008: Roofer CRM Series Part 1: The Best 1st CRM

The nice thing is that done properly, a successful implementation of a CRM system can single handedly add 20 to 50% more revenue to your roofing company in a year. Hey everyone and welcome back to the podcast. It's winter here again in Canada and I have a lot of awesome content coming to you over the next few months to help you grow your roofing business in 2019. This is part one of a three part series on roofer CRM software. So so what we're discussing in this particular episode is the common myths and misconceptions around what a CRM really is, why most of them fail. And I give you free access to the best first CRM for any roofing company. So stay tuned in the upcoming weeks and listen right to the end for that link so you can get that best first CRM. Thanks again for listening and let's get into it.

This is the show where you'll learn the mind hacks, 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 let's get after it.

Alright, thanks for listening and first, I think it's important that we get on the same page. What is a CRM and why is it important to your roofing company? CRM stands for Business Customer Relationship Management and a good CRM does just that. It helps you manage the relationship with your customer through their entire roof purchase journey. What most roofers I speak with do not realize is how much earlier your relationship can and should start with homeowners and your potential customers. Take note of what I said there. Homeowners and potential customers. Not every person you speak with is going to buy a roof from you. But the earlier you connect and build that relationship with your potential customers, the better the result will be for your company. And usually that includes higher profits and higher revenues. Ultimately, the best budget CRM system I have ever found for roofers is three pieces of paper and a pen. That's it. Plus a little notepad. But that's all. Why? Remember, we do not rise to the level of our goals, but we fall to the level of our systems. More often than not, a poorly implemented CRM in a small roofing organization will cause more harm than good. This is because many smaller roofer Operations the roofer is a one man operation. It's a one man company, often subcontracting and therefore does not really need a CRM as it is typically defined. As this roofer attempts to expand though he starts bidding on their own jobs and building and scaling their businesses, a system is required, but they often lack the funds, the technological expertise, the time or the experience to properly integrate a CRM software into their daily workflows. Whether you're a small one man operation or 32 million doll, a roofing and exteriors company spanning three states, it is important to understand how good CRMs are born. Most roofing companies that start small end up solving these little problems in the same way they start getting their girlfriend or a family member or an employee involved. The first thing they drop from their list of responsibilities is answering the phone and booking estimates. So they get their girlfriend to start taking the calls and taking notes. And I mean, hey, usually women are way more organized than any of us guys. So at first there is a sense of excitement and even endearment in the fact that you're now too busy and your quote unquote growing company is creating opportunity to grow what is now a family business. And as the romance of that dream starts to wear off, it usually just results in blame fights, unhappy customers, at which point knee jerk decisions, band aids and makeshift systems are built. And that's fine. The problem though is that you and your girlfriend or your buddy or your brother have no experience in building and managing a system like this and it becomes a barely functional make work project. With so many softwares out there, how do you choose? Well, we're going to get into that in one of our future episodes. First, I think it is a helpful exercise to explore what I feel is the best first CRM any roofer can implement into their business with zero technical expertise. Ultimately, knowing why this Fisher Price CRM is so good will benefit even the largest of roofing companies. I have worked with roofing companies doing many millions of dollars in business that are still using pen and paper. And that's not always a bad thing. However, the reason it can be a bad thing is because it results in massive burnout and starts to allow mistakes to occur, which gets expensive. But the best thing about having that pen and paper is that it always works and everyone knows how to use it. It's quick to get new staff on board and contributing to the company's goals. So what is my best first CRM? Well, like I said, it's three sheets of paper and a notepad no longer than your average iPhone. Now for the record, it could also be your iPhone, but I promised zero technical expertise needed. So there we go. Yeah, I said it. The best first CRM for every roofing company is three sheets of paper. It might seem like a big claim, but in a few minutes you will see why it makes complete sense. Those three sheets of paper have different titles at the top and there's an easy way to organize those sheets to run a pretty efficient company to the 200 customers Roof's 2 point, you know or sorry 2 to 3 million revenue mark. So the three titles are estimates to do follow up and booked roofs. And so what is the notepad for? That is where you enter all new leads. I suggest a really simple to carry always on device that allows you to work on your phone at the same time. So resist the temptation to run out and buy a $900 iPad and say, you know, because there's an app for that. I don't disagree. But this is something you could keep on the roof with you. And I mean that little, that little notepad, you can take it to the mall. You could take a call while driving and toss the pad to your laborer and tell him to write down what the customer says. It never runs out of batter or has a screen break. It always works. Even if you're fiddling around with your like say your homeadvisor web portal or reading the information off an email. You might be copying a text at some times, or maybe you're getting calls or Facebook messages or something from a referral from your Uncle Dave. Whatever comes your way, there's one place that all new opportunities need to go, and that is in the notepad. You need to remember to always gather name, address, phone number and email, no matter what. Bare minimum. We've had many companies who frequently