Ep1 - My customer learns - Follow The Process!

Adam Sand:
So, this is going to be a different type of episode just right now, I'm doing something kind of cool on Anchor. You can now submit questions by listening to the podcast on Anchor. So my typical episodes, which will be recorded like normal, where I record them on a microphone, send them off to the smart guys who make my audio sound a little better, then send it back and upload it to the podcast, which is a whole bunch of work, I'm also doing Anchor podcasts. They will both be downloadable in your favorite places, Stitcher, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, Pocket Casts, whatever, Spotify, all those places. But if you listen to it on Anchor you can actually just in the app record a voice question and then I can answer it in one of the upcoming episodes, which I think could be really, really cool. So seems like a really neat app, I'm excited to use it. Definitely come check it out, listen to the podcast on Anchor, or you can listen to it on whatever one you like currently. I don't even know if I can get in trouble saying this, I guess we'll find out. All right. Cue the intro music.

Narrator:
This is the show where you'll learn the mind hacks, strategies and process we use every day to turn everyday roofing companies into the dominating local authority with our ultimate roofer marketing method. You'll also learn how we use Facebook ad to rapidly and affordably scale up business for roofing companies and generate leads on autopilot, putting you in touch with the right customers who pay the right price at the right time. Here's your host, Adam Sand. Now let's get after it.

Adam Sand:
A lot of times when I'm talking to people and I'm correcting them inside of their CRM. So after I do the in-house training, we're then going to go through about what I call 66 days a hell. And 66 days a hell means for the next 66 days all we do is hold you accountable to the new process that we mapped out before we even got the job. So, how I bid for a job is we do a number of discovery calls, probably about like 10 hours worth of discovery calls. And then we tabulate that data, we map out your process. Then we run your process as if we're running it through a demi client. Then we modify that process to make it more efficient, assign each of your people into individual roles that are responsible for certain things and not other things to create a clear chain of command and responsibility. Then we figure out how much it's going to cost to build that. And then we provide a quote.

But then when it's done, it's like going from being the random burger shop to McDonald's, you have a franchisable system almost that we build and it just makes it so that everything's just custom. Everything just does what it wants. There's no work arounds, there's no adjustments. We just build it the way you want it, but we build it based on your process and a very efficient version of that. Now, what if we need to make that process repeatable over and over and over again? We have to train that. So that's when we come out to your site after we build it and we train on site to make sure everybody understands the new job. And this isn't like, come out and show you what the buttons do, it's actually walk you through the workflows, supervising you do it 5, 10 times until you know how to do it and then letting you do it by yourself and then correcting you. So that's why after it's all done and I go home we have the 66 days of hell, where I monitor the company remotely can hold you and your team accountable to the process.

So, now let's have me come into the CRM or into the communication program or into the bidding program and I monitor the automations. And every time an automation fails I get an email notification. It is the worst part of my job is waking up to 133 errors in the automations. And what that means is that people are going outside the process.

There's nothing worse than when you have to burp in the middle of an episode. I'm just trying to do some of these more off the cuff stuff, less produced and it means I don't do things like drink enough water before I start, but they're kind of fun because it can just riff, anyways. So starting off with an example, I had an admin staff in one of my client's companies who's responsible for getting the initial call, and in many cases, booking an appointment with the salesman, if they can get ahold of them right away. Because it just shortens the old buyer experience which increases the likelihood of the sale, that's a whole different topic.

But what you're allowed to do now is if you put the appointment date in the home inspection field it's going to create an automatic appointment reminder. It's going to send the customer a reminder, it's going to send the customer a notification of the appointment so they can put it in their calendar, as well as send a picture of the salesman saying, hey, this is what your salesman looks like. Because in my company my business partner is this big tall six foot six black dude and I'm not the bad one, it's all the rest of the people that were being afraid of him at the door or being uncomfortable when he showed up on their doorstep. They're the ones that are making judgments. But what I'm trying to tell you is that it really helped with that issue, when we just admitted that it was an issue, and we started sending pictures of the estimators. Now a friendly face is on the doorstep rather than this big scary person, apparently. I mean, I'm not scared of him he is kind of a big dope, but then again he is my best friend, anyways.

