210: Optimizing Leads to Signed Clients with Ted DeBettencourt of Juvo Leads

[00:00:00] So more and more AI is being used on my industry as well. And a lot of people say, Ted, you still use human powered chat. That sounds expensive. It is, but it's a lot more effective. So we'll use people powered chat, not robots, because someday AI is going to take it over all over. But we have some chat scripts that are fairly in depth. And we're always testing AI to figure out where it can and can't be used. And AI is really good on the chat side in the first question or two.

[00:00:26] And then you get to question three or question four. And this is the empathy statement. It doesn't really connect with the person and ask a question that's already been answered. And then when you get into the more complex role questions, it will just skip questions or not understand it. So AI is good for a lot of things. But the question I always ask is when someone asked me, well, Ted, how can we use in humans? Well, how can we use in humans to answer the phone?

[00:00:48] You can see AI. There's a lot of AI phone answering companies out there. And they're really good for like nights, weekends and overflows if you can't afford a human or have the bandwidth out of people. But most law firms say that our ability to connect with our clients is what makes us different.

[00:01:09] Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

[00:01:31] Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules, Growth Strategies for Law Firms podcast with a special guest and actually a dual podcast. We're with Ted DiBettencourt from Juvo Leads and the Traffic to Leads podcast. Ted, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules podcast. Jay, thanks for having me on the show. And thanks for being a co-host and a co-guest with me. I've never really done the double dual joint podcast, but to all our Traffic to Leads listeners, it's fun to be a part of this today.

[00:02:02] Yeah, we figured we might as well knock it off and do both podcasts at once. And, you know, to start out, why don't you tell everyone a little bit about Juvo Leads? Sure. So Juvo Leads is a human powered chat and phone answering company. We started Juvo Leads chat about 10, closing on 11 years now. And we've been a traditional human powered chat primarily for law firms for the past nine years. And about a year ago, we launched our phone answering division as well.

[00:02:30] So anything human powered chat, phone answering, long story short, you put us on your website. With our chat service, you get at least 50 percent more leads and we give you a free 30 day trial to prove it. So we're Juvo Leads human chat. And you were an attorney, too, right? I never practiced. I went to law school after being a debater in college and said, oh, this is what debate leads me to. And then I got to law school and said, oh, there's a lot more to this. And then just, you know, arguing points in front of a court.

[00:02:59] There's a lot of writing, a lot of reading involved. So I didn't really like that part, but I like the law aspect or the debating aspect. So I said, well, why don't I not do this? So I got an MBA as well and went into business instead. Fantastic. I'll tell your audience a little bit about 10 Golden Rules. And I went to business school and started working at ad agencies. And went from being the director of marketing at McDonald's Restaurants of Canada.

[00:03:29] Really? Being the director of marketing at ediets.com. And went from selling Big Macs to selling diets. Hey, you're feeding your future clients. That's right. We grew that to 60 million. And we were one of the top five largest online advertisers in the world. Oh, wow. And back in 02 and 03, we were running banner ads on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. I always joked that Google was still in beta and Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school when we got this all started. That's crazy. Yeah.

[00:03:59] It probably literally was. Yeah. Yeah. I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing Association. And I wrote a presentation called the 10 Golden Rules of Online Marketing. Ah. A bunch of people came up to me at the end and said, we hear this Google thing is going to be big. We want to hire you as a consultant. So basically, I've been doing the same thing for the last 23 years. I get on stages. I try and demystify digital marketing. And we've grown.

[00:04:25] And then six or seven years ago, we decided to focus on our top niche at the time, which was lawyers and legal advertising. Yep. And so that's where we met up. We've met up at several conferences. And Ted's been at Ten Golden Rules Conference, which is called TGR Live, Strategies for Law Firms. So we've hung out. And here we are. Yeah. Pleasure. Great to have you on this format, Jay. I didn't realize your agency started with one magnificent presentation. So it kind of started from there.

[00:04:55] They saw the future of internet marketing. What were the 10 Golden Rules at the time? And have they changed? You know, I'm really proud that the 10 Golden Rules have stood the test of time. Yep. And the only thing that I might have had more about was search, because there wasn't an actual rule that said, like, search is king or something. And I really wrote them as strategies, not as tactics. Yeah. Because if I did, the tactic would have been, you know, make sure your banner has a clickable button that says click here.

[00:05:25] You know, like, that was the stuff that was in vogue. But the first golden rule is there are no rules. And what I mean by that is I came from traditional advertising and marketing for Coca-Cola and McDonald's, and we used to have all these rules. Because you really didn't know what worked and how much it worked. Yeah. Like, one of the rules was, you know, a billboard should only have five or six words. Or you needed 350 GRPs, which was gross rating points, which meant 35% of the audience had to see your ads 10 times each.

