Adam Sand argues canvassing and outside sales are different jobs. Canvassers acquire leads through door-to-door work with high rejection rates, while closers need different skills. Overpaying self-generated commissions can make leads more expensive than they're worth.
What is canvassing? Because some people think it's just what we do in roofing, but it happens everywhere. And the thing that is apparent is that not every outside sales can or should be a canvasser. Canvassing and sales are different. I actually saw this argument play out on Facebook the other day where somebody said that canvassing isn't a sales motion and prove me wrong. And then all the roofers, of course, go back and forth arguing about it. But I would say that, like, we have to understand what is the value of a great salesperson, a great closer, a person who can turn a prospect into dollars and a commitment to do services. The skill of that person is wasted doing this where they just walk along the street and they knock on some doors and some people open the doors and they're renters and they don't want to talk to you and you knock on some more doors and some people are interested but they can't talk right now. Then boom, maybe you get someone who actually talks to you and lets you on the roof. And that is actually probably a conservative number. I think there's like 20 boxes here. Sometimes you knock 100 doors, you get one or two or three people that will talk to you. So seems like a waste of their abilities because 99 or 97 or 95% of the work that they're doing in knocking on doors. Like the emotional burden of knocking on doors is not necessarily best use of their ability. It's just rejection. It's like they're not even getting a chance to actually do their job. Meanwhile, there are people out there who are great at canvassing but suck at sales. And so it's important to know the difference between the two. Canvassers exist to purely perform in a canvassing career. Like, there are people out there who are great canvassers. There's a whole career around canvassing and they sell other things, like political canvassing during the election. You can make a lot of money if you compare roofing where it's like, well, they can make more money because most business owners will say you get X number of x percent commission on business leads and then you get an additional X percentage if you self gen. Meanwhile, canvassers could go work in security or lawn care where it's like, hey, do you want to get your lawn mowed? Canvassing is really a marketing motion in the roofing industry is the acquisition of opportunities. It is not necessarily sales. Sales itself. We blend the two. But if you're trying to create a sustainable, long lasting canvassing motion in the business. It helps to entertain the possibility that canvassing is marketing, not sales. When you pay a higher percentage of sales to self gen, you're also overpaying for leads. You're paying more money. If you're $18,000. Average job, let's say you're paying like 7% commission. Average job is paying out commission of this. If I go here and I say, you know what, we pay out an additional 2% for SelfGen. Well now you're paying 360 dol to the sales rep to do that. If you can generate leads for 280 bucks, you're overpaying for that opportunity. But because we don't know how to generate leads for $280, we continue to pay more. And then we also have to hope that we find these very unique people because Johnny can do this and you can hire ten Johnny's pretty easily. But only Mike can do this and it's really hard to find another Mike. Salespeople can control their own income. The challenge is that when you ask salespeople, do you like canvassing? They're going to say no. And they say, do you like 2% more money when you sell a job? They're going to say yes. You're just pitting them against themselves in a way that.
