Adam Sand argues that roofing companies should hire full-time canvassers instead of part-timers or commission-only workers. Dedicated door-to-door teams create a steady pipeline of appointments and reduce turnover by treating canvassing as a scalable marketing channel, like Facebook ads, rather than a side hustle.
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, going with another contractor. We lost the deal because the other guy said he was going to 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 them up. We lose deals because we don't sign them up and we lose deals even if we sign them up. Is the point I'm trying to make is 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 two 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 can canvas 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.
