How to Build a Lead Generating Machine for Your Roofing Business

There's numbers that you need to know in order to measure your success. I'm going to dive into those a little bit. So some of the first numbers you want to know is your lead, your MQL and your SQL. It's really important to define what those are so that you know what type of lead you are getting. A lead cannot be just like a lead is not a lead is not a lead. Because if I was to say, all right, I want to get somebody help me get leads for my roofing company, I'm going to pay $150 a lead. If you get me a lead, it's 150 bucks. Based that information alone. If I go to a home show and I say, okay, no problem, I'm going to invest a thousand dollars in a home show booth. I'm going to get a 10 foot by 10 foot booth. I'm going to take that roofing company's logo, I'm going to put it on a banner, I'm going to get a 70 inch TV in box, I'm going to have some roofing materials on display. I'm going to be there to talk to the passersby, I'm going to put a fishbowl on my little table and I'm going to say, leave a business card or fill out this form to enter to win a free roof or a free tv and we're going to call everybody back. So then I get a bunch of people who enter their name and their phone number and their email for an opportunity to win a free roof or free tv and there's the tv. Well, if I take all the business cards and little paper slips out and hand that to me, the marketer, like if I hand that to the roofing company owner and I go, okay, I got you 100 leads, pay me $15,000. That roofer is going to buy that these leads are junk. So from me doing his marketing, did I qualify to be charging him $150 for those leads? Do those leads qualify? You have to have a clearly defined, clear definition. I should. What is a marketing qualified lead? Because a lead just needs to be nurtured. A lead is just someone you can contact. A lead is where some kind of exchange of value happened already, but it wasn't in exchange for the you doing your service. They're not a hand raiser. That said, hey, I know who you are, I know what you do, and I'm interested in you doing it for me. And I am within your ideal customer avatar or ideal customer Persona. To some degree. So, so the people putting those names in those fishbowls, they could live three hours away and they, they live in some tiny little rural community, but they come into the big city that come to the home, show they're not in our market or they weren't interested in a roof, they just wanted to win the tv. They live in an apartment. So we have to define what marketing qualified is. Sales qualified and SQL Sales qualified is where we say, okay, we've met that, there's demand from the customer, a hand raise, they're interested and they're within our market and we would pay kind of the going rate for the lead. But sales qualified might mean that there's a clear determination of need in that the salesperson's closing rate should be measured against this and the company has a clear examination of what definition of need is. So they don't just cherry pick the easy ones, but at the same time we measure that by like, well, they raised their hand, they were interested, and then we booked an appointment with them. And that appointment did happen. That's the first marker is like, did the customer show? So we can measure show rate by measuring between marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead. Three things we want to measure the volume, the conversion rate and the delta of time between those first three stages of lead, MQL and SQL. And in some cases it's almost instantaneous. Right. A marketing qualified lead can turn into a sales qualified lead, you know, very quickly, the next day, the same day. So then the next one we kind of determine is our close rate. Right. What is our close rate? I won't. This isn't a sales thing, so we're not going to talk about that. But we also want to know our show rate because in many cases different marketing sources will have a different show rate. Because when you're comparing channels or comparing ads ads or comparing device type. Device type, meaning like a lead from a computer versus a lead from a mobile phone, there might be a difference in show rate and we should be measuring that. These are numbers that we should know if we're noticing. It can help us inform our marketing decisions. Kind of going back to lead MQL and SQL. Facebook lead ads. Right. Can sometimes have a lower sales qualified lead rate. So you might choose to add an additional piece of software to nurture a Facebook lead form ad that you wouldn't choose to do for an ad that came through or a lead that came through Google Ads ads. So show rate. Then we have our cost per lead. Every roofer knows about cost Per lead. What I will say is that when you know your numbers, beginning with the end in mind, you have to know what you want your number to be. So what do I mean by that? I've met a lot of roofers who've missed their opportunity to grow a significant amount because there was some surge in demand. Like this was Covid. There were companies that went like, oh, we went from 2 million to 3 million, where like, we've been 2 million for 20 years and we did 3 million last year and we're great. Or 2 million to 4 million over the course of the three years of COVID and we're great. And then there's companies that went from 6 to 30 million in that same period of time. And it was because they knew upfront what they could build a business model around in terms of cost per lead. And as long as the lead was under that number, they poured as many dollars as possible. Their marketing budget was unlimited. That's one of the things that I learned from working with big roofing companies is they said, if the numbers are in line, I know if I apply this sales process to this type of marketing qualified lead, I'm going to get this close rate. So if the lead costs less than this and I can get the money back in 30 days because my production's tight, I can get the roof produced in two weeks. And we're hiring and we're acquiring crews at a rate that allows us to keep our install time frame under 30 days. I know that this lead and that sale will pay for not only the lead that it costs to get them, but the next lead as well. So this is a customer funded acquisition. This is a lead generating machine. So my marketing budget's unlimited, Adam. I want to put as much money as possible into it. I will literally throw as many dollars as I can cash flow. But I know that the lead is paying for themselves and the next one. So I'm pouring as much money in. But alternatively, what happens is we go, well, I'm getting $150 leads and I'm getting $80 leads. This $150 lead source is ripping me off. I'm going to just go and give all my money to the $80 lead source. They do that, but the problem is they can't get more than 30, 60, 90, whatever leads per month. Meanwhile, that $150 lead source is within budget, and they could get a thousand leads a month because they're paying 150 for them. There's more of them that they can get and they're not buying them all. I see that happen way more often than I'm comfortable with from people that have trusted me to help them and so I want to make sure I say that here today. Now to determine cost per lead there's some things that dive deeper into it and that's your cpm, right Your cost per thousand impressions. Knowing this it kind of ties into your click through rate which can determine your cost per click and then when you think of your conversion rate these are the three things that make up cost per lead and what I find is that business owners who don't have a marketing background don't know enough about the CTR and CPM and the impact that those will have on your cost of customer. They're just thinking about cost per lead and conversion rate. So they're saying we pay $100 a lead and we close at 10% we're paying $1,000 a customer. They know that but they don't know the levers that they can pull.