Win Clients Before the First Meeting, with George Swetlitz
Host Bio
Stephen Woessner is the CEO of Predictive ROI, where he helps agency owners and consulting firms build authority-driven business development systems that translate into a healthier, more predictable sales pipeline. As host of the Sell With Authority Podcast (and creator of the Onward Nation Podcast), he has interviewed and distilled practical frameworks from operators, strategists, and growth leaders—consistently emphasizing credibility, trust, and service as differentiators in noisy markets. Stephen is also an educator and speaker, with experience leading business education programs through the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse’s Small Business Development Center. He’s a bestselling author and co-author of multiple books written for agency leaders, including Sell With Authority, which focuses on escaping the “sea of sameness” by becoming genuinely useful to the right-fit audience. His work sits at the intersection of reputation, customer experience, and leadership: how firms show up publicly, deliver consistently, and turn trust into durable growth.
Summary
Stephen Woessner frames this conversation around a blunt reality: trust is being formed (or lost) in public, before a prospect ever raises their hand. As he puts it, the episode is about “build[ing] trust at scale, not likes, not impressions, but actual credibility in public,” because your right-fit clients are “watching… evaluating… and deciding.” Stephen also grounds the urgency in a data point he cites up front: according to Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer, nearly seven in ten people say they’ve made a buying decision based on what they read in public forums—including reviews and company responses.
From there, George Swetlitz connects the trust problem to a very specific operational battleground: the moment someone is reading your reviews. George describes the reality inside a 220-location business and the practical complexity that comes with scale—call centers, local teams, and the sheer volume of review activity. The core problem, in his view, is that “that’s where the decision gets made,” and the business question becomes: how do you engage at that decision point, and how do you do it consistently across dozens or hundreds of locations?
Stephen immediately translates George’s multi-location lens into a “two-sided” opportunity for agency owners. Agencies can apply the same thinking to their own reputation and authority, and they can also bring it to clients who operate at scale. Stephen’s reaction is essentially: if reviews and public responses are now a decisive trust surface, then agencies can stop “yelling in a crowded arena” and instead win by being more visible in the places where prospects are already deciding.
The “three levels” of reputation engagement
George lays out three levels of how agencies (or operators) can engage with reputation and reviews:
- Engage where the customer is evaluating you. George argues that a review response needs to carry the brand’s experience and values. He emphasizes that “your brand, your experience, your values… comes out in your response to that review.”
- Use review data to walk into meetings with real authority. For agencies, this becomes a pre-pitch advantage: process a prospect’s reviews (and competitor reviews) so you can speak intelligently about what’s really happening in their market. George suggests doing this quantitatively—so it’s not “we skimmed reviews and have a vibe,” but measurable themes. He gives the kind of line that changes a pitch dynamic: “20% of your customers are saying this.”
- Operationalize review intelligence as an everyday system. After the pitch, the longer-term opportunity is to help clients incorporate this into how they run locations—especially because each location operates inside its own competitive reality.
Stephen validates this structure as a concrete way to move from “reputation” as a vague concept to a repeatable operating system. He also pushes into what that means at scale: a hundred locations, multiple competitors, and potentially thousands of reviews—far beyond what a human team can manually read and synthesize efficiently.
Recency beats all-time stats
One of the most practical—and “editorially cuttable”—moments in the conversation is the shift from all-time review stats to recency. George argues that Google’s surface-level “all time” numbers are incomplete for decision-making, because “What Google cares about is what’s happening now.” He describes looking at the last six months: how many reviews per month, what the average rating is during that window, and what trend line you’re actually on.
Stephen lights up here, because “recency” becomes a pitch framework and a strategic lever, not just an SEO footnote. He calls it out as “what have you done for me lately” backed by real numbers, and he explicitly sees it as a way to align competitive reality with a client’s strategic priorities. His enthusiasm is unmistakable: “I think that is so incredibly smart,” because it equips agencies to differentiate with evidence instead of platitudes.
Importantly, both Stephen and George keep tying this back to conversion. Visibility might get someone to your reviews, but visibility alone doesn’t close the deal. George pushes a critique Stephen clearly agrees with: “map ranking… gets people to you, but then… it’s the trust… that gets them to decide, I’m gonna try you next.” In other words, reviews and responses aren’t just a ranking signal; they’re a conversion gate and a public trust mechanism.
Why generic AI replies fail (and how AI can feel more authentic)
The episode’s most vivid illustration is George’s example from audiology clinics. A reviewer complains about parking. George contrasts two responses:
- the typical, generic reply that apologizes and repeats the complaint (which he characterizes as the kind of generic AI response many businesses end up with), versus
- a response that adds business-specific help: where to park, how to access accessible parking, and what to do next time.
The difference isn’t “tone” for tone’s sake—it’s usefulness and relevance. George’s point is that the response should create a real human connection by adding details a future customer can act on. Stephen reacts to this as a values-and-trust mechanism, not a copywriting trick, emphasizing how “bring[ing] my values into that response” is what makes the response feel truly human.
This is where the conversation surfaces a productive tension: many operators are skeptical of AI because they associate it with robotic templates. George argues that’s misunderstanding the potential. He insists that “If you give AI more information, it can provide very personalized responses,” and he reframes the goal away from “sounding human” and toward sounding relevant—infusing the response with the business’s real differentiators.
He sharpens this further with a blunt behavioral claim: “More people read reviews, then we will visit the website,” which leads to a strategic implication: if you invest heavily in your website, you should also invest in bringing the content and values of that website into review responses. George summarizes that shift in a simple line: “They’re not going to my websites. I gotta bring the website to the customer.”
Voice-of-customer insights and topic-level diagnosis
Beyond replies, George describes review content as “raw, real feedback” that can be coded into insights. Historically, agencies have done this manually—reading reviews and synthesizing themes. George’s argument is that AI is particularly well-suited here because reviews are “small” units of text, and there can be thousands of them.