deal with people who give their home number and for many reasons. It will become clear later in the process that you want to make sure you have their cell number. So here's a line I want you to practice. Hey Betty, I just want to make sure that I got your cell phone number because just in case we're lucky enough to get the job and we need to reach you in case of a site emergency when you aren't home. I want to make sure I have that number on file. It's not a bad idea to get the cell phone for that reason alone, but it also helps for your follow up. You can also take some quick notes on those first calls or in the emails you want to have A small conversation. But the idea is that you never, ever, ever want to miss or opportunity or talk your way out of a deal. The one thing I like to always train my clients and students to ask any new lead is what side of town they live on. This is to set themselves up. To avoid wasted driving time down the road. I suggest having a planned estimate schedule that is simple enough to give to a customer and they would have reasonable expectations while also not costing you a fortune in fuel and stress and wasted time. For example, we do this. The north side and outlying towns north of the city we do on Mondays. Everything west is Tuesdays. Wednesdays we do south and south of town, Thursday, east and east of town, Fridays we clean up all the leftovers around town, and Saturdays we do downtown and out of town. And if we got all caught up, then we get to take Sundays off. And that's just how we run it. In my organization you can do it any way you like, but it's important to set your customers up with reasonable expectations and to know what you're doing every day. This way customers will know what day to expect you. And we try and call to book appointments on those days, but to stay in that certain area. That way, if we're doing downtown on days that are Saturdays, we're less likely to get stuck in traffic madness on say a Tuesday at 5 o'. Clock. Trying to get from our third to our fourth estimate, for example, the next appropriate time, you want to take that information from your notepad and put it onto your first page, right? So that's that. That's the estimates to do page with the name, address, phone number, email, and you can have a column left empty for a date and time for the appointment. Only put in a date and time when you actually confirm that that's when the customer is expecting you. Don't just say I'll be there Friday afternoon because it's most likely they might not show up because it didn't seem like a hard booking, it's just the initial call. And we all know how often things like that can change. Late installs, truck problems, your wife has an appointment that you forgot about, or just plain saying that to too many people in a row, you'll eventually fail to show up on Friday afternoon, it'll Friday evening. And quite often customers plans change too, right? So once you do the estimate, right? So you have your sheet, you've gone to do your estimate. Once you do the estimate, you need to cross it off. But whenever building a system, you need to define what a Done estimate is for me, I consider that to be when the estimate has been presented to the customer and you have communicated, ideally in person, but however, but in some way you have communicated and confirmed that, that they know that you have given them a price and they know what that price is and that you want their business. So for clients with insurance warranty concerns, right, you like to add a few symbols along the way, such as a circle, star and a triangle to delineate certain stages. So again, in the end, we're going to have this system that you can actually just copy. Well, we're going to provide it to you free and you can print it off. And it has a lot of these little systems and icons already built into it. So, you know, the important thing here is that you don't consider an estimate to be done when you show up and measure the house because then it's not ready for the next step, which is follow up. So the idea of crossing it off is to know when a customer has moved into that next stage of follow up. But you have to have something to follow up on. So you can't take them off the estimates sheet and onto the follow up sheet until you know that the customer has understood your intent to earn their business. If you want to double your sales this year, you need to get comfortable, consistent and organized with customer focused follow up. Right? And so you need to have a strategy for that. So once that client's crossed off page one, you put their name, their cell phone number, their email and a job and the job price in columns, right? And you want to leave some room for about 30 letters after that. And this is how you will track your follow up effort. Right? The reason I want you to have the job price on there is so at a glance without needing to open up your estimating software or your book or your pad or whatever you're using for estimating, you can always have an idea as to the size of the job. Plus, it's incredibly motivating when you're on the phone to think about the 5, 10, 20 or $60,000 job that could be at the other end of that conversation if you close the deal doing good follow up. Now at the bottom of the page, right, if you're doing this by hand again, you'll have it at the end of this podcast. You can just download it and it'll be there for you. But at the bottom, I want you to write 10 letters and this is your follow up legend. C is for call, T is for text, E is for email. Every Attempt that you make is marked for the communication medium or style that you attempted. Some people will only do business over the phone, others find that too confrontational and calls to be just intrusive and they prefer text. Some people only do email for business and that's it. The nice thing is customers will usually teach you how to treat them by letting you know what they like most based on their response time and their attitude towards your follow up attempt. If you call someone and they seem miffed, that probably means you shouldn't call them again. But then if you email them and they get back to you right away and ask a few questions, that means that's the communication method that they would prefer to live within. Now, three more letters. M is for morning, A is for afternoon, and S is for evening or supper. I preferred S instead of N because the M and the n's look too close to. So when you're quickly scribbling things down, sometimes they can get messed up. But this is to indicate what