The 7-Day Testimonial Playbook

So we are thrilled to announce that FMG has a new product called FMG Testimonials, which we have developed through the acquisition of Testimonial IQ. So, Andrew, welcome, and thank you for joining.

Thank you so much.

And welcome to the FMG team officially. So we’re gonna give everybody a very high level overview of what the tool looks like, what you’ll need to know because I’m sure so many of you have lots of questions. We wanna get to as many of your questions as possible as well. But just to sort of set the stage, I thought I would just share a few data points that I think, you know, many of your advisers are out there hearing this and and talking about it and thinking about it. And so just so that we’re all on the same page of why now, why this was such an important acquisition for FMG and offering, let me just share my screen. And, Andrew, if you could tell me if you can see that chart.

Yep. Okay. So when we think about, you know, how people are finding a financial adviser today in twenty twenty six, we’ve been hearing, you know, forever, advisers say, I mostly grow through referrals. And, yes, that’s true still in a lot of cases.

But one of the things that really is changing a lot is the way that people find, discover, and research the advisers that they end up choosing. So this chart that we’re looking at is a Google Trends report for the search term financial adviser near me. So we can see that around twenty twenty when the pandemic hit, you know, we thought at the time that was an all time high for people really looking for an adviser near them digitally because, right, a lot of those in person events were no longer there as well as there’s a big influx of people having more wealth at the time. Now twenty twenty five, look at how far up into the right that it is.

So this is just becoming something that people are doing more than ever. Right? They are looking online to find a financial adviser. And the way that the search determines who they are shown, one of the biggest factors is client testimonials and reviews. And we’re gonna get more into that, but one of the other things that’s really affecting this trend of why reviews and testimonials are so important is the LLM searches. So here’s just, you know this is just through September of twenty twenty five. I didn’t have a more updated chart.

Just ChatGPT alone. So we’re not looking at Claude and Anthropic, but just ChatGPT alone, we see now, you know, crazy, crazy exponential growth in the number of people that are using that tool weekly to search for things. And a lot of sources are saying that they are projecting that this, you know, LLM style search, so going to ChechiPT, Google Gemini, Copilot, Claude, that it’s going to overtake traditional search by twenty twenty eight. So why am I telling you all this?

One of the the main things is that the way people are searching is changing, but the most important thing is that the results that they’re getting is drastically different. Right? If you go to ChatGPT, you are not given a big long list of links of firms, businesses to go look at. You are given just a few answers.

So how do these LLMs how do they decide which businesses to show? One of the big things that they lean on are real testimonials from clients who have used that product or service before. Right? So these AI models want to rely on this social credibility.

They want to hear from real consumers who have used this product or service before, actual humans who’ve been there, worked with that business. So this is why these reviews and testimonials have been more important than ever and why we at FMG are so excited to launch FMG testimonials. So I’m actually gonna skip ahead, and we’re gonna give a demo for you all. And if you have further questions about some of those data points that I’ve shown or, you know, just the state of what this looks like, of course, we can answer those.

But this is just a screenshot of the dashboard of the F and G testimonials. I will say, I think it’s important to note if your advisers are logging into F and G, they’re not seeing this. Right? This is a stand alone separate product.

We can talk more about that and what that means, but this is not, again, in the FNG dashboard. It is its own separate product.

But, maybe I can introduce you and have you share your screen, and we can go into, what it actually looks like, to go through this process if you are an adviser.

Sounds great. Thank you so much. Samantha, are you able to see this okay?

Just give me one second. And we should mention Andrew was the founder of Testimonial IQ, and and I actually am not seeing your screen just yet. And so he built the product and launched the product and, has worked with many large teams to get it implemented for their advisers as well. So we are lucky to have him spearheading this.

Okay. There we go. Yep. Now I can see.

Wonderful. Okay. Thank you all so much. I’m really excited to be here. Very excited to be part of FMG.

And if you’ll humor me, I wanna give just a quick kind of one minute background on the company we launched in Testimonial IQ and now FMG Testimonials because I think it’s really relevant to this kind of advisor discovery and trust building challenge, which is not new, but certainly now being amplified by ChatGPT and the other LLMs.

