009: Part 2: How do you Choose the Right Apps for your Roofing Business?

So on that drunk night, it's also when I discovered an amazing website called Zapier that's Z A P I e r zapier.com that enabled thousands of different apps and softwares to talk to each other and automate tasks based on easy to set up rules and triggers. This did more than just allow me to accept that some CRM systems are better at certain tasks, but not others. But it allowed me to embrace that fact hello boys and girls. Welcome back to the Roofing Business Partner Podcast, Episode two of my three part guide on implementing a CRM into your roofing business business this year 2019 today I'm discussing how I helped a few roofers this year implement a few simple CRM systems and got pretty incredible results. 150% increase in work volume, a drastic reversal in their Google reviews that doubled their account and added two stars, and another company reduced their total overall payroll costs by 22%. Doing the math, that saved them over 100 grand a year straight to the bottom line profit right into their buckets. So stay tuned to listen right to the end because this week we have an awesome free tool that will take your answers to specific questions and point out the best CRM software tools for you to explore based on the needs, wants and goals that you have for your roofing business.

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.

Hey, welcome to another episode of the Roofing Business Partner Podcast and Part two of my three part guide on implementing a customer relationship management software into your roofing business in 2019. If you haven't listened to part one, I highly suggest checking that out first for the free sales process, employee manual generator and and an overview of what I think is the best quote unquote first CRM for any roofing company looking to scale and grow their business while making as few mistakes as possible along the way. Now, that being said, if you're the type of person who just doesn't like doing things in order, or you already have a detailed written sales process that has been tested over time and you just want help picking the right software, well, this is where you're gonna find out how you can learn how to narrow down and select the best CRM for your roofing company. But I welcome you with one quid pro quote if you questions they're most likely answered in that last episode, so be sure to check that out. I'd also love to hear your feedback on that, so make sure to let me know. You can always hit me up on Facebook Messenger. I always answer right away. Now you might be wondering why am I, the Roofer Facebook marketing guru guy suddenly talking about evaluating software to manage your customer's experience? Well, after all, marketing is the stuff that we do before we have a customer relationship to manage. So we why would I be talking about it? Well, you'd be correct in like a marketing 101 class. But if we dig a little bit deeper, you will see that the customer relationship management and marketing need to walk hand in hand. With your permission, I'd like to share with you a few things that I learned from working with my marketing clients and my students in my Roofer Facebook Ad Journeyman program over the course of the last year. And in many cases, the CRM and the process it is built around is a big problem for many roofing companies, regardless of revenue or their marketing abilities. In many cases, it's bigger than their marketing woes and is usually the cause of many marketing woes. So one of the first things that I teach my students and one of the first guided projects we undertake when I onboard a new one on one marketing client is my ideal roofing customer avatar exercise. Without going too far down that rabbit hole, I can summarize it as that we dig a little bit deeper into the variety of customers, job types, roof materials and buying circumstances they work with and identify the traits, behaviors, patterns and circumstances that they personally find best to interact with, as well as the most profitable, easiest to sell and deliver for the customer, or whether the most competitive in an underserved slice of their local market. Then we designed their entire marketing plan around how we can use Facebook's amazing targeting features and pixel technology to show those ideal customers ads that contain the very best messaging to drive the most leads at the cheapest price that convert roof sales higher and faster and easier. But all too often the challenge during this crucial first step is that they end up with an imaginary perfect customer that doesn't actually exist, or they're not even suited to attract, which really means they have no clue who their ideal customer is and they have no way to figure it out. In many of those cases, it is a lack of real customer data due to a poorly implemented or non existent CRM and the roofer is not really familiar with how their customer journey really works beyond Get a lead from somewhere, do the estimate as soon as we can sell as many roofs as possible and install them on time without any screw ups so they have a happy customer and a profit at the end. That is literally the most generic ideal customer journey and should be considered the bare minimum cost of entry to running any roofing company. Really. That's every roofing company's buyer's journey on a very basic level. So that is just the bare minimum cost of entry. You shouldn't even be allowed to be a roofing company if you don't at least try and do that. But in these cases we can't accurately identify what jobs, what customers, or what circumstances are sold the fastest, easiest or for the most profit. That means we can't identify hidden or underserved customers in their market. This is why they typically declare their ideal customer avatar as rich homeowners who are willing to pay more for quality and good customer service. And I'm holding up the finger quotes right now because you know, that isn't even very like isn't even a very good customer avatar to begin