Best Sales Territory? How to Find the BEST One for Roofing Sales

Hey. In this video, I'm going to be teaching you how to find the very best sales territory, the neighborhood for you to spend the time so you can make the most amount of sales in the least amount of time. Because after all, that's what we're here to do. So welcome and stick around because I'm going to be teaching you four key areas to help you focus on finding that best territory. Some people say territory, some people say neighborhood. Either way, that means where you're spending your time making sales. Hey, right before we jump in, I just want to welcome you. If you're new here, my name is Adam Bensman, the roof strategist. Everything I do on a podcast, videos, programs, services, one on one work, private training, is all designed for one reason, to help you smash your income goals. Because this silly little roofing industry none of us come into on purpose. We don't grow up for me to be a roofer. We fall into it, often from rock bottom. We have no choice but to make this succeed. And we're here to build a better life for ourselves. And in order to do that, we need to level up, embrace this personal development challenge, grow personally, professionally, while learn to communicate, learn to pitch, learn to sell, and doing it in a way that's natural and easy. And I'm glad you're here because that is what you will learn. So if you are new here, hit the subscribe button and the bell so you don't miss a thing. Hit the like button. If you like the videos, drop comments, I read and reply to all of them. And share this material with your team, with your friends, with your fellow salespeople, with your owner, with the manager. Pass the good word. Welcome. All right, let's jump in. How to find the very best sales territory. Let's cover some fundamentals. First, I want to get your mind around the philosophy of why to do this. Alright, so first is the why. Why are we finding the right territory? Well, one is obvious, we want to make sales, right? Duh. And two, we want to save time. So the whole big idea is more sales, less time. Would you agree? Kind of a no brainer, right? More sales, less time. So if we think of the logistics, how many visits does it take to a house? So you sell a customer, let's do a fictitious customer. So here's the house you sold, here's your happy customer and they're like, oh man, this guy' awesome, I love him. And they're going to give you referrals, right? So here's your customer, there's their house, you sign them up. How many visits? Best case is usually 5. How sign them? Assuming it's a one deal close, you knock the door or it's a lead, you sign them up. Then we meet the adjuster on site. Okay. And again plus or minus the five. But this is a good average. Then after the adjuster is out, it gets approved. We review the scope with the homeowner. And during this time we're often picking up our check. Right. And picking colors. So assuming just pays for it. Homeowner calls, we go review the scope. Everything looks good, we get the build order in. Then we have install day. And we would be absolutely silly to not be there on install days. Is their best time to drum up business. And then finally we have collect payment. Now I know some of you have different sales process with your company. But ultimately 3 to 5 sign adjuster review install the 3 is going to be bare minimum. Usually like if the adjusters already, you know, the adjuster appointment already happened. But it is safe to see on average five visits. Alright, so now that we got this fundamental, you're going to be at that house five times. Now it's your job to calculate how much time you will spend serving this customer. So let's do a little deal. Let's show you a mistake I've made so you don't have to do it. If this is your customer. And then you've got a customer here. And then you've got a customer here. A customer here. So this drive is 40 minutes and we have five trips back and forth. Okay, do to do. And you can see how this is going to get busy really quick. So there's back and forth. And then you get this job. This was a referral and this is 15 minutes away. And now we're doing this whole thing back and forth. And then you get this one and that's another 10 minutes. And this is back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And then you sign this one because you got shiny object syndrome. This is 20 minutes and travel. Okay, yes, I know this is not to scale, but my point is to show you that all of a sudden when you're doing this, you're spending so much time behind the wheel. And believe it or not, what will happen is you will not be able to keep up when you get busy. So your job is to find a neighborhood and stake your claim. So you do, you're focused on all the houses in this little neighborhood and you can ignore all the crap out here because one of the Biggest mistakes of roofing sales is this. Are you ready? Might make you laugh. Oh, I knocked this neighborhood and you know, no one's home. I talked a couple people but wasn't there. Oh, this neighborhood. And then I, and I gotta leave. And then I tried this neighborhood and then I went to this neighborhood, then I went to this neighborhood and then before you know it, like this is what you've done. You have driven all around like this. And then you tried here and then you tried a little here. And this is by the way, like a city. And then you're like, oh, I drove through there and this is like. It is an illogical pattern and all of this is dead time. And if you end up with those deals, you're spread way too thin. Alright? So you need to do what you need to focus, which is tough for us in sales. Focus, slow down, stick and stay in the same neighborhood. I've told this story a lot. I had a sales rep selling with me and we found this one little honey hole of the neighborhood and it opened up due to a small new storm and there was some old damage and it made getting jobs approved really easy. And his name was Lonnie and Lonnie sold. I believe this was a long time ago. It was six blocks. I believe it was 40 homes. Okay, so 40 homes. 