He also describes a key capability: controlling the topics you evaluate against. The agency (or client) can define the lens—what “metrics” matter, what themes you want to track—and then run comparative analysis across a prospect and their competitors. That produces not only thematic insight, but a quantitative map of what’s working, what’s failing, and where competitors have momentum.
Big AI vs little AI: how to actually make AI reliable
Stephen asks George to unpack a distinction they discussed off-record: “big AI” versus “little AI.” George’s take is pragmatic. The market talks about big AI doing everything, but in practice it’s hard to get AI to work reliably if you ask it to do too much at once. His approach is “little AI”: small tasks, strung together into a stronger system. He says it directly: “AI is just better at doing little things.”
George gives a concrete example of how that “stringing together” works operationally: run a review through multiple “stamps”—is the review even related to the business, is the name usable in the response, and so on—so you de-risk and improve quality step by step.
Stephen mirrors this in his own mental model, comparing it to building a house (foundation, framing, then roof) and stacking Lego blocks. He’s animated about the real power of AI being computational—processing datasets and producing usable models—rather than the shallow “write a blog post” use case. George agrees and adds a caution that functions like a field rule for teams: don’t do too much in one prompt, and don’t endlessly “argue” with the model. In his words, “the more you engage with AI, the dumber it gets,” so it’s better to craft a strong starting instruction, rerun, and iterate cleanly.
The episode closes where it began: trust is being decided in public, before the first meeting—and agencies can either keep fighting for attention in crowded channels or win by showing up with relevance, consistency, and proof in the places prospects already use to decide.
Q&A
- I run an agency—how do I build trust before a prospect ever books a first meeting?
Public credibility matters before a discovery call happens, especially in places where prospects read reviews and evaluate how you respond. Showing up consistently in those public spaces can shape trust before you ever talk. - Is responding to reviews really about SEO, or is there more to it?
Visibility can get people to your listings, but conversion often hinges on what people read in the reviews and how the business responds. Responses can build trust for the next reader making a decision. - Why do generic review replies feel like they hurt more than they help?
Repeating an apology or restating the review can come off as templated and impersonal. Business-specific, useful details are more likely to create a real connection and reduce hesitation for future customers. - What should a strong review response actually include?
Add something the reader can use: a helpful detail, a next step, or a business-specific fact that reflects how you operate. The goal is to reinforce values and trust, not just acknowledge the comment. - How do I respond to a negative review that’s about something operational, like parking?
Address the concern and add specific guidance that removes friction for the next visit (for example, where the alternative parking is, or how accessibility is handled). Specifics can change a reader’s decision. - Should I respond to reviews even if my business already ranks well locally?
Ranking and visibility can bring someone to your reviews, but that does not guarantee they convert. The trust built through review responses can influence whether they choose you over a competitor. - I manage multiple locations—who should own review responses: a call center, the locations, or corporate?
It’s a complicated operational problem at scale because different teams may touch reviews. The key need is consistency and the ability to respond effectively across many locations without overwhelming the business. - How can an agency use reviews to walk into a pitch with more authority?
Process the prospect’s reviews and competitor reviews to identify what customers are saying and how that compares across the market. Bringing quantitative insights can change the conversation from opinions to evidence. - I’m pitching a client with hundreds of locations—how do I make review analysis feasible?
Manual reading doesn’t scale well when you’re dealing with thousands of reviews. Using AI to process short review text can help summarize themes and quantify patterns across locations and competitors. - How do I avoid saying “we think we saw this” when talking about review insights?
Use numbers and measurable claims—like the percentage of reviewers mentioning a topic—so you can point to concrete patterns rather than anecdotal impressions. - What does it mean to control the topics in a Voice of Customer analysis?
You can evaluate reviews against the themes and metrics that matter to the business, then process the reviews through that lens to see what’s working and what isn’t—across the business and competitors. - Why are Google’s all-time review totals and ratings misleading for decision-making?
What matters is what’s happening now, including recent volume and recent average ratings. A strong all-time rating can mask a weaker recent trend, and competitors may be improving quickly. - How do I use the last six months of reviews as a competitive framework?
Look at review cadence and average rating over a recent window, then compare that to competitors. Recent trends can reveal who is winning momentum in the market right now. - What’s the real purpose of responding to reviews—am I replying for the reviewer or for everyone else?
Many readers are using reviews to decide who to call next. Responses can be written to help and reassure the broader audience making that buying decision. - I’m skeptical of AI—won’t it make my responses feel less authentic?
Generic, low-information AI outputs can sound templated, but AI can produce more personalized responses when it’s given more relevant information about the business and what it stands for. - What does it mean to bring my website into my review responses?
If people read reviews more than they visit the website, review responses can carry business-specific details and values that would otherwise live only on the site—meeting customers where they already are. - What’s the difference between big AI and little AI in practical terms?
Big AI promises everything at once, but small, focused AI tasks tend to be more reliable. Breaking work into smaller steps and stringing them together can produce better outcomes.
How do I keep AI from getting worse when I iterate on prompts?
Not directly addressed here as a universal rule, but the guidance is to avoid long back-and-forth corrections. Start with a strong, clear instruction, rerun cleanly, and improve the initial prompt instead.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Stephen Woessner: Welcome to the Sell With Authority Podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of predictive, ROI. And my team and I, we created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner looking to sell more of what you do, then you’re in the right place. You want proven biz dev strategies so you can attract all the right fit clients you want.
[00:00:26] Stephen Woessner: Yep. We’re gonna cover that. You wanna learn how to. Step away from the sea of sameness. So you actually stand out from your competitors and own your addressable market. Yep. We’re gonna cover that too. Do you want to futureproof your agency? You can successfully navigate that next challenge that you know is going to come your way.