with. But then once they kind of decide that that's what they want, they start to imagine what those people's traits are in an effort to tell me what kind of people we're going to target with their Facebook ads. So they usually default to wanting a white Republican, middle aged, college educated, dual income married couple with kids in a suburban forever home. And now I don't believe the stereotypes. I'm not that kind of guy. I'm just repeating what? But believe it or not, this is not always the best customer to target anyways. So to return to my original point about CRM and marketing walking hand in hand, it should be clear by this point that a well implemented CRM can deliver valuable insights back to the marketing department. And when you're a ninja with Facebook's ad targeting features like I am, we can drastically increase your flow of quality leads from ideal customers that are pre sold and ready to buy a roof for the right price. Since coaching and guidance is a part of my service, when I encounter this with my clients clients and my students. In many cases we discovered that more or better leads aren't their current problem. Doing more with the leads they have was the area of maximum unrealized potential and opportunity for growth. Adding more leads would simply add to the number of Unhappy customers falling through the cracks as estimates, appointments are missed, missed email responses, lost customers, failed promises to sold customers, and installation headaches that cost money and killed the likelihood of future referrals. These were all problems that were happening. And over the course of the last three years I have also had to overcome those challenges. And we have invested heavily in trying to find the right CRM and project management systems, which resulted in wasting big bucks custom building a number of different solutions to do things the way that I wanted, but in many cases they just came up short. I watched demos, installed trials, tested them for days and weeks and months. I trained my team on them, then I export the data from that CRM, import it into the next solution or product or software that promised me a big bright light at the end of the tunnel and and I drank the Kool aid on like 12 different CRM solutions. You name it, I tried it. Invoice to go insightly one page CRM method for QuickBooks ProsperWorks now known as Copper HubSpot Pipedrive, Acculinx Roof Cheese Jobnimbus Jobbers, Salesforce, a free one offered by the guys doing my Google AdWords. And I got suckered at $8,000 to do a custom build of Zoho that never got anywhere close to what I wanted it all in the goal of trying to find the perfect program that met all my needs. The one thing that always bothered me and got worse as time went on is that the further I dug into one of these solutions, each and every one of them had some things I loved and some things I hated. Hence the $8,000 custom program Zoho that never even got past number three of my most wanted features. Or I love ProsperWorks Gmail integration, but the mobile app didn't work on iOS very well, only Androids. And like you couldn't scroll properly to see half the details of a particular roof deal. So you know, when you were on iPad or iPhone, so you know, it was like I didn't want to have to pay for everyone to have laptops when our presentations were already being done on iPads. And I didn't want to convert all of our iPads over to Android tablets either, right? And so like another one method, CRM integration with QuickBooks was top notch, the best, but it only had one solution for collecting leads off the website and it was this ugly garbage form that, you know, looked like something you'd see on a website in the 90s and I didn't want to have to change our website and convert to this Ugly thing. Jobnimbus showed a ton of promise but lacked a bunch of things I really wanted badly. Plus I hated their user interface. Acculinx was better in that regard, but it was a totally closed off system. Some had a price I really liked, but of course service was non existent at that price. And in the case of Salesforce and Zoho, hugely powerful, but required hiring a quote unquote implementation partner that charged absolutely insane prices, had no idea about my business and in many cases couldn't accomplish basic desired features. It was really like hiring a contractor and not knowing how to actually qualify that contractor. It was a very familiar experience to how many of our customers go through trying to find a roofer. So some of these softwares tried to build a perfect project manager and then they just added marketing integrations or CRM into their kind of into their project manager software and it was just to kind of give an added value. But they had high cost to their prices and many had features that they were promising to be coming soon and today still like years later still don't exist in their programs. So a lot of these features were simply built into the system so that they could put it on a list and say that they had it. But at best they were not well thought through at all. Or worse, they had huge bugs that allowed mistakes to happen, the worst of which cost us 4,500 bucks to replace half a roof, which trust me, led to a lot of late night drinking. So if you have been stressed or annoyed trying to figure out why these simple and turnkey solutions aren't simple or turnkey, you're not alone. On one such night of drinking, I worked until three in the morning to figure out how to build a feature myself that I'd been waiting weeks to get from the expensive smartypants CRM consultant guy. And it never worked. So I managed to make it work on another CRM software that this programmer told me was junk and to just stick with Zoho. Then I recorded a screen share video of how I I made the feature work and mockingly like I was, sent him a video mocking him declaring how I'm so much smarter than him and it was a drunk and spiteful move and ultimately the breakup between that guy and I was like a divorce. But I learned a lot from the