40. All right, that was a house. And in six weeks and he was in and out of the same little neighborhood each and every day. And it was amazing. Our yard signs just littered the neighborhood. So stick and stay. Now number two is how do I find the right neighborhood? All right, how do you find it? Well, think of this. This is now a hail map. This is our swath. So we've got the outer store, the layer, the little layer, then this one. And like there's the ground zero. Okay, so we are all working off the same data. Here's our hail swath. What does every roofer do? They swarm like gnats. And they're all going to go to this big area first because they want to grab, we call the low hanging fruit. So since we know everybody's working on the same data, we have to work smarter. So what are we going to do? We're going to drive out to the storm. Here's you. Look at how cute you are. And you are going to post up in your vehicle. Then you're going to pull up Google Earth or Google Maps. You're going to look at the aerial either overlay directly in your hill map software or next to it so you can start to See the trends of those houses and you might find houses over here that are, let's say this is a neighborhood, this is all brand new and you know we only had 1 inch hail, brand new construction homes probably not going to be hit. I'm not going to focus there. But then I go over here and even though this is a fringe area, these are older homes and I know those older homes have older roofs. So there's a lot of potential. So now I'm going to zip, zip over here and start focusing on this neighborhood. So think of this hail swath as the beacon to get you within searchable radius. Right. Like an emergency beacon is going to be accurate within 20 meters. Well, the hail swath I know is going to be larger, but we just want to get there and then do our eyes to the ground and start to think intelligently. Where's this opportunity for me to call this home for a long time? All right, so that's what we do to find the neighborhood. Now our next mission is to open up the neighborhood. We need to get traction, open up our territory or neighborhood. And how do we do this? We do this with our multi touch marketing and I cover this in great detail in my program. The complete sales strategy. And this is working very, very well for people. Why? Because two reasons actually, three reasons. One, it makes door knocking not suck. You're not cold. Every time cold. As you show up, no one knows you. Everyone's like what who are you? And that's the one that's hardest as like a door to door person versus warm, which is it's familiar. They recognize you because they've the neighborhood and you're there with a reason to start a conversation. Okay. Second reason is because it uses multiple touches so it creates that familiarity. And third, it keeps you focused. It simply works. Alright, so what are we going to do? We're going to knock the door using the SLAP canvassing formula to open up the neighborhood. After we knock the door, if no one is home, we don't want to waste our effort and just leave, which is what we do. Oh, I knocked this door. No one's home. Go to this one. But they don't even know you were there. And no, that little door hanger, that shiny plasticky glossy crap, people are going to look at marketing material, throw it out. So we're going to leave a letter. Okay. A letter on plain paper. Those are by the way, I include those in the battle pack or you can write your own. Leave a letter at the door. Okay. The letter should have a Compelling offer in a direct call to action to get them to call you or text you and tell them what you can do for them. Okay, Hand sign it, do a little personal touch more on that later. You can even write like hey, stop by on the outside, stop by and then the time, like 4:26pm Right, Adam? Anything like this. Or you can write their address or whatever it is. Okay, so we're going to knock, leave a letter. Then when we get home, we're going to send a letter in the mail. And I've done plenty of videos on this direct mail. This is personalized, hand stamped, hand addressed letters hand signed. You can print them out in bulk again. I include these in the battle pack. I teach you how to use them in the complete sales strategy. Either way, knock the door, leave the letter, send a letter in the mail. Then you either you show back up and you knock again. But here's the difference. You can mention, you can mention the letter and the mailer. So now you have a reason to be there. Hey, my name is Adam. Beautiful boat in the driveway, by the way. Hey, reason I stopped by, I was leaving Peggy's the other day after helping her out with a roof and you weren't home. I sent you a letter in the mail because I didn't catch you and I just wanted to stop by and ask what questions you had for me about that letter I sent you. So there's your open ended question. What questions did you have about the letter I left at your door? The letter that I sent you. Alright, now you have a reason to be there. It's familiar, it doesn't feel like a cold solicitation. But they've also seen you, they've seen the letter at the door, they've gotten a letter in the mail. And the more and more you're in that neighborhood, they see your truck, they see you on the roofs, they see the yard signs and it becomes easier and easier. And also you can layer in cold calling. Okay, so at this point, just quick summary before we move on. We've learned that it's five visits per house on average. And we need to stay focused in the tightest neighborhood, which means your territory is where you have traction. All right, next, I taught you how to use that swath to locate the right area. And if you're selling retail, by the