[00:05:54] And these were just kind of made up rules that we knew, you know, if we did about that much advertising, people would know that we had Happy Meals at McDonald's that weekend and they would start coming into the stores. And advertising worked, by the way. Like, when we started advertising the Happy Meals, sales would be up 10 or 15% that weekend. Really? What I always struggled with is the lack of clarity of what worked. Yeah. The franchisees always wanted to know, like, was it the TV, the radio, or the billboards?

[00:06:23] And so we'd test in markets. We'd do TV and billboards or radio and billboards. And the biggest factor was the weather. Really? We could never really define. But, you know, I personally had a theory that one plus one doesn't equal two in advertising. One plus one kind of equals three. And, you know, I sort of experienced that personally, but also, you know, it seemed to work professionally as well. Like, if we launched those new Disney Happy Meals.

[00:06:49] And I think, like, you know, if you're driving home on Thursday night and you see a billboard, and then Friday morning you hear the ad, you're like, okay. It clues in more than just the one hit. It's kind of like, okay, I'm going to take the kids to McDonald's because they'll love this. And, you know, we'll have some fun on Saturday. And so, and it really, you know, like I said, advertising works. But what I loved about digital is, you know, we knew to the penny which ad worked, which keywords worked, which landing page worked, which offer worked.

[00:07:17] And so at eDiets, we were spending $40 million. And it was a virtual test lab. Yeah. Half the traffic would see the blue website and half the traffic would see a pink website because we were 92% female. By the way, guess which one worked better? Uh, the blue one. The blue one. Yeah. But the learnings we got, like the pink one, the new, we designed a whole new version of the funnel. And the pink one actually converted more prospective emails. Really?

[00:07:47] And so we redid the blue one. So it's like we did a ton of that A, B testing. And then you take elements from like B in this case, the pink design email extraction worked better. And so we were constantly testing and improving. Yeah. I like that side of marketing. And we do a lot of A, B testing here at Juvo. I couldn't imagine my whole marketing career. We've been where it's been all digital. So I've never worked on the non-digital side.

[00:08:12] But the notion of like running different tests in different markets and seeing if it works and then checking the weather and saying, all right, well, it was sunny then Miami that week. So that's why we had a lot of visitors. That scares me because I would have no way to pull meaningful data from it. So like for us, we're probably running right now probably 30 or 40 different A, B tests. Some against competitors. Most of them are just internal. So like we'll do a test where we have this type of pop-up or that type of pop-up. We're even testing different types of scripts.

[00:08:41] So like we'll say we'll open a chat with these few questions. And then on the other pages, we'll open it with these questions. But for us, it very much has to be controlled. So like it's the same traffic during the same period of time. So we can take into account the weather, the time of year, the seasonality, all those things. And like every other visitor will see a different iteration of what we want to test. And we can learn some really meaningful things. Like we've had some different pop experiences where we saw competitors were using them.

[00:09:08] And we're like, oh, this probably isn't really doing anything, but let's just make it ourselves and test it. And we had one where like it increased our leads by like 50%. And we're like, we had no idea this was going to happen. So we did that split test and we replicated against 30 other sites and we saw the same results. And we're like, all right, there's something to learnings from these split tests. So now we're constantly learning. And if you're not doing it in the digital marketing world, you're hurting yourself. Because is that opportunity in digital that isn't in the older marketing or what do you call non-digital, I guess? Traditional marketing? Traditional, yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:38] By the way, we've done a number of A-B tests with Tuvo leads for our clients with TED. And they've won a lot. So I encourage you to test it out. And you can do an A-B test. So literally half the traffic would see your old chatbot and half the traffic would be TED's folks personally taking a call as a human. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we love doing this. And well, tell me, I want to learn a little bit more about the transition from the traditional marketing to digital.

[00:10:04] So aside from the 10 golden rules holding up, any other big changes that you're seeing from a strategy perspective and not so much a tactic perspective? In truth, the Ten Golden Rules are the Ten Golden Rules of internet marketing. They were all digital. You know, some things that I, as a matter of fact, most of my rules, as I mentioned, they were strategies. I learned a lot. I went to a great course on direct mail and that type of traditional marketing, but mail marketing. Yes, it was.

[00:10:34] Oh, snail mail. Yeah. Yeah. But really sophisticated marketing in that space. And so that's where I learned a lot about A-B testing and statistical significance. Oh, I bet you can do testing in it with snail mail, can't you? Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, there was a huge industry and still is where, you know, you'll get an envelope, you'll get a blue envelope and a red on. Yeah. You know, you learn not to test too many elements. Yep.

[00:11:01] Or you're eroding statistical significance and you have a control. So your control is probably that blue envelope like it was our blue website. Mm-hmm. And then our target audience was female. We thought we could do pink. But like I said, every week we were testing things. Here's a fun one. The boss one time did a secret test and he wouldn't tell us what we were testing. And he did it only with the head of IT. And we did an AA test. What's an AA test?