process. I learned that no CRM is perfect out of the box and that I needed to have a clearly mapped out process driven by goals for how I expected that CRM to improve my business and what key performance indicators were to measure those improvements and a list of my must have features that were required to achieve them. So on that drunk night, it's also when I discovered an amazing website called Zapier that's Z A P I e r zapier.com that enabled thousands of different apps and softwares to talk to each other and automate tasks based on easy to set up rules and triggers. This did more than just allow me to accept that some CRM systems are better at certain tasks but not others, but it allowed me to embrace that fact. This released me from the need to find the perfect all in one solution that inevitably led to compromise and frustration. It also allowed me to give certain employees access to certain information or features or abilities, but restrict others and simply had to teach them which apps performed which tasks. So training was then faster and easier. Adoption was finally something everyone was excited about. Namely my business partner Joe, who was extremely exhausted from trying to learn all these different softwares and process adaptations. Most of the time he was ignoring them and abandoning them, which told me that I hadn't found the right one until now. Best way I can explain it is that I allowed myself to evolve past the three tab shingle. And I know, like what kind of crazy tangent is that, right? But think of the three tab at one point in time that was the perfect one stop shop roof system. It works as a field panel. It works as a California cut valley edge. You can cut the three tabs off for a quality starter, or you can just flip it upside down for a quick one. Or you can cut it into threes for a nice uniform captioning one shingle to rule them all, they said. But while the 3 tab is equally good at all things, it is great at nothing. It's a wasteful starter. It's a boring and inconsistent cap. It's not really designed well to withstand high wind as a field panel. Which made way for the roofing systems of today. Laminated architectural shingles with Kevlar strips and attractive color contrasts. They're built to last twice as long and installed on top of fast, easy to use starter strips that help actually set up the shingles for success. And then they're finely accented by luxurious high profile cap shingles. All these components are separate and different, but they're designed to work together. And as I'm sure you have all encountered, not every component of each system is perfect. I notice many roofers spend countless hours debating roof systems online. Some say they like the leading edge starters, but prefer the safety of Malarkey's super grippy eave protector. Many love the performance of the fornail install on an Owens Corning because it has the surenail strip, but they prefer the consumer confidence inspired by Gaff's masterly warranty. And now that BP has less than six warranty claims per thousand roofs and it's the lowest in the industry, they became the first shingle manufacturer to not only eliminate pro rating and exclusions, but will also cover the inflation costs in any warranty claims coming up in the future. Which is a great sell, but it requires overcoming previous reputation concerns. See, each system has components that rank differently for every roofer. Now what Zapier allowed me to do is take the best tools that is great at performing a given task the way I want it done. That is made by people who are dedicated to being the best at that particular thing but had no interest in developing their app to morph into doing all the other company tasks. Instead, they focused on connecting through Zapier to seamlessly integrate with other great tools. This new way of thinking made it so companies got me as a customer because of how well they collaborated with each other instead of how much they compete with each other. So going back to the original problem, my clients and students end their challenge with not needing more leads, but instead doing more with the leads they had put me in a position where my value to them evolved and grew into helping implement some of these tools into their existing systems and in a few cases completely building something from scratch right from the ground up. I didn't do it myself. I added two really awesome people to my team, Carson and Maya, as well as gained an incredible mentor, advisor and friend who is a master with this stuff. His name's David Tash and we're going to get him on the on the show here right away. And as a team we have had some awesome results. One company in 2017 laid down over 150% more material that year and both revenue and profits were off the charts. Six months later. Another company that hired me for marketing Initially the conversation was because they weren't getting enough leads from Google and HomeAdvisor and wanted to explore the power of Facebook ads to generate more leads. When I did a little more digging we found that some outdated nine year old processes were costing them in their Google review score and their scores on other sites as well. They had a very few reviews and all of them were bad and all occurred as a result of situations that could have been easily prevented. So in addition to marketing services, we integrate a few useful tools that reduced and eliminated those errors from occurring while reducing the workload of a sales team overall. At the same time, we plugged in an automated process to their invoice and payment collection that drastically increased their score with a two star improvement over their previous score and got them a ton of new reviews which result in more organic unpaid searches which then convert into phone calls for estimates totally free and two other companies we were dealing with had massive payroll issues. They had huge costs to administer their payroll and their records, they had time clock theft cost overruns, and on top of all that they had