[00:00:46] Stephen Woessner: We will absolutely help you there as well. I promise you each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights, tangible examples, and best practices, never theory from thought leaders, experts, owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do. So I want you to think practical and tactical.
[00:01:06] Stephen Woessner: Never any fluff. Each of our guests had built a position of authority and then monetized that position by growing their audience, by nurturing leads and yes, by converting sales. But all the while they did it by being helpful. So every time someone from their audience turned around. There they were with a helpful answer to an important question, so their prospects never ever felt like they were a prospect.
[00:01:33] Stephen Woessner: I also promise you every strategy that we discuss, every tool we recommend. We’ll be shared in full transparency in each episode, so you can fill your sales pipeline with that steady stream of RightFit clients and sell more of what you do. Today we’re going to focus our time and attention on what it means to build trust at scale, not likes, not impressions, but actual credibility in public where you’re right fit clients and prospects.
[00:02:05] Stephen Woessner: Are watching where they’re evaluating and where they’re deciding if you are the authority. They can rely on. Candidly, it’s noisy out there and you and I both know it’s only going to get louder. If you’ve ever felt like your agency is producing thought leadership content, showing up on the right channels, following all the best practices to build your authority position, and yet biz Devon leads still feel flat or inconsistent, you may be stuck in what we call yelling in a crowded arena.
[00:02:38] Stephen Woessner: You’re doing the work, but it’s not moving your biz dev needle, and here’s why. Today’s conversation can be super helpful. According to Edelman’s 2025 trust barometer, nearly seven in 10 people say they’ve made a buying decision based on what they’ve read in public forums, including customer reviews and company responses.
[00:03:00] Stephen Woessner: Also, according to Edelman, 68% of people now say they trust, quote someone like me, end quote, more than a company spokesperson. That means your authority position, your reputation among your clients, prospects, and audience is being evaluated before your first meeting ever gets scheduled, and likely impacts candidly whether the meeting even gets scheduled in the first place.
[00:03:26] Stephen Woessner: So what if you can ensure that your agency as well as your clients, show up in the relevant public spaces with more consistency, more authenticity, and more trust without adding more to your team’s plate? And that’s exactly why I’m excited to introduce you to today’s guest, George Swetlitz, co-founder of RightResponse AI, because I believe this conversation will help you and your team build.
[00:03:53] Stephen Woessner: Trust at scale before your first meeting with a prospect, or you use what George shares in this conversation on behalf of your clients to help them win more often. Now, George isn’t your typical SaaS founder. He’s a proven operator. He’s scaled a previous company to over. 220 locations. So George knows how to lead teams, implement systems, and grow companies through smart, repeatable processes.
[00:04:20] Stephen Woessner: And now through RightResponse AI, he’s giving agencies a way to scale review responses, to generate meaningful insights and to build trust across platforms at scale without losing the human touch. So if you’ve been looking for a way to stand out. Without shouting louder. If you want to build authority and trust before the first meeting with a prospect ever happens, and if you’re curious about how AI can help you deliver more value without adding more overhead, then I promise you this conversation with George will help you sell more of what you do.
[00:04:58] Stephen Woessner: You can future proof your agency. Okay, so without further ado, welcome to the Sell With Authority Podcast, George.
[00:05:07] George Swetlitz: Thank you, Stephen. It’s very exciting to be here.
[00:05:09] Stephen Woessner: Well, it’s exciting to have you here and thank you for saying yes, and I’m very much looking forward to our conversation. I appreciate our sort of recording chat in the green room.
[00:05:19] Stephen Woessner: So. This is gonna be a whole lot of fun. Obviously, I shared just a couple of snippets from your background, but there’s a lot of context before this conversation and before the current business that you’ve started and, and are leading. So, take us behind the curtain and share, you know, a couple minutes of some context around your path and journey, and then we’ll dive in with the questions.
[00:05:39] George Swetlitz: Sure, sure. Happy to do that. So my journey, I mean, it’s been a long one. I kind of date myself there, but it’s been a long one. But I’ve been on all sides of the table. I’ve had several stints where I was a consultant, so I did consulting for McKinsey. I started a small consulting firm and have worked in various consulting firms over the years.
[00:05:59] George Swetlitz: I’ve also been an operator, so I’ve run factories and I’ve built businesses, and in my most recent iteration, as you mentioned, was the CEO of a rollup, consolidation of audiology and hearing aid clinics.
[00:06:16] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:06:16] George Swetlitz: And learned about what it’s like to run multi-location businesses. It was that experience that led to RightResponse AI, because we struggled with those issues.
[00:06:29] George Swetlitz: We worked with agencies on those issues. How do we grow? Organically. So the Holy Grail in a multi-location business is organic growth.
[00:06:41] Stephen Woessner: Hmm.
[00:06:42] George Swetlitz: For not having to pay for the leads,
[00:06:44] Stephen Woessner: right
[00:06:44] George Swetlitz: Through paid social, but how to get customers just to come to you. And so what I learned at that experience at Alpaca led to right response after chats, UPT was launched.
[00:06:56] George Swetlitz: So all of those years of experience came together. Consulting, operating multi-location technology to say, you know what, this is an opportunity to try to solve that problem, right? Through leveraging this new technology called ai, and essentially that’s what led to right response.
[00:07:17] Stephen Woessner: Okay, so let me make sure that we crystallize the problem and then we’re gonna take this into some foundational context too, between big ai, little ai, and then we’re gonna go into the reputation piece.
[00:07:28] Stephen Woessner: So in the marketplace, what is the chief problem or the primary problem you and your team are trying to solve?