So before Testimonial IQ, I helped found and grow a lead gen company that’s done very well in the space. And if you look through our client list, what you would see is it essentially looked like the Barron’s top fifty, kind of the usual suspects and no long tail. And what we discovered is that’s because for most advisors, generating collecting leads is not the hard part. The hard part for them is consistently closing them. And the challenges were really more foundational.

It wasn’t about getting phone numbers or email addresses, it was once they do, how do they get those potential investors to understand them to identify with them to build trust with them and actually be willing to take that phone call.

This is right about the time the SEC marketing rule was going into effect, and so we saw this great opportunity of how do all the other industries do this, and it’s largely through social proof. A big component of that is reviews and testimonials.

But when we’d speak with industry leaders, both on the marketing side and the compliance side, and we sat down, we talked to folks at the SEC, with folks from FINRA, with folks who do examinations, and what we kind of heard was, well yes the regulations now enable this, but there’s a huge challenge with complexity and that challenge gets amplified as an organization grows. So collecting testimonials not that hard. Collecting them compliantly, a little more challenging, but not too hard.

But the real problem is doing it in a way that’s compliant, doing it in a way that you can prove is compliant, and being able to do that at scale. So we spent a long time building this platform that at the beginning I almost always apologized. I said I have to warn you this is really more a compliance platform than a marketing platform. But what we found is that that’s exactly what the industry wanted because that’s what gave scale team confidence and the ability to do this.

And so I’ll walk you through an example of what it looks like, how it can be used. But keep in mind, we built it to be incredibly customizable. So not only can you tailor it if regulations change or new risk alerts come out, but you can tailor the workflows and the evaluation criteria specific to your firm setting. So it’s really easy to control the way this will look for your advisors, your compliance professionals and for your marketers alike.

I think that’s really important background and important to to remind everybody so thank you for that.

Yeah.

We use what’s called campaigns to collect feedback so advisors will see a dashboard like this, and you’ll see that when they’re created they’re in a pending state. So no one can do anything with this. No one can access it until it’s been approved by someone’s compliance approval access to the platform. And you can go through and control who has what level of access, things, who’s able to submit content, who’s able to access content that’s been approved.

And I’ll show you just real quick what the process looks like and how these are built. So firms will customize this, advisors can put their profile picture here, their firm’s logo, their firm’s name. They can also control the way they ask for feedback, or this can be a template created from a leadership team, so it’s standardized across the firm. But we have templates that are very neutral, unbiased, ask clients for feedback.

And then what you’ll notice down here too is this form contains a privacy policy, this can’t be edited by marketers it’s sent centrally by compliance. They can customize the language they can add hyperlinks but usually this is going to have something along the lines of, I confirm I haven’t been compensated I’m a current client. I’ve read your privacy policy or I agree to whatever terms of service you had.

Next advisors can create an email or we can have built in email templates to go along with this Again a way to have standard neutral language that goes out along with these testimonial requests. We do have mail merge fields as well. We have some CRM integrations so advisors can automate this process and we can talk a little bit more about what that looks like and some of the benefits both from a marketing standpoint and a compliance standpoint.

And then this is given a name and this is submitted to compliance. So again it’s in a pending state, advisors can’t do anything with it, they can’t send these links out, they can’t request feedback until someone with compliance access, which is required to access this section of the platform, our compliance center goes in and looks at it. So they’ll see the feedback form that they built. They’ll see what happens after the submission happens.

Excuse me, and they’ll also see the email that’s been created by the advisor. Here they can leave notes, they can send it back, ask that advisor to make some changes, or if it looks good, they can approve it. Once it’s approved, that’s when advisors are able to use this to start collecting feedback.

Really, really simple process, they’ll go here they’re going to launch the campaign.

Excuse me, once the campaign has been launched, they can’t make any more changes, they can’t edit the content, they can’t change the email, doing any of that they’d have to create a new campaign and resubmit it to compliance. So this is locked in.

I’ll also call out we have an audit log associated with all this. So everyone who logs into the platform makes any changes, approves content, we store a record of all that that’s accessible right there in the platform.