approximate time the follow attempt was made. Many people are impossible to get ahold of during the day or in the evening. Many of maybe the customer gave you a work email that they ignore in the evenings and by morning your email is already on page two of their inbox and they just never ever saw your email. You just don't ever know, right? So you need to get used to trying different times. Sometimes people will get a text while they're working and, and they have every intent to answer it later, but they just, you know, don't want to be seen texting at work. Think of your roofers and how much it bugs you if they're seen texting too much on the job site. So if they're looking at buying a car and their salesman is following up with them through text at work, they're going to have to ignore those texts. Well, by the time they finish work, they might have forgotten about those texts and now the notification is gone, so they totally forget to answer. This way you can document and try different times to make successful contact with your customer. This means you have to be consistent. Consistent in doing follow up at regular intervals. I suggest during breakfast or before your work starts so you can maybe show up to the site early and do it from your truck at lunch. Let the guys go for food. You know, be busy keeping them busy and let them know how hard you work for them by doing follow up during lunch rather than hanging out with them, having, you know, having bites right after supper. This is a great time and usually the most unexpected Time for customers. And it they really open up after a big meal. So you know, they might have been speaking with their spouse over dinner about the roof. And this allows them to speak at a time when it's fresh in their mind and most business stuff is not distracting them from other things they have going on because they're at home during free time. So you want to make sure you're keeping a consistent effort on doing follow up in the evenings. Okay, so now finally to your legend, you need to add a check mark, a big X, a question mark and an exclamation point. This is so you can capture the most important data on from the follow up attempt. So a check mark would indicate that you reached them. So if on your first attempt you text message the customer in the evening and they answered, you would write t s check mark. Now I'm sure at this point you can guess what the X is for. That is for a failed contact attempt. So that way you'll know either texting works or doesn't work or evenings works or doesn't work. Now on any contact attempt that works, if a conversation about the opportunity to earn their business ensues, you want to always try and land the job. But if you cannot, you want to end the call with either a question mark or an exclamation point. The question mark is to tell yourself that you don't feel the deal is closed or the customer needs more information to feel confident in making the decision to go with you. A lot of the time this means material changes, waiting on other estimates, seasonality issues with the insurance, things that would usually result in you calling to ask a question about their readiness or calling back to answer a question they had to address a concern. Explanation marks are for the hot deals. This is for customers that are really, really close, such as someone that says they're making a decision tonight or tomorrow, they have another estimate coming through tonight and they require super urgent adjustments to close that deal. If the next follow up isn't a sale, it's probably a lost deal kind of situation. With this system you should be able to visually see 30 to 40 estimates that are out there pending a purchase. Right? So follow up customers and you should be able to know which ones are most likely lost, which ones need urgent attention, and which ones you can let slip to focus on the hot deals. The most important thing is managing your time in your follow up process. So a common question that I get is do you put a check mark or an X beside emails? This is because you often do not get A response immediately. And if you were wondering about that, then you're well on your way to understanding and developing good systems in your business. So I commend you. So what I tell people is that when you sit back down at lunch or dinner or the following morning, check your emails to see if they responded. If they haven't, by that point, you should consider that email is buried and gone from the customer's view and they're never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to see it again. So try another point of contact and move on. So what happens when you lose or close a deal? Well, since this quote unquote CRM system is likely with you everywhere you go, since you need to reference it three times a day right when you're having your breakfast, you can do it at lunch, do it after supper. You can choose to do a couple of things. Personally, I like highlighters of different colors because I can gather even more useful data without cluttering up the page with a bunch of text. And you can also just use a pen if you just want. Simple yes or no. But the easy thing I do with sold roofs is to circle that entire row so their whole thing is circled, right? Lost deals where the customer can find confirmed with you that they're going with another another company. Put a big fat line right through it. Now, if you like coloring like me, you can always have my highlighter system. But you'll need to have all those highlighters close by and always on you. This usually means a zipper binder with your three sheets to keep the highlighters in all. So it's all in one place. So I use blue highlighter for sold roofs since you're going to transfer most of this information to the next page, the booked page. The fact that the blue kind of makes that line like your text, harder to read isn't usually a huge problem. A green highlighter is when you lose a roof because your price was too high so you're going to for too much green. This is not a bad thing. It just means that you are not presenting your value well enough or else the customer would have had said yes. So this is good data to have to know every deal that you lost and why you lost it to price. And you can kind of revisit your experience with that customer or how your salesperson presented value and try and improve upon that for the next one. Red or pink depending on which highlighter box you buy, is for when you lose a deal as a result of something you did. So if the customer didn't like Something you say