[00:11:30] So exactly the same landing page, exactly the same funnel. And he was testing the testing methodology. Oh, I like that. I thought that was an Alcoholics Anonymous reference, but no. It actually took like a month because one, A was beating A by like 53% to 47%. And it took a month to get down to that statistical reliability. So yeah. Did it even out of it for a long enough period of time? Yeah. Eventually it evened out.

[00:11:58] And one thing we determined, we needed about a thousand purchases to have statistical significance. It was less about the traffic and more about the purchase decisions, which really mattered. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool though. Yeah. We've seen those before. We've gone live with split tests. We're like, oh, we got an easy winner here. Like five days in because we're too antsy to want to see the results. And then it's like, no, no, we need to let this run. Don't you have 10 chats. You can't use that as a barometer there. Do you guys have a measure?

[00:12:27] Like how many weeks or how many variations on A and B do you want to see? As many as humanly possible. So like when we do a split test, so we are, we give everyone a 30 day free trial. So like a lot of times they'll say, Hey, Ted, I want to try, I want to use you guys, but I want to try the video or the not video. So we'll load chat with video for half and no video for half and then see that. But like, if the site gets like 50 visitors a month, like there's not enough traffic. Yeah.

[00:12:53] So we like to say, you know, between three to 5,000 visitors over whatever period of time to draw some meaningful learnings. So let's talk a little bit about the state of traffic and conversions. Traffic to leads is the name of your podcast. That's right. What are you seeing these days in the days of AI? Have you seen any significant changes in the type of traffic? The two biggest changes we've seen over the years are ones that just kind of continue the same way.

[00:13:23] The rise of text. So every year, a larger percentage of our leads are coming in for our clients. Predominantly, you know, 95% of our firm or of our clients are our firms and the vast majority of those are PI. And the increase every year, the percent of leads that come from for our firms via starting a conversation with the firm via text is going up. So when I started, you know, in 2015, 2016, it was under 1%.

[00:13:50] Nowadays for our PI websites, we have PI sites where I mobile 20% of the leads are coming in via SMS. So it's just an increasing amount of leads every day just because people are getting more and more comfortable starting a conversation with text. So what's the difference between chat and text? The call to action. So if you're on a, you go to a client's firm's website, there's a button down below. Start a chat. We pop up. Hey, how you doing? Start a conversation with them.

[00:14:15] The other call to action we put is a big SMS bar at the top of the website. Call us or text us. They click the call button. Calls the firm. They click the text button. Now they started a text conversation. So it's no longer in like the window of the website. It literally sends them to their texting app on their phone. And then they text them that way. We like text messages because we have the ability to follow up with them, even if they leave the website. And it's always one less question we have to ask. What's the phone number? Well, we got that because they're texting us from that phone number.

[00:14:44] So that's been a big increase in the state of chat. So that's probably the primary one. That's going to all signs indicate that's going to keep going up. The next big one we're seeing is that LSAs keep becoming a growing percentage. of some leads firms. So I have some firms that are really big and a third, two thirds. I even have some firms where like 70% of their leads overall are from LSA. And messaging are becoming a bigger proponent.

[00:15:12] It used to be one out of five leads from LSA were a message lead. But now Google is really promoting the LSA messages. So we're seeing about anywhere between 50% to 35% of total LSAs now are in the form of messaging. So we're just meeting Google where they are. So the rise of text and the rise of LSA messaging is what's really been shaping our industry in the chat side. And do you know definitively that it's younger people who like to text?

[00:15:39] We say that, but we don't have like if we're if I was asking every chatter, how old are you? Like, you know, we're not asking that in the in the chat. But that's what we're seeing is just as that age bubble gets higher and higher. So, for example, we're on a lot of it's not it's bigger on the PI side. It's not as bigger in the estate planning. So the estate planning is generally a little bit older demographic. Yeah. So there's your reverse math on the ages. Yeah.

[00:16:08] So it's not like a true A-B split test, but like we're saying, all right, well, Texas bigger MPI sites are in the sites where it's not anyone getting in a car accident or over 16, theoretically, hopefully. So that's where we're seeing that that job. How about you? What are you seeing on the on the legal marketing side? What are the I'll get there in one sec. I just wanted to share you and I had a great insight. And you said something to me that I thought was really smart. And I said, well, I heard this as well from the same source that you heard it and developed it.

[00:16:37] And that was that you shouldn't take someone who starts the conversation and texting and force them to get on the phone because some people prefer texting. And I want to give Rob Levine a shout out. Yeah. Rob did a great, a real tour de force presentation. And at TGR Live, growth strategies for law firms at our annual conference in March. And his presentation was awesome. It was the highest rated presentation or neck and neck with mine.