So, Andrew, just to just to make sure everybody’s clear, the process that you’re showing us, the adviser either can depending on the, home office, what they decide to put, they can either choose from one of these templated, the language for the email that we’ve created and offered up, or the home office can standardize that. And once it’s set up once, though, it’s running. They don’t have to hit it every single time. It’s just gonna continue to go in the background.

Exactly. So we have really neutral language in there as a base template that we’ve reviewed with attorneys and regulators. If someone wants to create a customized template for their advisors, we can do that. And then now on the FMG side, we’ve also got email templates that advisors can take these links and drop them into. And so obviously from a publisher standpoint, you could publish your own customized email templates that are accessible right there from the FMG email hub.

So once these are ready to get sent out, super easy, advisors will take that link, they’re gonna send this out to clients and the clients will see exactly what they built. You can see it’s optimized for mobile, works very well from that experience.

And I’ll show you just a little bit what it looks like from the client’s perspective.

Going to force them to fill out this full field. So there’s no way they’re able to submit it until they’ve finished everything here.

It’s also going to make sure that they hit the checkbox. So every single client that submits this feedback form has consented to whatever privacy policy or terms of service your team has set. So everything that comes in has already gone through that process.

And speaking of privacy policies, Ray has a question. He said is there a reason why privacy policies can’t be customized?

Oh they can absolutely be customized. So from the compliance hub and it’s just not accessible by the marketers is the point. So the privacy policy is set centrally by the compliance team, can’t be changed by the advisor or marketing, but all of that can be customized. You can insert your own hyperlinks, do whatever you need to there.

So compliance teams at the home office can customize all that. What your point was that the people sending them out, either it’s the marketing team or the individual advisor cannot. So hopefully Ray, that clarifies that for you. Thank you, Andrew.

Exactly.

So really easy to send those out. And again, now that we have those FMG email campaigns, you can grab that link, drop it into an FMG email, attach your client list and send it out. And we have some really cool stuff coming next quarter, where it’s automatically going to parse your client base out, send that on an ongoing basis. You make sure that every client gets an opportunity to leave feedback. It’s just not all day one.

You’ll also see in here, I’ll refresh this, you’ll see as the feedback comes in, you’ll see it come in in just about real time. You can get alerts, notifications as new feedback comes in.

You’re going to see that it comes in in this pending state, which just means that it’s been submitted to the platform, no one’s reviewed and approved it.

The reason that can have a big impact is because we also have some pretty fantastic tools to design website widgets that advisors can embed into their websites with approval, and once that happens every time a testimony gets submitted it’s going to go into a compliance queue, once it’s approved it’s automatically added to the website carousel.

But just to be clear, Andrew, if somebody wants to and sorry to keep interrupting you, I wanna make we’re on the same page.

At this stage, all we’re doing is collecting feedback. Right?

Like, can you know?

Exactly.

So way, you could just collect feedback and not even publish it anywhere. You didn’t you wouldn’t have to put it on websites. It’s not going out to Google reviews or anything.

It you’re just collecting feedback at the same only.

And in fact, you can design as many different campaigns as you’d like and adjust the wording. And we have some firms that use us for gathering feed feedback at different points of the client life cycle. So some will use it not for testimonials, but to collect feedback about seminars they’ve done. Others will use it to collect feedback about their onboarding experience or particular services their firms offered that are not designed in any way to incorporate the content and marketing. So they can do unlimited uses when it comes to the feedback there. Okay.

I mentioned too, we do also have some CRM integrations. The reason this is really nice to do is firms can set it up so that these emails are triggered automatically after client events. So they meet with the client they have an annual review, it’s going to trigger that feedback request afterwards as a part of the process.

We’ll have a dashboard in here so you can log in advisors or their leadership teams are able to see summary of all the feedback they’ve gotten any sort of trends. But as I said, everything’s going to go to the compliance hub first before it can be used. And this is where compliance teams are able to log in, and they’re going to see a queue of the feedback that’s been received. And they’ll see the person’s name, the email address, timestamp rating, the full text of the testimonial, and we also copy and log the IP address. So not that we’ve had any cases of this happening, but it discouraged people from trying to abuse the platform, fill out the feedback forms on their own, because we’d be able to see a log of continuous IP addresses.

