Adam Bensman (YouTube) warns that private-equity-backed roofing firms threaten independent roofers by pouring far larger marketing budgets into in-house channels. His core recommendation: test your marketing systems before pouring more ad spend into agencies. He prescribes 'secret shopper' checks of phone intake and appointment-setting, end-to-end testing of online lead forms (including showing a calendar on the confirmation page), and fixing routing/CRM holes. Anecdotes and numbers illustrate the stakes (examples of budgets, a broken web form, and conversion-rate improvements).
Questions this video answers
$15,000 per month and $120,000 per year; another example nearly $600,000 per year.
From $15,000 per month to $150,000 per month.
From roughly 30–40% up to about 80–90% after plugging intake/process holes.
From about $7M, then doubled to about $15M, and now on pace for about $40M.
Chapters
This is the number one best thing you will ever do for your marketing. And you're going to want to listen to this video if you've ever had a fight with your marketing agency. They say the leads are great. You say they suck. You're spending money like a gentleman. I talked to. His name is going to remain sound. He's a member of ours. Razik. Dude, I've been spending $15,000 a month and little to show for it. Talk to another one. I spent $120,000 with this company. We're under a contract. The results were dismal. I hear this over and over again. 15amonth, 120 a year. Talk to another company. Nearly $600,000 per year. And when I shared with them what I am about to share with you, their marketing game changed forever. So before you spend another dollar on marketing, watch this video and do the very simple homework assignment. I'm going to give you welcome or welcome back. My name is Adam Bensman and we are talking marketing over a beautiful espresso. And you may have noticed that I'm making a big shift in the content that I'm delivering here here on my YouTube channel and inside the Roofing and Solar Reform alliance as I work with my members. Because I was recently inspired by a quote from Gary Keller came up in the book the AI Driven Leader by Jeff Woods. Highly recommend it to every single roofing company owner and manager. And he quoted Gary Keller because Jeff woods worked with Gary Keller as he launched the one thing. And Gary Keller says, what's the company that will drive your company out of business? Build it first. And as I begin analyzing what can run a roofing company out of business, the answer, like without a shadow of a doubt to me, is a marketing company. And we're seeing private equity get gobble up Roofing companies. They come with very big budgets, a high level of intellect and business expertise, and a tremendous amount of resources, in other words, marketing resources. And you pour on that a huge budget like a friend of mine who got acquired by a private equity group and he went from a $15,000 per month budget to 150,000 per month overnight because of the private equity backing. Now, to add insult to injury, the private roofing company, which is probably you if you're watching, is paying someone a management fee to run your PPC ads, your Facebook ads, and then your ad spend. And then the private equity group comes in and they're able to have 10x higher budget and run things in house. It's a bidding platform do the math. Okay. If you don't learn to become a, as I call it, GC of your marketing, you may not need to know all of the individual trades and how to do it all, but you have to know how it all fits together so you can call the shots, sniff out the bs, pour gas on what's working, and develop a repeatable, predictable marketing machine. That's the name of the game. And that's why I'm shifting my focus here. Because even though people know me as the sales guy, I developed the most followed roofing sales training in the industry by way of marketing. I also ran all the marketing for our company when I was coo. And I also spent five years as a very handsomely compensated direct sales consultant and digital marketing strategist. So what I'm bringing to the table is not like theory that I just pulled out of a hat. I'm doing this. I'm looking at the data of marketing companies and we're doing live marketing audits and coaching inside our sra. I know that was probably the longest introduction of any video I've ever done, but is incredibly important. And now let's get into the number one most important thing for you to be doing in your marketing. 