Adam Sand argues roofing companies lose money when canvassers hand off leads to outside salespeople. Keep canvassing constant like a paid ad channel, feeding steady appointments to your sales team. Treat door-to-door as a full-time job, not a side task.
So many times I hear from salespeople that, oh, I got these people signed on contingency and then they said they wanted to think about it, or they're switching and going with another contractor. We lost the deal 'cause the other guy said he was gonna pay the deductible, probably. That's what they did. Yeah. If the canvasser knocks on the door and the customer agrees to an appointment, so then they reach inside outside sales, they book the appointment, there's a chance that they could change their mind and cancel. There's also a chance that another canvasser could come along and sign 'em up. We lose deals because we don't sign 'em up and we lose deals even if we sign 'em up, is the point I'm trying to make. There's an attrition, there's a conversion rate deprecation that happens both ways. Which one allows you to get the most volume? The one that allows you to get the most volume is the one where there's canvassers constantly canvassing that don't slow down the customer acquisition effort because now they've got a couple of deals underway. The minute that sales guy gets a couple deals, he stops canvassing for 2 weeks. Meanwhile, there's a lot more doors to be canvassed. How much more money could everybody make if we just treated it like Facebook ads or like Google Ads and we just said like, no, we is full-time and we've got sales appointments coming into the salespeople non-stop, and the sales guys don't get to decide when they want to stop because there's more canvassing leads being generated every day by the canvassing team. That's the point I'm trying to make, is which one allows you to forever do it. Canvassing is a career for some people. They enjoy it and they do it full-time. They like the idea that they don't have to see everything through, that they're just there to generate opportunities for the business, and then they get kind of like the quick cash without even caring if necessarily the insurance company buys the roof, because their whole goal is to just generate opportunities for the sales team, get claims filed.