That’s so important.

And then we have a nice checklist here. I think a lot of this language will look familiar, but a checklist for approving the content. This is also customizable at the home office or at the account level, so compliance teams can set up whatever customized criteria they want to evaluate feedback.

So if something comes in and it has technical investing advice, performance results, PII, compliance can leave a little note, they can reject it, it’s not going to notify the person that left it, it’s not going to delete it from the platform, it’s just going to change it from a pending to a rejected state. As soon as that happens, it’s not available for use in marketing. It can’t be changed back to approved. Advisors can’t go in and mess with that approval status. And it’s gonna store a log of why it was rejected. So at any time you can download a full list of all the testimonials, the compliance history and notes associated.

So when advisors are getting an exam and it says, hey, got fifteen testimonials on your site, you’ve received eighteen, prove to me you’re not cherry picking, they can very easily point to the platform and say, these are the three that are filtered out. These are the reasons that they were filtered out.

Not anything trying to bias the results there.

It’s also very easy for kind of a bulk approve process. We have firms that have thousands of advisors and tens of thousands of clients and you can imagine they get in hundreds of testimonials at a time when get a big tranche of feedback. So they’ll see a full list of all the feedback that’s been received here. They can scroll through it, read through it. And then if it all looks good, they’re able to just select all the feedback on the page. They can check all and they can approve it as appropriate. So we try to cut down on the compliance burden from this perspective.

And I love that it makes it for auditing purposes. Know I think one of the things we’ve heard a lot with FMG over the years of why people have said they don’t wanna roll out a testimonial program is for that very reason. You can’t control what the client’s gonna say, and then does it seem does it create a cherry picking situation? So from an auditing perspective, being able to collect these and not do anything with them necessarily only if they meet the requirements for the SEC ruling. I I just think you’ve built such an amazing tool, I’m so excited that we have it to offer. Danny just asked, can the star rating be removed from the template?

So it’s not removed from the template, but when content’s being created through our platform and used in website widgets, it can be removed from those. So it doesn’t need to be displayed in marketing. It’s just always a part of the the Feedback. Process.

And then Ray asked, can you approve these for certain periods of time?

So approve approve, like, a campaign that goes for a certain period of time, and then it’s it’s not?

You know what, Ray? Maybe clarify if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure what the use case is.

So maybe we’ll wait for him to explain and we can Yeah.

I’ll say while while we wait for that. We don’t have any kind of default settings for when a campaign might expire.

But if there’s a strong use case there that’s absolutely something we could look into and put on the roadmap.

You’ll see here now this is an example of what it looks like you’ve got an approved testimonial very clear. And again, the advisor can’t go through and change the status if it’s a critical review, they can’t take it out just because they don’t like it. But let’s say that you have a client who is no longer with your firm and you need to remove that. Well, you’ve got an active website widget with us, instead of having to go in and make updates to your website remove content from the widget just because someone left.

They can use this archive option, they can leave a little note say hey Andrew is no longer with the practice I’m gonna archive it. It’s immediately removed from any live marketing content. But again nothing’s deleted from the platform. The status just changed to archive. We make a note about who archived it, the reason, the date it was pulled, but nothing’s deleted.

And to your point about the website widget, I’m sure some people listening, they have advisors that have FMG websites. They have advisors that have websites elsewhere. Yeah. Does this platform does that website widget only work with FMG or does it work with other platforms as well?

It’s it’s a standalone platform so we’ve not come across a website that it won’t work on but it worked very very well with FMG websites. And it’s designed to be unintimidating, low code, super easy to set up. It’s automatically when you’re building it, this is all you do. You come here, it’s going to ask you, it’s going to pull in all of your approved testimonials. So by default, everyone that’s been approved by compliance, you click next, it’s going to give you some stylings you can choose from.

You can control whether or not you’re using some sort of client attribution. And this attribution can be customized, so it doesn’t need to be Andrew Jay. It could be client of ten years, whatever you’d like. You can choose whether or not you have star ratings associated with this. And then it’s automatically going to force every widget to embed disclosures. Again, the disclosures while the website widget can be designed and customized by marketing, the disclosures are set centrally by their compliance team. And it’s gonna force those to be embedded along with every widget that gets created.