[00:17:07] But I have an inside seat. And one thing he said that really resonated with me was that we think that when people start a chat, you want to immediately get them on the phone with an attorney. And he said there's a huge number of hangups because a lot of people who want to chat don't want to get on the phone. Yeah. So validate that for us as well. Sure. So Rob actually taught us that a long time, years ago.

[00:17:33] So we were always of the philosophy that do what the client thinks is best. And everyone has a different opinion on should you mode transfer them? Are you just starting to chat to get them on the phone? Or if they're starting to chat, should you meet them where they are? So we were always kind of the philosophy, well, maybe it's just best to get them on the phone first. But Rob said like, no, no, that's not how you do it. And so we adopted that philosophy overall as a company. And our leads overall went up when we started doing that.

[00:18:00] So what we learned pretty quickly is that if someone starts a text and you immediately call them, they chose the text for a reason. They didn't choose the text. That's the mode they choose to communicate with your firm in. So if you try to change up how you're communicating with them, at least to start the buyer's journey for the prospect to become a client, you're doing them a disservice. You're saying, hey, I don't want to operate on these rules that you've already told us is how you want to talk to us. We want to talk to you the way we want to talk to you. And that hurts your overall lead conversions.

[00:18:30] And we see that for, you know, obviously for Rob's site, but also for all the other sites as well. We still have some firms that say like, just get them on the phone. I'm like, all right, well, it's not the optimal way to do it, but we'll do what you want. But if you try it this way for 30 days, let's see if there's a difference there. So we do definitely see a big increase when we try to meet the prospects, where they're at and not forcing them to convert to the channels that we want to convert on. Because what's best for the law firm isn't always what's best for the prospect.

[00:18:57] And the firms that can meet the prospect where they are, communicate within the channels that they choose to communicate with them are the ones that are going to win more cases. Yeah. So I'll take your question now. I think you said what's new in digital marketing or? Exactly. Yeah. I want to, I know that I know the front end world. I don't know the back end world. So how are, what's all the magic you're doing to bring, bring visitors to law firms websites nowadays? Well, I think the biggest thing that people are trying to understand is

[00:19:25] what's the impact of Google AI search results. Yep. And chat GPT and perplexity and how many people are using those tools. Yeah. So first of all, the big number, the most important thing I think is that, you know, Google and their little brother, YouTube, Google bought YouTube. They're still by far and away the big dogs. Yep. And Google is about chat GPT is about 5% the number of searches every day of Google. Yeah.

[00:19:54] And a lot of chat GPTs are probably very sophisticated business queries. Yeah. Not like who's the best personal injury lawyer around the corner for me. Yeah. So Google, it's still, I still think the game is played in one on Google and, and YouTube is pretty important. Matter of fact, YouTube's, we often hear this at conferences and whatnot, but the numbers are there. YouTube is by far and away the second biggest search website. Bigger than Bing? Bing's not even in the top 10, I don't think. Right.

[00:20:23] Chat GPT is now number five. So, I mean, just the traffic and the daily visits and, and the amount of searches on YouTube are just massive. And YouTube is still about four times the size of Facebook. Wow. So when you look at Google and YouTube combined, that's still really where it all happens. And then the other big chunk that I think people need to understand is that there's probably

[00:20:50] 10 or 15% of searches that used to generate traffic to a lawyer's website and they donate. Yeah. But what I. That's a long tail you hear people talking about? It is. Long tail is one way to describe it, but I really say it's top of the funnel. So the description of long tail is a very sophisticated search. Yeah. Like who's the best personal injury lawyer? If I got rear-ended and the other person doesn't have insurance and my insurance agency

[00:21:18] is Geico, that would be a version of a long tail search as opposed to like personal injury lawyer would be a very short tail search. But what's really the differentiator is what I call top of the funnel searches. So if again, we use a car accident example and your first search might be, do I need to hire a lawyer if I was rearing? Because you're just starting to understand how complex this is. Yeah.

[00:21:46] And you're talking to a few friends and they're like, oh, your insurance company's not going to pay you anything. And you talk to the insurance company and they're like, they want you to do a recorded call. And, you know, they're not exactly forthcoming with getting your car fixed and paying for your medical and stuff like that. So you're just doing that first search or two. Yeah. You're like, you know, do I need a lawyer? How much does a lawyer cost? And things like that. We call that in marketing the top of the funnel.

[00:22:13] As you get more and more educated and you realize like your next searches are more sophisticated, like how much money can I get if I was rear-ended and the other person has insurance. And then your final search is who's the best personal injury lawyer near me. Yep. And things like best or near me are the final criteria. Now, those initial searches, Google is going to show the Google AI search result called AI overviews. Yeah.

