Inside the Sales-to-Production Handoff of $50M Roofing Companies

Foreign. Sales is done. No more phone calls back to sales saying, hey, what was this? What was that? Can you go check on this? Can you go get me a color for that? Can you go. Can you ask the customer this? Can you clarify that? Right? And two, production is confident. Production is confident in what they and what was sold, that they know what they have to do. And so that means there needs to be a very clear handoff where sales goes. They say, I'm done. Sales management says, yes, you're done. And then now it is productions. It's productions responsibility in this spot. This is completely production's responsibility. If something goes wrong, it's production's fault. So none of this thing where it goes, we blame sales. So this is what we're really talking about. It's a really great handoff from sales to production so that production can think like a robot. And the way that we have to do that with no duplicate data entry is to make sure we have connected information. Because the old way was where we had, you know, several different systems where information would not be the same. So if you had a new contact in your CRM, we'd have to create a new project for your company cam, you'd have to create something new in QuickBooks and then you'd have to have something new in some kind of scheduling tool. And so we want to reduce the duplicate data entry, but we also want these tools to be good. And we also want there to be more than just first name, last name, address and phone number that's passing through, but also key details, stuff that's being passed through. And we also want to make it so that data can be reported on. So if that information's answered here, we want it to be over here so this information can be reported on or filtered down by. And I'll show you what I mean by that in a moment. And then we also want to be able to require things so that we require certain steps to be done. And one way that we can accomplish that is through making it so that a playbook has to be filled out in full before production manager is even allowed to be looking at it. So before a production manager is even allowed to look at something, we have to make sure this playbook is filled out and filled out correctly. And we can do that with a workflow while maintaining the zero duplicate data entry and the ability to report on the data. And so what I mean by that is not just revenue per square, but also what what is being sold on this job. And so I'm explaining why this is important. So if I come back here and this is just a demo account, but if I come back here and I look at my deals, well, when a contract is signed, it doesn't necessarily mean that the project is sold. If I move it over to projects sold, I want to be able to require certain things to be filled out. Now how do I get a deal into project? Sold is important. Now from there, someone has to approve it because someone needs to be responsible for the handoff between sales and production. If you don't have a sales manager, that's you. And I've got one customer who I'm just gonna see if he's in here. Cause I never wanna talk smack. He's not in here. But I have one customer here who learned this lesson the hard way. So what he did was he sells. He also has his brother, sorry, he runs the company, but his brother works there in sales. And his brother sold a metal roof. Right? And the brother who sold metal roof, a lot of times they do the layovers where they put the, the strapping down and they put it on top of the strapping. Other times they do the full tear off and they put it down on a bare roof deck. Right? You guys can argue in the chat about how much, whether that's right or wrong or good or bad, but the point is that sometimes they do it one way, sometimes they do it the other way. And the brother who is too good for that process didn't fill out the job file playbook. And the brother who runs the company, he approved it as a, as the sales manager. So he just moved it to approved. And then production said, okay, everything that's here is my football. So they took it over and they said, well, if the owner approved it, I'm going to go do it. And he didn't stop the bus and say, hey, why'd you approve this with no job file playbook? What ended up happening was they installed the roof, the metal roof, the normal way, the easy way, the cheaper way, and they put it on top of the shingles. Well, what do you think happened when the customer saw this? Put your answer in the chat. Money. Ripping off a brand new metal roof and putting on a brand new metal roof, all for no money, cost $20,000. All you have, you step on enough of these landmines and you see why I say follow the effing process so much because you have enough of these things happen. You don't do this anymore. We have to say, okay, well we require in order for this to be Filled out in order to move a job from contract signed to project sold. Why is there a difference? Because when a project is signed, we get a task to complete our Job File playbook. So we have to do our job File playbook. What is that? And again, you guys can figure out what to do in your own CRMs if you're not in HubSpot. But in HubSpot we have this thing called a job file playbook. And if I make this bigger, you can see that there's some stuff in here because this is probably from the last time I did this, have to answer these questions. So I should probably do a new one. So Clark Kent, I have to fill out his job fall playbook. So if I go here, I also did this one. Okay, I've done this demo a few times. But we have a series of questions we can kind of jump through here. And so in here it's like to start, is there anything that could make this job go bad? How could production lose the five star Google review? And it updates a property called Most