So let’s just take a step back for a second. If somebody wants to say, okay. We’ve collected these reviews.

We’ve collected these testimonials. I’m sorry. From advisers. And now, yes, we would like to go ahead and we’ve got the system in place.

We feel confident about pushing them out and allowing them to be displayed on websites. Is that the case then? Do you does it you know, at the high level for the enterprise, do they have to allow all advisers to display them? Are there different ways you can do that?

And is there any, like, time limit? Like, do you have to say, okay. We’re pushing them out to the website within a month of collecting them?

Not at all. Mean you know it’s totally up to the firm and the advisors how they you know how and when they choose to display that content. Now while they can’t say I’m gonna you know it’s not a hard and fast rule you collect the testimonials the moment you get any man to put them on your site. Like you brought up earlier Sam, totally fine for advisors to use this just to collect feedback and never put it in on their website or their marketing.

Obviously once they decide to use though that’s when the increased scrutiny comes on so once you have the testimonials up and that’s why we have the platform designed the way it is, we make it very difficult for advisors to try to cherry pick which testimonials they’re using to create a misleading representation of the feedback they’ve gotten. And so when they design a website widget like this, and again, even though all the testimonials have been approved, the disclosures are forced upon them, this gets submitted again to compliance. So advisors still have to submit this, compliance is going to be able to log in, they’re going to see this and they’re going to be able to make sure that it’s got the right disclosures, they’re the right size, they haven’t been hidden by a different font color, everything’s clear and obvious.

And only then does it become accessible to the advisors or their website teams. And then it’s just going to give them a little line of code, they drop it into whether it’s an FMG site or another site that they’re using.

And once that’s in place, then they don’t have to make any updates. New testimonials come in, they get approved, and as they’re approved they’re going to get added to that widget. So you don’t have to answer those questions from examiners about you’ve gotten twenty testimonials a year ago and you got ten last month, how come you haven’t added those ten? It’s just going to happen for you automatically.

It’s good to Can you show us what those look like on a website because we have some people asking about what they actually look like?

I was just gonna say, so this is a firm called Prosperity that’s been using it. You’ll see they’ve gotten them as recent as eleven days ago. One thing I’ll call out here is advisors don’t have the ability to filter and curate this. So they can’t say, hey, when you’re displaying my testimonials, only show the five star or only show four and above. Not possible it’s going to display all the approved ones and they’re going to come in just get automatically added to this carousel as they’re done.

So a couple things I’ll call out about this. It’s designed so that you’ve got the disclosures embedded alongside it. It’s automatically updating. You’re not going to see FMG testimonials brand or anything like that. You’re not going to see Google My Business or any of that. It’s all completely native to the advisor.

But the other thing that’s really cool about this and this gets back to kind of how you started us Samantha is if you search for this firm AI is picking all this up and so if someone gets referred to prosperity planning you search for it the very first thing you see is google’s AI summary talking about the client experience and pulling from their client testimonials page So we know that both traditional SEO metrics as well as AEO engines are using this content in terms of how they rank and evaluate recommendations for financial advisors.

I think that is such a crucial point that the you don’t need to have them published in a third party tool for them to be picked up. And, you know, the way that you’ve labeled that client testimonials, that page, it’s really easy for the AI tools to understand that schema and pull from them.

Somebody at Kim asked if the widgets are auto scrolling or do they show, a box section? I’ve seen other websites where you only see, like, three reviews at a time. So there are some ways, and you kinda showed that before.

Yeah. So they have two actually so if you go to their homepage, they’ll have a traditional scrolling widget in here and then they have this other section of view more where it’s easier for prospects to read through the full list. There’s a few different designs they can choose from and different use cases. For larger firms, firms that want to get really fancy too, I won’t go into too much detail, but you can add UTM tags, you can automatically filter the testimonials by either advisor or use case practice area.

You could create and approve one website widget, put that widget on ten different advisor profile pages, and it’s automatically gonna filter and show the testimonials associated with that advisor or that location. So lots of ways to to slice and dice the the content for the firm based on their needs.

