Adam Sand shows how roofing companies can use HubSpot to track what actually closes deals. Testing three sales behaviors, he found that attic inspections didn't matter, video walkarounds helped but were hard to do, and photo annotations with 70% adoption had the biggest impact. Use data to drop what doesn't work and fix training.
The intent of reporting our pipeline is you want to answer questions, where am I losing deals? Where are my logjams? Where do deals get stuck and sit? Because we haven't developed a process for unstucking them. How long does it take to make a sale? A lot of this stuff is done by HubSpot automatically. Or how long does it take to process a unit of business from start to finish? So when thinking about reporting, and we just want it to work, but reporting actually begins when creating your systems and processes. So the first thing I think of when someone asks me to add a new feature to their HubSpot is how can I report on that? Like, if we're going to add a new feature or we're going to add a new expectation, we want to make sure we can report on it. To know, did they do it? This is a big thing. When we did a few years back, there's all these hypotheses in the roofing industry, right? Like, you got to get in the attic. Every time, you got to get in the attic. Owen's corning contractors for sure, right? Because they're always trying to sell installation. And then it was, oh, videos, you got to do videos on the roof, right? Like, if you do a video on the roof, it makes a big impact on sales. You should be doing some kind of video walk around on the roof. And then the other one that I suspected based on my own experience in sales, was annotating a lot of photos, putting a lot of annotations on photos. So I said, okay, annotate 70% of the time. So we did the test with our customers where they commit to doing it, right? They commit to doing all those three things and leading their teams to do that. And now they didn't do it 100% of the time. That was the other thing we want to do is like, when you commit to trying the control was that they committed to trying and leading and trying to do that. Then to what degree were they able to be effective in getting their teams to do it? And then we're able to sort deals by what was the close rate when they didn't do this thing? And what was the close rate when they did do this thing? And we had to have it so that an independent person the inside sales would report on did go in the attic, right? Measured by pictures of taken inside the attic, did they annotate 70% of their photos? So that was a quick scan of the photos and like, pretty easy to guess if it's over or under 70% and then did they record a video walk around measured by there's a video walk around in company camp. And so then they would set yes or no on this and that would be in HubSpot so we could report on it. So there were three things they do in their post inspection debrief call with the outside sales is they would check those things off and then we could measure the close rate differences by based on that. And what we found was that getting the attic didn't make much of a discernible difference. The video walk around did make a big difference, but it was hard to execute. Like the lowest percentage of the doing it was on the video walk around. The 70% of photos annotated, there was a high percentage of doing it and it made a big difference in impact. So that became the thing that RBP sticks to is like you have to do that because we have the data. So that's what I mean by if we're going to add something to our process, we got to think how can we report on it? Because we want to see the effectiveness. So the reason we do this is because we need to see the value of that effort. Right. If you were forcing your people to go in the attic, you want to know like, is that making a difference? Because every time you say yes to one thing, you could be saying no to something else. And so if the sales people are expected to go in the attic and they're doing that all the time, and then you add taking and annotating 70% of the photos, if you knew that getting in the attic had no discernible difference on close rate. But we did this data set, we knew that if they could only pick one, they should do the annotating in 70% of photos. And so if the system is not producing results, then we can retire that system or retire that process, retire that requirement. This is something Elon Musk talks about, which is like make the requirements less dumb. And then that's how he makes an proves things and gets to the point where he is who he is. And then it also allows to see if your people are following the process that we developed. Which is a huge thing in leadership is there's a difference between your gut instinct and being able to prove it with data. I recently had a salesperson say that they didn't know something and that's okay. But that caused me to go, wait a minute. I really feel like I've given them an ample opportunity to know that. And so then because I had the system, I was able to search the thing that he said he didn't know in our video, like, zoom recording thing and be like, hey, here's a bunch of examples of where I, I did say this stuff in front of you. If you don't know it, there's a reason for that. But it's not that you didn't have access to it. And then we were just able to have a truthful conversation about what was wrong. And what was wrong was that my training was not effective. That's the conclusion that I came to is like, okay, you had the opportunity to know it, but you still didn't end up knowing it. So that means I have to work on my training. But I should have found this out a little bit earlier. So let's work together to make sure we know what you don't know. So this is what I mean about seeing if people are following the process. You want to make sure that people know to talk about it.