or didn't like a material. This is time for self reflection. This is to learn how you personally may have transferred some kind of negative energy into the situation or not represented yourself well or not responded to an objection. Well, this is where you really kind of quote unquote highlight things that you need to work on. And yellow is for when you lose to another kind of shingle or material. Now this is all good to keep track of because it's going to give you that good visual proportion of deals being lost for what reasons. And you can then correct or improve your presentations and your communication with customers. So over time you can also change your colors so they can become more common objections that you're dealing with in the current period of time. So sometimes you might lose deals regularly because you do not offer financing. So you could make a color for that. This could translate into valuable information for how you're going to progress your business and how you're going to advertise your offers. And when it's time to look into things such as offering financing. And then once you are financing it can evolve even further. So if a number one of your number of your contractors in your market are offering 0% and they're building that reserve into their price, so they're adding on two grand but then giving the customer zero percent interest and you on the other hand are offering no payments for 12, like for 12 months, but you're doing 6.9% interest, you don't have to build in a reserve. Well, if you're losing customers constantly to that 0%, 0%, 0%. Well, you need to adjust that to your pitch so that you can start building in that reserve and attaching that 0% offer so you can be competitive with your market. You only know this by having a good follow up process. If you just wait for people to say yes and just mark down the people who say yes and don't learn anything from the nose, you never ever grow and get better and you never adjust your business. Right. So finally we're moving on to the last page, the best page, the most exciting page, the Booked Roofs. It is crucial for a five star customer experience roofing company to have the right information here on this page at a moment's notice so that you can review this list daily, even if it's just for a minute or two and you're going to have all the right information at the top of your mind. The columns that you're usually going to want on this page are and again this is all available in the free download at the end of the episode. But you want customer name, phone number, a general area or neighborhood of that roof's job site, an indicator of the job size and the initial install date promised. The reason for names and numbers is obvious, right? We've covered that. At this point you want to be able to keep these customers informed and up to date on the progress of their install and when their install dates approaching and if there's any delays. But the reason you want the general area of the roof and not the exact address is that you likely have the address on the estimate itself in some other place. Right? But in many cases, especially when managing equipments and crews and loading, it's nice to try and book jobs that are close to each other whenever possible. Like I said, especially when managing multiple crews, right? So you want to have that system built up front. And come to think of it, it can actually help your relationship with your distributor as well. Because by doing it this way, you're transferring, you're making it easy for them to say load multiple roofs in one day. Again, as you're starting to get to the point of managing multiple crews and multiple jobs on the same day. But by doing this way, you're moving their information from the follow up sheet to the booked sheet. So you can try to give them dates close to other booked roofs in the other in the same area as well. So you're on that conversation, they say yes, you're moving them onto the list. And you know that say you're booked three weeks out. Well, on day 21 you're on the north end, but on day 24 you're on the south end. So you could have both crews working on the south end. So you don't tell them that their install dates on the 22nd, you tell them that their install date should be on the 24th. Because then you can have both crews working in the same neighborhood, which is awesome for all kinds of logistical operations type stuff later on down the road. Now, why do you want the indicator of the job size? Well, you can do this in a number of ways. First of all, you can have small, medium, large. You can have a number to indicate how many days that it's going to take. You can have the dollar amount, but you want to do this because you want to know what size of job this is again, for logistical reasons and to know where you should allocate your labor. Right? And then finally, you want your install date that you initially promised. For the most part, as a general rule, you want to transfer those Follow up customers to the booked list in the order sold, right. However, if someone wants to book way out, so they say I can't, I won't have the money until, you know, let's say it's April and they say they won't have the money until September, right? I suggest estimating how far down the page that would be and over time you're going to get better at understanding what that is. This is why eventually a lot of companies do move to a computer based software as there is only so much information you can ship save on one page. But that's why I say this is the best first CRM for any roofing company. Now what I want you to do now is try to guess right on that sheet of paper how many, how many roofs you can fill in in between now and that day. So if they say they're not good for another three weeks, well, you need to guess how many roofs you can fill in in that three weeks so that their name kind of comes up on the list at the right time. You might have to make adjustments later on, but this is to eliminate you drawing arrows up and down and scratching things out and rewriting it. So save yourself work, right? And again, if you do this, you get a good visual as to where you are and how far booked out you are so you can tell your customers that they're 11th or 33rd on the, you know, on the list of installs. So just again, you want to set yourself up for success and put yourself in a position to always have great communication with your customer. And as you get really, really, really booked, you might have to start a new list. So with approximate timing notes such as middle