[00:07:36] George Swetlitz: So think about a large 220 location business. You have a number of problems. One problem. Is you’re trying to win the battle. When the customer is reading your reviews, at the end of the day, you bring somehow people to your reviews.
[00:07:55] Stephen Woessner: Okay?
[00:07:56] George Swetlitz: But that’s where the decision gets made. And so the question is, how do I engage at that? Problem number one.
[00:08:03] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:08:03] George Swetlitz: Problem number two is how do I do that at scale? How do I do that when I have a call center that might be dealing with reviews when I have people in locations that are dealing with reviews, when I have to request reviews?
[00:08:16] George Swetlitz: And so it’s a very complicated problem depending on the business’ size, right? All businesses. Struggle with this, but at the end of the day, it’s how do I convert more customers? Right? How do I take that reader who’s evaluating and making a decision in that moment and turn them into a buyer?
[00:08:35] Stephen Woessner: Yeah. When you and I were chatting in the Green Room, you know, I shared with you that, so now I guess for our friends listening is, when I thought about this, I thought about the duality of how your expertise could be helpful.
[00:08:46] Stephen Woessner: When our agency friends are listening, agency owners and their teams are listening, I want them to be thinking about, wait a minute, what George just said, they’re super smart, and we can use that for our reputation, our authority position for the agency. And then Holy bananas, we actually have a client that has 200 some locations and we could think about how we can be helpful to them at scale.
[00:09:11] Stephen Woessner: So that they win more often and won’t that be lovely? Like there’s wins on both sides of the ledger, so to speak.
[00:09:18] George Swetlitz: Right? Well, once you start thinking about that problem, so whether it’s a client or yourself,
[00:09:23] Stephen Woessner: yeah.
[00:09:24] George Swetlitz: The point is you have to engage where the customer is. So as an agency, your customer is looking in certain places to get evaluations of you.
[00:09:35] George Swetlitz: So you have to make sure that your brand, your experience, your values, the way you think about the world comes out in your response to that review and your engagement with that review. That’s critical. So that’s level one. Okay. Level two is now that I think about that, if I’m gonna go pitch a client, I can actually leverage that kind of thinking so that when I walk into that client meeting.
[00:10:04] George Swetlitz: I’m seen as having authority or knowledge around their business. So can I process their reviews, their customers or their competitors’ reviews so that I have something intelligent to say about their position in the marketplace when I’m talking to them?
[00:10:22] Stephen Woessner: Smart. Okay.
[00:10:23] George Swetlitz: Third point is, after you’ve done that, how do I then.
[00:10:27] George Swetlitz: Propose to the client that they incorporate that as part of the way that they run their business every day. So there’s three different levels to the engagement with reputation.
[00:10:36] Stephen Woessner: Wow. Okay. So I just wanna peel the layer just a little bit on level two. I know we’re gonna come back to all of these here more in depth, but.
[00:10:45] Stephen Woessner: Let’s say the scenario is an agency is pitching to a client and that client has no reviews whatsoever, and then maybe part of the presentation is level three. But I think what you’re also saying is. Even if the prospective client hasn’t been paying attention to reviews online and so forth, managing their reputation, maybe one of their competitors has, or maybe multiple competitors have.
[00:11:07] Stephen Woessner: And so I think what you’re saying is that’s a data set and you want to be able to use that data set and highlight what the opportunities are and maybe where the prospective client is losing because the competitors are doing such a great job. Am I tracking with you?
[00:11:21] George Swetlitz: That’s exactly right. I mean, it would be unusual for companies to have no reviews.
[00:11:26] Stephen Woessner: Right. Yeah.
[00:11:26] George Swetlitz: I mean, everybody, and it’s a problem whether you’re a one location business, a 10 location business, or a two oh, the problem is the same. You still need to learn from the reviews, right? I mean, reviews are the most unvarnished, raw, real feedback that you’re gonna get. Right. And so many agents teach historically prior to ai and even today, go through those reviews manually and kind of code them up, figure out what they say, and take that to a client meeting.
[00:11:58] George Swetlitz: And I think the point that you’re trying to make is. Ai, whether it’s part of our tool or anywhere, right? AI can help you do that for your clients prior to a meeting. At scale. AI can process. AI’s good at that kind of thing because it’s small. A review isn’t that long. A review’s a paragraph. Yeah. It’s not like a review is a.
[00:12:20] George Swetlitz: So a review. Small and AI’s very capable of processing that and helping you understand what those reviews are saying.
[00:12:28] Stephen Woessner: Yeah. Let’s say as part of that pitch process with a prospective client, you know, let’s say the client has a hundred locations, and then let’s say that there’s, you know, three viable competitors in the marketplace.
[00:12:39] Stephen Woessner: Each one of them have a couple hundred locations. So now we’re talking about potentially, you know, maybe even thousands of reviews. And one of the things that I love about this conversation that I’m learning from you is that, yeah, you know, there’s ways to take those thousands of reviews, create a computational model for analysis that candidly would be pretty darn near impossible for a human to do.
[00:13:01] Stephen Woessner: Efficiently and then maybe even be able to tie that into some of the strategic pillars of the pitch. You know, looking for the red threads that are connecting through all of those things and be able to do that quickly and theoretically without error, and then be able to put that into the hands of the strategists.
[00:13:18] Stephen Woessner: This preparing for the pitch, right?
[00:13:20] George Swetlitz: Right, exactly. And quantitatively with numbers, with data.
[00:13:23] Stephen Woessner: Yes.
[00:13:23] George Swetlitz: And not, Hey, we read your reviews and we think we saw this. Hey look, 20% of your customers are saying this. And so what’s interesting about AI and our platform is that you can control the topics that you are evaluating the business against,
[00:13:40] Stephen Woessner: okay?