commission issues with their sales team. Originally they were attracted to my agency services on the idea that my content strategy plus using the Pixel and Facebook ad targeting could initiate a higher quality customer relationship and better leads. But during that discovery session we chat about some of their operational systems and one of the biggest problems that allowed those problems to exist was that they lacked the ability to do same day job costing. We agreed to do some experiments and in 30 days we reduced total payroll cost 22%. Doing the math, that improvement result in $100,000 going straight to their bottom line in 12 months. That is before we factored in eventually eliminating bad, rewarding the right behaviors, reacting to problems faster, making better decisions and a better understanding of their financial position. In short, I could claim that I single handedly paid my entire marketing fee for the year with money to spare with just this one easy to use system. This was so much more rewarding than even the best VUDU magic that is marketing and it allowed me to work with so many interesting people on challenging problems and in a few cases we finally got the data we needed to improve their marketing. Now let's be clear. No, I do not have a pitch for you. This isn't where I tell you that I scratched my own itch after I thought there had to be a quote unquote better way and then created a solution that does it all and you can have it for the low low price of $99 a month. This is not that podcast, but I do have some valuable lessons on how you can compare and consider the right customer relationship management system for your roofing business. At the end of this episode I will share a link to a cool quiz calculator thing that I made that'll actually tell you the best CRM tools for your roofing company. It is based on your answers to some specific details about your business, the pain points preventing you from hitting your goals and dream features that you think would make your business easier to run. But before you go and Skip to the end or visit my site for the show notes and start to fill it all out. I'd like to walk you through the 10 questions you need to ask yourself to make the best use of this calculator later. So what are the goals that you hope the CRM will accomplish for your business? Some of the most common ones that I've heard now that I've been doing this is increase the productivity of sales reps, improve the closing ratio and profitability of sales reps, facilitate and encourage collaboration between sales and production to reduce mistakes, reduce common conversations with sold clients and improve communication overall or understanding your sales cycle and allocate marketing budget accordingly. That's what I was talking about with the ideal customer avatar. So let's dive into these a little bit. That way you can start to understand how CRMs can be set up to help you accomplish certain goals. So if you're wanting to use a CRM to increase the productivity of your roofing sales reps, you want to find a CRM that allows them to plot all pending estimates on a map so you can reduce your wasted travel time back and forth from estimate to estimate and ultimately complete more estimates per day per sales rep. You also want to ensure that the CRM can connect to email and allow simple deployment of templates or frequent communications communications to reduce the time needed to answer common questions. Small teams have found a 20% reduction in their amount of follow up required to close a deal by simply including a link in their email signature that allows customers to schedule a call on their sales reps calendar. Also by seeking a CRM that allows every touch with a customer to be documented easily by autologing or even transcribing phone calls and allowing for an in app text or emails will increase the accountability and management or your ability to address customer service standards as well as get involved in deals fully informed of all communications and customer provided information back and forth. Now what does that mean? That's a whole lot of words. But all that means is that there are tools that you can plug in that will allow every time the sales rep makes a phone call they can send a text right within there and respond and receive those customers texts back right within the app. And the same thing with emails, but then it can even transcribe those calls. So that way if you have a sales rep you can hop into his bucket, I call it hop into his bucket and say okay, where are we at? Where are we at with Mr. Smith? Where are we at with Mr. Henry? Where are we at with Mr.— Frost. Right. And you can see all the communication and then when you get involved in those deals, you have all the, all the data so that you can kind of maneuver close that deal, overcome those objections and ultimately sell more roofs. Right. Imagine the power of just those three features and what impact it could have in your roofing company. Now what if you already have a very productive sales reps that are doing a lot of efficiency estimates, but closing ratios and profitability are suffering a little bit? Consider a CRM that allows you to improve the way jobs are bid and have the ability to better predict your profit while also enabling the export of a quality itemized proposal that can be presented on site to the customer. Stats show that making this simple shift of presenting a line by line estimate on site can increase roof sales 15 to 30%. Those aren't my statistics. Those are actually. But by finding a CRM that allows for an email nurture sequence to be sent will help you close those kind of slower to decide leads as well. So that's where when you have a customer who isn't buying, you can tell your CRM to trickle out emails every day or every couple of days or every couple of weeks to make sure that you're staying top of mind with your customer. That way, when we provide periodic valuable educational content sent by your company to bids that are awaiting closure, that'll