of July or before September 1st, you can also have yourself another sheet of paper for long term installs booked. But I just want to focus on the simple three page system at the start. Don't go and get yourself too concerned about what you're going to do with a three month long install schedule when you're only booked out for the next three weeks. Don't build a solution to a problem you don't yet have, right? And as they, as you do their installs, you just cross them off the list as you go. It's very easy, but you might have already guessed. You probably want some codes or symbols on this page as well. So at the legend in the bottom, this is what I suggest to use and what I like most of my customers and students to use when we're helping them with systems. C would be for confirmed. So this is usually 7 to 10 days out. This is so you mark this once you confirm, confirm with them that you're coming soon and that they have an approximate date, weather permitting. So this isn't when you tell them right off the hop, when you say, yep, we want to go with you, we're going to get you done the first week of September, that's great. Then late August, you're going to call them and say, listen, we should be getting you around September 3rd. Right. Weather permitting. So that way they know it's not an exact date, but pretty close. And you want to be able to manage their expectations and not set yourself up for failure by keeping them uninformed. Right. So uncertainty and silence will kill otherwise, very good roofing deals. This is why it's important to have that confirmed status 7 to 10 days out, because that's when they're starting to wonder if what they need to do, they're going to start having questions. Right. And you need to make sure that they know you're going to hold their hand through this entire process. It's such an important, vital part of creating that five star experience. And the only way you do that at scale as you grow is to put a system in place and have a way for you to easily track that system and how it's proceeding. Right. The next stage is M for material ordered. So if you have a confirmed roof on your list and it's a couple days out, you want to make sure that when you're finishing the job you're on today, that you're not going to all of a sudden run out of roofs that are loaded. That can be a huge problem. So you want to make sure that you've always got, you know, the next few days always loaded up in front. So if you look on your list and you see there's, you're starting to run out of M's, then you know you need to order some more material to some more roof sites. This way you can always have a visual of how many loaded roofs or how many M's you have out in front of you to make sure that you're not catching up on yourself. Because sometimes if you don't have a way to track it, you're going to look back and go, oh crap, we need a roof loaded tomorrow. And then you're calling your distributors frantically asking for a first out or making your guys load the roof themselves, which taxes your installers, which lowers their efficiency. We have machines to load roofs, guys, stop loading your own roofs. But next step B is for A hard booking. This is usually where you call the customer and tell them, hey Bob and Betty, it's Adam from ABC Roofing. Just want to let you know that we are coming the day after tomorrow. The weather looks good and you're all set, right? And then you write the exact day that you told them on there. So that way this week you know who's Monday, who's Tuesday, who's Wednesday, who's Thursday, Thursday. Right. Now this is by no means an all inclusive list, so feel free to get creative with your own list. I've had people who added G for gutters, an S for subs booked or solar panels, a D for the dump bin or disposal booked. Right. But I think it is important that as you get busier, you also have an I for install complete and a P for paid. This way you're not going to sit there and then all of a sudden, a month and a half later, look down the road and realize that your customer never paid you because you never invoiced them or you invoiced them and failed to go collect or get the check or follow up with that customer. Right? And this starts again to happen to roofing companies as they start to scale and get bigger. And if they don't have a good, at least basic system set in place right now, you might be wondering with so many free or very affordable highly rated CRM softwares available there, right? And I know them all. Job, Nimbus, Jobber, Accu Links, Salesforce, Zoho, Freshbooks, Insightly, Method, Podio. Like they're all like there's tons of them out there. Why, why would you develop a system like this that ultimately you know it is going to change eventually, right? Well, clearly this quote unquote, 3 page CRM is missing a lot of pretty awesome features that you can get if you get a CRM software. In fact, many in many CRM specific project management or bidding softwares offer a CRM component to their project management. So why would you want to have two systems? And these are all great questions. And like I said earlier, even a company spread across three states could take value from this experience. The most important part of this exercise or running your roofing business this way at first as you get an appreciation for the automation and the systems and the features that are available because you're forced to do a deep dive on your customer service process because we all have the curse of knowledge within our own industry. I find it helps to think about another industry to really see the forest through the trees on this issue. I learned to value the importance of mapping out your system when I was actually working with an entirely different industry. Car dealerships. The sheer volume of dealerships in the market, the huge amounts of money and people flowing through them from both the employee side and the customer side, the highly competitive nature of the business and the pace at which many departments have to work together in order to make sure that things that seem relatively simple, like purchasing your car, picking it up clean and full of gas, goes smoothly. Even though it seems simple, it's not always. And this is why that industry lends itself to need many computer softwares, systems and automations and consultants to make all the departments talk to each other. So in this particular dealership, there were three softwares used in this business. First, a really good tool for managing all the incoming leads and the communication needed to get customers