So do you find that most people do wait until they’ve like, let’s say they run their first campaign. They wait till they get three, four reviews come in before they push it?

Yeah. It’s funny because I I think, you know, a lot of times we see the, you know, advisers are nervous. It’s like they’ve been working with clients for twenty-twenty five years and they haven’t left them. They have amazing retention rates. Sometimes they even do NPS and I’ll know their numbers are great but they’ve never requested feedback like this before. And so they’ll be nervous and they’ll send it out and then after they send out fifty requests and they get twenty testimonials back and a lot of them are just so taken aback by how much their clients love and support them that then it’s like oh my gosh I have to get this on my site now. Before I thought I was just doing this for feedback, but we need to be able to share this.

Yes. And so we’ve actually looked at a lot of research that’s shown that on average it’s about a four point nine out of five that advisors are averaging, right?

Yeah, when we did a study on Google, that’s what we saw. And then through our platform, it’s even higher. I think the average rating is a little over four point nine, close to four point nine five. So by and large, we see incredibly positive feedback clients. And the firms that are using us, not cherry picking. All of them have processes in place where they’re surveying their total client base each year.

So it’s really awesome to see that kind of positive feedback.

So let’s talk a little bit about setting this up. Right? Because you mentioned a couple steps. I love the idea that once it’s set up, it just runs in the background, and it really becomes a scalable process and system. But how long are we talking to get set up for a team? Is it days?

Is it week?

I mean, we did it on the beginning of the call. Right? Mean, is Why was it? Contact campaign, you drop in your logo, and then as long as you can have someone from your compliance team log in and approve it, it’s going to give you that link you’re ready to send out.

And we’ve had firms that sign up at the end of their thirty minutes, they’re sending out their first feedback campaign and the next day they’ve got a website widget up. So it’s really low effort. And then going forward it’s even less. Because once you have that in place, you have your system where you’re collecting feedback on a regular basis, your compliance team logs in occasionally, approves the content, the website updates automatically, and it it’s really low burden for the advisers and their marketers.

So, you know, obviously, setting it up for one adviser is a little different than a larger group. You know, we talked at FMG about how we will be rolling this out with our enterprise partners, but do wanna talk a little bit about that and, you know, what people can expect?

Yeah. And and we’re really excited to to, you know, take the feedback, learn about new use cases and adapt it. So I think one of the biggest things and low hanging fruit that we talked about already on this call is we’d be happy to set up whether it’s standardized templates that they can access in the platform, feedback forums, emails, all of that can be set up. But from there, it’s already built to be very accommodating. We’ve got firms ranging from solo advisors just getting started up to those with over three hundred billion in AUM, and it’s been built with the flexibility to support very different needs.

So it’s very easy for teams to go in, they can add new members, they can assign the right access level, they can customize their review criteria, their disclosures. Of course at scale we can help build all that in, but really setting up an account, I don’t know Samantha, I think I gave you one a week ago and I’ve already seen you in there playing around. I think it’s pretty easy to get up and running.

Yes, one hundred percent agree, it’s really, really intuitive. So in terms of I see some other questions just coming in, but I wanted to let you finish if there was anything else you needed to show us from the actual demo.

Yeah, just two other things I wanna cover very quickly. Well, three actually. So all related to compliance and oversight record keeping. The first is on this testimonials tab, you’ll see this export to CSV.

Anytime you can go in there, click that button, it’s going to give you a big Excel file that has the testimonial history, all the testimonies you’ve received, who approved them, any compliance notes, if they’ve been archived, all that’s going be there. We also, second piece I mentioned, we have our audit log here. So everything that happens in the platform, people who log in, changes that are made. And then I’ll touch on just a bit this compliance hub.

So again, I’ve got an admin account so I can see this, it can be set up so that advisors or marketers don’t have access to this. This is where it’s very easy to go in and say, hey, I’m going to customize this privacy policy. This is going to apply automatically to every campaign. So advisors can’t change that marketers can’t change that you can set that here.

You can control and edit the review guidelines. This is the guide these are the guidelines that checkboxes your compliance team members use to review and approve criteria. This can all be edited and changed as well.

