Best Roofing Leads: Canvassers vs. Digital Marketing

Which will produce more leads for you. Is it developing a canvassing team in house or taking that budget and pouring it into traditional marketing efforts to generate leads? Well, there's no one size fits all solution. So before you follow the advice of whatever you heard online, watch this video all the way through. I'm going to break down the pros and cons of each and help you figure out what you need to do for your business. My name's Adam Bensman and I'm really glad to have you here. Welcome if you're new now, let's get started. Roofing sales is personal development in disguise and the reward for growth is life changing. I hope my content helps you create a richer life and bank account. I'm glad to see you using this time of year to figure out how to grow your roofing company into 2025. You're probably exploring the different paths and want to bolt on additional lead sources. If you're a door knocking company, you might want to layer in digital marketing. And if you're an inbound lead company already doing marketing, you may want to develop a canvassing department. But pump your brakes because in this video I'm going to break down everything you need to know so you can figure out what's best for you. This video was inspired by a recent post inside rsra. That's the community of roofers who don't like traditional roofers where we share winning secrets to help each other dominate in today's fast changing and uncertain times. And there was a recent post in there and I gave my feedback and it inspired this video because I know that this topic is much is a big discussion talking point as people like canvassing's dead and digital marketing is the way of the future. And there's truth to both, which I'll share more shortly. And I provided a very detailed response in there and I want to share this with you because so many people have this like dogmatic approach that this is the only way and some of the best advice I ever got was this the most expensive advice in the world is bad advice. So if we integrate this bad advice and let's say I'm already doing canvassing and I bolt in a digital marketing plan and I do that because other people said I should. I have a lot of learning curve which you'll hear me talk more about in optimizing my marketing efforts. And that learning curve cost me time and money. Money I'll never get back and time I'll never get back which compound and equate to missed opportunities. So imagine like, losing three months of selling time to because I didn't quite get that system down, and they turn back and be like, man, I wish I knew this then. So I hope to help you skip that learning curve so you don't need to go at it alone, and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. All right, so let's jump into it. First, as you decide where to put your marketing efforts, I want to ask some foundational questions. Question number one. Do you have an incredible inside sales team or someone answering the phone who can quickly qualify leads and get them into set appointments? Yes or no? If the answer is no, do not even consider putting money into marketing until you do. In that case, just stick to canvassing. Next questions. There are four key metrics, or KPIs key performance indicators that if it were my company, I would track like a hawk. These are the four following metrics. Number one is your set rate. That is, let's say you get 10 leads that call into your office. How many of them convert into an appointment? Now, this needs to be tracked like real numbers because feelings are not facts. So for conversation, let's say it's 7. You have a 70% set rate. 70% of leads that come in turn into an appointment. We like to see that number north of 80%, by the way. Next number is your close rate. And again, I know it seems rudimentary, but you'd be amazed at how many people don't have this number tracked or they give me their feeling. I feel like we close 1 in 3. Your feelings are not facts. It needs to be tracked. Okay? Number three is your average sale price. You can figure this out by taking your total revenue divided by the number of customers you have. But if you're spending money on marketing, and let's say you're in this one neighborhood and you're only getting repairs, and the average sale price is like 1200 bucks. That's a problem. So it's really important to know that number. Okay? And then your last number is your customer acquisition cost, which means how much money do you have to spend in order to get a sale or to get a customer? Now, one of the things that's really shortsighted about roofers, and we talk about this in rsra, is stop thinking like a roofer, okay? Because roofers think like roofers. And here's how roofers think. Well, I got to worry about my lead cost, and that leads only 100 bucks. I'm not going to spend 300 on a lead that's such shortsighted thinking. And let me explain. There are really cheap lead sources. For simple Math, call it $100 lead source. Sometimes those lead sources, they're are higher volume but lower quality. Maybe they're off like Facebook ads. You just get a lot of people that are clicking through. Or maybe they're lead aggregators that are farming that lead out to a bunch of people. It might take you 15 leads to get one customer because people aren't qualified in the lead quality as garbage, which means your customer acquisition cost is $1,500. Meanwhile, you might have a really expensive lead source. Let's say it's 300 bucks. But the lead quality is incredible. Maybe it's canvassing, maybe it's pay per click advertising. It doesn't matter where it's from, but it's expensive. It's 300 bucks. But with that lead source, you can close one out of every three leads, which means that your acquisition cost is $900. Now it's three times the price per lead. But your acquisition cost is all that matters. And if you can, if you know all these numbers, you can pour money into marketing and you can actually, and I mean this, like pencil it out. I've done other videos and I'll put a link to one of the cards up there if I can find it. And these four metrics, if you move the needle just a little bit on each one, you can literally double your business. Without more leads, you can increase your set rate by 3, 4 or 5%. Increase your close rate just a little bit through training, you can again increase your average sale price by having add ons or upgrades and upsells. And then your customer acquisition cost goes down, which means you can spend more money on marketing, which means all of that put together, you can literally double your sales without changing much. It just takes a very strategic lever pulling approach. Now all of this needs to be in place. Otherwise you're treating your digital marketing like a gambling slot machine where you're putting