006: Part 2 of 3 – What I Learned Talking to 586 Roofers – Understanding your Funnel

You're listening to the Roofing Business Partner Podcast.

This is the show where you'll learn the Minehacks strategies and process we use every day to turn everyday roofing companies into the dominating local authority with our ultimate roofer marketing method. You'll also learn how we use Facebook ads to rapidly and affordably scale up business for roofing companies and generate leads on Autopilot, putting you in touch with the right customers who pay the right price at the right time. Here's your host, Adam sand now, so let's get after it.

Welcome to another episode. I am super excited to share with you part two of what I learned talking to 586 roofers on the phone in two months. For those of you that don't know, during the launch of my one year coaching program where I personally guide roofers through every step of growing their business 25 to 50% in one year with Facebook ads, I end up talking to a lot of roofers because that's a pretty big claim. 586 in fact. And this is on the phone. That's over a thousand emails as well. So this exposure to me to a lot of great trends, common thoughts, failures and also some really cool lessons that I'm sharing with you in this three part series. @ the end of this episode there's a great cheat sheet because I dove into the sales process of hundreds of roofers and compared them based on the revenues but also their personal feeling on generally how free they are in owning their business and how confident they are going forward. So make sure you stick around so you can get that free cheat sheet where I give you the exact roadmap shared by the most successful financially free and happy roofers I spoke to and compare it and implement into your own business. Now it doesn't just stop there. In the process of finding students, I'm also finding clients that would be a good fit for me to handle their marketing one on one through my agency. Out of just over 20 potential clients, I took on four and one of them we almost didn't make it fit, but they had such a strong vision and a connection to what I saw for them that we had to build a custom plan. But I'm very excited to be working with them. In this episode, I'll be sharing with you what I'm looking for when taking on a one on one client so that I can pretty much guarantee my results of getting 10% 10x their spend on my service, which is about 150,000 a year and doing so in a way that lasts long term after I'm gone. Just to recap, in the previous episode, we talked about what the big difference was between the roofing companies that feel like their business is, you know, running them instead of them running their business, and what separates them from the owners who have zero anxiety when it comes to delegating and scaling their operations. So make sure you go back and listen to that episode as I really love talking to these companies and I can see exactly why they feel the way they do in their business. Now, in this episode, we're going to discuss another very big division, regardless of income, because there were some roofing companies that felt like they had a great business and had lots of money, and some that had a great business had no money. But what really separated them was that they had no idea how to tell me why they felt they had a great business. They couldn't confidently tell me what was working, what wasn't, why, and how big of a separation there was between the things that were working or not working. And so while my main focus was with their marketing, when you give people room to go off on all their tangents, there was a very clear polarity. Either roofing companies had no idea or they felt they have a very clear, concrete picture of their business. So for simplicity's sake, we're just going to talk about the marketing stuff that we discussed. But the companies who weren't feeling super clear, at best, they could tell me how many leads they got and how much they spent on marketing. And this is one of the most common failures in roofer marketing budgets is only dividing down to cost per lead. And then maybe, you know, they can infer revenue per lead or something like that. But this is what allows marketers, lead generators and directory sites like HomeAdvisor and Yellow Pages to really sink their claws into you, because you only think of cost per lead. And so more leads must equal good, right? Well, if there's one thing you should learn this year is that not all leads are created equally. The companies who didn't have a clear picture knew this, but they didn't invest enough in finding out the specifics of why. They would say things like, oh, home advisor leads are junk, but they would just recognize that they cost a lot and there's more competition. Maybe that there was lots of dead leads, but the great companies maybe still used HomeAdvisor. Right. But they had things in place to make sure they got the refunds when a lead was dead. And since about 20% of leads are just contractors testing it out to See who's responding in their area. That's important for them to have that process in place. So I want to talk about why not all leads are created equal. A long time ago, I worked at a Dodge car dealership. And where I'm from, this is kind of a smaller city by American standards. So, you know, the churches are kind of sporadic throughout, but. But then when there's a church somewhere, then a lot of people of that and ethnicity go to live in that area because it makes it easy to get to church because we have tons of bad weather and snow. So just having a church close by is convenient. It kind of dictates where you live. So there was a lot of people living in this one area town where this Dodge dealership was. And because of the location of the church, a lot of the people were of a certain ethnicity. And I'm not trying to poke anything out there, make