Tech-Forward Roofing: Build a Smarter Faster Sales Experience |Podcast Ep. 41|Mastering ServiceTitan

That we connect to your account and we get your real time pricing. For anyone who's working in any level of construction these days, with the constantly changing costs, this is huge because it means that your costs are accurate as of today and you don't have to worry that you haven't updated your pricing.

Welcome to Mastering Service Titan, where you get expert advice from power users. Josh. I'm your host, Josh Lu and today I'm joined by Sue Drummond, the solutions delivery manager for residential exteriors here at Servicetitan. We're diving into the whole sales flow and what it looks like in service time for roofing and exterior contractors. And so, sue, welcome to the show.

Thanks Josh. Thanks for having me.

Of course, typically we just jump right into the product and how to use it and all the best practices. But you have such an interesting story about how you got into roofing and working with software. So I was curious if you can tell our audience how you got into the space.

Sure. I started in the industry. I worked directly for a very small family owned and operated residential re roofing company. Very typical where you're sort of an office administrator. You touch all the things and learn. It was a great place to learn about the industry. I'd know nothing about it going in especially spent about five years there and then I moved on to a larger new construction and commercial focused roofing contractor focused on material procurement. There safety and the service department became very frustrating to me very early on that even at such a large company, the level of efficiency in roofing and in construction in general was very paper based and very minimal. And as a millennial, I was kind of banging my head against the wall with the lack of use of technology. So I ended up leaving that company and using my knowledge of the industry, I co founded a construction safety software company that focused primarily on helping roofers to manage their safety programs. I spent about another 10 years, so now two decades worth, working with roofers, you know, standing in back shops, helping the field workers to use an app on their phone and then moving right over to the admin team in the office, in the C suite, in the boardroom, making sure that the entire company from start to finish had recognized the value and was able to benefit from the adoption of technology, which in roofing was very slow to adopt. So I was on that sort of like beginning of the frontier of pushing technology into this space.

Wow. Super cool. We are so lucky to have you at Service Titan and I'm so happy to have you on today to dive deep into these workflows you're like the perfect person to have on to talk about this.

So I feel passionately about it because I love roofers. I love working in that space ways and there are such easier ways. It doesn't have to be so hard.

Yeah, let's talk about some of those ways and we'll kick off here with basically an explanation and deep dive into this workflow and servicetitan. And the whole goal today is just to show you all the possibilities of what's everything you can do in servicetitan and how smooth it can all go. So if we start off with, let's say you're a roofing company and a customer calls you looking for a quote, what happens next in service titan?

Today's consumers have very high levels of expectations, right? Like the customer experience has changed a lot in the last few years. We're able to track our food when it's being delivered to us. We know the name of the driver that's delivering it to our door. We have these levels of the customer experience that have increased and so we want things fast. We want our questions answered without having to answer them. We're capable of doing our own research. So the experience that a homeowner is looking for needs to be delivered with speed and with accuracy today. So we want to get out to the home as quick as possible and be able to deliver an accurate estimate that also provides choices. Studies have been showing that this new level of consumer wants choices. And if they're not provided with choices from your company in the form of different materials to choose from, different warranties, different products, then they're going to look outside your company for other options. So providing a good, better best, a gold, silver, bronze, whatever you want to call it, that is what today's consumer is looking for. And so we want to do that and we want to also utilize then technology to get us there, but still have a. They're still looking for a face to face interaction. They still want to build that connection and that rapport with the salesperson and with your company because that's important. It's a lot of money. They want to make sure that they're feeling confident in your capabilities.

Totally. How does serviceten help in that customer experience right off the get go when it comes to booking that job?