[00:22:42] And Google gives you a chat GPT style answer. Now, there's a great opportunity to show up in those searches. So question everyone's asking, like, how do I get in the Google AI searches and the chat GPT searches? And I think there's two or three main things that you want to do in that area. Obviously, there's a lot of sophisticated stuff we're trying and testing. But the three biggest things is one is do Q&A SEO. So question and answer stuff.

[00:23:09] Because essentially, when someone's asking a question, like we talked about the top of the funnel, like, do I need a lawyer if I was in a car accident? You want to literally write blogs and we do a lot of video for our clients where they literally answer that question. They're like, question I'm getting asked all the time today is, do I need a lawyer if I was hit by an Uber? And the lawyer goes on to answer that question. And we put that on YouTube because, as I said before, YouTube's the number two. But YouTube's also very connected to the Google algorithm.

[00:23:39] So can the AI see a YouTube video and say this answers those questions? Oh, a thousand percent. YouTube shows up all the time in AI. Nice. In chat GPT and perplexity and obviously very much so in Google. But if you actually look on YouTube and click on read more, there's a transcription for every YouTube video. Really? So Google's already transcribed it, right? Google owns YouTube. Oh, so you're saying these aren't people, transcriptions that people would do. These are automatically done by Google now?

[00:24:08] Automatically done by YouTube and Google. Oh, cool. So literally all the words you said are on the internet. They're on YouTube. For chat GPT to read and use. We literally get the question and the answer by saying, the other day a woman was in my office and she asked me, how much can I get if I was rear-ended by a FedEx truck? And so we literally get the question in the answer. We get the question in the SEO.

[00:24:35] We get the question in the title of the video and the meta tag and the description we write. We do all that on YouTube. And then we also put the video on the website. So it goes on a blog or a practice area page. So that's the first part of this opportunity to come up in AI search, which is question and answer SEO. The second part is becoming an authority. Yep. So there's a lot of talk about how you become an authority in the eyes of the chat GPTs,

[00:25:03] the Claude's and Google, meaning that your questions are validated. And one of the best places is answering questions on Reddit and Quora. I keep hearing about Reddit. Yeah. And they become very significant players in these AI algorithms because one of the things Google wants to do and chat GPT is validate whose question is better than someone else's question. And the Reddit and Quora community, if you have a good answer, they voted up. If you have a crappy answer, they voted down.

[00:25:31] So if you've got 2000 pluses answering a question about fighting someone on your car accident, I don't want to pick on any of the insurance companies nationwide. It's not on your side. Not on your side. Yeah, I did it. So the second piece is becoming an expert or an authority. So getting in articles written about you, PR, Wikipedia pages, or even Grokipedia and things like that are taken into account as you might be an expert.

[00:25:58] Articles on your bar association, articles on your chamber of commerce is the second part, which is being an expert. And then the final part is stuff you can do on the website. So you're going to revisit things like your frequently asked questions on your website. Yeah. And schema code is a type of code that Google and Yahoo and all the search engines came up with to simplify their job. So if you have location schema on your website, that's a precise way of telling Google exactly where you're located and telling Yahoo exactly where you're located.

[00:26:28] And originally there was eight or 10 schemas like that, your type of industry. But now there's about 800 schemas, including like FAQ schema and industry schema and even legal schema. You want to have the type of code that makes it super easy for the search engine. And there's an LLM schema, large language models, the AI schema. So the three things are question and answers and proactively answering questions and helping

[00:26:55] these new AI searches answer questions, becoming an expert, and then optimizing your website. For questions and answers and schema. The content sounds straightforward. The schema, I mean, that sounds a little bit technical above my pay grade, but on the authority side, how would you, as a marketing agency, is there anything you can do to help a law firm get more authority? Yeah.

[00:27:23] You know, we do a lot in terms of press releases and getting them in articles, creating authority style content. They like unique data, like running a survey is great. Yep. Publishing the results or doing an analysis on the most dangerous roads in state or the most, you know, iciest intersections and things like that. And coming up with proprietary data, you know, makes you and your website an expert.

[00:27:51] And there's certainly a case to be made for Ted DiBettencourt being the expert as opposed to Juvo Leads or Jay Berkowitz as opposed to Tangled Russo. The individual right now, they're looking for individuals who are experts. Oh, really? As opposed to companies. But there's a company role to play as well. That's cool. That's cool. Speaking of content, I know AI is a hot topic nowadays, and it's probably because both ways, of course. But tell me about how you're using AI or in content. Do you? Do you not? Or is it all AI? Is it non-AI?

[00:28:20] What's your thoughts on AI and content? Yeah. I guess our best answer is AI with human editors. Because I think you're... Any agency is kidding you today if they don't do research with AI and they don't develop content ideas with AI. Because it's such a powerful tool. So... Yeah. But then you definitely have to humanize the content because Google and others and even humans, like if something... There's that slick chat GPT style content. Yeah. We all can recognize now as users.

