In this video, Adam Sand, CEO of The Roofing Business Partner, outlines a set of practical levers that roofing businesses can pull to dramatically reduce lead acquisition costs and improve sales effectiveness. He first explains marketing levers: raising content and media quality, hiring experienced ad managers, fineātuning audience targeting, optimizing existing assets versus creating new ones, and expanding omnipresence through retargeting on multiple platforms. He then connects these marketing actions to commission levers: providing or requiring tools (vehicles, ladders, devices) to affect salesperson overhead, improving lead quality to lower commission payouts, clearly defining scope of work and ādefinition of doneā to align compensation, and establishing proven training pathways that let inexperienced hires become productive salespeople at lower commission rates. Throughout, Sand emphasizes that each lever can be adjusted independently or in combination to lower variable costs (commissions) while maintaining or boosting revenue, offering a roadmap for roofers to achieve higher ROI on advertising spend.
Chapters
Struggling with high ad costs and low sales? What if you could flip levers to slash expenses and boost results? I'm Adam Sand, CEO of The Roofing Business Partner. Today you'll discover proven marketing and commission levers that transform your roofing business, from content upgrades to smarter targeting and commission structures. Let's dive in.
Well, what are the levers that we can pull in marketing to make our costs go down or our effectiveness go up or get the scale that we're looking for? All right, well, what is the quality of our content? If we want our effectiveness per dollar of ads being paid for that are being put out on social media, if we want that effectiveness to go up or our cost per view or our cost per lead or our cost per click to go down, then that quality of our content and media has to go up. We have to say the content has to be better. It's like you go from black and white TV to color TV. The channels that had color shows got more people watching them than the black and white shows because people wanted to watch TV in color. If a movie sucks, well then people don't watch it, right? You have to increase the quality of the content in some way. The quality of the content in terms of its ability to engage a human being and target the behavior of keeping them watching has been hacked. But then there's also the experience of the management. Who is managing the ads? How much experience do they have? So if you hire somebody out of some foreign country who it's their first time running ads and they're charging you $5 an hour, well, your cost is low, but their effectiveness might also be low. You could spend more and potentially get more effectiveness, but then you have to think how much time do they spend on your ads. Then there's also targeting. You could narrow your targeting and reach more higher density of a particular prospect, but then potentially lower the volume. You could increase or widen the window of your targeting, but potentially reach people that you don't want to reach. Then there's optimization of current content versus creation of new content. Sometimes you don't need to create something new. You need to optimize what you have. There's a lot of people who talk about repurposing blog content. Content or updating blog content as being more effective than simply creating new blog content. You can optimize existing stuff versus creating new. These are levers that you can pull. And then there's omnipresence, just being in more places. If you are retargeting people who visit your website on Facebook and that works well, then maybe you should also be retargeting people on TikTok, Snapchat, and Google Display. So you might have to again create content or optimize your content for another platform. And the targeting is the same, it's people who visited your website. The management experience just has to know like how to promote on that particular platform. And you want to make sure that before you do any of that, you figured out that the quality of the content and media is getting the result that you're looking for. So these are levers that you can pull in marketing. Now there's also levers that you can pull in commissions. So you could be using company versus employee-supplied tools and enablement to sell. So if you say, hey, you got to bring your own vehicle, your own ladder, you got to have your own computer and your phone and your own data plan, well, then now they're required to pay for these tools, and then they kind of get the equity of owning those tools and be capable of doing that. If they have a truck that they can put 30-foot extension ladder on, they can inspect more roofs than the person who shows up driving a Chrysler 200. So if you provide those things, well, then you might first of all open yourself up to talent that doesn't have the capital to invest in those things right away. So maybe they're amazing talent and they're willing to work for less commissions as long as they have no input costs. Then lead quality. If the leads are garbage, you have to pay more. If the leads are good, you can pay less. So choosing to pull the right levers in marketing can also allow you to pull a lever in commissions where you can say, hey, you could work anywhere else, but our leads are better. It's easier to sell for you than the next company. You get to pay less commission because you took the fixed cost upfront in building the brand, which makes reduction in your variable cost, which is your commission. There's also the scope of work and definition of done. What exactly is required from a salesperson in your company. If you have an inside sales rep, well then you can pull down the commission because inside sales is taking on a scope of that work. The definition of done could be you have to run the job, order the materials, you know, be there to meet the crew, get the check, quality control or quality assurance the job, meet with the adjusters, all that kind of stuff. If you have more work to do and it's longer until your job is defined as done, you're probably going to pay more commissions than if you say have a site supervisor who will do it for a lower incremental costs. This is all ties into the roles and responsibilities as well as the training that's provided. If you have a proven pathway to success and you can turn a person who knows nothing into a quality salesperson, you can generally have a lower commission rate because you have a proven pathway to success and you can take people without experience and turn them into good salespeople. But if you don't have that, then you have to hire people with experience and then they set the rules.
