioned, that the scripting that you have is incredible, But also, I think getting people to take action for something that's not themselves to giving that extra reason. the reciprocity, as you mentioned, all of those elements really help to make people feel good about taking action rather than just letting it go.

Brandon Breshears 00:40:14  So yeah, it's amazing.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:40:15  And a little bit about that too, is something interesting is like earlier on when we were testing out different ways to motivate people, we tested a lot of different things and the tree planting just won hands down. Like it was no contest against everything else that we tested. I'm still delighted to this day that that's rings true, because what it tells me is a few things. One is when we tried to essentially, quote unquote, bribe people back in 2016, when the ethics and legalities of doing so were a little bit more murky, and we tried things like $5 Starbucks cards, two for ones going to a draw, a $20 Amazon gift ticket, you name it.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:40:51  Those things move the needle a little bit, but they didn't really work that well. And just ethically, I just felt gross that we had, you know, our clinics essentially bribing people to say good things about them online. And they didn't like that either. And I'm glad that they didn't. And so when we tested the tree planting, it was just hands down, way more effective. So I think that says something really beautiful about humans, that they're more responsive to the idea of a tree getting planted than the coffee card being put in their pocket. And I love that. I love that what I'm about to tell you, which is usually, you know, the feel good, do good option, is some kind of fuzzy thing on the periphery of the brand or the strategy. It's, hey, you're buying a plane ticket to Phoenix, would you like to spend an extra two bucks to offset the carbon optional? In this case, the tree planting is a core part of the strategy, and not because it's some fuzzy feel good option, but because strategically it's the best move on the board.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:41:51  It's the thing that's going to get the most reviews. And I love that the the, the option to do good for the planet is the thing that does best for the business as far as revenue growth.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:04  Very cool.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:05  That's that's amazing. Yeah, I think that would be be super, super helpful. Like and thinking through it with the vet med space. I mean there's a lot of it's like ecosystem for animals. It's like a connotation of planting trees. Right. And so like you're yeah secondarily helping with more places for animals and there's.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:27  Yeah.

Brandon Breshears 00:42:27  Exactly. Oh sure. So that that is really cool. do you have any, anything that you think, my clients would also benefit from that we haven't covered here because, I mean, you're you're in the space of of reviews. Is there anything you think that we're missing that they should know about in general?

Daniel Vivarelli 00:42:48  I mean, I think just, I think when we look at our own behavior in our personal lives, quite often, that's indicative of just basically the overall way that human beings are behaving.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:43:01  And so when we overlay the way that we search for stuff, and most of us do read reviews, whether we're trying to find a Chinese restaurant near us, a lawyer to help us with our wills and estate, an emergency plumber because the basement's flooded, or the Airbnb that we're going to choose.

Brandon Breshears 00:43:20  Reviews.

Brandon Breshears 00:43:20  On Amazon all the.

Brandon Breshears 00:43:22  Time. Yeah, exactly.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:43:23  100%. Anything you buy on Amazon, like the reviews, determine where our money gets spent in our personal lives. Right. So I guess I want the practice managers, the doctors, the the the marketing teams to think of it from that perspective, like the behavior that you guys use that we all use in the day to day is the exact same behavior that your potential new clients are doing when they're trying to choose which clinic to call. And beyond that. Like, I just feel like in business, the numbers tell us what to do. If the vast majority, 80% plus of clients these days are seeking out reviews to determine which clinic they're going to call, well, then give them what they want.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:44:06  Give them every reason possible to choose you guys first, by establishing market leadership and making your clinic the clear choice.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:14  Yep.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:14  Totally. Totally agree. Well, how can people get in touch with you? And I've looked at the pricing tiers. They are super. I thought it was gonna be way more expensive. So I think the price is amazing. And so how can people get in touch with you?

Daniel Vivarelli 00:44:29  Thanks. Yeah. Look on the pricing. we actually haven't put our rates up since we launched in 2016. We're probably due for a price hike pretty soon. I actually was speaking to a doctor recently who had signed up with us and he said like, don't do it to me, but you need to charge more.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:45  I've heard that too, all the time. Don't do it to me. But you should be charging more.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:49  Thank you.

Brandon Breshears 00:44:50  Yeah, I love that one.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:44:51  And that's as far as finding me, people can go to. Com if they want to learn more about the software and the tree planning and how we can help them establish market leadership through reviews.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:45:05  Or you can find me at my personal website, which is Daniel Verrilli.

Brandon Breshears 00:45:11  Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time and all of your insights. I really, really appreciate you coming on and I'm excited for people to try out. Excited to see you guys on on this innovate med space. But very exciting.

Daniel Vivarelli 00:45:24  Thanks for having me, Brandon.

Brandon Breshears 00:45:26  Thank you.