[00:13:41] George Swetlitz: Right. And so you or your clients may look at the business, you may have had a conversation with them, and they look at the business in a certain way. They have certain metrics they think about. You can just build that right into the AI model. Process, the clients you’re pitching, their competitors so that you have a quantitative roadmap to what’s working for them and their competitors, what’s not working for them and their competitors.
[00:14:06] George Swetlitz: And there’s another angle to this as well. Google reports all time reviews, right? You see that in the box 450, all time reviews, right? All time rating of 4.9,
[00:14:17] Stephen Woessner: right?
[00:14:18] George Swetlitz: Completely irrelevant.
[00:14:20] Stephen Woessner: Oh, okay. Why?
[00:14:21] George Swetlitz: Totally incomplete. Because the fact that you had 200 reviews seven years ago, doesn’t Matt Google doesn’t care.
[00:14:31] Stephen Woessner: Okay?
[00:14:31] George Swetlitz: What Google cares about is what’s happening now. What’s been happening over the last six months? What’s the trend? So what we do, another feature, we as part of our competitive analysis, we crunch all those numbers and we say, okay, over the last six months you’ve been getting four reviews a month, and your average rating over those past six months is a.
[00:14:54] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:14:55] George Swetlitz: It doesn’t matter that your all time rating is a 4.5.
[00:14:58] Stephen Woessner: Sure.
[00:14:59] George Swetlitz: You’re a four right now.
[00:15:00] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:15:01] George Swetlitz: And your competitors over the last six months doesn’t matter that they all time are a 3.8 right now they’re a five. And so you can use that data to create a framework that you’re talking about. Reputation with the client.
[00:15:16] Stephen Woessner: I think that is so incredibly smart. It’s like the what have you done for me lately with a whole bunch of numbers behind it, which is great. And when I heard you say that, I literally just highlighted in my notes, I put that in the category of level three, right? The how do I then propose to the client that this is the trend and this is what we should do now, this is what we’re putting in a model because we’re either trending up or trending down, and this is what our competitors are doing because you’re bringing recency and why that matters.
[00:15:44] Stephen Woessner: Into the pitch and then being able to align it then with the, these are the three strategic pillars and these are the insights that we want you prospective client to go down the path of. And you’ve got immediacy. No, not immediacy. What’s the word I’m looking for? Recency in the data. Right,
[00:16:00] George Swetlitz: right. No, that’s exactly right.
[00:16:01] George Swetlitz: So as an agency, you’re always looking for an edge.
[00:16:04] Stephen Woessner: Yeah,
[00:16:04] George Swetlitz: right. They’re talking to multiple people for that pitch, and you have to say something different. It’s kinda what you said before when your introduction about kind of talking into the noise, talking into the right. Yep. And so the question is how do you differentiate yourself?
[00:16:18] George Swetlitz: And so an angle I, I fit, again, this is what we do, but it’s also my experience as a CEO. You have to tell somebody something different. And what’s different is not that we’re gonna get your map pack rankings higher.
[00:16:33] Stephen Woessner: Mm-hmm.
[00:16:33] George Swetlitz: That’s what everybody says.
[00:16:34] Stephen Woessner: Yeah,
[00:16:35] George Swetlitz: we’re gonna get your map, but that doesn’t matter if nobody converts.
[00:16:38] George Swetlitz: Right, so, so the map ranking, the visibility gets people to you, but then it’s the quality, it’s the engagement in that review, the trust that’s built between the brand and the potential customer that gets them to decide, I’m gonna try you next. Yep. Versus someone else.
[00:16:59] Stephen Woessner: Yeah. Well, and you know, going back to what I shared in the introduction as I was introducing you.
[00:17:05] Stephen Woessner: And so friends, if you’ve probably all downloaded and maybe studied Edelman’s Trust Barometer, they’ve been doing this now for the last 20 plus years, you know, providing annual data around the word trust, um, for, for a long time. So in their most recent issue, again, I shared this in the introduction, so nearly seven in 10 people say they’ve made a buying decision based on what they’ve read in public forums.
[00:17:29] Stephen Woessner: To George’s point, it’s the trust that’s built in the review. So having the review is sort of like the ante, but then being able to have the reviews at scale and then being able to build trust at scale, and then for your clients across multiple, you know, locations and all of that because their customers are making those decisions before your client even knows.
[00:17:51] Stephen Woessner: Then of course here at Predictive, we would argue that you as the agency should also be thinking about your own reputation and then using some of the insights that George is sharing, using that for your own authority. So. I love how you just said that. You know George talking about that it’s the trust that’s built in the reviews.
[00:18:12] Stephen Woessner: It’s not just the review, it’s the trust. Then that’s built in the review, right?
[00:18:17] George Swetlitz: That’s right. It’s the trust that’s built in the response to the review. So let me give you an
[00:18:20] Stephen Woessner: example. Okay. Okay.
[00:18:22] George Swetlitz: Let me give an kind of a real example. Audiology clinics, where I came from,
[00:18:26] Stephen Woessner: sure.
[00:18:26] George Swetlitz: Somebody writes a negative review and says, you know, I really love them, but I had a hard time finding parking.
[00:18:32] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:18:32] George Swetlitz: Okay. So if you’re an older person,
[00:18:35] Stephen Woessner: yeah.
[00:18:35] George Swetlitz: You’re gonna read that and you’re gonna say, you know, I, I don’t wanna do that. I don’t want to go there.
[00:18:39] Stephen Woessner: Sounds like a hassle.
[00:18:40] George Swetlitz: Sounds like a hassle.
[00:18:41] Stephen Woessner: Right,
[00:18:41] George Swetlitz: right. And a typical review responder will say, oh, we apologize that you had a hard time finding parking, you know, apology, whatever.
[00:18:50] George Swetlitz: It’ll just repeat back. That’s the generic AI that most people use. It doesn’t establish a human connection.