money in, pulling the lever and just praying for the sevens to line up. And it just doesn't work out consistently in the long run. You'll hit some home runs and you'll go, you'll blow through a lot of money at other times. Now on the flip side, canvassing, a lot of people say canvassing is dead. I believe that's a lie. I just had a client of mine just a couple years ago do over $50 million a year. The only money they spent on marketing was their website and yard signs. They Knock doors, okay? And that's what they do. There's a lot of folks inside RSRA that do that, and there's a lot of folks that are just on digital marketing. But my point is, one of the comments that came up in our private app was, I would never develop a canvassing team because I would never buy from a canister. And I was like, pump the brakes. And I say this respectfully because I believe it's a safe place to challenge each other and share our different perspectives because we're value aligned, not like minded. Like mindedness is a cult in an echo chamber. I got no place for that. So I challenged this person respectfully. I said, hey, it doesn't matter what you think, okay? I would never buy from a cold caller. Yet we ran a session, we call it our leadership roundtable in rsra or where multiple members peeled back the curtains and shared step by step how they built call centers in house, how they hired a manager, how they hired callers, how they paid each of them, how they got their data, how they scrubbed the data to stay compliant, their call scripts and their metrics. And all of that is done and is a very, very profitable lead source for them. But if I said, well, I'd never do that because that's not how I buy. It doesn't matter how I'd buy. What matters is how the hundreds of thousands or millions of people in your market would buy. So we have to remove ourselves from the equ. So I just need to get that disclaimer aside for developing a canvassing team. Now, there was one comment in there that was. Was really powerful. I don't like the way door knockers make people feel. And I get that Sales. You upset people. I made a living knocking doors. I teach door to door. But I cannot fault someone that says, listen, you know what? I don't want my company knocking doors. It's just not the kind of company I want. Well, guess what? The beauty of being your own business owner is you get to write your own rules of engagement of how you want to work with people. So if you just don't want to do that, then you shouldn't. Even if people tell you you should. It's your business in your life. All right, now let's break into these pros and cons real quick. Pros of digital marketing. When you have everything tracked, it becomes a predictable cash machine. You can easily scale it up and scale it down by just adjusting some numbers on your ad spend. It's what we call Evergreen. It requires very few People, and it can be an incredibly profitable sales system. Now, the downside is getting to that point is an expensive and time consuming learning curve. You have to be willing to flush a boatload of money down the drain, but have a good mindset about it that each time you do what doesn't work, you fix it and learn what does. So it will take time to get to an optimized system. And it takes again, you can't just be like, well, I'm going to put $1,000 in it. Like, you're going to probably spend 5, 10, 20, $30,000 to crack the code to get it to where you want to be, maybe even more. My guess is probably even more, depending on what kind of ad spend you, you're looking at per month. But we got folks that are spending like 40 grand a month. And 40 grand a month, it could take you three months, that's 120 grand to figure it out. But the more you spend, the faster you learn. All right, so that is a con. Now the pros and cons of canvassing, pros, you get to deploy in the exact neighborhoods you want so you're not wasting money putting impressions on people who aren't qualified pros. The lead quality is exceptionally high because there's a human to human interaction and the canvasser is safe setting the table for the salesperson. And the close rate is generally really high. The other pros is that you don't need branding and billboards. You just get exactly where you need to go. Okay, again, you can scale it up with people, but that also leads to the cons, which mostly are people driven. It's not as evergreen because if someone doesn't show up to work, then you get no leads because they're not working. Unlike having digital marketing run, the other cons is having to manage people and hiring and training and all that jazz. So finding the right canvassing manager to manage the team. Again, people and personnel are really costly and they increase our overhead, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. So those are the pros and cons of each. Now, which one is best for you? That's what matters. That's why you're here, isn't it? To figure out where you should put your spend. Here's my simple answer, and I hope it is incredibly insightful for you as well, is if you have the infrastructure in place, digital marketing is worth considering. But let's go one layer deeper that's even more simple. What have you already done successfully? Better yet, what are you doing right now successfully? See, many of us as entrepreneurs and leaders, we get shiny object syndrome. We chase the shiny the squirrel. We're like, well I've got some people door knocking and making sales. I'm going to join a BNI and I'm also going to layer in digital marketing and then get into social media and start a YouTube channel. We want to do all the things where the reality is if we took all of this energy that would be dispersed in all these places and we just doubled down on what we're already doing. Well, the growth is extraordinary. So my advice to you is first double down on what you're doing. Well, if you've got guys and gals out knocking doors that are closing sales, do more of that. Grow that division until you've got it humming along like a well oiled machine. Then and only then, turn your attention elsewhere. Likewise, if you've already got a marketing system in place, a great inside sales team and a sales team who's great at converting those appointments, double down, crank it up, get those four metrics in line and pour gas on that fire until you optimize each channel that you are already good at. Then and only then does it make sense to turn to the next one. I hope this helps kind of break through the noise and let you figure out how to grow your roofing company and 2025. And if you're exploring other lead sources, jump into this very next video. I break down every lead source you can possibly imagine, the pros and cons of each to help you put your money where it matters most. Thanks for joining me. I'll see you in the next.