So going forward we have this admin staff, who's not putting the home inspection date in. So then all those little automatic things aren't happening. Now, she thinks, well, if you read the comments you're going to notice it's kind of the same thing, it's very important to read all the comments. Totally agree, it is important to read all the comments when dealing with that specific customer. But when trying to manage customers around other customers, your CRM isn't just a place to store stuff, it should also be a way to make sure that you're optimizing your sales team to succeed and schedule what I call batch work to be done throughout the day.

So for example, at the same time when that customer had his appointment set, that means he's not in the appointment set section of the buyer's journey, which also means he's sitting in the rotting leads bin. So there's a rotting leads bin in the computer, so to speak. And that rotting leads bin was where the manager would walk up and pull it out and say, holy crap, there's nine people that need to have some kind of contact from a salesperson. Well, the fact that you put it in the notes and there's always a reason. It's oh, well this is an insurance job or this is a developer or this is a realtor or this is a referral or this is a friend of mine or this person's old and didn't have a phone number. There's always a reason why we end up not doing things the way that we're supposed to do them, but it's all BS because the system is greater than just any one of his parts.

The reason for this is that when the sales manager is going through his files he needs to know that appointment is scheduled. So by putting in the inspection date, it changes the status to appointments scheduled. So then the sales manager isn't looking at that appointment and having a problem saying why isn't this estimate being booked for an appointment when it actually is but he's not looking in the notes on every file, he's looking at a picture of where his business is at, where his customer flow is at, how efficiently are they helping customers purchase a roof from them. And so also to that point when he's reviewing estimates that have not been sent out to customers. So you have a customer who they went to the house, did the estimate did the quote, or didn't do the quote, didn't present the quote, couldn't meet with the homeowner, whatever the reason is in 1 of the 1,000 cases where this will happen, because again, it's about the process, not about the individual customer.

So as we get further into that process, when that sales manager is looking and saying, wow, you went and did the estimate for this person on Friday and now it's Tuesday the following week and they still haven't been changed to the quote given status. Now, is that because he didn't send the quote or is that because he actually hasn't done it? The manager doesn't have time to go read the comments on every single file, he needs to just go off the data that's according to the buyer's journey. And how do we make sure the salesman doesn't forget? We make it so that as soon as the quote is created and sent to the customer, it is automatically changing the buyer's journey status to quote given, so the salesman doesn't have to go back and click that. It just happens automatically when you send the quote.

But you have to set up your views properly in your reporting, and that's one of the biggest things. All these things have awesome report functionality but nobody knows how to use them and how to set them up so that they can follow a batch work program. And a good example of that is, so once this customer has now been appointment set, and we can't see that they've been given a quote, we're not going to be able to manage our sales team more effectively and we're also going to start to be able to show if we start presenting estimates on site, and their quality estimates, not carbon paper, not just new GAF Master Elite 50 year warranty shingles plus ridge vent, $9,000. But an actual line by line quote, a job plan presented to the customer, a real pitch done and a systemized pitch, when you start doing that you're going to be able to track the fact that the longer a deal waits between when you estimate it and when you present the price, the lower your closing ratio will be. That is the only for sure, for sure, statistic in sales.

The longer the time between when you measure the roof and when you present the estimate to the customer the lower your closing ratio will be. And that is simply because you've got to get customers while they're having that relationship with you. And that's why we need to quote on site and we need to quote on site in a way that's going to be of service to our customers while still making sure that the business has its bases covered so it never puts itself in a position to cut corners because of wanting to maintain profitability on a job. A well planned job is always profitable and affordable for the customer because the price is what it is, the price is the price. It's going to cost a certain amount of labor and a certain amount of material to do this roof. The labor is basically market rate and the material is market rate. And then we are going to have an overhead that's going to entice us to make shade that we take care of our brand and our client base because we want to pursue this business into the future. That's business, boom, right there.