[00:18:59] Stephen Woessner: Right?
[00:19:00] George Swetlitz: Well, what if you could infuse that human connection into the response? What if the response said, Hey, I’m sorry that you had difficult finding parking. Next time you come, remember that there’s parking behind the building off of Main Street where there’s actually accessible parking as well.
[00:19:16] George Swetlitz: That’s what you would write if you were responding yourself if you had the time
[00:19:22] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:19:23] George Swetlitz: To respond yourself, that’s what you would write. But you don’t have time to respond by yourself because you’re busy. You’re busy building a business,
[00:19:30] Stephen Woessner: right?
[00:19:31] George Swetlitz: And so the way to think about review response is, how do I bring my website?
[00:19:36] George Swetlitz: How do I bring my values to that response? To create that connection, that trust with the customer?
[00:19:44] Stephen Woessner: Wow. Furiously, uh, trying to get this into my notes because the last eight words that you just said there, I’ve got more in my notes. But when you said, you know, how do I bring my values into that response?
[00:19:56] Stephen Woessner: That’s what creates the human connection. That’s what helps build trust as scale, right? Is being able to infuse the values of the business and the team into that response.
[00:20:08] George Swetlitz: I think, see that’s where I think people get AI all wrong. They don’t understand the potential of AI because people are used to these very generic.
[00:20:17] George Swetlitz: Responses.
[00:20:18] Stephen Woessner: Yeah.
[00:20:19] George Swetlitz: Well, AI is really, if you, if you give AI more information
[00:20:22] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:20:23] George Swetlitz: It can provide very personalized responses.
[00:20:26] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:20:26] George Swetlitz: More people read reviews, then we will visit the website. Right. It’s fact more people will read reviews that will visit your website, so. If you’re spending all sorts of time and money on your website, you should spend a little bit of time thinking about how do I bring the content of that website to the review response, because that’s where the customer’s engaging.
[00:20:48] George Swetlitz: They’re not going to my websites. I gotta bring the website to the customer.
[00:20:51] Stephen Woessner: That’s so good. When you were talking about the potential of ai, I don’t know if this is gonna fit here or not, so maybe I’m gonna be throwing you a curve ball here, but that reminded me of what you had said. In the green room before I hit record and talking about big AI or little ai.
[00:21:09] Stephen Woessner: And so if you think it fits here, because I really liked that piece of foundational context of big AI and little ai, would you mind peeling that apart a little bit? I think it would be super helpful for our audience.
[00:21:22] George Swetlitz: Yeah, I, you know, everyone talks every, all the noise in the market is about big ai. It’s gonna replace all the jobs, it’s gonna do everything.
[00:21:31] George Swetlitz: But the reality is, is it’s really hard to get AI to work for you. So if you’re trying to kind of, and I know that because we’ve been struggling with it for two years, so if you’re trying to actually leverage ai. You should think about little ai. What are the small things that I can do with AI that can help me prepare for a meeting?
[00:21:55] George Swetlitz: Get smarter about something if you try to focus even us, right? If we try to focus on big ai, we stumble. So even within our platform, we do little things and then we string them together because AI is just better at doing little things. So I call that little ai, right? So when we think about bringing the website to a review response, that’s actually not that hard to do.
[00:22:20] Stephen Woessner: Hmm.
[00:22:21] George Swetlitz: It’s complicated. But you know, from an AI perspective, it’s not that hard because the review itself is small. It’s paragraph, you have maybe 20 or 30 things you really want people to know about your business. Okay. And AI can do a great job of pulling those things together because the real purpose of the review response is not to respond to the person who left the review.
[00:22:44] George Swetlitz: It’s to attract all the other people who are reading. Those reviews deciding, who am I gonna call next? And so people are looking for connection and values in businesses. So they go to the review, they wanna know about the experience. Yeah. But then they’re also really thinking about how did that business engage with that content, right?
[00:23:12] George Swetlitz: So if you ha, even if it’s fun, like somebody, you have a restaurant. And your whole thing is you’ve grind the beef fresh every day.
[00:23:21] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:23:21] George Swetlitz: Right. That’s your thing. We grind the beef fresh every day. So if somebody writes a review and says, ah, man, these were just the best, you know, just freshest, most wonderful burgers.
[00:23:30] Stephen Woessner: Yeah.
[00:23:31] George Swetlitz: You could say, oh, thanks for appreciating a burger. But you can say, we make a point to grind them fresh. Every day we buy this kind of beef, whatever. It engages the customer, it tells them something that they didn’t know about the business. Right. You have some vegan recipe that you know everybody loves.
[00:23:51] George Swetlitz: You get Oh, yeah. You know, we love that recipe too. It’s one of the favorites. It came from my grandmother, right? When you infuse the values of the business into that response, you make a connection. And people want connections. They want connections. When they’re deciding who to purchase from, who to visit, who to, and whether that’s you as an agency.
[00:24:12] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:24:13] George Swetlitz: Right. Or whether it’s a client. Yeah, like I said, it’s kind of like undeveloped real estate, right? No one pays attention to that real estate, right the way they should. So for example, back it up, you know, at, at the company that I was leading at haka, a very common problem that we had, and I’m sure you know your, the agency listeners will see this as well, but we could have two locations that, with our internal metrics, performed exactly the same.
[00:24:41] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:24:41] George Swetlitz: But one, they were winning the market and another one, they weren’t winning the market.
[00:24:45] Stephen Woessner: Okay,
[00:24:46] George Swetlitz: well, why they, for, they’re performing exactly the same what was because of the competitive environment. Every location exists in its own unique competitive environment. And in order, you know, to win, you have to be, you have to be cognizant of that and if you as an agency can help them understand this is the competitive environment that this particular location is, and it’s different than the competitive environment for this business.