pricing and book their test drives and follow up on the price and make sure they bought from that dealership. This was their CRM. Then there was a system used to manage inventory and build the prices and the payments for, for customers as well as manage the trade ins coming in and out of the dealership and submit the personal info to the bank for financing to print the final paperwork. Right. So this would be like the management software. And finally the third system was made to track every deal from the initial deposit. So that's where you know, if you go to the car dealership and you give the salesman a deposit because you agree on the price and you want to apply for financing. So from that stage then it would track it from all the different banks it was sent to, whether the financing was approved or not approved and what rates they got, or if the banks needed something such as pay stubs. Right. Lastly, once a deal was approved, there was a process of adding accessories, touching up or fixing issues that was kind of included in the deal. So it's like, oh, I'll do it if you fix the windshield and put running boards on and then finally filling it with gas. And then the last step is booking it in for a detailed clean so the customer could pick up a nice clean car when they're, when they come back to the store. So there was a problem that none of the software is really solved. A salesman would not see, could not see or modify that shop and detail department software. So basically they couldn't, they couldn't see what was going on in there. All they could see was the stock number of the vehicle that was sold and there was a drop down menu where they, someone else picked a status and A text box of the delivery date given to the customer so the salesman could just see what stage their deal was in, what vehicle it was, and the delivery date for the customer. Right. The detail department, their screen was a little bit different because it was too difficult for anybody else to understand because it managed their side of the business. And in this particular store, there was both a Nissan dealership and a Mazda dealership that were sharing this one building detail department as well as the used car department. So it was a very, very busy area, and no salesman could really look at it and know intrinsically what was going on. So what frequently happened was the detail department would clean a brand new car on Monday that was to be picked up on Tuesday, and the salesman would see the car as getting picked up Tuesday. So Tuesday morning he would go and get a gas jet. So the thing to fill it up at the gas station, and he'd go fill the car with gas. The problem that kept on happening in this particular dealership was customers were upset because they were coming to pick up their car and it was dirty when they picked it up because it was, because it was cleaned on Monday. And then the salesman went to fill it up Tuesday morning. And to make matters worse, this dealership had all their customers pick up the car from an indoor delivery bay. That way, no matter what weather or time of day, the dealership could do a very comfortable, very in depth, very, you know, easy delivery process. And then the customer would sign off on any liability on the condition of the car after they left. So that meant that they couldn't come back the next day and say, oh, there was a scratch there. And there was no argument as to whether the homeowner's kid did that with their bike. You know what I mean? It was always, this is the condition. The car left, you're happy go. Right. But this meant customers would be really, really picky. Right? And I'm going to bring this all back in a second. So it was just important to understand the problem that was going on. So the salesman would be going to the gas station and he'd be getting the floor mats dirty. He would be getting mud and dust and dirt on the sides, right? And this was slowing down the delivery process because the customer would complain. Quite often the detailers would have to pull another car out of a wash bay that was half completed and they'd have to do an emergency reclean on that car that the, that he drove to the gas station on Tuesday to make sure the customer left happy. And then it would just get Worse, right? Once we mapped out the process and saw the flaw in the software, many began to wonder about putting boards in the office to try and manage that one step right. Others wanted to use, you know, carrots and sticks by, say, handing out a penalty on commissions if salespeople drove clean cars to the gas station. Some wanted to change or, you know, pay to have the software modified at a ridiculous cost, no doubt just to allow sales associates to somehow know the times that cars were getting booked for a clean. Right. Managers face challenges of training salespeople, especially new ones, how to use that new system. And then it would just open up this whole can of worms if you tried to do something like that. This was the first store that the owners had built with these delivery bays and customers loved them. When everything was done properly, however, the sales department began avoiding them. They would leave cars in there and tell customers that the delivery bay had or the delivery bays are full, so they had to go outside. So that alleviated a lot of the issues, but it resulted in less 5 star reviews, right? And in some cases, customers wouldn't or couldn't sign off on the condition of a car. So they want to come back the next day demanding new windshields or fix things and dents. And the dealership would have to eat the cost. So in the end, the solution was much, much simpler than anybody really would have thought. So to let the sales department know that they needed to work out a time for the customer to pick up their car, the finance department. So the people getting the guy approved would have to change the deal status. Remember that drop down menu from awaiting bank approval to approved scheduled delivery? This would be a clear indicator that now the vehicle was spoken for. But the software had no way to mark a car as full of gas or not. Because it wasn't something that happened in a system. It had to be done in the real world. So in came the now beloved B process. Since the pickup date in that little software the sales guys could see was a text field. We simply instituted a rule that the manager that gives out the gas fill chips to the salesman to go fill up the car. That manager would put a B beside the test, beside the pickup date text box. So it'd be the B and