3 Easy Fixes to Close More WITHOUT Changing Much

Here's 3 easy fixes to increase close rates without changing much else. I have a message for my sales friends. I have a message for the owners and managers in the room. Owners and managers, we have a tendency to want to fix things. And that's great, by the way, because all business is, in my opinion, is solving complex problems on a regular basis. And as you grow, they just become higher stakes. And mistakes become business-ending or critical. And the problem with many roofers is that they're solving the wrong problems. We just want to fix. And I know what will happen because you'll be like, hey, I saw Adam speak and we, we need to increase our close rate, throw a hand grenade into what we're doing. We're building a whole new sales system, emergency training tomorrow. Casey's laughing at me because he's probably done this. And we're switching the system up, right? Yeah. And then everyone's starting over. And although that might be the answer, today what I'm about to share with you is something that you can fix right now. Now, I have had an opportunity to get behind the scenes with a lot of different companies. In roofing, of course, that's kind of obvious, but also outside of roofing. And with almost every single company, We can fix a closing problem in one of 3 ways. It's stupid simple. And I'm going to share those with you right now. The first place to look is the beginning. Second place to look is the middle. The third place to look is the end. I'm going to walk through this progression with you. All right, in the beginning. Some of you may have heard this story. And it's funny, by the way, I was in Genius Network and followed Joe Polish and Dean Jackson, 2 very phenomenal marketers. And Dean says, I don't know why people follow me. I've been saying the same thing for 20 years. So for those of you that have been tuning in and have heard this, you get an opportunity to hear it again, but it's really powerful. I got involved with a personal injury lawyer, which was not really by choice. Anyone here think personal injury lawyers are like good businesses? Yes? No? Yeah, probably everyone here is like, ah, personal injury lawyers. And I felt that way too. And this personal injury lawyer reached out. They wanted to get some sales training. This was one of my 4 times I attempted to leave the roofing industry. Here I am. Anyone else in here try to leave the industry? You can't. It's impossible. You too? Oh, it's great. So these guys hire me. Originally, I'm like, nah, I'm not doing it, man. I'm not doing it. And then I started to see some parallels. See, personal injury attorneys work on this thing called the contingency agreement, and then roofers, some of us work on a thing called contingency agreement. There are some similarities. So this firm's down in Texas. I'm under an NDA, so I'm not going to share the, uh, the names here. If I'm blurring them out, that's why. So as a sales consultant, let me tell you the secret to getting paid. Get people results. If you get people results, they're happy to pay you. If you don't, you don't get paid. So these guys paid me hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I was like, all right, well, we gotta, we gotta make them some money. First thing I do is I audit the calls that are coming in. By the way, this kind of goes into the set rate piece. We keep them on the phone, we run the appointment. Now we start moving into the close rate, which is why they hired me. Their current close rate was 70% of wanted cases. Now, a wanted case is a case they can actually take and win. Someone was actually injured. It's not like this guy ran into my car and ran off. So there has to be criteria. Same thing like if someone called you wanting a pool in their backyard, you're like, we're a roofer. I'm not a pool company. I can't give you a pool. So I'm listening to the calls, and I started to spot that at about 30 to 40 minutes in, there was this one question that would come up. What do you think it was? How much is this going to cost me? 40 minutes in. What do you think someone was thinking about for those first 40 minutes? How much is it going to cost? Now, if I'm fixated mentally on this, how much is it going to cost, do you think they're paying attention? Yes or no? No. No. Because if you were like me and you were in the same math class 4 years in a row, You probably had a point in your scholastic career, because you're a roofer now, which means you didn't do that well in school. And you were stuck. You raised your hand. The teacher's like, not this special kid again. And then they keep going. And then finally, 5 minutes later, they call on you. Did you retain anything from the first second you got lost and raised your hand until they called on you? No, you can't. So our homeowners are doing the same thing. The reason I bring this up is to emphasize how important it is to open the conversation. All I did was write a new script for them, and it went like this. Thanks for calling so-and-so law firm. Before we get started, I want you to know that this is a 100% free consultation. There are no fees unless we take your case and win. Does that make sense? Yes. Great. And then we can continue. We worked on that in empathy. Guess what happened to the close rate? Went up. Went