anybody upset, but a lot of people came to this Dodge dealership looking to buy Dodge Grand Caravans for taxi cabs. It was like the number one customer. We would always have people coming in for that one thing. Now, this customer was a very good negotiator. And because they were buying it for their business, I mean, just it was about bottom line. The vehicle was a commodity to them, right? It was just a caravan is a caravan is a caravan is a caravan. They don't care if it's white or black or blue, as long as it is okay for the company that they're driving for. They don't care what color it is. They don't want features. They don't care about warranties. They don't want to be upsold, anything. And they just want the base, base, best, best, best price. But the thing was, is there was tons of leads coming in, right? Like, tons every day. You know, it's constant. So it was super high volume. I was feeling quite well working in this environment. But, you know, the negotiations would last several hours, the test drives would be very short, and, you know, there would be a lot of friction along the way to getting the deal. And sometimes you'd think you'd have the deal and tomorrow somebody would save them $50 and they'd be gone. So, you know, there was some stress to that. Well, over the course of about a year, another store invited me to come work there. Now, where this store was, it was on the highway. It was in a different area of town. It was a little bit busier traffic wise, like vehicles driving by, but actual people pulling in, not so much, because you could Only get to it from one side of the highway. And it was kind of an awkward way to get in. Now, the difference was is that where this dealership was located, it was very close to the oil field community. And so being a Dodge store, lots of Ram trucks, lots of ladies coming and buying Grand Cherokees, lots of people coming to buy on their first car, lots of people coming to buying cool Challengers and fast cars. And so all of a sudden, I wasn't getting quite as many sit downs with customers, but I was dealing with people who were really excited about the car. They'd really dreamed about buying that Ram 3500 with the Cummins diesel, and they really wanted it only in white, and it had to be a Laramie and they had to have black rims on it. So they had to get that upgrade and all those things. And all of a sudden I was sitting down with less customers, working less often, talking to fewer people in a day and making more money. And that's when it really connected to me that not all leads are created equally. If you were just measuring how many leads were coming into the store, you would think that other store is better placed to be. But this store attracted the kind of customer that I like dealing with that was good for my paycheck. So I liked working in that other store better. Even though technically they spent more money on advertising and got less leads out of it, that it was a much more profitable store for the salespeople and for the owners. So knowing that a lead is not a lead is not a lead. The great companies knew what is working for their marketing. Not just down to the lead source or revenue, but also timing. They knew how long these leads took to sell, what the, you know, what the buying cycle was like, how often the leads came in, whether they came in primarily in bunches around certain events, or if they came in consistently day after day or week after week or around around all year. They knew what salespeople were better with what leads and what places and with what kinds of roofs. And they knew the average revenue per job, but also the average profit per job. And so it might help you to know what they didn't do. Right. Many roofing companies camouflage spending as marketing. And they don't do this. They just, you know, a lot of companies that I did talk to were, you know, just, they think spending more money equals more leads. More leads equals more sales, which equals more money in their bank account. And this is a technique called the Gap method. This is how Pepsi manages their marketing department from kind Of a global level. They say, okay, they spent $200 million on marketing, got $10 billion in revenue. So they assume that if they increase to 250 million or a 25% bump, they should get a 25% bump in income. That works when you're a global brand developing a one year marketing budget, but it doesn't work for all the smaller departments responsible for actually implementing that spend of Pepsi's. So you need to treat your marketing efforts with a little bit more respect. And the idea that there's smaller departments within your company that are all doing their own se and they're competing with each other to get you business and you need to allocate funds accordingly. The great companies don't see sales as just one department within their company, but instead as the heart of the whole organization. It's a vital part. And without the heart, everything else stops. If the heart isn't healthy, other departments are going to suffer, right? By learning what is going on with the heart, they will learn how to improve their marketing operations, billing, sales, everything. They even think out their commission structures. We really have to talk about that. To understand their marketing expenses, they have to have a strong understanding of their sales commission structure and how it was or wasn't working to incentivize the behaviors that they're looking for. And this is a big part of the free guide. At the end of this episode, I was amazed at how many roofing companies didn't think of commissions as a marketing expense, but instead as a job cost or a staff expense. I made this mistake when I first started marketing for a roofing company and it caused a huge problem for us. A client that I still feel guilty about today. And I tell this now to every client before I start them