[00:25:12] George Swetlitz: And so we have to treat it differently. That’s a very powerful. That’s personalization in the same way that responding to that review is personalization.
[00:25:21] Stephen Woessner: That is interesting. Okay. You may think that this is a, a rabbit hole in, in just silly, but when you just said that to me, I love sports, so I put that into a sports context and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting.
[00:25:33] Stephen Woessner: When you know, back in the day, let’s call that in the eighties and early nineties, there used to be big Super Bowl blowouts. It was very typical, right? Whichever team was gonna win the Super Bowl won by a very large margin, and we’ve seen less of that because of how the league has adjusted teams and schedules and create more parity and also with contracts and so forth.
[00:25:53] Stephen Woessner: Baseball’s done it too in the way that like it never used to be, the American League would play the nationally, right? The only time that they would play was in the World Series. And so different rules in the leagues and so forth, and then the league stripped that out and now there’s a lot more, like Interleague play used to be like really special when it was first introduced.
[00:26:11] Stephen Woessner: Now every team plays every team across leagues and so forth. There’s a lot more parody and so forth. So my point with that is, is that when teams used to only play the teams that they were the most familiar with or whatever, and then they would step out of their market like we were talking about, then you’d really see like who they line up against and so forth.
[00:26:31] Stephen Woessner: Right? And then that created either a competitive advantage or disadvantage when that happened because you know, the lens was different, the model was different and so forth. So I find what you are putting here really fascinating, excuse me. ‘cause you’re bringing this competitive piece into it. And then also a really smart listening post.
[00:26:51] Stephen Woessner: To like collect all of those data points and then do something about it as opposed to, well, it’s performing the same. Well, okay, that’s like the basic level, that’s the anti level of analysis. How can we peel that back even deeper and then get some true insights and then from that, take action. Right.
[00:27:09] George Swetlitz: Right. No, it’s true. We opened a greenfield clinic in a town.
[00:27:14] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:27:14] George Swetlitz: Because, you know, a big market and we’re gonna relocate in this area. It was a Harrisburg and doula clinic. We did it and it was a disaster,
[00:27:24] Stephen Woessner: huh?
[00:27:24] George Swetlitz: So after we go in and it’s disaster, we look around and there’s this big, very highly rated, wonderful clinic group with six locations all around the city.
[00:27:36] George Swetlitz: We didn’t do the competitive analysis. You gotta do the competitive analysis. You have to pick your spots.
[00:27:41] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:27:41] George Swetlitz: You have to know the challenge when you engage in an area, and one way to know that is through reviews. The people in the town will tell you they’re telling you every single day, and so you just have to analyze that data.
[00:27:59] George Swetlitz: Process it and use that in, in your decision making.
[00:28:03] Stephen Woessner: This is so good, so, so good because not, not only does that give us some intel as we’re stepping into going back to your levels, level three, well actually level two and level three as an agency is getting ready for a pitch, stepping into the room so they’re more informed about the customer, prospective client, and I guess in that situation, prospective client, and then doing a competitive analysis.
[00:28:26] Stephen Woessner: But if it’s a competitive pitch, they could also reverse engineer that and then look at the other agencies that are in the room too, or not in the room, literally, but figuratively as part of the due diligence process. And then be able to better understand what their competitors are doing as well, right?
[00:28:44] George Swetlitz: That’s right. Everyone has a reputation.
[00:28:46] Stephen Woessner: Yeah,
[00:28:47] George Swetlitz: everyone has a reputation, and so therefore you can leverage. Understanding that reputation in multiple dimensions. Right? You, like you said, you can use it for your clients, you can use it when you’re understanding your own competitors when you’re making a pitch.
[00:29:00] Stephen Woessner: Yep.
[00:29:01] George Swetlitz: But I think the most, the biggest angle is how can you say something that is unlikely your agency competitors are saying? Right? Yeah. Making it one step further towards, you know, bringing data, bringing real, tangible information about that business. To the cus to the prospective customer.
[00:29:20] Stephen Woessner: This is so good.
[00:29:21] Stephen Woessner: I know that we need to start thinking about coming in for a landing here, but, uh, just a couple of more questions here ‘cause I wanna make sure that I close the loop here in my notes. A few minutes ago you said when we were talking about big ai, little ai. You said, and this is only an incomplete thought in my notes here, so I wanna fill in the blanks.
[00:29:40] Stephen Woessner: You said little things and then string them together. So tell me a little bit more about that. Like little tasks, little projects, little data analysis, like, and then stringing it together. Can you peel that apart a little bit more?
[00:29:52] George Swetlitz: Yeah. So, you know, in our world when we look at a review. What we’ll do is we’ll put it through multiple stamps.
[00:30:00] George Swetlitz: So when a review comes in, we’ll look at that review and we’ll just ask a simple question. Is this review related to the business?
[00:30:07] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:30:08] George Swetlitz: Very simple because sometimes reviews come in and they’re completely unrelated to the business, right? Someone is just some prank review or whatever it is, and you don’t wanna respond to that, right?
[00:30:17] George Swetlitz: So it’s a little tiny piece that gives you a little piece of information. The next step is we look at that and we say, is the name in the review a name that we want to use? We don’t wanna say dear, you know, Bob’s Grill in the response, right? So we make an evaluation about that. So my point, my point is, is that we do lots of little things that might be difficult if we try to do them all at once.
[00:30:41] George Swetlitz: So we do lots of little things and we string those together to create an outcome that is wonderful. And so the lesson is true as an agency as well. If you’re analyzing data, analyze bits of data, do a specific task, don’t ask it. Don’t ask AI to do too many things at one time. Yes. Because then you get disappointed, and especially when you go back and forth when you say, well, no, I didn’t mean this.