keep you top of mind and it can build value in your brand during that consideration stage of your customer's buyer journey. Now, if you identified more with the desire to use your CRM to encourage and facilitate collaboration between sales and the installation department so you can reduce job site mistakes, you want to consider a CRM tool that works with some kind of internal communication system to allow employees to quote, unquote, message each other. That's where they can just type and it'll send a notification. And this will happen all internally and send notifications to their mobile devices. But you want all that communication to happen in an inside place. You don't necessarily need to have John and Jack having each other's cell phones. You want to have it in a place where you can also see all the communication between departments. And if someone gets fired or hired or quit or transfers, you can also allow them to also go back and see that conversation. You can't do that with email, you can't do that with text, text message, but you can do it with a system like Slack. Right. And so I can show you guys more about that later. Right. But this allows everyone to understand the scope and the customer's expectations before making mistakes and reacting to them. Now, you also want to consider connecting a photo documentation tool that allows a picture to tell a thousand words, right? It is even better if that picture also shares measurements, job plan notes, and it's all in one easy place. So installation crews can see only the information that matters for that particular job when they're on that particular job. This is what allows installation crews to also notify sales reps of interested neighbors or potential upsell opportunities on the current job to make so that they can have their change orders created on that current project while communicating them to the customer in a fast and transparent manner. This is a huge, huge opportunity that most roofing companies are missing right now. So that's if you want to have the improvement between your sales and your installation department. But if your goal is to to improve the communication between you and your customer, right? Or to reduce the common conversations or manual work of giving instructions to customers, you want to consider a CRM with calendar integrations that allows you to send notices automatically by text or email based on what date their install is, or their materials getting loaded is, or their estimate is right. That way they'll get an email notification that say rain has delayed their installation date. We have a button in my CRM that I had made by Carson that allows me to just hit one button. It's the rainy day button and it sends a message to all the clients that are pending install letting them know that their install date has moved one day forward on account of the rain today. So that way everybody always feels like they're kept in the loop. Right now it is a huge bonus if this can be automated from such actions such as ordering material, booking a disposal bin as well. This way you don't have to actually do the work of sending out that communication or even remembering to send out that communication, right? Commonly overlooked benefit of a great CRM is understanding your sales cycle and improving your marketing budget allocations. Again, this is the seed of all of this. This is where all this came from was me working with roofing companies in their marketing and really getting frustrated by the fact that they just had no data, right? We couldn't really make any improvements because we didn't. They couldn't really give us a picture of where they were, right? So if this is a goal or a point of opportunity for you, you want to consider a CRM that integrates with online tracking tools to get a better understanding of what Google searches led them to your site, what ads or offers they saw, what pages they visit on your site and how long they spent on those pages. You can even see how many times they visit your website before they finally called you or sent in an email lead. And did you know that you can actually set up what's called an email parsing system? So you know how you get those email notifications from HomeAdvisor, Home with Stars or trusted pros, right? And they got like the customer's name and email and everything. And then even if you have a CRM, you always have to it call, copy it, right? Copy that information or type it in manually. Well, you can actually get what's called email parsing that can read those emails and automatically put all those leads into your CRM as well. So it just reduces those one off kind of cases that cause your processes to all fall apart, right? And you can add a cost per lead to your expenses. So you can then start to make decisions as to whether or not you want to stay with this lead provider or that lead generator or that web service provider provider. Right? So it makes it easy to compare the costs of your marketing efforts and make better decisions going forward. Another way I've found to help roofing companies assess their goals is to examine their fears and frustrations. So the next question you want to ask yourself once you decide what goals you want to accomplish is if you could wave a magic wand and make a common but irritating, complex, time consuming task just happen automatically, what would it be? So just write that down, make a note of it, right? Come back to this part of the podcast and fill that out. It has to be a common one though. So like, don't say like year end taxes because that isn't common. You only do it once a year. We're talking stuff that happens once a day, once a week, several times a day, right? Even a couple times a month. But the best stuff is the stuff that actually takes time over and over and over again several times a week. Also, you want to consider what situations regularly keep you up at night and worried about what might happen tomorrow if you don't micromanage these things today day, right. Once you have those, those two