And then you can also change those disclosures that are available on websites. So again, when anyone’s creating a website widget, they’re gonna be forced to choose from approved disclosures that your team has already set.

Beautiful.

Alright. I will stop there.

No. That’s good. And Ray just asked if you could show again where those compliance notes go.

Yes.

Of course. And then Danny did ask if there was a separate if this is a separate platform that the firms would be using in terms of a compliance dashboard or if it’s integrated into the current FMG compliance dashboard. Currently, it is separate. So you would you can see here we’re logged in to FMG testimonials, not the FMG, the regular FMG dashboard. So currently it is separate login.

And I’ll show you real quick while those where those notes go. And the other thing is to that point.

One of our first priorities and what we’re excited to build in Q2 is an integration with the FMC compliance dashboard.

We just want to make sure that it’s incredibly easy for teams to kind of work where they already are so I’ll show you what it looks like again to add some compliance notes to something. So here you got a testimonial. Let’s just say that this one has performance results and so you can write that comment here and you’ll reject it.

And and that’s it. Then over in the testimonials tab you’ll see nothing gets deleted. It’s still there in the platform. It’s just in a rejected status and if you hit that export to CSV or you scroll through the activity log you’ll be able to see the reasons listed as to why it was rejected.

Awesome.

You know, there’s a lot of, questions coming in. One that I saw sent, you know, sort of, separately is a lot of people, you know, have questions about testimonials versus, let’s say, Google reviews. And we you can see the little Google review tab. Can you talk through if a team did want to allow these reviews not just appear on the website, but also on Google?

Is that possible? And could you only review it or allow it to be on the advisor sites and not on Google? Are those two things separate from each other?

Yeah. So this is something we spent a long time research and building and got a lot of input from regulatory officials on as a Google workflow. So one, call out totally optional firms can shut this off. Can they don’t need to allow advisors to link their Google Business Profile to build campaigns linked to Google.

We do have a really nice deep integration of Google Business Profile. We have one firm that synced I think about close to two fifty different locations.

So one of the benefits is if you do that you’re able to monitor all the Google reviews whether or not you’re soliciting them it’s going to give you a nice dashboard with all of your locations pulled together and summarized. You’re going to see all the reviews as they come in there. It’s just going to pull that live data. And it’s also going to let you get real granular and see GBP analytics for each location.

But if firms do want to create feedback campaigns linked to Google, what they can do is they can create a new campaign and then when they’re building this, I will show you, instead of that standard thank you page, they can have a redirect to Google. So if firms do this, one they can customize the language on this redirect page, but if they choose to allow this, then after the client submits the feedback to the advisor, they’re going get a customized message that makes it very easy for them to choose share that content to Google. They click this button, it’s going to redirect them to the Google Business Profile. There’s no ability to do review gating. If this is turned on, every client gets it, whether it’s a one or a five star.

And the workflow is designed in such a way that all that content goes to Google if the client chooses to share it, but first it goes to the advisor, it gives them permission to use it in marketing, so that they don’t have to have that risk of putting like a Google Business Profile widget on their site directly sharing, referencing those third party reviews that could trigger entanglement and additional scrutiny from regulators.

Great.

No. That’s really good. And somebody was asking just about best practices. I mean, I think obviously, if someone is searching on Google, the best adviser near me, Google is gonna pull in its own Google reviews in those searches. And so often, you will see firms that do allow the advisers to publish on Google, having a little bit of a leg up there. But with the rise of AI search being ubiquitous, across all of these platforms, we are seeing, you know, on some other cases, some of the other LLMs do not have access to the Google reviews. And so just having the testimonials on the client’s site can be enough to really give you a huge lift in that AEO or answer engine optimization.

So, I think the the biggest negative is to do nothing.

At least getting them on the adviser sites is already gonna be a huge leg up. And and even if you are not thinking about from a search engine perspective, just from the social proof of the client, you know, as it it used to be consumers never saw reviews of advisers. Right? But now in the last year or two, we see a huge influx and proliferation of a lot of firms having reviews. So now the consumer is expecting to see them more and more.

Yeah. And to that point, we really designed the platform to give compliance teams the kind of crawl, walk, run approach.