[00:28:49] And even if you don't recognize it, you subconsciously, you're thinking, this is just not really connecting with me. Yeah. So it definitely has to be humanized. Yeah. So we feel a blend. And we're trying to really become an AI agency, but all of our senior department heads are, you know, North American-based experts. Still humans. Yeah. A thousand percent. Yeah. Awesome. And that's why I've kind of been hearing, great for ideation.

[00:29:16] But, you know, you know when you see it, when you're reading AI slop, you can pretty much tell right off the bat. Yeah. Definitely don't go with the slop. Yeah. For sure. What are some of the other big trends you're seeing in the industry? Well, I thought you were going to ask about AI because I served you up an AI question. So more and more AI is being used on my industry as well. And a lot of people say, Ted, you still use human-powered chat. That sounds expensive. It is, but it's a lot more effective. So we'll use people-powered chat, not robots, because someday AI is going to take it over all over.

[00:29:45] But we have some chat scripts that are fairly in-depth. And, you know, we're always testing AI to figure out where it can and can't be used. And AI is really good on the chat side in the first question or two. And then you get to question three or question four, and this is the empathy statement. It doesn't really connect with the person. It asks a question that's already been answered. And then when you get into the more complex role questions, it'll just skip questions or not understand it. So AI is good for a lot of things.

[00:30:13] But the question I always ask is when someone asks me, well, Ted, how come you're using humans? I say, well, how come you're using humans to answer the phone? You can still use AI. There's a lot of AI phone answering companies out there. And they're really good for nights, weekends, and overflows if you can't afford a human or have the bandwidth to have people. But most law firms say that our ability to connect with our clients is what makes us different. So if you're saying that on one hand, and then you're turning on a phone system that

[00:30:40] is all AI, what we know is that when I transfer phone calls, because I transfer my chats via phone, when I transfer my phone calls to an AI answering system, 40%, a little under 40, it's like 38%. 38% of people hang up as soon as they realize it's AI. They get ticked off. They're like, oh, you can't even do me the honor of listening to me talk about my car accident where someone was severely injured and maybe or died. And you think AI is an appropriate way for it to handle me? People get ticked off at that.

[00:31:07] So if your philosophy is and your difference as a law firm is you make a difference between you can really communicate with your clients well, you can relate to them, you build a real relationship with them. And then you're using AI to answer your phones or even AI to answer chats. You're doing your clients a disservice and your numbers will suffer for it. So that's the other big change that we're seeing. You mentioned off the top that you've also started a call center. Yeah. The industry certainly has been frustrated with the amount of expertise out there in the

[00:31:37] call center business. And so how did it come about and what makes you guys great? Sure. So we came about because I was frustrated. The same reason we started Juvo chat 10, 11 years ago now, because I was answering, I was using the chats on the market. And for my clients at a small agency, Jay out of Boston, I was managing the chat vendors and they kept stinking like really bad. So I was like, all right, you're fired. I'm going to do it myself. And I answered chats. My leads went up.

[00:32:07] So then, you know, we're doing this for 10, 11 years now. And then about a year ago, I realized I made about 50 to 60 reference referrals to other phone answering companies. Every time I'd make a referral, not every time, but a lot of times the firm would come back to me and say like, Ted, these guys are duds. I went through about 10, 11 different phone answering companies and like, they just kept burning me. I had a few clients that got ticked off at me because I made a bad referral. And I'm like, all right, I can't keep making these referrals. So for a while, I was just saying we can't do it. And then we realized it was a natural transition.

[00:32:35] So the same management structure we have on the chat team, we just rolled out on the phone team. It's a lot harder to manage and the margins aren't nearly as good. But you know, the big difference is you pay people a lot more than you think you should. And you hire people with a lot of experience. And then the big difference between us is our tech. So we have a lot more technology that our phone agents use in real time than all the other call centers do. So just by focusing on the quality, only taking certain clients, like we're not taking everybody,

[00:33:04] we only take mid-sized and up law firms because if we have to answer five or 10 phone calls a month, we're not going to get enough reps. Our chat agents, our phone agents aren't going to understand the nuances of your law firm. So we only take certain clientele and we have a lot more technology behind the scenes that are powering our phone agents than every other one on the market. That's great. Well, definitely get someone over and we'll get a trial because that's got to be one of the number one questions we get all the time. Yeah. And that was for us too. After hours calls, right?

[00:33:34] Yeah. Oh, we do daytime hours, overflow nights, weekends, whatever the firm wants. Yeah. Overflow is important too. You mentioned the LSAs for a minute and you kind of quietly said something I understood. Maybe not everybody does. The Google screen local service ads, there's an option to have phone calls or messages. And if you have messages, I think the general understanding is that if you make yourself more available, Google will give you more leads.