things figured out, you'll really start to see the opportunities and your goals will really start to come to light. And once you have that list of the goals and the solutions, right, and you have it written down, make sure you want to have these things written down because you don't want to just willy nilly go into this. You want to make a plan, right? But then you want to get a good idea as to what Features are truly a must have and which features are nice to have, right? Think about it in terms of how often they would be used, how much money they save, and how many people they affect. At least then you can explain the fear or the pain point or the challenge to a sales associate from a CRM software company and they might be able to help guide you in the right direction. The next question you want to ask yourself or the next thing you want to take care of is an assessment of what software is currently being used in your business at all levels, including your industry partners, such as your subcontractors or distributors. Distributors. So what is your accountant using to manage your expenses and payroll? How are they providing job cost reports? How do they get receipts documented for taxes? What are you currently using to measure your roofs, and what do you use to turn those measurements into your material list requirements? And how do you turn those material lists into purchase orders? Do you currently have a project management software that works for you or do you already have a CRM? Is it an all in one? What are you using to create, present and deliver your proposals to your customers? How do you keep track of your sales rep schedule? How are leads currently captured and distributed from all sources of leads? How are your job notes regarding access, disposal and special requests or site concerns collected and eventually communicated to your install crews? What are you using to send emails to clients or distribute content on social media? How do customers get invoiced and make payments payments? Having a strong overview of your current software situation might really start to highlight inefficiencies or opportunities going forward. Before you start shopping, it really helps to know what you're already paying for. Maybe the people providing you these programs might be willing to offer some free consultations to prevent losing you as a client. So you want to get involved with them. The next question is how well do you understand your budget and the costs of standing still? The best way I can explain what I mean by the cost of standing still is actually to relate it to a roof job we did with my personal roofing company this year. We had this great client, semi retired, successful business owner, lives out in the country and he has this massive home on a beautiful property and he has this old barn down this little road kind of behind the house, probably 200 yards behind his house, right? And when we did the estimate, the sales rep told him that she didn't think we could do the barn for sure as there was a lot of questionable wood rot, but that we would really try and that we would assess it when we got do the project a few months later. Now, the roof sheeting on one side of this barn, like just to give you a picture of it, was, like, needing to be done for sure. Like, there was holes in it. It was just dry, flaky plywood. Right. So she obviously didn't feel comfortable ascending and measuring this roof when she's there all by herself. Now, good thing she didn't, because it wouldn't have taken much to, like, knock this barn over. Right. So something would have happened for sure. And at the time, there was also a bunch of brush and old trees. It was like, waist high. So access was difficult. Right. And all he really had in this barn was some, like, rims and tires for his truck and a couple of wasp nests. So a few months later, when we came to do the job, we saw that he had rent some equipment and cleared all the brush 150ft of every direction of this barn. So it was actually really nice. He had obviously invested in making sure that once this roof didn't have any holes in it anymore, that he could access and use the building. And once the crew looked closer, it was also obvious that the building was about to totally fail. Low quality materials, neglect and weather exposure had caused the barn to begin actually splitting in half. And so he asked the crew what it would cost to fix. So they called me for advice on how I thought this should be communicated to the customer, to not be offensive, but to also try and help. They felt that basically this guy would be spending 60% of the cost of having a new bar barn just to bring this one back to life and make it. And they felt that it would be stronger than a new barn. But they had doubts that he would want to invest in a building that was ready to fall over. So I asked them, well, what would it cost to get rid of it? Because, I mean, he doesn't want it falling on anyone, right? So maybe we can cancel the roof and just demo the building. So we worked that price out as well, and it was about 30% of the price of a new barn just to tear it down, cut it up into a million people pieces, and get rid of it. And that was the key to our proposal. The key psychology here was to make sure that he understood that it wasn't a decision between leaving in it and investing money in it. So spending no money or spending lots of money. It was a choice between spending some money to have nothing or spending more money to save the building and have something. You need to play that same trick on yourself when Thinking about how to invest in a new CRM. Because again, you cannot rise to the level of your ambitions and your goals. Goals when you'll inevitably fall to the level of our systems, right? You have to get intimate with the cost of not accomplishing the goals you wrote down in the very first question, right? Think how many valuable employees were lost due to the environment bad systems created. What about the mistakes? What did they cost? What about