Important Job Details. What that means is that there's a property here, right? So these are called properties. So if you've been any of my trainings, you have all the properties associated with the deal. So there's lots of information that's stored in here for all kinds of reasons. But you're seeing the most important stuff over here on the side. And a property is nice because you can insert it in other places. You can reference a property somewhere else. You could copy a property from one place to another property. You can even include it in an email. I don't have a connected inbox here, but you could include a certain property in there. You can, you can pull this piece of information from here and put it somewhere else, which is really important when we consider panning off to production. So in doing my Job File Playbook, what I'm saying is that it's going to go fill out this property, this data field with this, whatever I put into here. So if I said I promised to paint a fence because it was damaged in the hailstorm and in order to get the job, we had to agree to take on this extra work, literally. This happened in Charleston a couple weeks before. I came out to train them on the new HubSpot and we were talking about this and they're like, like getting a fence, like installing a fence, like, it was the joke that kept getting brought up in this TR because this guy in the room agreed to pay for a new fence and the production manager had to go and learn everything there is to know about making fences. So then we say okay, we usually need to collect deposit payments. About 10, 15 customers will cancel a job if no deposit collected. So we want to make sure we get. Our policy is to get this much so we can say can we bill the customer our standard deposit? Yes, bill customer deposit. No, we cannot or yes, the deposits received already? Well if it's yes, bill customer deposit, if we know that we always take 10 to 15% or 50% or 30% or whatever it is. Well, when the deal stage equals approved and this says bill customer deposit, we could have a workflow that generates an invoice in QuickBooks for 15% of the deal amount. Right. And that makes it a little bit faster, a little bit automated because now we have said that yes, we need to bill the customer deposits and that way maybe all accounting does is approve the invoice and send it. But it's already created before even proceeding. Are all the right contacts with this associated with this deal and do they have labels stating who they are? So make if we make this kind of fun, we say yes or no. Have fun guessing who's who. So what we mean by that is that on this deal, and clearly I've demonstrated this before, Clark Kent is the, is the owner, but Tandy Bowen is a family member. And so how I do this, I can go to remove association. So if I go to add a contact to this, I can create a new contact, let's say the tenant. So I can keep track of that. I'm just going to add another contact that's in here. I'll go Bob Broken Roof. And Bob Broken Roof is the tenant. So now we know that Clark Kent's the owner, but Bob Brokenroof is the tenant. So if we're trying to contact somebody about moving the cars out of the driveway, we should probably contact Bob Broken Roof, not Clark Kent because you don't know how good a communication he has with Bob. So I'm going to say yes and I'll say I might put in here Bob is the tenant. Where would the customer like the dumps replace? Very common one. We could say left hand side in front of RV door. Before we go on to what we should be should be doing in this job, is there any exclusions? Right. And so we'll say not doing the flat roof portion. Sort of save two clients of mine at least $10,000 because this happened two times that I was on site. Are there any eyebrows or overhangs they include in the Scope of work. So what I mean by that is this is. This is another landmine is we had a customer, copper, orange. We had a customer who had. Where is something like this? Something like this, right? They had these things over, over the doorways and over the windows. And the roofers showed up and start. Yeah, like stuff like that. And they started ripping off these copper overhangs without asking. And you might be thinking, that's stupid, that's crazy. How'd that happen? Well, a reasonably respectable roofer, someone that people know in the community, just like a couple weeks ago, was in the Roofing Insights Facebook group asking about the 1050, 50 commission and if he should be charging his sales rep back for the losses on a job. Because they. He sold a roof and it was like a 50 square roof or no, like a 30 square something. It was like, yeah, 30 square roof. Roofers showed up, started ripping the roof off the house and turns out the roof, the sales guy sold the pool house in the back. So they went to the right address and you're just thinking like, did they look at company cam? Did they look at the size? Did they not see that there was no bundles on the roof? Like, how did this happen? But it happened. And he's trying to think, well, should I be charging like 10,5050? If we made a lot of profit, sales guy would get that. But now we're not going to lose anything. Should I be taking that out of the profit for the sales guy? And there's this whole hundred comment debate about this whole situation. So this kind of thing happens all the time and I don't know what those things cost, but I know they're not cheap. So we can say not doing copper overhangs on doors and windows. Does the customer have any out of the ordinary requests the production should know about? So another really good example of something like this is. I don't know what you call these things, but it was like a window direction detector ornament. This one of my customers had one of these things right on their roof, right. It was some family