[00:34:03] So you want to add messaging and then you've got to make sure that you answer really quickly. So having Juvo answer those within seconds is going to help you perform in the local service ads. So talk a little bit about LSAs and what trends do you see there and how do you get more of your piece of the pie? Sure. The number one ranking factor in LSAs is message response time. When you answer the messages fast, Google puts a badge in your profile. It says typically replies in a few minutes.

[00:34:32] But what just came out on the 13th, so less than two weeks ago from the day of the shooting or podcast episode is Google. The 14th of July, 2026. 2026. You're listening to this sometime in the future. So about two weeks ago, Google came out with a new button on the LSAs, request RMO, request multiple opinions. So what people can do now is instead of sending one message to one firm, they send one message to six firms.

[00:34:59] So that means one lead is going to six firms. So then it becomes a raise to whomever can answer that lead fastest. So we provide a distinct advantage to our law firms is that we're the fastest one to get them on the phone with the lead because when a lead comes in, we call the firm with that lead and get them on the phone with them as fast as possible. You know, using Rob Levine's trying and true methodology of meet clients where they're at, that applies to everything. But it's a little bit different when the one lead is going to six firms.

[00:35:27] So with our LSAs, the number one thing is to when you get a message, call them up as fast as you can, because if you don't, there are five other firms that are doing the same thing. So if you try to meet them where they are in LSA, you're going to lose the battle. Everybody else that answers LSA messages, they reply in LSA. We're the only one that calls an LSA message as soon as it comes in. So if you use us for LSA, we get you on the phone with every LSA message first, beating your competitors to every lead in LSA.

[00:35:55] So that's our biggest distinct advantage as a company right now. And it's why a lot of firms are really doing well with LSA with us. You said the number one factor in LSA is response time. There's another argument that the number one factor is click-through rate. Yeah, but how do you get a click-through? Well, LSA, so like if there's two or three at the top. Well, how do you get a click-through is you rank higher.

[00:36:22] You've heard how you get a click-through in Google, not by showing up on page 10. So right now, Google is only showing two ads at the top of LSA. So the number one factor to show up in the top of your market is to have response time. So if your ad isn't being fast, you're not going to get that click-through rate. It's like self-fulfilling. Interesting. Yeah, exactly right. All right. Well, look, we're at the time in the 10 Golden Rules podcast. Where I asked the one-liners. And you told me you also have some zingers at the end of your podcast.

[00:36:50] So since I'm intrigued, why don't you go first? All right. Jay, here's a very serious question. You're in death row for a crime you didn't commit. What's your last meal? I don't want to answer that. Probably. Can I get pizza, burger, and fries? Absolutely. Don't worry about carbs in the morning. You'll be dead. Yeah, might as well eat the stuff. Yeah. Wow. So my question is exact opposite.

[00:37:19] Ted, do you have a personal fitness and wellness routine? A personal fitness and wellness routine? Wellness, no. Personal fitness, not even. But we do a family fitness routine. So I'm trying to get my girls age 8, 5, 4, and 2. So we're starting our family fitness routine. So we're getting the kids into running and exercise. And it's not personal because I go at the pace of an 8-year-old.

[00:37:49] But they're all running. They're all keeping pace. And we're trying to get fit as a family. So I wouldn't say it's personal, but it's a family fitness plan. I love it. I'm afraid to ask, but go ahead with another one. Weird fact about you that maybe you shouldn't share. Weird fact about me that maybe I shouldn't share. The only one that's coming to mind is I was a soapstone carver. Ooh, that's cool. You know the expression, there's an elephant in the room? Yeah.

[00:38:18] So I made this little elephant out of soapstone. Hey, that's cool. Oh, you did? Look at that. Oh, yeah. A little pen knife or something? No, no. I had files and knives and stuff. I don't know. We went on a family trip in a camper a million years ago. My aunt and uncle loaned us their camper. And so I grew up in Canada. So it's far to go anywhere. But I don't know. We stopped one place and they had soapstone.

[00:38:48] And I guess they had a few tools. And so I started my soapstone carving career. Fair. That's a fun one. That's a good one. Aside from the elephant, got any good examples? Aside from the elephant? Yeah. Another good example. You got some giant ones floating around? No, I never. Most of them I think I gifted to my parents. So I don't have that many left. Yeah. That was a good one. All right. Best television show in existence?

[00:39:15] My first reaction was Stranger Things. But I'll tell you the best television show not in existence as a Canadian. It'll be the first year hockey night in Canada. That's a good answer for Canadians. Because the rights are something. And there will always be a Saturday night hockey game. But it was not only was it the highest ranked TV show in Canada. Yeah. But there was a session called Coach's Corner with Don Cherry, the former Bruins coach.