The first thing that we did was partner with some of the leading measurement companies in the industry. It used to be that you would send a salesperson out to the home, they would spend up to maybe an hour climbing around the roof and taking measurements, recording notes this is time consuming. It has safety risks obviously involved in it, and it's taking up the customer's time because they, you want them to be there so that you can present the estimate to them. But while you're doing all of this and then sitting in the truck building writing out your, your estimate, they're sitting inside wondering, what's going on? What's this guy climbing all over my roof? What's he doing out there? And why is it taking so long? This still happens a lot. And lots of customers are totally capable or lots of contractors are totally capable of manual measurements. What we're able to do now with our partnerships with gaf, Quick Measure, Eagle View and Hover means that as soon as that lead comes in, as soon as you've booked that appointment for the sales team to go out, you can order a measurement report for from one of these companies right from your Service Titan account and have the report, the PDF delivered right into the job. And then also pull the values that are important to you for your measurements right from that report into the form that you're eventually going to use to create your estimates from. So it means you're arriving at the door with the information that almost all of the information you need in order to create that quote.

Wow, that is so amazing. I remember in our previous conversation, I was like, how the heck do they get those measurements before you even get there? Is it like some kind of satellite thing or other drone cameras? And I was joking with some of this stuff, but it sounds like there is some pretty advanced technology behind the scenes to help get those measurements right?

There is, and you'll have to ask them for their secret sauce.

And you mentioned gaf. I did see on their website they say they have an exclusive partnership with the preferred CRM of Service Tie in, which is such cool news to hear and very validating, I think, for the industry.

Our partnership for measurement is with GIF's quick measure, which is their measurement software. But also GIF as a shingle manufacturer, is enormous, a very popular brand. And yeah, to be named their preferred software provider, which they've never done before, was a huge recognition in the industry that we've arrived.

Yeah, it's super cool. How about if there's someone listening and they're still kind of in that old way where they still do kind of manually measure things, can they still book that and do all that within Service Titan?

Absolutely. And like, there's value to that too. It can be time consuming, but it can also be rewarding. And the features that we've built for our estimating tools will still provide value to you no matter how you're collecting the measurements. What we have designed for our roofing contractors is a way to use a custom form. We provide it in a stock format first so that you don't have to recreate the wheel, but then a form that collects the key measurements that you need in order to measure any roof. Things like the linear feet of the eaves, the rake, the hips, the ridges, all of these are measurements that are on your roof. And you have to capture in order to then run a calculation and determine how many pieces of material you're going to need in order to complete this re roofing project. When you enter that into the form in Service Titan, we have preset calculations that in the background do all the math for you so the salesperson never has to use that calculator. It will then generate a good, better best or however you've designed your template to be. It will create and spit out those estimates based on one entry of that form, meaning it's consistent. So you can ensure that it doesn't matter which salesperson is visiting which house your material quantities based on the specific brands that you are using. And that could mean if your ice and water shield has a coverage of 66ft instead of 75ft, we've factored that in to the calculation. If you like to add a waste percentage or round up to the nearest roll, we factored all of that in. It's done once. You don't have to do it every single time. It it's done once in the setup process. Then it's consistent from roof to roof, salesperson to salesperson. You know, it's consistent across the, across the board. But it also means that it's easier to train someone new who maybe is a very skilled salesperson but doesn't have the roofing experience. Maybe they wouldn't have excelled or couldn't be brought up to speed as fast as when you have tools like this and they don't have to learn what the the calculation is for ice and water shield.

Right. That makes sense. It's good to know that we support, we're flexible in that option of hey, if you want to go out there and take the measurements and, and fill out that custom form, we'll still support you with those custom calculations and actually generate a good, better best estimate. Or if you're a little bit more, I don't want to say me ahead of the time with the times we'll call it you using JF Eagle View Hover, one of those. Those integrate perfectly. And that'll also generate the estimate with multiple options.

Absolutely. And this is a game changer for companies who are used to quoting based on a per square basis because it's really difficult to try and calculate every single material that's required on a roof. There's a lot going on there. It may not look like that from your driveway, but there is. There's a lot of, of customers who are up there trying. They're trying to deliver quickly, and when they deliver quickly, they scale.