So the price is the price, it doesn't matter, there's no negotiating the price. It's just a matter of making sure the customer has a good experience and understands why they're paying that price. And that's why we want to do detailed in person pitch presentations and estimates on site or presenting the estimate and the having done the measurements on site same time, same visit, because your closing ratio will skyrocket.

So, once you start putting in that appointment set date, if you start noticing that the jobs that are estimate sent and signed that same day, what do you think you're going to do? You're going to start presenting on site more often, and then eventually it'll be the only way you do it. And you'll be able to sell more roofs working from five to eight. Then you when you're working from eight to five, you see what I'm saying? So 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM you can sell just as many roofs as when you're working from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM if you learn how to present on site and learn how to do it well. And have an entire system where everyone from the admin assistant who's taking the calls to the sales manager, to you, yourself, the salesman or to the scheduling person who handles deploying the jobs and making sure that the install crews take their leg and run it properly, they all need the data to be in the right place. And that's the important of the process that we build. So it's so important to do the right work up front.

It doesn't matter which CRM you use. It doesn't matter who says what is the best, the best CRM is the one you set up for yourself properly. Almost all of them have positives and negatives, but it only matters if you know your process. If you don't know your process you can't determine which CRM is best for you simply based on reviews. Because if you don't understand your process you won't even understand the difference between your process and their process, the people who are leaving the reviews. And you don't know if someone who's doing purely retail in Indiana is going to have a completely different process for handling customers in their database and how they keep track of the difference between a point of contact and the homeowner manage the jobs and the job site addresses and making sure that follow up happens. They're going to be totally different when they're doing pure retail in Indiana to where they're doing all insurance in Denver, Colorado, to where they're doing all commercial in New York.

Those three companies have a totally different buyer's journey, and the success of your roofing company is dependent on you being able to handle one particular ideal customer, whether it's insurance, HOAs, developers and builders, or apartments and multi-family, or residential roof replacements, or residential roof upgrades going to metal roofing or something like that. You need to handle one of those verticals perfectly, because if you try and be the roofing company for all those different people, because even in those jobs you have subsets where you're going to have big developers that give you 30 jobs a year. Then you're going to have one off developers that really give you one job a year, or maybe you get only one in 30 of the jobs you bid, right?

And then you're going to have medium developers that do two or three jobs a year and they're managing even those three different kinds of customer require different processes. So why would you possibly think that you could be all things to all people? If you're going to be dealing with residential roof replacements there's subsections within there. You've got people who are dealing with warranty claims. You've got people who are replacing too early, due to common weather problems of poor install the first time. Then you have people who are replacing the roof because of a life choice like selling the house, moving, planning a family, a death estate, something like that. And then you're going to have your people who are redoing the roof because it's time. And so you have to have somewhat of a different process for each of those people. So you have to pick your vertical and then master it. But in order to master it, you have to have disciplined thought, disciplined actions from disciplined people. And the only way you can discipline them is if you give them a process in which they can judge themselves, have it done the right thing or the wrong thing.

Narrator:
Free stuff is the reason you listen to the end. And this week's episode is no exception. Head to roofingbusinesspartner.com and check out this week's show notes to get your freebie bonus. Also, until February 2nd, get our roofer Facebook ad apprenticeship program for only $127. This 18 day program includes over 80 minutes of video instruction, done for you resources, two guidebooks, a forum to ask Adam all your questions along the way. This should remove any excuse or doubt that you can have your own ads running and generating roofing leads in less than 18 days. Adam spent thousands of dollars to learn this stuff and to give it away for only $127 is the kind of craziness that only happens during a new podcast launch. So go check out the show notes and we'll be here again next week flapping our gums and making you money.