Best Way to Deal With "Marginal" Hail Damage (Fresh & Old) - Roofing Sales Ethics [Lunchtime LIVE]

Hey everybody, Adam here, the roof strategist and welcome to today's lunchtime Live. I'm talking about how to deal with marginal hail damage because it comes up both for fresh, exciting things in the field. Broadcasting from my truck, I'm heading up to Cheyenne, Wyoming to check out a small little hailstorm that happened up there to do some more on the fly scouting tips and answer questions like Brian's that literally just came. Today's video is about dealing with marginal damage and I'm going to read a couple emails so shout out here to Joseph for submitting this and then Avi for submitting another question on dealing with marginal damage in the field. And this comes an ethics question. When it, when it comes to sales, like with marginal damage, do you roll the dice? Do you sign up all of them? Do you not sign up people with marginal damage? Where's that boundary of feeling like you're just like a sleazy dude saying yeah, your roof's totaled, go file a claim. And then the insurance comes out and says there's nothing versus telling people, hey, you're fine and losing out on an opportunity. So all those questions and more I'm going to answer today. And if you haven't done it yet, head on over to the roofstrategist.com get a copy of the pitch like a pro roofing sales training video library. They sent an email out with a link to it before the link's broken because we found a better way to do it. And what's up, man? Sup from Colorado. Sup from Colorado, from you too. Colorado got hit in the Springs and then some folks are up in Wyoming as well. And Marty says, hey, thanks again for all the great info. My pleasure guys. Thanks for being here. And when you download this, by the way, the free training, it's all my videos that are organized by category and it was a great way to answer the question. I hear. What's the best way to ask for referrals? Well, there's a whole section on that. So now you can take a look. And that'll be updated every week. So when you get that email, save that download. Hey Adam, you seriously rock. Thanks. You're going to make me blush, so thanks. In here. By the way, you'll notice it says personal check in. Anyone that grabs a pitch like a pro personal follow up email from me. I want to check in and I'm going to ask you a simple question. Anything I can do to help out. And I reply to these and that's what influences these videos. So Joseph brought up a great question. He says, thanks for reaching out. We just got some fresh hail on Cheyenne Wang, which coincidentally I'm going to be up there on Thursday broadcasting from the Troch during that one. And I'll share kind of what I'm finding because it was some smaller hill. He says, I have some questions about roofing ethics. What are your thoughts on signing up? Marginal damage? Yes, the roof might. Excuse me. Yes, the roof might leak. On the other hand, what if it's a one year old roof and the owner doesn't want to pay their deductible again, even very marginal damage and leave the conscience part up to the insurance. So really common question, right? What do you do? What's the conscious part? What would you do if it was your roof? So I want to give you a few tools. And this applies both for fresh damage and for old hail damage. I know a lot of, a lot of folks are still working older areas that hail hasn't kind of hit their core market yet. So first I want to tell you a story. And this story was from a guy that used to work with us, okay? And a hailstorm landed in our backyard. He goes out and the. By the way, Rick, I just drove back. I just drove through Omaha on Sunday from Wisconsin where the videos were posted from the other day. So there you go. Hey, Jason. So this is a true story. Sales guy of mine, we're going to change his name because just for privacy sake, we'll call him Derek. And it wasn't a Derek. I did have a Derek selling for us, but it wasn't that one. So Derek goes out, this homeowner, hailstorm land in our backyard, beautiful monster house on a lake. And he hops down, he says, Mr. Mrs. Homeowner, you're fine. I wouldn't worry about a thing. Looks like he got through this thing with no big deal. Okay? And this is literally our backyard of our company. We had a huge rep, we dominated the market. We had a great reputation there. So two weeks goes by, I get a call at the office from a homeowner who's irate and she says, Derek came out and looked at my roof and he told me it was fine. The next company whose name I won't mention came by, told me my roof had damage, filed a claim in the insurance company totaled it. I just wanted to call you and tell you guys I know what you're doing. Okay. That didn't make us look very good. So there's a, there's a lesson in this story that even with what you see as marginal, the insurance company. And I'm going to give you some tools on how to communicate this here in a second. The insurance company may or may not see it that way, okay. They may come out and say it's totaled. We may get some freezing, which I know is not going to happen during the summer. But let's say for older damage, freezing, thawing rain, weather, temperature swings, all that's going to loosen those granules and make that hail damage more evident. If. And hail damage is subjective when it comes to shingles, right? Like when. When we talk about metal, I wish I had something metal that could dent within arm's length. But yeah, here's my metal water bottle. If this had a dent on it, which I actually just cracked the top, right? So there's a crack that's pretty. You can't argue it. It's cracked, right? It's cracked, it's cracked. You show this to anyone, they're going to come to the same conclusion. When we come into a roofing shingle, the subjectivity of what hail damage is isn't going to be interpreted differently by insurance adjuster and. And by the insurance company. And I want to give you these tools. So here's how I'd explain this to the homeowner, because in my opinion, it is your civic duty to sign up everyone, and I'm going to share kind of how and why to do that right now. So let's say there is marginal damage that you find. This is what I'd say. I'm going to go into role play. Hey, Mr. Homeowner. So I just got back