heirloom and he was like, I want to make sure that you take this down. It had like a crow on it. So it was very much like this, right? Now, this thing had been in the family for a really long time and it allowed them to see which direction the wind was going. And they liked this thing. And so we had to take it off and then put it back in the same place so they would have this rooster that showed the wind direction. That was just important. To them, it's kind of weird, but I did not. And again, now's the first time I'm seeing what these things cost. And they're a couple hundred bucks, right? It seems like. But it's not a family heirloom anymore. Now it's just something I bought off ebay. Right? And so remove and replace the wind direction thing with the rooster on it. Do not break family heirloom. EPDM rubber roofing is pretty common secondary service. So if you're a market, if you're doing a lot of like sloped and flat, like in Hawaii, very common weathervane. That's what it's called, weathervane. I learned something new today. You have a lot of flat roofs that get done. Sometimes you do them, sometimes you don't. Right? Well, are we doing this or are we annotating it in company camp? So you say, like, is this being. Is this annotated what we're doing in company camp? So not just yes, we're doing it or no idea, but we actually said you have to go into company cam and you have to put in company cam. What are you doing with the flat roof? Because again, $10,000. For $10,000, you can go on company cam and say not doing so. That way when the guys show up and they don't read because these guys didn't even read on the pool house situation is probably somewhere written down. They didn't read. But if you have a picture in company camp that says not doing on the flat roof, they're not going to do the extra work, right? So I'm just going to say no flat roof. What are we doing with the gutters? Cleaning and leaving them. Dropping them. Dropping and reattaching them. Replacing them or nothing. So, okay, we're going to drop and reattach. This happens all the time in some markets, right? Skylights plan. Oh, gosh, here's another one, right? Costs money all the time, right? Remove and reinstall, right? Install new no skylights. Will say, no skylights. Now, this is one place I want to stop. So see where it says update deal, skylights plan. The reason that's important. So if I go back to my deals and I'm going to filter my deals. Oh, see, you can see I've already done this. No skylight. So if I filter my deal. So here what I've done is I filter my deals by skylights plan. Is any of no skylights. So you can see that Clark Kent has no skylights. So if I'm trying to pull A job that I want to move into a scheduled job. Like if I want to pull, I need to fill a spot for whatever reason, Barry canceled. Now I need to get John. Well, I don't want to see all my deals. I only want to see the ones where I have a filter on that says I want ones that do not have any skylights because I want to be able to pull this job forward knowing that I don't have some, you know, super complicated skylights plan. This is super common where we have solar on the roof. Right. A lot of places have solar and the warranty on the solar is void if we, if someone else touches the solar. So you have to wait till the solar provider will come and detach and reset the solar. And so if the solar status like some jobs we like some companies, we have a solar status field where it's like solar status equals they have solar. Right. What company is it? R and R Solar or Tesla? Solar or Solar Tech. Right. And then we have a status for as soon as we get notice from Solar Tech that the solar is removed, then we move the solar status to removed. Now we can only pull jobs that have solar status removed. And so the production liaison, when you get bigger or the production manager's job is to make sure they're keeping in updated as to the status of the solar so we can pull the jobs forward because that leads into the next thing with long lead items. So let's say we did have a skylight, we're installing a new skylight and we have a long lead item like. Yes, right. And we're going to say customer 60 by 22 inch skylight deck mount. How's the customer been informed that these are long lead items? Or does production have to give them the bad news? Because if the customer thinks, oh, so you have a two week time frame. Yep. And they go, great. And then they talk and they go, by the way, replace my skylight? No. Well, can you replace my skylight? Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, we'll replace the skylight. Well then now the customer still thinks we have a two week lead time, so we have to go. Yes, I inform the customer that even though we have a two week lead time, this job is going to take six weeks because it takes four to six weeks to get the custom skylight. What type of ventilation was sold on this job? So again, same kind of deal. How come you put back my vents? I thought I was getting ridge vent. Oh, sorry, you bought the ridge vent upgrade? Yeah, I told the guy. Happens all the time. So we're going to say upgrade to ridge vent. This job require material order other than shingles. So maybe. Yes, it does. Maybe there's something extra that we have to order as a result of this. I'm trying to think of something based on what we said so far other than the skylight, but we could say the flashing is copper because it's close to the ocean and it has to be protected from salt spray. Salt spray, by code, needs copper flashings. Is there a satellite dish? Yes. What are we doing with it? Staying on the roof. We got to put it back. What does the scope of work here? We're doing a roof replacement. This allows us to sort our jobs by roof replacements, section replacements, or repairs. Is the area of work to be completed highlighted