Adam Bensman argues that roofing referral programs fail because they offer big payouts too late. Instead, give $25 gift cards immediately with an "introduction" frame, not a commission pitch. He walks through scripts and a cheat sheet to actually get people to refer.
Simple sells. Okay? Simple sells. Most referral programs in the roofing space go like this. Hey, were you happy with my services? Yes. Wonderful. If you refer a friend or family member to use us and we do the work, once we get paid from them, you get 500 bucks. Who's heard this stuff before? Yeah. Okay, so let's go through the mind of our customer. You, my friend, need to throw your friend into a sale with me. They need to buy from me. I need to do the roof. And in eight weeks, when the insurance company finally decides to pay, or when they pay out of pocket, whatever it is, weeks go by. Now, I'm going to give you a whopping $500. The homeowners thinking to themselves, 500 bucks, that's a crapload of money. How much money are you making off of me? The next question is, if you're willing to give me $500 to tell you about something, why don't you just give me $500 off my roof? The next question is, do I really believe you? You're going to pay me, what, in like, eight weeks? I'll give you one referral, and then I'm going to see what happens to see if it's true. The next one is. So what you're telling me is I have to tell my best friend or my cousin or my family member to spend two hours with you and then buy from you? And we're setting ourselves up not in a great spot. Most people I know that have this referral program, they don't do that well with it, and it's hard to communicate. And when we study the psychology of referral programs, which I've done extensively, I studied what Dropbox did. And Dropbox, this file storage system, built their business without marketing using referrals. And they use what's called an altruistic referral, meaning you give a gift and you also get rewarded. Instead of, if I said, you tell your friend about me, I'm going to pay you 500 bucks for me. Selling your friend like that doesn't feel good. And an altruistic approach would be, I'll give you 250, and I'll give them 250. We're not going to do either of those things. But that's the altruistic approach. The other thing is that all psychological principles apply for motivating behavior via financial rewards in the same way as they apply to compensation plans to sales reps. And it follows a formula called pick P I C. Positive reward that's immediate and certain. Positive, immediate and Certain humans are not dogs, but we'll just use these because we get it. If I'm training a dog to sit, I'm going to use the hand gesture, and then I'm going to use the voice command, sit. When the dog's butt hits the ground, when does the dog get a treat? Immediately. So not eight weeks later. Every reward comes every time. You're not sometimes treating. We get to that point. If you've trained a dog to get to the behavior, you give a treat every time it sits. Only after that can you move to intermittent rewards and then no rewards. And the same goes with human behavior. So if I want someone to hand me a customer, a potential customer, what I don't want to do is say, you tell me about someone that I can sell, and then in eight weeks, we'll give you a boatload of money instead. What do we want? The referral. Whose job is it to sell? The homeowner yours or. Or the person who's giving you the referral? It's your job. What's the close rate on a referral? It better be a damn easy deal. Unless the homeowner doesn't have a problem or isn't qualified. But if they have a problem you can solve, it's pretty much a done deal. If we're talking on the storm side of things, it should be a 90% close rate. So what do we want? Introductions. What does the homeowner want? To feel thanked. Here's what we do instead. Mr. Homeowner, have you enjoyed the service we provided you? It's called fishing for compliments. Yeah, you've been great. We've loved it. Fantastic. Listen, I would absolutely love the opportunity to provide a friend, family member, neighbor, coworker, the same level of service we provided you. In fact, we built our business over the last eight years on word of mouth. And we have a really great way of rewarding folks just for a thank you for getting an introduction. Because the last thing that I know you want to do is throw your friend into an opportunity that they're feeling sold. So as a way of saying thank you for every person that you refer to us, I'd like to give you a $25 gift card to blank. Whether they buy from us or not, 10 comes out. So who do you know? A friend, family member, neighbor, or coworker that I might be able to help the same way that we've helped you. Peter. See what happened there? He got uncomfortable with the role play, and he shared Peter's name. See how long I was Silent. I just looked down and I assume that's it. And then if he doesn't, it's okay. I click my pen. This one's not a clicker. Click my pen and I say, hey, not a problem. Listen, thank you so much for your business. We have this referral program. I have this sheet right here, by the way. Include this in my program, and it goes in every single welcome packet with a customer. It's called the referral program cheat sheet. There's 10 slots for homeowners names, and it spells these rules out. I'm going to leave this with you, okay? So if you think of anybody, you can fill this out and keep this handy, because next time I'm in, I'll ask you for it. Set the expectation. And in my program, every single email that goes out to a customer includes this request. Every single one. So $25 gift card for every person you refer that we might be able to help whether they buy from us or not. And what we did is now we're buying appointments for $25 gift card, which is enough to say thank you. But it's not so much to be like, wait, wait, $500, $200? Are you kidding me? Like, that's a lot of money you're making. I have a gentleman who didn't buy into this system, used this cheat sheet, walked out of a house with four deals. I got another one. Guy walks out of the house, he goes, actually, I own a whole bunch of rental properties. Here's a list of all of them. I already started the claims. Here you go. Here's five more deals from me. And I had another customer who's an older retired guy, said, man, I know this whole neighborhood. Let's go out knocking doors together. The neighbor literally brought him and. And hand introduced him to all the neighbors. Now, if you want to, you can offer $25 to each party. That's okay, I'll give you 25. And them I pay $50 for an appointment every single day of the week. Why? Because even if you sucked at closing and you only closed 30% of those, your acquisition cost is still stupid cheap. And they're really warm handoffs. And if you're half decent at sales and you're closing 70% or more of a referral, which you should, you're getting customers for like 50 to $75. So I want to talk about what to use on the gift card side of things, because you have to match the gift card to the market. What I don't want to do is go into some really fancy neighborhood with like 80 square homes and be like, I have $25 Walmart gift cards. Like, that's gonna fall flat. So find the boutique place that makes cookies or cupcakes or a coffee franchise or a cool coffee shop, Boutique coffee, winery, something that's fun. Because $25 to a millionaire is not anything. It's the gesture, right? Likewise, if you're in a blue collar neighborhood, what works really well? Walmart, gas, gift cards, grocery stores, franchises, popular restaurants for the family. All right.