down from your roof and I was going to grab my phone, but I'm broadcasting from it. So I'd hold up my phone. We'll use my wallet as a pretend phone for right now. So I'm going to hold up my phone and say, so let's go take a look at the photos and videos I took and I'll walk you through what I found. So, Mr. Homeowner, you might agree with me here. So I'm going to show the soft metal damage first, right? That you can see. There's evidence of hail, right? You saw it, it fell. The soft metal, the gutters, the downspouts, window wraps, all that has been but the shingles, that's what I would consider marginal damage. Now, the reason that I'm going to encourage you to file this claim is this. You just spent a lot. Your roof is the most expensive wear and maintenance item on your home of anything that you'll ever do, you're expecting it to last. Let's say it's a 30 year shingle. Lifetime shingle, 30, 40. Impacted by hail or severe weather, the lifespan of your roof is shortened, okay? And when it's shortened, that means you're going to have to replace it sooner. So let's say this hail storm, even though it doesn't look like much now, might shave 5, 7, 10, 15 years off the lifespan of your roof, which means you're going to have to pay to replace it much sooner. This is why it's covered by the insurance company under your homeowner's insurance policy, your property insurance policy, if you're doing commercial sales. So the reason that I encourage you to cover this is you only have this limited window and it depends on the state. By the way, check your state laws. I know that hurricane losses are longer than hail and wind, but it can be anywhere from six months to three years. Okay? Typically it's about 12 months from when the hail storm started. And even if you don't see a lot of damage now, but it starts to show and it gets worse in 18 months or 24 months, you're literally out of opportunity. And the reason it's insured is so you don't have to pay a whole bunch of money to replace your roof because no one gets excited about stroking a check for $15,000 or whatever it's going to cost to replace their roof. So by filing a claim, you're leaving it up to the insurance company to make the call for you. And I'm going to go to bat and help you out the best I can. But ultimately you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. And should you wait, this can become problematic in the future. Okay, and watch my video this coming Sunday. I have some videos about realtors, by the way, and how to position that. So I'll save some of this pitch for that video on Sunday. But ultimately, when you present this subjective, I also go with this. I'm going to shift back into role play. Insurance companies change year by year. Their criteria might be that the matting needs to be bruised. They might be looking for six impact marks or, excuse me, seven or eight impact marks per square 10 by 10 section of roofing one year and then the next year it might be 10. I've witnessed this change and I've also witnessed being on a roof with three different adjusters and having three different opinions. So we're going to leave it up to them. So again, when you use scarcity, excuse me, Urgency and saying this might become a problem later, but your window of opportunity is now. When you explain that this is the roof costs a ton of money. And for them to put it off and find out that there's damage that they didn't see, that can be a problem later on. So we want to be proactive, okay? Because again, they have everything to gain and nothing to lose. And you'll hear me using a car analogy. If you found out that the neighborhood kid stole the car and we're ripping donuts around in the neighborhood and smoked through the tires, you're going to file a claim to get the damage replaced because the lifespan of your 50, 50,000 mile tires has expired. Okay. Makes sense. So, Joseph, I hope that answers your question on the conscience part, because ultimately you're there to help. And the last thing I'd hate to see happen is you say it's fine and someone else jumps up there and calls on the claim and it gets totaled. So there's Joseph's question. Now, canvassing question. This was from Avi. Avi, by the way, story about Avi, Avi got the battle pack. He is a canvasser. His sales started to surpass his entire team. He was killing it. And the owner reached out, said, what are you doing? And he showed him the channel and then ended up getting the battle pack for the company. So Avi's been with me for a while. So, Avi, thanks for writing this one. He says, I'm in the canvassing department, and sometimes when I set up a lead, I have an inspector, meaning a roofing salesperson, go to the property and they'll not find enough damage to file or maybe not be experienced enough to handle a certain type of route, therefore losing the sale. Which sucks for Avi because he's a canvasser and getting paid for that. My problem is this. How do I set a reinspection with the homeowner? By sending a more experienced inspector to the property who will more than likely find a reason for the homeowner to file. I don't want to come across incompetent by saying, oh, well, that first inspector didn't know what he was doing. That would sound very unprofessional in my eyes. Thank you. So Avi had a really good question. How do you handle this, especially if you're canvassing? And I had another canvasser email me who was working some storms this morning. So here's what I would do, Avi. I would do this. I would make sure first that the company knows what's going on, okay. Because from a top down, you don't want to go talking to a homeowner saying, hey, I'm going to bring someone else in without the owner of the company or the sales manager knowing what's happening. So that's first thing. Second thing is, I would have no problem communicating this exact pitch to a homeowner by saying, hey, Mr. And Mrs. Homeowner, you know, Tom just hopped down from the roof. Looks like he didn't find a whole lot there. Now, what I'd like to do for you is similar to if you injured your knee, for example, you go to the doctor. One doctor might say you need knee surgery. Another one might say, hey, let's put it in a brace and do some physical rehab because it might void surgery. So you're going to get varying