They can use this for internal feedback only, they can get a sense of what clients are saying about their advisors, they can do that at scale to find trends and opportunities for coaching, they can turn on the marketing features, can make it easy for advisors to share that content on their site. And then if they’re comfortable, they can also allow them to do that GBP connectivity to get those Google reviews to improve local SEO.

I love that. One other question that came in about best practices.

Is this kind of an all or nothing in the sense of do do all of the campaign asking for a review go out at once? Can you tie it to something else? Like, we just had a meeting with the client, so now the review is out.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, when we sat down and talked with some officials about this, what we heard was there’s a lot of ways to do this right. What we care about is that you document your firm’s process in writing and that you follow that. But most of the firms we work with kind of fall into one of three categories or they do a little of each.

The simplest is just to say, hey, once a year or twice a year, we’re going to send this survey out to all of our clients at the same time. We’re going to put it in our FMG marketing list or our constant contact list, and we’re going send it out to all the clients at a set time each year, almost like an NPS survey.

A second is to say, we’re actually going to tie this to events and that’s why we have the CRM integrations we support wealth box red tail and salesforce and make it easy for firms to say, I want to send these out automatically after I have a touchpoint. I’m going to send it out after every annual client meeting and they can pick very specific meeting types that are going to trigger those emails and it’s going be the pre approved email. And one note on that, the emails don’t come from us, advisors actually connect their own email address. So it’s gonna come from their email, it’ll be in their outbox, all the books and records, it’s all associated with the advisor whenever sending or contacting clients on their behalf.

Or they’ll use a hybrid approach They’ll say, hey once a month I’m going go back and reach out to the people I had an interaction with this month and send them out. And all are totally fine. They just need to make sure they’re consistent.

But that’s also why I’m so excited for us to be building these FMG email tools to take that kind of mental load off the advisor’s plate, drop it into a campaign that’s already been preapproved, hit send, and then they can just sit back and collect the feedback.

Yeah.

And Ray asked if there’s a current timeline of integration into the FMG compliance tool. I don’t think we have a hard date for that yet. Wait. The product hates to give hard dates for those kinds of things.

But We’re we’re starting we’ve already started scoping it out.

And if there’s particular drivers behind that, we’d love to set up some time to understand it to make sure that we can kind of build the integration in a way that works best for our partners.

Yeah. I was gonna say, I mean, I think one of the things to really be aware of is this is brand new for FMG. It’s a new product, FMG testimonials. So for those of you who are really eager to work with us, you know, and and partner and think about what are some, you know, unique things that you would need to get the program up and running.

Now is the time to reach out and do it as we’re building out our plans for the year for this product, which we are so excited about. And I’m sure many of you have advisers knocking on the door saying they want a product like this because we’ve been hearing about it nonstop too. So I think a good way to close is just, you know, Andrew, what would you say is sort of the risk of doing nothing? You know?

Because we still there are some firms that might look at this and say, We’re still not ready because we’ve heard horror stories of people of advisers, you know, who are just I’m doing it no matter what.

Yeah. I I just think that as adoption of this is increasing and and what we always see is advisors usually come to us because they’ll do a local search. They’ll either ask ChatGPT, I’m this type of client, who should I work with? Or they’ll ask Google, who are the best financial advisors near me?

And they’ll see that their name doesn’t come up. It’s not even that they have bad reviews or not enough reviews, it’s just that they’re not visible. And when you think about this world in which we’re no longer just working with local advisors, people are not asking for referrals anymore, they’re asking ChatGPT or Google to tell them where to start their search. If you’re not visible, you’re just you’re not even in the conversation.

Right? You you don’t even get a a in at bat.

I always call it the visibility crisis because, yeah, you’re either there or you’re not. There’s no more. I’m ninth on Google. It’s either you’re the answer or you’re not.

So we are so excited to launch this product with all of you. You can reach out to your enterprise success coordinator at FMG, and we would love to talk with you about what it looks like to roll this out, with your firm. Thank you so much, Andrew, for partnering with FMG to bring us this product, but also for that great demo and walking through it. And thank you all for your time. I hope this answered many of your questions, and, we’ll look forward to talking with all of you soon about FMG testimonials.

Thank you all.