up, right? It's like, that was kind of a dumb question. It's like, Adam's going to tell you this and be like, it went down. Don't do that. No, of course it went up. It went up to 90% to 100%. And this is not a joke. Week over week, audited by a third-party consultant, because these law firms have crazy money. They actually just reached out. to rehire me. And I obviously am not doing that right now. Uh, 5— that was— we worked for 5 years and I haven't talked to them in 5 years or more. Yeah. Something like that, 4 or 5 years. It never dropped from 90 to 100%, and that's all I had to do. And that's the beauty of what we're about to touch on, because for the entrepreneurs in the room and sales folks, I want to give you a new concept. This concept is, uh, One of my favorites. It's called information leverage. See, we make doctor money, we write like doctors. That's how it goes. By the way, I wrote like this when I was broke, so it doesn't really apply to me. Information leverage. Now, what does this mean? What it means is that as a salesperson or an entrepreneur, Our job when we're in settings like this is to identify the one winning item, the one winning idea. Because when implemented easily, the output, like a lever, provides incredible leverage for your company. I'll give you a few different examples. One, let's use marketing. If I sat down with Drake, with Drake, with— They're a larger company, and I'm going to guess that their ad budget is pretty healthy, probably higher than the revenue of most companies in this room. I'm going to just use $100,000 as a simple math. If I sat down with a company spending $100 grand a year on ads and said I can save you 20% by cutting wherever you're hemorrhaging money, how much money do I spend— save you in a year? $20 grand. Now if that company is spending $1 million a year on ads, which I know that there may be other roofers in this room that are doing that, how much did I just spend you or save you? $200 grand. Now if you're brand new and you're spending $1,000 a month How much did I save you? $200. $200. $2,400 a year. That's nothing. But information at scale is powerful. That's why when you're smaller and you're looking at your books and you're like, yeah, it's 2%. It doesn't sound like a lot. If I'm cutting expenses and I cut for a $2 million— and someone fact-check me here— $2 million a year and I save $30,000 as an example, that's $30,000. But if I save 2%, is that $40,000? Someone math me on this one. Yeah, $40,000. Well, guess what? When I double, that's $80,000 because I learned about finances. And if I double again, it's $160,000. This is information leverage. So when you're in sales and you take one thing from today, one thing, and it helps you lift your close rate from 20% to 30%, as an example, and you're doing 100 deals in a year, you just lifted your sales. See, this is what's funny about math. People be like, oh, well, I just, you know, it's 10% more sales. No, it's not. If I am at a 20% close rate on 100 leads, how many sales do I get? 20. If I have a 30% close rate and I run 100 leads, how many sales do I get? 30. What percent increase is that? 50%. This is why salespeople, like when I say information leverage, they're like, oh, it only went up a few percent. You got to just look at what that means in your pocketbook. 50% more. The higher the volume, the more leverage that information gives you, which is why I can go to a private— excuse me, to a personal injury lawyer, and they'll pay me a few hundred thousand dollars to do what took me 20 minutes. They're not paying me for the information. They're paying on my lifetime of work. Same reason, I don't know about you guys, I go to a mechanic. Why? I'm paying for speed. I ain't just spending my whole day doing this crap. I got money to make. This is information leverage. 1% of $3 million. When you're at $3 million, it looks a lot different. I can tell you this than 1%. Hold on. Let me give you the mic. 1% in a $3 million company. As I grew, I started, the more revenue you do when you're looking at gross profit of the business, right? The 1% becomes a lot more. I wanted to add to what he said. So it's a big difference. I can tell you from experience when you're looking at 1, even 1% of revenue at $3 million and 1% at $20 million, and it makes so much difference on the bottom line. Yeah. Right. Continue on. Yeah. Small, small hinges swing big doors. I don't know who I can attribute that quote to, but I really like it. Okay. So let's break this down. Beginning, middle, and end. Beginning. Beginning end of an appointment. This is another true story. I was down in Houston, Texas with a roofer. This was years ago. And he says, hey, do you have an opportunity to run with me on this sales appointment? And I was driving from Houston back to Colorado. I was like, yeah, I'll run it for a little bit. I can't stick around for the whole time, but I'll join you. This younger salesperson was so proud to like have me look over his shoulder and be in the house. And I'm going to just walk through a series of mistakes. Well, the first one is we showed up and there was another roofer's yard sign in the yard. So just, I don't know, this might be a trick question, but like, what might be one of the questions you'd ask when you show up and there's another roofer's