opinions. And what I found with hail damage is it is subjective when it comes to the roofing shingle, similar to the pitch I just did before, by the way. And what I'd love to do is just get another set of eyes up there because there's a chance everything's fine. And a second set of eyes on it with will just put your mind at ease and say, everything's good, you're good to go. Or if they come out and see things differently or interpret things a little differently, we'll educate you on the next steps that might be best for you. How does that sound? And that way you can get that second person out there without throwing anyone under the bus. Make sense. So I hope that helps answer the questions of the ethical side of roofing sales ethics. When it comes to marginal damage, my opinion is this. Educate the homeowners and leave it up to them. I would encourage you to. To encourage the homeowner to file the claim because they literally have everything to gain, nothing to lose. The other thing, too, which I'm going to go into more detail this coming Sunday on a video is when it comes to realtors and watch my video. I did another video on realtors. Was that last week? Tuesday or Thursday? All these days kind of blur together. And if someone doesn't do the work and they go to sell their house, even in 10 years and the home inspector finds hill damage, I can hold up the same. You don't want to see that stuff happen. So it's best for everybody's interest to take action now, specifically, and I know it's not all that common for roofs to link. To leak from. From hail. And by the way, Joseph, thank you. By the way, that was Joseph, who's Who's joined in. So thanks for making the video on it. It's not super common for roofs to leak from hell. It might happen, it might not. But that, you know, you don't want that on your conscience. And the last thing you'd want to do is if an insurance company is going to cover a roof, the homeowner is going to want it done. So I would encourage you to kind of educate your homeowners to go in that direction because they literally have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So that's all I've got for this video. There's a little delay on the YouTube live. If you guys have any outstanding questions on this topic about handling marginal damage, drop a comment and I'll answer it now. Or if you're watching the reply, drop a comment. Let me know if there's something I miss on how you work marginal damage. If you guys like this video, smash. That thumbs up button lets me know that these are topics that are helpful to you. Everything that I do on this channel is in this very simple format. You ask and I answer. Pretty simple. So if you want more free training, hop on over to the roofstrategist.com, there's a link in the video description and you can get a free copy of the pitch. Like a pro roofing sales training video library. It looks a lot like this. And all you do is you enter your email, you click go. You'll get it emailed to you right away and then I'll follow up with you to see if there's anything I can do to answer your questions. I'm going to scoot forward. I saw a couple chats come in. Let me pop this open so it says hey Adam, thanks for making a live. And then I see just starting in roof sales, 20 years in real estate. I found your videos today. I've been binging at least four hours. That's been great. Awesome, Charlie, glad to have you here and thanks for being here. So looks like so far all of the questions have been answered and if you have any other questions that you want to see an upcoming video, shoot me an email. Adamoofstrategist.com so no the just Adamaroofstrategist.com and stay tuned. Thursday's live, as you can see is queued up and I'll be live from my van in Cheyenne. I'm going to use some scouting in a smaller hailstorm to kind of show you how to how to pick the right area when it's marginal damage. Speaking of marginal damage, thank You, Joseph and Avi and I'll be just kind of answering some more general live questions as well. And one question came thing came through. Joseph said what if the homeowners want to file a came in place the premium goes up. Joseph, this is a great question. Now there is an article that I'm happy to email you. It's linked on one of my videos. I forget which one. By law there's a. Oh man. What is it? It's an insurance law website. I bookmarked this article years ago. Technically an insurance company cannot increase your premiums from an act of God loss. Act of God meaning hailstorm. Nothing you can do about hail, wind, hurricane, tornado. Okay now what they can do is increase your your premiums from other types of claims that aren't act of God. You left the oven on and started kitchen fire, you're a burglarized vandal, things like that. But an act of God, they cannot increase your rates. Yes, premiums go up every year because that's what happens, especially when storms occur. But ultimately an insurance company cannot so far as my understanding goes. Again I'm not an attorney, this is not legal advice but all my research has indicated that it cannot go up from act of God claims. And email me. I have the article linked somewhere and it's on the truthaboutinsurance.com and Joseph, I believe you have the Battle Pack in the Battle Pack a link to that article is if my memory serves me. I'm trying to think of which one. There's 70 pieces in there. I think it's in the follow up email on the 30, 60, 90 follow up emails and I think it's the 60 day one. I can shoot an email and let you know. So that's all for today's live See you guys Thursday from in the van in Cheyenne. That rhymed at Indian Planet. And if you have any questions about scouting, finding the right area and all that stuff, we'll be covering that then. And stay tuned for a video this coming Sunday on making the most out of your time in the vehicle. Sorry, I filmed a few in advance when I was in Wisconsin. I don't remember which one's coming Sunday. And it'll teach you about cold calling and using that invaluable drive time. Drive sales. That's all I got for now. We'll see you guys again. Subscribe if you haven't already click thumbs up, grab a free copy of your training and check out the marketing Battle Pack. If you haven't already link in the description. We'll see you on Thursday.