then November 17, 2019. This meant that the car was now full of gas and finance could schedule a time for pickup and book the car in to be cleaned. Every manager, from sales to finance to service in detail, all knew that no car could be cleaned until there was a B in the date column. Since everyone could see that information. So boom, it was fixed. Now what the heck does all that have to do with a roofing business? Well, what it really highlights is how in many cases, even if you map out an entire process for getting a customer, from their first phone call to paying for a clean job site and a completed roof project, it will most likely surprise you how many little things that you don't catch. So it's smarter to test it against a variety of unforeseen circumstances, against the strengths and weaknesses of you, your salespeople, your installers, and how it impacts the customer experience. Before you go, invest in technology and tools and infrastructure and make promises to your customers, such as in the case of this dealership with the delivery bays. The delivery bay was a great promise, it was a great idea, but the existing processes in the business were not built to accommodate them. Every roofing company runs a little bit differently and before you begin to fall in love with with all the automatic time saving buttons and powerful scalable features that a CRM software provides, it is important to understand how it needs to be designed and if it works right and meaning your process right. So the success of any CRM is determined by testing and confirming what information you need at a glance at each stage of that customer journey and what ways you need to modify that information and how that information affects other team members down the pipe. Most CRMs fail for this reason it is important to note that no CRM software, even the roofing specific ones, are perfect out of the box in my opinion. Some of the roofing ones are the worst because of how and why they are created, how they're positioned in the market and how they're sold to roofers like you and me. Most CRM softwares out there and many of the roofing ones I've seen have the exact same backstory. They get your attention in their advertisement with common pain points that every CRM is designed to eliminate, automate or fix. They relate to you by explaining that they experienced the same problem in their business and after trying a bunch of other products they thought there has to be a better way. So they built their own software from the ground up up. And now they want to share it with contractors just like you. And for the low, low price of whatever, they have the perfect CRM that solves this pain point and that obstacle, allowing you to finally scale into a bazillion dollar five star roofing company and live the life of your dreams. Then they display a handful of powerful features and their benefits. And if you're Lucky they've thought out, they've thought ahead and that they integrate with a few different products or brands that you're already using, such as Eagle View or QuickBooks. And finally there is a bronze, silver and gold pricing program and a button to request a demo. That's every business for CRM on the planet right now. On the surface this is great. And many of these companies do offer some kind of training site support and usually for a few thousand bucks they will do a build out and training where they will do some things like custom tailor the CRM to your process. They'll maybe add a form to your website. So now when people fill it out, it automatically puts their information information into the CRM. If you're migrating from another system that didn't work out before, they will usually figure out a way to get your old data out and get it into their CRM software. Lastly, they'll train you how to use the features and where you're at. You access the reports so you can watch your sales department explode, right? And that's the promise. Now the fact that most roofers fail to really scale their businesses following this CRM implementation is not the software provider's fault. This is because it is a huge task to teach you the value and the importance and the necessity of mapping out your processes early. And frankly they don't have that size of project built into the setup prices that they're charging you that and if they drop that on you, it might be misunderstood as them not being helpful, right? It might seem come might come across as them being, you know, budding heads, right? So most instead to opt to give you a generally good one size fits all, best practices sort of workflow setup and then make themselves available to try and help you use the system along the way. At least with the non roofer specific CRM software when they set you up they will know nothing about your industry and they will attempt to understand your typical customer journey before customizing your CRM for you. That ends up being a blessing and a curse though because in many cases CRM experts do not understand that roofing is very unique in the fact that that unlike many other industries that they serve such as hair salons, mechanics and realtors and we're marketing agencies, is that you only deal with your best roof replacement customers once in a lifetime, right? Maybe twice. And that's usually a really long time frame between the two months, if not years or ever. So at the same time they don't really understand your business model and that can be a bit of a hindrance. So it makes it very important for you to know, right? And that's why mapping out your process will also help you deal with another huge problem in regards to finding the right CRM, and that's adoption. Three of the eight most common reasons that CRMs are reported as being a challenge are 16% say their sales team doesn't use it. Seven percent say it's too complicated to use, 4% say their managers don't use it. And I think it's also important to recognize that 14% of respondents said they don't even know why their CRM isn't helping, right? If a CRM isn't built around a familiar process, it often means that there's a pushback from the sales department and in many cases the managers who just want the salespeople to use it because they want them reporting and they want to be able to follow up or they want the automation, right? But in many cases, the managers don't even take time to learn it and that can often be the owner, right? And more often than not, they just kind of throw a wrench in the works every single day because they're not using the system properly. This is either the result