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. All right, I'm gonna cut right to it. Here's a. Here it is. What you need to do is test your marketing. Now, what do I mean by test your marketing? See, we were at, I've been hosting these little mini events for RSRA members only. So they're tight knit, exclusive WE gatherings. And one of them, two of them, we did this. Actually the last two. One of them was in Arizona, one was in Colorado, and we did what's called secret shopper. So we put on speaker in a group of about 30 fellow members, owners, and we call the roofing company and we tested their intake process. Now, one of them, specifically the gentleman that shared he had had been spending 12 to $15,000 a month on his marketing. And he's saying, I'm not getting great results. And the answer was very clear to me right then. What the reason why. And his office person who was answering the phone and setting the appointment said everything except the appointment. They used the classic like hey, do you want morning, afternoon, night? Great, we'll call you back once we have someone that can help and that drop off the minute someone calls in ready to buy from you. Which as Marcus Sheridan says 80% of the buying decision is made and we say, hey, we're going to call you back. That's just an example of a drop off, like the chances of you actually getting them back on the phone, not in the voicemail loop and converting the appointment, drop substantially. So their set rate, meaning the number of people that call in whose appointments are set, is likely. This is my prediction because it wasn't tracked likely. If they are at 50% that would be high. My prediction would be 30 to 40 ish percent. Why? Because I audited our marketing when I was CEO of our roofing company. This was years ago, before we even had a CRM. And I realized that when we use that same method, which many people did back then, we never got in touch. So we only converted about 30% of the leads that came in. So with a very quick tweak that to the system by secret shoppering, we found a way to plug the hole, book the appointment on the spot and we'll very easily take that set rate from the 30 to 40% range and bring it up to the 80 to 90% range, which means twice the leads. No more spending money on marketing. Your systems need to be in place first. Case study number two. Hey, I'll make this quick. My goal is to help you win big. So now you can get free one on one coaching advice for free from my brand new AI clone. That's right, you can call, text and even video chat with me. So click the link in the description and check it out. Right now there are two people in RSRA that happened, that has happened to. One of them said my website form has been broken for a month. I just found it. I have no idea where all my website form fills went. So that's people on the website. I want an estimate. Flush down the tubes. Another gentleman reached out to me just this last weekend. Holy crap. And by the way, he's got a $30,000 a month budget. I'm working with him to test some new things I'm bringing to rsra. We're auditing his process, tweaks, the landing page, the offer, the conversion page, the appointment. Warm up all this stuff, keywords on PPC by applying the laws of marketing and the best practices for copywriting. And he says to me, my lead form broke, but guess what, you don't know these things unless you test them. So what so many roofing companies do and owners is they start throwing money out the window at all these agencies. Give me leads, give me leads, give me leads. But they don't put the focus on and look at how they're converting those leads. First, build the system before you feed the system. This also happened. There's another member of ours. They're on pace for about 40 million this year. When I first started working with them, they were at about 7 million and then they doubled and to about 15, and then now they're on pace for about 40. But the first time we did a secret shopper, we found out that by calling them. When I selected that it was a commercial lead, the phone rang to someone's cell phone who no longer works there. And this happens. It happens because we get busy and we don't think to do this. So your key takeaway is to do the one thing that you need to do right now, which is plug the hole in your appointment setting system as a secret shopper. Task number one, call your office right now, do it on someone else's phone, have an address handy, and run through the process so you can see did they qualify you and did they set the appointment and did you remind them of how affordable your solutions were and how amazing your customer service was? By the way, affordability is financing. Number two, you want to test all of your online lead sources to make sure that you get the form. You're able to convert the lead. Ideally, you're booking them an appointment, so you don't need to call. So on the confirmation page, instead of being like, hey guys, thanks, we got your message, we'll call you later, you just show them a calendar. And even if you don't have an exact calendar, you can say, pick your preferred meeting time and again. Psychologically, the homeowner believes that they have a set appointment so they're less likely to start shopping elsewhere. These are the simple tweaks you can make. And by doing so, there's no exaggeration, you could nearly double your leads by plugging holes like I just shared. Now, if you want to double your sales, I have another video for you that you should jump into right now. It's the four magic levers to pull to double your sales. Jump into that one right here and I'll see you in the next one.
