From Roofing Marketing to Industry Pioneer: Adam Sand's Remarkable Journey | Supered at INBOUND 2023

Foreign. Implementation Service has gone from four weeks on site to a week to three days. So I'll get to watch my son grow up. Before I was a HubSpot partner, I was a roofer. And this is a picture of actually one of our job sites in Canada where I grew up. And it's actually, I'm in the northernmost city in the world with a million people living in. Now it's important to note that I was not actually the roofing skill in this business. That was my best friend who, who was a shingler for basically his whole adult life. And he asked me if I could give him some help. And after more than a decade of friendship, he was more like a brother. We spent every Christmas together. His kids were basically like my kids. And thankfully I had other skills to offer when it came to this business. My role was to do the marketing and sales processes, developed a technology and put all of that into systems that we could use to attract, engage and delight our customers. And it worked because we actually got a lot of Google reviews really quickly. And in four years we had triple the reviews of our largest competitors and they were doing 10 times the amount of revenue that we were doing. And they had been around for decades. And customer feedback told us that they liked our technology driven process. So, and that was all powered by a very simple tool at the time called Podio. And we were able to squeeze a lot of functionality out of it because I genuinely loved building the CRM. In fact, every winter I would actually go down and help other roofers build their CRMs, mostly to escape the cold. Cause fun fact about where I'm from, it's actually 200 days a year below freezing, so it's cold as shit. And so that was pretty cool. But then I fell in love, right, and it was with HubSpot. So I just, I had to have it for my roofing company. I, I liked Podio and it was good, but I looked at like 20 different CRMs in 2020 and I could tell that HubSpot CRM was the future. Podio was the past. And based on customer feedback on our technology enabled roofing service, I knew that if we don't adapt and change and harness the power of technology, we might be getting left behind. We. But try as I may, it was really hard because I couldn't find anybody who could help me set HubSpot up for a roofing business. And my partner and I couldn't agree on how to use it. The team resisted and I couldn't get the team to kind of roll along them in the boat with me and we start to have problems. Silos began to form between the sales hub and the service hub where we managed production. And then the mistakes began to pile up. Literally. Yes, that's a roof caving in from too many shingles being placed in the wrong place because of bad note taking. But being best friends, you know, we were in this together until we weren't. And then eventually we split up, breaking the partnership. And I would end up with nothing and unemployed. But I had a dream. I really, really loved HubSpot and helping us roofing companies build their businesses. And I wanted to have a lot of success in my life. And the customers in the US seemed to like, have a better chance because they wanted this, so they were able to endure the challenges of implementation. So I had this crazy dream that my girlfriend actually agreed to. We hopped in my truck and we drove down the United states with my 150 pound dog, Thanos, and to make CRMs for roofing companies in the United States. And we traveled all over the United States a few times, back and forth. We moved out of our condo and we had like, we essentially were doing zooms, building a team and constructing hubspots from the passenger seat of my truck. And I got the nickname the homeless hubspotter because I actually slept in the truck many times as we were trying to save time, save money, make it to different places, and when you know what a lot of roofing companies actually really enjoyed and wanted this better employee experience, this better customer experience. And so we actually built a business out of it. And early on my journey, I found this blog from our friends at RevPartners. And I talked about how the tool didn't matter as much as the process, and the process didn't matter as much as adoption. And it was all the validation I needed to know that we were doing the right things because this really cool HubSpot partner agreed. So when they came out with this super software, I just knew that this was the adoption boss that we needed. And kind of got to try and school you guys in 30 seconds on how the roofing business works. So essentially, when storms hit cities, everybody in the roofing industry rushes in, knocks on doors, and tries to get people to let them help them with their claims in exchange for letting them do the work. But the problem is the insurance company has lobbied Congress and created all these rules that really handcuff the roofer's ability to do this help. And so then what happens is they have a three pronged strategy, they deny the claim and they say that that stuff isn't approved. And then they delay the responses and then they defend the responses over and over and over and over again. And then the roofer struggles to get paid. And so what they do is they have this activity called supplementing, which is where they say this thing that needs to be on the roof, you need to pay for that. And then sometimes the insurance company doesn't agree. And what happens is with all this massive rush of work, sometimes roofers accidentally bill for too little because they didn' the supplementing activities weren't completed. They didn't know the claim was closed, or they didn't even know that supplementing had even started. And so then they, they lose up to 7,000, $16,000. And this is happening five to ten times per day. So there's a lot of risk here. This is, I have a customer $3.2 million in AR right now, today, because of this problem. And that's what super does is it allows us to eliminate the gap in the deal and the supplement process because we get real time feedback with cross object validation. So we built, we built a five step cross object validation rule inside Super. That starts with the ticket status. Every job is a ticket that progresses through its stages of production. And when that job moves out of installation complete, it's when billing activities can begin. But we have to check the claim status because the claim goes through its own journey, because the insurance company is like a customer, because they're ultimately paying for this. So there's a claims process to get them to approve it. And then once we do that, we have to make sure that in the claim all the supplement orders are completed. So that's another custom object that we had to make and we had to validate against. And then we also want to make sure we understand what our expenses are. So every bill from QuickBooks comes in as an expense custom object. We sum it up to know how much we've paid. And then we also bring in another deposit which is any payment logged in QuickBooks so we know how much money we've collected. So getting all this information in ends up looking like that. And Super. And we have to build several process rules so we get a red, yellow and green light because we want to know. The accounting team needs to know how and when to proceed with the final billing. So there needs to be different warning labels. And we get this validation in real time to cards with instructions and videos. So even an accountant who doesn't spend a lot of time in the CRM can know where to look and what to do and who to communicate with to ensure there's no profit loss. We're taking super to new heights now by including links to internal knowledge base articles with relevant pre built built views in the CRM. I know my ugly demo photos. Creative hated it. But that way sales is enabled to work through their pipeline with the right data and the instructions at each stage. So now we're putting super everywhere to make maximum impact for our customers. And We've deployed over 671 packages to date. Being able to have accounting data inside HubSpot while also supplying instructions to less frequent users is a total game changer. We even have Playbooks with validation workflows so then when they don't fill the playbook correctly, they get warning labels so they know what to go back and fix. And I would have showed you that, but Creative was getting really upset with the amount of ugly slides. Now we're also getting to deploy this into other products. So we're putting into Sumo Quote, which is our configure price quote so we can give this fully enabled end to end experience with best in class connected tools that are required for the roofing industry. That all feels familiar because they got these pink things everywhere that make them feel comfortable. And we asked super, hey, can you make it so that when we release an update people can know about it? Like can you let us put a second hotspot in? And they said instead we're just going to put these video updates in. And so now we can push these out and, and actually let people know, hey, this is the thing that we did and now you can use it better. But this isn't why I love Super. I love it because in my journey across the country, my girlfriend at the time, Alice and I, we got engaged in Hawaii, working out there and then we got married in Vegas in Flannels because we really like Alex or Mosey. And then we moved to Hawaii, but I wasn't there to help move in. I was working, I was working on training roofing companies on how to use HubSpot and so she had to do it alone. That's actually one of our employees helping her out move in. And then we found out we were going to be parents all while we were on the road. And so thanks to super and my team, my on site implementation service has gone from four weeks on site to a week to three days. So I'll get to watch my son grow up. Thank you.