sign in the yard? How's that process going? Yeah, like, why? What's up? Why are we talking that there's roofer's yard signs in your yard? Okay, so just one thing. Do you think he asked that question? No. Big miss. Second thing he does, which we'll talk about in the middle, and I didn't stick around till the end, I had to take off, but he busts out his presentation and he just cranks through it. And he did such a great job. It was like on an iPad and it looked beautiful. He hit every slide perfectly, but he missed what I'll be sharing with you. Did he ask any questions? No, he didn't ask a damn thing, and he didn't get the deal. So let's start about the beginning. If you were to look, and owners, managers, I'd write this down, I would ask, what is our process for how every appointment begins? And if the answer to that is— by the way, that's the silence of you trying to figure out what you— what the process is. That's the first thing that we can fix together today. Okay, because there should be a process. So this is what's known as the discovery, and I'll give you a few of my favorite questions. There's really no magic wand, in my opinion. But it's important that we understand where the homeowner's at. And I'll give you my favorite talk track. You probably saw this in the video I just shared. So one of my favorite questions is, what's the problem with your roof? If they're— and some people like, you don't want to ask them what the problem is. I'm like, no one wants to talk to you, dude. No one's like, let me call this roofing sales guy because I'm just so excited to get quotes, right? Like, you're not a Ferrari. I'm sorry, they're not showing up. You're like, oh, let me just— I don't know, let me see if I can swing this. Right? You're not the Corvette or the Mustang. You're a roofer. What's the problem with your roof? Okay, next question: where are you at in the process? Why do I want to know that? Because I want to know if I'm first or if I'm last. I want to know if I'm number 17 or number 2. And my third favorite question is, how will you evaluate— how will you evaluate which roofer is best for you? This is easy criteria. Now this is what will happen. And by the way, I went through this in the training with that company that sold 20 hail guard systems in 6 weeks. That was just their premium sales, obviously. And, uh, I said, this is how it'll go. Most salespeople will write this down, be like, easy, I'm going to ask that question. Hey, Mr. Homeowner, I watched this guy, his name's Adam. He said tell me to ask you this. He goes— Don't, by the way, never say that in the home. Ever, please say, you know, how will you evaluate which roofer is right for you? And the homeowner is going to tell you lip service, by the way. They're going to tell you what anyone would: I want a local company with a fair price and a good warranty. Okay, and then this is what the amateur salesperson does: Great, I'm glad you said that. Whip open the deck: We're local. We've been around for so many years. Here's our reviews. This, does that check the box? Now you can buy from us because we're exactly what you described. No, don't do that. And that's what most people do. Instead, here's the other follow-up word, and I would write this down, called what else? That's all you got to ask. And by the way, I learned this. I like giving credit where credit's due. That's why you hear me mention books a lot. You know, I, I don't really believe— this is my own opinion, I'm gonna go on a slight tangent— I really don't believe that anyone's actually self-made. I think that we all create our own lives and we have the opportunity to learn from others. And I don't think anyone on here just whipped up all their knowledge out of thin air, right? I have learned from a lot of people. I've read a lot of books. I've digested them and applied them. And this one is called How to Find Out Anything About Anyone Anytime. I believe it's Joe Pyle. Joe Pyle. Last name's Pyle. P-Y-L-E. He's an interrogator. For the government, you can learn a lot from them. They have really big budgets thanks to us. All right, so here's how it would go in real life. So, Mr. Homeowner, how are you going to evaluate which contractor you'd like to choose? And they're going to say, you know, local company, been around a while, fair price, good warranty. Great. What else? And they'll say something like, you know, um, I really— I'm really interested in a shingle with a really high wind speed rating. You know, this one blew off and I just don't want to deal with this again. Is there another option? Okay, great. Yeah, we can talk through that. What else? Like, okay, you know, I just had my kitchen remodeled and they went over budget. There was a bunch of surprises and communication was terrible. So I really want a company that's like organized and can communicate and there's no surprises. Great. I'm sorry to hear that. What else? They'll say, all right, you know, my dog is really afraid of noises. I know this is a dumb question, but I just, I need to coordinate with a kennel so I can get my dog out of the house. Oh, what's the pup's name? Find out the name. Okay, great. What else? Hmm, that's it. Well, now I know they want someone local with a good warranty. They want a shingle with a high-speed wind rating, and they want a company