up. And I talk to it with every single one of my students as well. And I call it the 50% commission story. So I was working with this one roofing company and they had a very common salesperson's compensation. You might have this in your company. They would have a 35% commission above profit and above a desking fee. And that would be if they were below par pricing, and that was 50% if they're at par pricing and above. And you know, and he had like really good experts that were really good with insurance and negotiating with the insurance people. And so, I mean, these were long term sales sharks. They were made to go out into the depths of the ocean and find the best fish and they kept what they killed. And so they were doing primarily door knocking, telemarketing canvassing, stuff like that. And so occasionally they would get personal referrals, maybe a phone call into the office for a roof replacement, occasionally a website lead. But otherwise, Facebook was the first real intentional drive for retail roof replacements from a marketing effort given to the salespeople. All of a sudden, 60% of booked estimates were now coming from Facebook leads. So now that was like putting a shark in the swimming pool, stocking it with fish, and giving it the same pat on the back that you would give them when they're out in the ocean. And they were just eating up this guy's profits. And so he tried to find a way to take these Facebook leads back, and it created a mass exodus, right? And a bunch of guys quit. One went and started his own company. They took his subcontractors, and it cost him tons of money. And I felt so bad for this guy. But I now mention this to every stud because I don't ever shy away from warning people about the negatives of good results. Learning that roofing companies cannot live in simply a dollars per square or net on job numbers, but they need to know each part and understand if they're losing out in certain areas, or they could be more efficient. Perhaps if salespeople are paid a high commission to generate their own leads, they're at least partially a marketing expense. And we need to think of it that way when we're comparing it to what we might want to spend on Facebook ads. The great companies already had plans for this immediately. The ones that I tend to work with as one on one clients are because they have the ability to scale up their operations, because they have a clear understanding of their numbers, their marketing, their sales, and their operations, all the facts and figures, and they're able to have processes that give them the ability to scale up. They don't live in this price per square environment. You know, the companies that were bigger and had multiple departments usually had a better understanding of the numbers than companies with one or two crews and only roofing as a service. They knew that it was so important because the data never lies. What gets measured gets improved. I remember when we first started the roofing company, and I had no idea about this business, but I invest in it with my best friend every single day after we got paid, right? So if we finished a roof and got paid, which was generally every day or every second day, we would sit down and go over every single part of the job, the hourly pay, the stuff that we put on, any bundles that were returned, how much fuel we spent, how much we spent to get the lead. Like how many leads were we had to estimate before we got the job. For every single job we would do this pro forma in the rec room of his condo and we would figure out the numbers every single time we got so tired doing it and some days we'd leave it four or five later and then we'd have to do this massive catch up and it was so exhausting but it really gave me a strong picture of where the business was so that I knew how to scale up and improve the company and get it to where it is now. Really. I want you guys to go through this freebie that I got and you know, look at your sales process. Use this roadmap to kind of put your own numbers in and really figure out where you might be able to improve or increase your profits or reduce your expenses. Thank you so much for listening. You know, if there's any questions at all, I would love to hear your guys comments and feedback. So come see me on the Facebook group or you can leave a rating and review on the podcast and let me know what I'm doing right or let me do what I'm doing wrong. But thanks again for listening and we'll see you again next episode. Thanks again for your attention folks. I really hope you learned something and I hope you'll tell me about it. Remember to take advantage advantage of this Instagram contest. Take a screenshot of the episode tag me oofing business partner and then hashtag it Teach first, sell second so I can see it. Ask me any question and I'll answer it. Plus one lucky listener a month will get a gift from me personally. Now we also have some free stuff and I mentioned it earlier in the episode. So here's the roadmap to start building, measuring and testing new and existing ad campaigns in four simple steps. With this guide, you will be able to create dramatically improve your advertising and roofing revenues as well as gain valuable insights into your business. These are the numbers that I found the most successful roofing companies were focusing on and they were also the results that they were looking for from me when exploring the idea of hiring my agency or joining my coaching class. So check this week's show notes on your podcast player or visit roofingbusinesspartner.com roadmap to download your totally free guidebook for better business. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next week. Well, I won't really see you and you won't really see me, but you can listen to me flap my gums and I really think that part three of this series is really going to bring it home and be awesome for you.