of or it contributes to the list of its too complicated complaint and many others, right? It is so important when moving your company to a software system such as a CRM that steps are taken to get the entire team to buy in, realizing the increased likelihood of them all having a really good day at work. And that's what's going to get a successful adoption to your new software and your new process. Otherwise, you're just stuck with a bunch of the tasks being done the old way, some being done the new way. You never really get off the old system, you never really fully invested in the new system, and you never really get actionable information because half of it's gone right, half of it's still being done the old way. The nice thing is that done properly, a successful implementation of a CRM system can single handedly add 20 to 50% more revenue to your roofing company in a year. This is done simply by scaling the effectiveness of every member of your team to process more business with happier customers at a higher profit. And this is realistic because you can eliminate double work while also eliminating errors that quite often hurt the customer experience and cost money. When problems do happen, you have the data to react to them faster, but without worrying that you will drop a ball somewhere else. Every employee can operate more efficiently, allowing you to either reduce overhead costs or increase work capacity. This makes for a happier workplace and customers will notice that your organization runs like a well oiled machine rather than a chaotic circus. Under constant stress, the customer gets constant communication and basic from you instead of the other way around, which is way too common in our industry and drives customers crazy even though they've come to expect it. So your company will feel like a breath of fresh air. So if you would like to start mapping out your process, I have included a free package that you can download and print that has all your sheets organized into columns ready for you to use tomorrow. Also is attached is a link to a fill in the blank customer journey template that you can fill out to help you map out the standards and expectations for your perfect customer journey and allow you to make sure your eventual CRM is built the way you appre you operate. I really need to hit this home that this software not it's not a software, it's really just a very simple form. But when you answer the questions, it will then produce at the end a document that becomes your lead process. From when they buy or sorry, from when they submit a request for an estimate to the day that they have the roof installed, you will have a written process by answering, I think it's about 45 questions and then based on your answers to those questions, it will fill in the text so that you have a written process so that literally once you're done, if you go answer 50 questions right now, in an hour you're going to have a written process for your business on top of having the first, best first CRM, the three page CRM. And that way you can start to begin and test your new mapto process and eventually when you decide to implement a CRM software, whichever one it is, based on the next two episodes that you hear about and see, you know how to make the best decision on what CRM to use, what they cost and what features you need. You'll be able to use your new mapdo process that you create today to make sure that you have the most successful adoption and built CRM that's going to work for you. It's not going to become another thing that actually just makes more work. My goal whenever I do this, like as a consulting gig and I help roofing companies move from an old system to a better system, is that anytime I create a system that requires a roofer or someone in their company to push a button, I have to remove two buttons from that person's workflow somewhere else. This is how we drop 30 minutes per lead 120 minutes per sale. This is how we do that is by ultimately using that focus. For every button we need you to push, we're going to make you not have to push two somewhere else. So thank you so much for listening guys. This has been awesome episode. I'm really excited to get this one off to get mastered and have you guys give me your opinions on it. Thank you so much for listening. Welcome back to the Roofing Business Partner Podcast. Thank you so much again for listening guys. You can check out the show notes or visit www.roofingbusinesspartner.com papercrm to download the templates as well as use our Process Manual generator. Now bear in mind this process generator is in its beta version, meaning I need your help improving it and understanding how it helps you. So please let me know Comments, Emails, Facebook Messages Messages. Let me know how it works. Let me know any challenges you come across. Of course it is always important for me to note how much I appreciate your attention today and your dedication to growing your roofing company. I think this podcast was about an hour long or just short of that. I know that's no easy task, so thank you again for your attention. As a roofing company owner myself, I really respect the hard work and dedication from everyone. From the receptions to the roof inspectors to the installers and even the bookkeepers. It all came keep our businesses going if this show is valuable. Please something that would really help me is open up your app. Leave me a quick review. Good, bad, I don't care. But your feedback is so important to me so I can keep creating content you like, value and implement. So have an awesome day and be back for the next episode on how to pick the right CRM software for your roofing business. Thanks again. Talk to you later.

Free stuff is the reason you listen to the end and this week's episode is no Exception. Head to roofingbusinesspartner.com and check out this week's Show Notes to get your freebie bonus. Also, until February 2nd, get our roofer Facebook ad apprenticeship program for only $127. This 18 day program includes over 80 minutes of video instruction done for you, resources, two guidebooks, a forum to ask Adam all your questions along the way. This should remove any exception, excuse or doubt that you can have your own ads running and generating roofing leads in less than 18 days. Adam spent thousands of dollars to learn this stuff and to give it away for only $127 is the kind of craziness that only happens during a new podcast launch. So go check out the show notes, and we'll be here again next week, flapping our gums and making you money.