Adam Sand, CEO of The Roofing Business Partner, explains why roofing companies abandon their CRMs within 1.5 to 2 years. Poor adoption, lack of internal ownership, and insufficient support create a cycle where teams stop trusting the data and switch back to spreadsheets. He argues for continuous prioritization and an internal CRM owner instead of hiring external 'CRM babysitters'.
Every year, thousands of roofing companies fall into what we call the CRM doom loop and they don't even know it's happening until it's too late. I'm Adam Sand, CEO of the roofing business partner. In this video, I'll break down exactly why your CRM fails and how you can finally fix adoption support data, trust and fragility before you end up buying another new system next year.
Why do CRMs fail to meet the hopes of what we have in them? The number one reason every time is adoption, right? We just, you don't use it. There's going to be sales guys who are really, really, really good at sales and they're really, really, really bad at following the CRM process. It's super, super common. Owners are another super common like target on this one. The owners are like, I don't need to use Xero because no one needs to hold me accountable because I'm the owner. I'm going to do the right thing. But usually our team is counting on us following the process. And so owners, we're terrible, we're naturally terrible at adopting the processes because we're usually just trying to make it so other people will do those things. The second reason they become fail because they become fragile. The other thing is that we start lack prioritization. We don't prioritize continuously updating, adapting the CRM to meet the needs of the business. We don't view prioritization of the CRM as part of the process of evolving the business. So as visionaries, you will get an idea of something you want to do. You could build 70% of that bridge from your idea to the rest of the company. You can build that bridge. You can get 70% of the way there without touching the CRM. But generally if this has to do with customers and sales and production, you see CRM is going to touch it. But if we don't prioritize, how is this going to work in the CRM? How are we going to measure it? How are we going to track it? How are we going to hold people accountable to it? How are we going to make sure we understand the differentiation and how we deal with our customers? If we don't prioritize that, then what happens is the CRM starts to break down. It contributes to the fragility. Another common reason for CRMs failing is support. Like if you try and call HubSpot, you get a different rep every time because they have a customer support team and that customer support team doesn't usually know your business. So if you're relying on the CRM support, usually that's going to come up short because that person doesn't know your business at all. They'll have like 10,000, 80,000 roofing companies on their system. When you're counting on support for that, they might not know your business or your unique go to market approach. If you're not a customer of rbps, you really want to have an expert inside your company on the CRM who that is their job, right? You need to have someone in your company who is your data administrator. And then that leads into the next thing, which is the data. We start to not trust the data and then if we don't trust it, then why do we even put anything in there? So usually you want to simplify as much as makes sense. Try and just focus on getting a few right things in there and then gradually ratchet it up. So when we look at why CRMs fail, it's what creates this doom loop, right? And you as a business owner want to be watching for these early signs so you don't fall into the CRM doom loop. Because generally the implementation of a CRM takes about six months. We've got it like kind of down to three. The most effective implementations, it's about three. But typically customers to really, to feel really confident in their CRM takes about six months. Now we provide a lot of additional support, that's why we get there. But then you go into a period of decreasing usage and then you go into the shopping phase. So in many cases what will happen is you will get to October, you'll switch CRMs, right? October, November, December, January, February, April. All of a sudden you're in the busy season, you get decreasing usage, you don't have people in the company who are good at the CRM. You have a lack of accountability around using the CRM. That starts happening and then about a year and a half to two years later, you're back in the market in January or February going, oh, we need a new cr. I mean my business looks at this, right? Like we lose deals to customers and then a year and a half, two years later those customers come back and then they buy from us because they went through the CRM doom loop. So they were shopping, didn't choose to buy us. Implemented two years later, they're coming back shopping again. We've recognized this from our own customer buyer behavior. As the industry goes, we've seen this play out in Facebook groups. If you just go into any Facebook group for roofers, same thing, someone Says, what CRM is the best CRM? And this question gets asked about three times a month. So this is a common problem. It's not any particular CRM's fault. It's these things start happening. And I'll show you how it starts. The first thing, it starts with hiring an admin. Now the problem is that admin isn't what we think of as like a data administrator or a super admin. You hire a CRM babysitter. The companies that go into the CRM doom loop, this is one of the first steps is you go, the CRM's a mess, you guys all suck at it. I'm hiring you all an assistant, you know what I mean? And you get this like CRM babysitter. This is really the sales manager as a piece of the role. The production manager has a piece of the role, the owner has a piece of the role, the accounting team has a piece of the role. They're the babysitters, the leaders in the company. You don't hire a babysitter. That's a sign that these other five points that we talked about earlier, right? That's a sign that this stuff is already happening. Because you think, oh, this data doesn't work. So then you hire the babysitter. Then the other thing that'll happen next is usually the CRM is going to get an update. Like HubSpot is constantly putting out updates every single month. But when the CRM gets an operate, sometimes it's just going to break something. And so then reports stop being accurate. And so the answer that a lot of people have is, oh, get a spreadsheet. We're just going to take this data out of the CRM, we're going to put into a spreadsheet, we're going to have all this stuff go into a column and then we're going to have a function or we're going to have a calculation, or we're going to try and smash these two spreadsheets together. And then we're going to do that. Now we're just out of the CRM. We're not using it, we're not fixing it, we're not prioritizing it. And then new users don't get proper training because as the spreadsheet starts to come in, so a new user would not get the right training, which means the spreadsheets would either not have good data or wouldn't even be known about or being used. And then there'd be no documentation on the process. Because as the process changes, the CRM is not updated. So in many cases it's like you have no documentation on your process, and as that process changes over time, the CRM is not updated to match that process process. And then if we don't have any documentation now, the CRM doesn't line up on our training, so then it doesn't work the way that it's intended to.