[00:39:44] And that was by far and away the highest rated five minutes in Canada. Really? Year after year of 25 years. Yeah. That's funny. That is a great answer for Vanadium, Jay. I appreciate that. All right. So let me go with one. Best business books. I like the E-Myth, I guess. I don't know if that's appropriate. No, that's a lie. I like E-Myth. E-Myth is one of the best and most consistent answers on this podcast. But I'm not going to say that. That's not going to be my answer. It's a shoot.

[00:40:14] Was it how to make friends and influence people? Dale Carnegie. Both classics. And, you know, if you're starting out in business, E-Myth is basically how do you systematize your business? Yep. So when you go from being one person, you've got a nice training manual. We call them standard operating practices now at 10 Golden Rules. Yeah. And they're in our software system. Yeah. SLP. All right. Well, I got that question too, but I'm going to skip that one. Best part of your home day and best part of your work day?

[00:40:45] I'm going to say the best part of my home day is playing tennis, but it doesn't happen every day. Real tennis or you pick a ballpark guy? No, no. I play doubles tennis. I live in Florida, so it's year round. It's a little, it's a bit of a grind in the summer. Yeah, I bet. But we go out at 730 and it's fantastic. And it's some time with the guys and it's competitive and it's twice as good a sweat as going to the gym. Yeah. Especially now, 730 a.m. or 730 p.m.? A.m. Oh, nice.

[00:41:14] It's still hot at 730 p.m. now in Florida. And best part of my work day? I think my answer is going to be EOS. Yeah. We started using the EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System from Gino Wickman's book, Caption. And what I love is that we now have a system of common terminology and everybody understands it now. We've been fully integrated for about two and a half years.

[00:41:43] And it takes a lot of the load off the founder's plate, too. Because I'm our EOS visionary is what it's called. And so it allows me to play in the spaces I should be, like doing things like this, podcasting and branding and building awareness of Tangled and rules and high-level sales and relationship building. And I'm not doing the day-to-day stuff because we've clearly defined those roles in the EOS system and handed those off. Awesome. Awesome. That's fun.

[00:42:13] Last one I got for you, Jay. Dinner with anyone dead or alive, even non-fictional. Who are you doing it with and where are you going? You know, I watched Commencement Speech by Steve Jobs the other day. And that's the first name that pops to mind. Certainly a phenomenal founder and entrepreneur. And you could learn a ton from him. And I'd love to see what his take on AI and everything today. Yeah, I bet his take on AI would be interesting.

[00:42:42] So last one for you. Blogs, podcasts, webinars, YouTubes. What do you subscribe to? And when it hits your feed, you stop everything else and listen to or watch, read? Oh, I don't stop everything because that's trouble. I listen to a lot of podcasts in my car. Or mainly just the 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast, Jay. That's my favorite. That's a very good answer, by the way. I listen to a lot of stuff, read a lot of stuff.

[00:43:11] But I don't have anything I drop because I'm kind of like a rapid. I get distracted easily. So I got to stay focused most of the time. Yeah, I'm the same as you when a good one hits. So there's one or two a week that seems like everything else is less important. Actually, I like the All In Podcast these days. You know those guys? I don't. I'll check that one out. Jason Calacanis was actually on the 10 Golden Rules Podcast. Oh, cool.

[00:43:38] He was doing a startup called Mahalo, which is Hawaiian for hello. And it was a search engine that was human powered. It was kind of like the Juvo leads of search engines. Yeah, but is that still around? Unfortunately not. Yeah, it didn't surprise me. I don't like that comparison. This is what you guys are doing. Thanks, Jay. But what Jason did get great at was founder investing. And he invested in Uber and Thumbtack.

[00:44:06] And he claims seven unicorns. A unicorn is a billion dollar valuation. That's a lot. And he has a great book called Angel and a great training and series this week in startups podcast. And so he started the All In Podcast with David Sachs and Chumath and David Friedberg, who were all early at Facebook and Google and PayPal. David Sachs was one of Elon's, the PayPal mafia.

[00:44:33] So I think the three guys are billionaires. And Jason's a several hundred millionaire. But they're very plugged into tech and AI and what Elon's doing and they're friendly with Elon. They have a podcast and a show and everything. That's cool. I'll check the one out. Thanks for the tip. Ted, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for making the time. And thanks for co-branding and co-podcasting. Yeah. This was fun, Jay. I've never done it before. Interesting flow.

[00:44:59] I appreciate your time and look forward to both producing and seeing the production from your end, too. Yeah. And by the way, if you have folks like this, let me know in the YouTube chat or wherever you're listening, iTunes. And we'll come to my socials, Jay Berkowitz or 10goldenrules.com and let me know. We'll get some other high impact industry experts like Ted on the show. Yeah. And likewise, Jay. And you can reach us at juvoleads.com or find me on LinkedIn. Thanks, buddy.

[00:45:29] Have a great day. Likewise, Jay. Have a good one. Thank you much. Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10goldenrules.com. That is podcast at T-E-N goldenrules.com.