How a CRM Audit Can Transform Your Roofing Business

We're going to go into why a CRM and what it is. Well, it's looking at a collection of your tools, your platforms, your apps and your pieces of software and how they connect together in a process. As I kind of alluded to earlier, this is something that I did a lot back in the days. In fact, this was 10 days of travel back in February of 2021. But basically that's all the places that I went. In 10 days, I had to leave the country because I have to leave every six months. So that's why I went to Merida, Mexico. But otherwise I'd flown all over doing these audits and I would be in person kind of going over the whole process of the company. You can see here, Brian's with me and Sam's with me. We did an audit and several businesses and the idea behind this was to kind of go over people's companies, review their processes, and then provide them with this audit report. The shortest way, if we do it remotely, it takes about three hours. And essentially we look at three phases of the business. So this is like a good way to measure the adoption of a company. It was really great for selling a CRM because if I went to a company, asked them to perform their process, I would see all the breaks in that, right? Because I would say, okay, get everybody in the room who does lead to, quote given. All right, demonstrate lead to, quote given. Then get everybody in the room who does job sold to handoff to production, show me that. And then get everybody in the room who does build dates, Google review, show me that. And we would have kind of a complete scenario mapped out in advance. So we would always have this test scenario where I had a specific Eagle View report. And that review, that Eagle View I chose very specifically because it had a house that had access issues, that had certain install stuff that you'd have to catch. And I'd always tell the salespeople, be very considerate of these pictures. Pictures. There are traps hidden in this ego view designed to trip you up, designed to highlight the flaws in your ability to communicate the challenges of a job site to production. Like, I would warn them that there are things in here that are designed to make it so the production would be set up for failure if you don't catch them. And even then with the warning, they would still miss them. As opposed to like the normal scenario, which is you show up to a house and what you assume the best or assume the worst, up to you. But here I would actually say assume the worst. Assume there are things hidden in here, and you have to find them, and they would still miss them. When we would do this, we would have a timer running. So we would time each step of the process because there are times to add healthy friction, there are times to remove unhealthy friction, and there are times where you can optimize and automate and systematize things. So we would time each step of the process. Whether we were doing this in person or remote, we'd always have a screen recorder on the computer that is performing the task. So if it was multiple people, we would do it even in a zoom room on site. And we would have a zoom open. So at least that way whoever was working would share their screen. And then we could go back and review the video and actually, you know, put in the timestamps and take notes. And then we would score that we would report on at the end of this whole thing. Now, here's some tips for when you're auditing your process, right? So if you decide that you're going to leave today and you're going to go sit everybody down and you're going to say, okay, everybody, I want to audit our process. I want to take a look at how we're performing this. First of all, don't skip the hard parts. When I'm on a zoom CRM audit with people or Brian Audia, who does a lot of our CRM audits, he would go into them, and then what people would do is say, okay. And then we do usually do this. That was the trigger word for us to say, no, I want you to actually do that. So we would then put this in, or we would go to that sheet and do this. We would miss certain parts of the spreadsheet. This is important for selling a CRM because we would, in the end have to make sure that if there was some rogue spreadsheet that they were using to run the business, we would have to know about it to make sure that data was migrated. In fact, we did this with a company, and even then we still found out that there were 17. This is about a $40 million company. There was 17 spreadsheets being used in addition to Accu Links to essentially conduct business. So there was like a work order sheet and a claims management sheet and a delivery sheet and a ready to be invoiced sheet and a pending payments sheet. And all this, like, kind of all these, like, random spreadsheets that existed outside. It's because people didn't take the time to learn the system of aculix and we had to make sure that their processes were brought into HubSpot when we put into them. But if we didn't stop them when they said okay, and then we usually put this on the payment log sheet or put this on the this sheet. If we don't stop and say okay, I want you to actually do that. So the goal of a CRM water is to try and adhere to your expected process. Exactly. You want to treat it like a live fire exercise. You want to treat this like you're actually going to go through and do a live fire exercise, as if it was real, as if you're going to do a real customer. Keep in mind you're trying to improve the process for your 1, 3, 10, 40 hundred million dollar company. Spending the money on an eagle view, spending the money on the three hours or five hours that this takes. I mean, even if this cost you internally 200 an hour, it would still be worth it because 30 and $40 million companies would spend 5 to $10,000 for us to come on site. Like they'd pay, I have to incur the cost of the flight to their office. So they would pay for the flight, the hotels, my food, my Uber and my time at a profit. So this is the CRM audit sheet. We would have a summary here of the points, but then this is kind of how we're managing it as we go. So this is the buyer's journey. We would walk through and say, okay, do you have a website form to your CRM? Does your website form put leads into your CRM? Does that give it a unique ID of some kind? Right, like, are we able to reference that unique ID for that lead submission? Is there some kind of duplicate prevention? Does it have a first name, last name split? Are we collecting the lead source? Is it categorical or like a structured data? Do you get more context than just the source? But like the drill down kind of like how HubSpot has the lead source drill down address verification. Is there a process where you verify the address? If you know, like our process we have in our playbook where we say, does the house match what I see on Google Maps? Because we found that in many places around the country the address doesn't always find the exact house. So you would go through and then we would kind of say, okay, on a scale of 1 to 10, how good is the quality of the data and how easy is it to use? Right. And these are kind of anecdotal or arbitrary, but we would try and basically make it a judgment based on how easy they made it look. Then we have lead to first touch from sales to marketing, qualified lead. So we'd go through and we would kind of score these things as we go. But we were trying to ultimately give a score on each of the steps of the business all the way down to, like, sub processes, like callbacks. Then as we're going, we would look at the reports as well and say, like, do they have these basic core function reports? This is like our fake scenario. So we have the homeowner and a property manager, because we would do different ones for commercial. Or you could have a homeowner and a tenant. We have the names, we have phone numbers we're supposed to add. We went because we're doing a fake lead intake call, right? So we're saying, oh, how'd you hear about us? Oh, I phoned in. I saw the Facebook ad is the video of an owner talking about the shingles. This is so we could say, do we get lead source and contacts? Then I would have an eco view link that we would use as a test. I would have job site details. We would have the color that we originally quoted, the color change. Because we also say, what happens if a color changes? What happens if the owner wants to change the color? What is your process for making sure that color change gets noted so that it ends up in the hands of the production manager? We would have a change order that we would go through. So we would process, like, what does it look like when you have a site condition that was unseen that creates the necessity for change order? How does that happen in your CRM? And we would track that process and we would take notes along the way. So this is like our CRM audit process. The idea was to try and make it so that they would actually go through their whole process and prove that they could do it and understood what they're supposed to do before they did it. And then we would really get a clear picture as to where they were at.