the impact to your brand? Or what is the lack of referrals, right? What about wasted time, wasted money, wasted fuel, lost opportunity opportunities? What is the lost opportunity cost of not being able to respond to leads fast enough or get proposals sent quick enough? Right? How much time would be saved in your business? What is the cost related to your payroll on that? How many more customers could be reached in a day? How much happier would you be if you had some of the features that you're looking for and if the CRM accomplished some of those goals that you wrote down in the process? You have to ask yourself, can you ever remove yourself from the business with your current self system? If not, how do you ever replace or duplicate yourself? Can you pass this business on to your son or your daughter? What if you were hurt? What if you were injured? What if you were killed? Heaven forbid, knock on wood. But could the business live on? Could you sell it and retire without being constantly bothered by the person you sold the business to? Can you even take a month off? Write all that information down and make it real. Understand your budget. Understand the costs standing still. If you could reduce your payroll costs 10%. So take your total payroll costs and reduce them by 10% without losing a dime of revenue or sacrificing quality, what does that equal per month? If you could respond to 10% more leads and close 10% more deals at a 10% higher price, what does that revenue equal per year? If you total up all the mistakes or unnecessary costs and expenses from this path year that were caused by not having some of the features you listed in the second answer that you'd like, what does that equal? If you could have stopped half of them, how much money is that back in your pocket? Remember, to make a dollar you have to incur an expense to take up. You know that takes up a percentage of that dollar. So earning a dollar really means selling $5. But if you save a dollar that goes straight to your pocket as bottom line profit. And if those savings are the result of less unhappy customers and having more happy customers, that is a double edged sword of awesome. So what if having an easy to manage system that accomplished all of the above allowed you to sell your roofing company to a large local siding company for three times last year's earnings instead of just two times last year's earnings. How much more could you get from selling your business, your life's work? If you could sell your company for two times last year's earnings or sorry, three times last year's earnings earnings instead of two, how much more money is that in your pocket? So to understand this, look no further than McDonald's. The value of their systems and their dedication to constantly improving them is why the company is worth billions and billions of dollars and it's enabled franchisees with zero restaurant experience to manage a money printing machine selling fast food run by high school kids. Someone somewhere in that organization looked at what was no doubt a massive cost of building all these new custom made touchscreen order kiosks right? Where you see them popping up at locations all over the place these days where you know, basically now I can enter my order instead of the person who works there. Consider the upfront costs, right? Implementing the software interface, the payment machine and the connection to the kitchen, then setting them up in 10,000 locations so that people kind of understood that that was a thing. Now this only made sense because they understood that the cost of not allowing me to process my own Big Mac order was high than constantly hiring and training people to push the buttons for me at the counter. So the cost of the kiosk is more or less a one time cost and very minimal maintenance and software updates versus employees whose wages, taxes, benefits and HR costs increase every year, right? This is all about automation, right? So next question. Get the input of your sales team and operations crews. Find out what magic wands they want, would want or what kind of things are keeping them up at night. Get a frontline battle view of their circumstances in their daily life and understand everything that they are dealing with in their job roles. Because many times as we get higher up in the company, we forget see what kind of excitement or disenchantment exists around the idea of a massive update or improvement to your system. Getting some wish list items from the team will greatly help down the road with a dog option when they had a part in making their daily workflows better. It increases the buy in tenfold down the road at this point. Now you're ready to fill out my CRM quiz calculator thing. I really do need a better name for it, so maybe let me know in the comments or on Facebook what you think I should call it like the CRM PickerBot the CRM Decider 9000 like I'm open after this episode. Visit roofingbusinesspartner.com all1word so CRMP I C K E R and you can find out what CRM tool will be best for your company and your sales process. Once you have an idea as to what CRM or tools will work best for you, it's time to do your due diligence. Read what people are saying on message boards, read third party reviews, look at CRM comparison pages and research what integrations they have on Zapier because I love zap. Finally, request a demo or a free trial and most likely you will work with a sales rep who can add clarity and context to your concerns and questions. Establish a price for the tool and what costs or work is required to build out the exact system. You need to start engineering a predictable, repeatable, measurable five star Google review experience generating sales system for your roofing company. Then call me to help you with your money marketing. 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. 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 that all 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 excuses 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.