that communicates well and someone that will coordinate with a kennel. So now, of all the things in your sales pitch, what can you eliminate? Pretty much everything except that. And then as we go through, I'll be like, great, let me speak to it. So now if I offer my best, better, good, what am I going to make a recommendation for based on their specific need that they shared? Shingle. Right, their shingle, Titan XT. Hey, by the way, I know you expressed concerns about communication in the past. As you can see, based on our 4.9 stars on Google, take a look at what Peggy said. She says they communicated with me every step of the way. We honor that commitment. We understand how frustrating dealing with contractors can be, which is why we keep you up to date on every single status change, and you will never be left in the dark. Make sure you actually do that before you say it. Yeah, and make sure you can deliver on this. Just saying, just throwing that out there. Assumptions here. Thank you, John. For those in the back of the room, John said make sure you can do that before you say it. Which is always the case. That should just be like the general disclaimer. Okay, and then the final piece is to say, hey, what day would be best for you to work with the kennel, right? Or would you prefer a Saturday maybe, and that way you guys can be out of the house too? What a win. And now who are they going to choose? And what if you threw in, I don't know, paying for the dog kennel? Just a possibility. I know if I was in sales, I'd take that out of my commission in a heartbeat. What's a dog kennel for a day to win a deal? Nothing, right? So this is the power of asking the questions in the beginning. Okay, who wrote them down? What's one of them? What's the— what's the problem with your roof? Number 2, where are you at in the process? And then number 3, yeah, how we evaluate. And what's the follow-up question? What else? Until you just get to nothing. And if you get tired, by the way, it's totally okay to keep saying, what else? They'll probably chuckle with you. You can also just say, tell me more, if you need to switch it up. But the idea is just to let them talk. People are guarded by nature, and it's not a diss. Homeowners aren't bad people. They're just like you and me. All right, so let's talk about the beginning. What I want you to do, this is for all the managers and owners in the room, I would encourage this to be a topic of your next sales meeting. So I would write, I'd have everybody write this down. And I'm going to actually take a few notes here. Let's call them out. I want to hear, let's say, from— let's get a list of 10 questions that homeowners ask in virtually every single appointment you run. Let's hear from this table first. What's a question you get asked from homeowners? How long will it take? How long will it take? OK, what's another one? Let's go. How much? How much? Let's go to the— go ahead. Are you insured? Will you help with the deductible? Will you eat my deductible? I love when people say, like, do you have an appetite for this or something? My response is absolutely not, or I'm full. Will you help with my deductible? No. We'll get into that. All right, let's hear from, from that table. Yeah, I love the ambiguity of a marker, so just shout it out. Yeah, you. People normally ask how we're different than the other vendors that come to them. Perfect. How are you different? What's not on the list yet? Go ahead. Warranty. What's your warranty? How long have you been around? Are you local? I love that. Are you local? Have you done any roofs in the neighborhood? Do you have a business card? I send customers. How painful is this process going to be? Okay, so here's what you're going to do. Grab your piece of paper and I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna put some music back on. I'm gonna give you about a minute and I want you to write out all the ones that you personally experience. Exhaust the list. This is part 1 of the exercise. So I don't wanna tell you where I'm going, but write down all the questions that you get in the home. All right, and if you didn't finish, that's okay. You can continue this. But now let's move on to step 2 of the exercise. Take a look at the list of everything you wrote down. I want you to circle the top five questions that are the most common in the majority of the appointments you run. So your list might be fifteen or twenty, but I want you to circle the top five. All right, we good? Yes or no? Yes. Okay, step three. Look at that list of top five. And write in order numbers 1 through 5, the order in which they are typically asked in an appointment. 