Adam Sand shows roofing owners how referrals get stuck with individual sales reps instead of building the company brand. He proposes paying the whole team—crew, supervisors, coordinators—to drive referrals, and shares Capili Roofing's "Just the Tip" program, which pays reps $50 per thank-you package to lock referrals into the brand.
Most roofing business owners think a charismatic sales rep is their greatest asset for referrals. But what happens when the customer falls in love with the rep instead of your company? Here is how to bulletproof your brand's referral engine. So the goal is to create a business that gets referrals, not sales reps that get referrals, because I don't necessarily want my sales reps to own the entire relationship with the customer. Because my business partner, he was the roofer, but he would get referrals from the customers that he was installing roofs for. He would do a roof for Lakeside Roofing and then he would make nice with the homeowner, and then the homeowner would just like him more than the company and give the referral to Joe. And then Joe is doing a side job. I see this story play out every single day where sales reps get that. So I want to kind of create a business to get referrals, not salespeople to get referrals. The function would be that the company would get the referral. I want the referrals for the brand. People refer brands all the time, like generational referrals go to Ford and Chevy and Toyota and Honda. Referrals exist for a brand all the time. There's a way to design the experience for the customer in such a way that they would refer the brand. And that would be a function of the site supervisor and the production manager or coordinator, if you have it, who is communicating with the homeowner. Idea being that everybody in the company is driving towards customer acquisition so that everybody would earn a referral. The sales rep would earn the referral. The production person who is calling and booking the appointment and following up for the money would get the referral. The site supervisor would get referral. Even the crews can kind of drive that. Like, if you see a kid do the window, like, smile and wave. When you see somebody walking up the street, like, wave and say hello. Like, always be in customer acquisition mode. Now, if the outside sales wants to drive referrals, if the site supervisors are not skilled in that way yet, if the inside sales are not phoning to ask for the Google review and creating a point of contact for the referral, and you really want the outside sales to get that without necessarily going back to the job, then it's simply a matter of like creating an environment where they could do that. The way that Capili Roofing did it is they did what they called Just the Tip. Tip means thank you package, T-Y-P. Outside sales would get scheduled in Arrivi to go drop off a thank you package, and they would get paid like $50 for every thank you package they went and dropped off. It's more work, but it's effective. So those are two ways to go about it.