way, which I breezed over, you can use tools like Zillow to check home age and search home built like year homes were built. I did another video on that, by the way, in my scouting playlist. It'll tell you when those homes were built. You can look for houses in the 2000s, early 2000s or 1990s, you know, they're coming up on that time to replace the roof and you can start localizing in those neighborhoods. Then to open up that territory, we're going to use our multi touch marketing knock. Leave a letter, direct mail, if no one's home, show back up again, cold call. We're going to continue because not everyone's always home. So this will allow us to make sure we make contact with everyone in the neighborhood versus that scatterbrained approach. Then we're going stick and stay. Alright, the final thing I'm going to leave you with is this is to get a pulse on the neighborhood. So what I'll call a local pulse. There's kind of three different types of neighborhoods that you'll be working and I'm just going to highlight high level how to structure this for you. So now you're in that neighborhood, you've made traction. Now you might be saying, hey, this neighborhood's good but it's just not producing the fruits that I need. So you want to work another one as well. So you might have two neighborhoods that you work at different times of the day. Let's begin. First is our blue collar neighborhood. These are often blue collar. We know what this means. They often are on shift, work the 9:00am or excuse me, the 6:00am to 3:00pm type. You know, the three shifts per 24 hour period. So oftentimes these people are home early in the morning or wait earlier in the afternoon. So you might have the 6 to 3, so 6a to 3p and you can start working these folks in the early afternoon, their kids are coming back from school and then you, you don't know by the way which one of these you're there working in. Then we have the retirees. Okay, these neighborhoods are great to work because retirees are what they're home most of the day and they're often outside. So when they're home and outside, especially in the summer, I know not in the winter as much. But now these folks can be worked all the time. And I found that there was a neighborhood that had retirees and I would do really well focusing on that neighborhood in the morning before I went to the next area, which I'm going to write in orange, this is my white collar folk. These are people with traditional nine to five jobs. They often get home at six because they're sitting in rush hour traffic. So we have early afternoon, late evening, and then all the time. Now the other final piece is you won't know this till you're in there trying it for yourself. Once you get there, you're like, oh, yeah, that's that blue collar neighborhood. Everybody's kind of home around this time. This is my white collar neighborhood. This is like your gated communities, golf course communities, larger homes often. And then your retirees can be a mix of. All right, so get a pulse on kind of the trends of who's home when so you can maximize your time in that territory in case you end up with two. Then the final thing I'm going to leave you before we wrap this up is that each of you is going to have a sweet spot in one or two of these, usually more than the others. I had a gentleman who saw with us. We referred to him as cowboy. He did great in the blue collar community. Absolutely awesome. Then I had folks like Andrew, white collar homes. I mean, he was in those neighborhoods and crushed it. And then I had folks like Russ. Russ was like the retiree guy. We always laugh because he was working with very, very elderly people. And he had such a kind heart and so gentle and so patient. Each of us kind of has a sweet spot. I'll tell you, my sweet spot was these two white collar and retirees. And that's where I focus my time. I could speak the language and relate to more. It was just a natural thing. So there's no wrong way, by the way. You just need to know that we're all going to have strengths in one or two of these areas versus the others. So let's wrap this video up so you can take what you just learned and use it in the field. Lesson one, stay focused in a neighborhood. Lesson two, use that swath as a beacon to get in there. Then use your Google map overlay to find a ripe neighborhood that's going to help you out. Number three, we're going to open it up using that multi touch marketing multiple times in the same neighborhood. Focus, focus, focus. Make contact with everyone. Give your. Make it easier for yourself. All right? Follow that system. Then finally we are going to do the get a pulse on who's home when so we can maximize our time in that field. All right. I really hope that this video was helpful in you finding your territory before we wrap it up starting on Monday. And if you're watching this later, hopefully it is available. Now I'm doing a three part brand new free training series called the roofing sales success formula. How to sell and close consistently in the 30 days or less without feeling pushy, sleazy or salesy. Alright, it's coming up soon so stay tuned for that. And by the way, you'll be able to watch it once it's live. Now, just because our time here is about to wrap up, I want to give you a little bit more so you can continue should you be interested. I covered how to find your territory but if you want even more on how to scout for the perfect neighborhood, I've done an entire playlist on it and you can find that right here. Scouting Playlist what to look for, how to find that ripe neighborhood and then if you haven't done so yet, click here to get a free copy of my Pitch Like a Pro Roofing Sales Training Video Library emailed right to you. All my videos organized by category sent to your inbox. 100% free pitch like a Pro for Free Scouting Playlist and I will see you on the next one. Stay tuned for Monday's new three part training.