in companycam? Yes, it is. And then we get into material types, material colors. Right. Some simple stuff. And then it's the simple things, like, is there any carpentry work? We're replacing 100ft of fascia rotting from no drip edge. How many roof squares is the job? 35. Now, everybody always asks, what should I put in here? The pre. Like the measurement, the squares we're installing, the squares we're tearing. Doesn't really matter as long as you get consistent about what number it is. Is the deal value accurate? Okay, well, the amount is not filled out because I didn't actually sign a sumo quote. So I have to put in here $28,536. Now, when I log this, what happens is we get this nice formatted note and when we create a ticket, it'll automatically associate it to the ticket so that when production does their intake, they're going to come in here and they're going to see, ah, here's my job file playbook. And this is gospel. This is everything that the human being had to enter, but what we can do. So you notice that I didn't put on the primary material colors, right? So if I have, I have Clark Kenton project sold. Now, we get a little more complicated than this, but I'll just show you a quick way to do it. So if I come in here and I require primary material, color is required. If I have Clark Kent and I try and move it to approved, it's going to pop this up and it's going to say primary material color. Now, if I don't have that, now what we actually do is we use something called qualifies for review. Right? Qualifies for review. And this particular property is set so that nobody can edit it besides super admins and sales Managers, so normal salespeople can't edit it. Now, we don't turn this workflow on immediately when we train somebody, not because we want you guys to make these mistakes, but because it's just a little more friction than new people can handle. But we say a workflow that says if. If all of the properties in the playbook. So the workflow is essentially saying if all of these properties. So most important job details is known. Bill deposit is either this or this or this. If all contacts, associate labels, if that property equals yes, not if it equals no. If it equals yes. If the customer special request is known. If this is either yes or no, flat roof, but not this has to be this or this. If this is known. If there's something in here. So it's a bunch of if, if, if, if, if. If all of the answers have. If all these questions have answers, then what the workflow does is it sets the property qualifies for review as yes. If some of the questions are filled out, but not all, it goes to no. And if it's not filled out or never been touched, it's going to be a blank. But if all the questions are answered and the certain questions that have wrong answers are not set, so it's only the right answers, this goes to yes. If I don't set this to yes, I can't save this, because even if I go to this, I can't save this. So if I can't save it and I can't edit this property, then what do I have to do? I have to go fill out my job file playbook. And so this is how we enforce it, because no sales manager should even look at it until it's qualified for peer review. So the only time he gets a task is when it qualifies for review. And once it qualifies for review, he reviews it, slides it over, which it'll be yes at this point, and then they can hit save. And now it's approved, at which point then we create a ticket and the production manager will now look at it, which means that it's a good handoff and all these $10,000 landmines can be avoided. So that's all I have for you guys here today for Class 4 5. I hope that you guys got something from it. Does the job follow Playbook look different when production receives it? The layout? No, when they receive it, Amanda, they're usually going to look at it in terms of the note when production looks at it. When they look at this, right? And this is moved into approved. When they look at this ticket, they're going to have a new ticket that's in production intake. And they're going to go and look at this and they're going to go, okay, here's my job file playbook. So they'll come in here, they'll go look at their company cam link. So they'll click on that and open up their company cam. They're going to go and look at their sumo quote, and they're going to look at this and they're going to say, okay, so this is what was sold. So they're going to review all this. They're going to look at it and they're going to review it because now they know that the sales manager approved this. All I'm doing is making sure the sales manager is doing their job, which they should 90% of the time. So I'm going to say, okay, this looks good. Now I look at the company cam and I think, all right, well, based on the company cam, I'm going to come in here and look and I'm going to say, well, there's not very many pictures. I'll come in here and say, okay, that makes sense. I know what I'm supposed to do. All right, what was sold? So then they'll probably go back to the deal and they'll go to the sumo quote section. They'll say, what was sold? So they might view this and say, okay, I understand what was sold now. So I know it was sold. I know what I'm seeing in the pictures. I know what we've promised the customer. Great. Now on my ticket, because they're going to live over here in their ticket, they're going to go, okay, I'm going to call the customer. Hey, I'm thinking I could get you done on the second week of September. And they'll go, great, that works for me. So then they'll schedule their. Their install, right? And now we've finished scheduling the job and it'll move to scheduled. And now our deal is our deal and our ticket is good. So then no more landmines, no more mistakes, no more calling the sales guy, asking them, what, what color were the gutters?