1 being the first question, 5 being the one closest to the end. So list them in order 1 through 5. All right, can I hear your list? How much can you do the roof for? Can you pay my deductible? How long will the roof take? Are there any hidden costs? And are you insured? Beautiful. Thank you. Well done. Let's hear another one. Who's got a list? You got one? You got a list? All right, let's hear. Uh, how long have you been in business? What's the warranty? Uh, how much is it going to cost? When can you build? And how long will it take to build? Awesome. Beautiful. All right, so next question that I would have is, are you answering these proactively throughout your presentation? In that order, yes or no? Let's try one more time, audibly this time. Are you answering these in your appointments out loud, proactively? Yes or no? Okay, I hear a few yeses and I hear nos, and then the silence is the nos that were not voiced. That's how this works, by the way. So here's what I'd like to do for those that are doing it. I would guess, and by the way, I could be very wrong, and I know that I am at times. Believe me, I'm reminded regularly from the people I get to work with. Oftentimes, it's one person in the company, or the owner or manager believes it's happening, and it really isn't happening. So here's the action item. Rework your presentation to address these 5 questions Why? Just like the example of the story I shared with you with, with the lawyer. If the homeowner's thinking it and we can go through— can I? I'm going to just use yours as an example. Oh, thank you. And I'll give it back. So number one, how much can you do the roof for? So I might open up this presentation after I'm finding out that the homeowner is looking for a local company who's going to do a great job. They want a shingle that has a high wind speed rating because that's why you're there— blew off. They're looking for someone that communicates well and someone that can do the roof coordinated with the kennel so the dog can be in the kennel. Okay, and I might open the presentation. I'm gonna do these in order. So, Mr. Homeowner, the first obvious question that you're going to ask me is, how much can you do the roof for? And we're going to get to that, but what I want to do for a moment is just to share with you How in the world a roof estimate is even created. Most importantly, what should you be spending on your roof? See, when we put together the proposal to share with you, there's a lot of different factors. One's the obvious one, which is size, right? How much material are we going to need? The second factor is the complexity of the roof. Is it a steep roof? Is it a really tall roof? Because there's different safety parameters and install requirements that are going to play into the estimate. Based on the size of your roof. Along with that complexity is the 3rd part, which is what we'll call the flashing. And you'll notice that most roofs don't leak from a shingle. Shingle is not the source of leak. It's usually what we call penetration, something sticking through the roof where the roof might butt up to the house or the chimney. Okay, the step flashing, or what we call the roof-to-wall flashing. And what you may not see shared in all the estimates is the specificity of how those items are being addressed. They can be reused or replaced, and on a roof your age, I'd be scared to reuse something that's already 30 years old and tell you it's going to last another 30 years. So we are a little bit more proactive than others. We will be adding that in our estimate. Now, of course, the other couple of factors are the components on the roof. Now, most people look up at a roof and see shingles, but we've got stuff sticking through the roof, we've got ventilation on the roof, and the final one is— The gutters. is again, we'll end with another obvious, and that's the grade of shingle. There's a variety of different options out there. Just like when you go car shopping, you can get an F-150 from an XLT all the way up to a Platinum and everything in between. So as we go through this, I'll break it down and I'll share with you what our actual price is for your specific roof. But just so you're aware, I'm gonna show you what HomeWise or what JLC shares as the average home value in your area. And this is what's called price conditioning. And I can share public data from those resources with a homeowner, okay? And again, that's not your information, it's third-party information, and that does what's called price conditioning, which we'll talk more. Now, the next thing is, many people ask me is, can you pay my deductible? And I'm sure you've been hearing this said a lot, and then I can address that. If you guys wish, I can get into it, but I'm not going to do that today unless we choose that we're going to, right? Then number 3 is, how long will my roof take? Mr. Homeowner, a typical roof will be done in a day. We're in and out the same day, and with yours, I expect the same, right? And then again, the next one here is, are there any hidden costs? The way that we're going to put your estimate together, Mr. Homeowner, is there's no hidden cost. Now, there's one minor risk that we will do everything we can to prevent from happening, but that's any rotted decking that we don't see. So we're gonna do an attic inspection, and based on the age of your roof and the condition, I don't really see anything. We do include up to 2 sheets of plywood should we need it. Anything beyond that, we will document and take photos. Okay. Is there anything that you see that we need to be aware of? Okay, great. And then the final one here is, are you insured? And absolutely, here's proof of our insurance. By the way, Mr. Homeowner, you wanted a shingle that has a high wind speed rating. Here's our good— or excuse me, our better package. And by the way, you wanted this done with the dog kennel. Saturday good for you? Great. We'll do it on Saturday. How easy is that?