[00:31:10] George Swetlitz: I meant that as the more you engage with ai, the dumber it gets. So you need to craft a good initial statement, right? An an initial thing to do. Yeah. Give it the data. If it doesn’t work, change it. Go back to the beginning. You don’t wanna go back and forth. And so you do these little things and then when you tie them all together, you look and say, oh, I did something neat because I did it in a bunch of small steps.
[00:31:35] Stephen Woessner: That’s fascinating. A, a few weeks ago I was having a conversation with, uh, some family here at the house, and I was like super jazzed and excited working on some models. Like GPT and, and so someone asked me like, oh, why are you excited about it? And so forth, and I’m like, oh my gosh. I’m like, the power of AI is not, you know, like writing a blog post or whatever.
[00:31:54] Stephen Woessner: I mean, that’s like the anti level stuff. What we’re super excited about is like the computational power and being able to take data sets and put ‘em in. But some of the things we’ve learned lined up exactly with what you’re saying is that if we’re working on a big data set or a big analysis or whatever.
[00:32:10] Stephen Woessner: Just like you would build a house, you pour the foundation and then you put up some framing and then you don’t just slap the roof on first, right? You have to be able to get ready for that, and so being able to stack those together like little Lego blocks or whatever, then it, it leads to the path of success.
[00:32:26] Stephen Woessner: You get this really amazing. Awesome model, but you gotta build it brick by brick because if you try to create that master sort of query or prompt as you say, right, this master prompt of what this big thing that you’re trying to create, it just gets all mishmashed. At least that’s been my experience.
[00:32:42] George Swetlitz: Yeah, and that’s a hundred percent. You gotta do it in pieces. So for example, we do this thing, we have this tool where you can look back. At the last, you know, six months and you know, what are people telling you over the last six months?
[00:32:57] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:32:57] George Swetlitz: Right. Well, you know, what we do in the background before we even run that prompt is we generate lots of information about sentiment that we have from another prompt or sentiment analysis prompt.
[00:33:11] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:33:11] George Swetlitz: And we take that data because it’s already summarized and we provide that. To the model. So the model doesn’t have to calculate all those things because just calculating those things is really complicated to do, right? So we say, well, here’s all the summary data. Now do this extra work, and then it’s wonderful at doing that small task.
[00:33:32] George Swetlitz: So if any, you know, agency listeners are kind of struggling to use ai, that’s one of the things that we’ve learned in this development process is to break it down, do smaller pieces, and then bundle it all together.
[00:33:45] Stephen Woessner: I’m just making an assumption here that the agencies that you know that have used. Your platform.
[00:33:51] Stephen Woessner: My guess is the ones who are bold enough, courageous enough, and so forth, to use it actually in front of their client. That only deepens the trust that the client has with the agency.
[00:34:02] George Swetlitz: Yeah, so when an agency signs up with us, we do a special thing for the agency, which is so our normal models, we charge.
[00:34:11] George Swetlitz: You know, $10 per location and then it’s kind of usage based after that.
[00:34:15] Stephen Woessner: Alright.
[00:34:15] George Swetlitz: But for the agency, they can set up companies in the platform for research and they’re gonna go do a pitch.
[00:34:24] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:34:24] George Swetlitz: And we don’t charge ‘em anything for the location.
[00:34:27] Stephen Woessner: Oh wow.
[00:34:27] George Swetlitz: So essentially they just, an agency just pays for the usage.
[00:34:31] Stephen Woessner: Okay.
[00:34:31] George Swetlitz: Right to encourage agencies to use it in their pitches, to use it for research so they don’t have to, you know, it’s very reasonable to use. So we do that for the agency partners, and we just think it’s a wonderful way to go out and. Provide incredible intelligence in a pitch.
[00:34:50] Stephen Woessner: And that’s such a great word, intelligence.
[00:34:52] Stephen Woessner: Thank you for sharing that. I had no idea that you guys are doing that, and that is really, really awesome that you’re doing that. So I know that we’ve quickly run out of time, which is crazy. I looked at my clock and I’m like, how can it possibly be that we need to come in for a landing, but a last we do.
[00:35:05] Stephen Woessner: So I know we’ve talked about a lot, George, but before we go, before we close out and say goodbye. Any final advice, anything you think we might have missed, and then please share with our friends listening the best way to connect with you.
[00:35:19] George Swetlitz: Sure. So, well, I don’t know that we could talk all day about this, Dean.
[00:35:23] George Swetlitz: Yeah, there’s a lot here, but I think we covered a lot of ground. It was a really nice conversation. I appreciate it. Really enjoyed it. In terms of reaching us, we have a spot on our site. So write response a.com, Sell With Authority, and in there we have some tools and some, you know, coupons, discounts for your listeners.
[00:35:43] Stephen Woessner: Oh, okay.
[00:35:43] George Swetlitz: And that gets you right to the site. And then people can tool around on the site and learn. And we have free trials and we’re always willing to set up portals free agencies. We do white label for agencies so. If, for example, sell, you know, it would be reviews dot sell with authority.com. So we make it so that it’s your capability, not our capability.
[00:36:03] George Swetlitz: Okay. And so all of those things are on the website. You can, you can see us there, you know, I’m on LinkedIn or the business is on LinkedIn. Happy to connect there as well.
[00:36:10] Stephen Woessner: Awesome. Okay, everyone, no matter how many notes you took. Or how often you go back and re-listen to George’s words of wisdom and insights.
[00:36:20] Stephen Woessner: And I sure hope that you do. The key is you have to take it. You have to take what he so generously gave you, take it and apply it. Because when you do, you will sell more of what you do. And George, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. I’m grateful that you said yes to come onto the show, to be our mentor and guide to help us move our agencies onward to that next level.
[00:36:44] Stephen Woessner: Thank you. So much, George.
[00:36:46] George Swetlitz: Thank you.