Switching Your Roofing CRM? Here’s Why It Keeps Failing

Foreign. Like many things, there's a million ways to do things right sometimes. And it can be an easy way. Place to start is to not doing things wrong. So what I mean by that is there's a thousand ways you can make your marriage work. But I'm pretty, pretty sure if you get drunk and put your wife, your marriage is not going to work Sometimes ways to figure out that if you just don't do the things that ruin it and just do the opposite of those things, that's a great way to try and see what are the actual ingredients of success, if that makes any sense. I think it's important. Before we start, like with what you can do, let's talk about what you shouldn't do or why CRMs fail. And as I probably alluded to at the beginning, the number one thing is adoption. If you don't get adoption, then all of a sudden things stop. Things stop working. What you expect to be there isn't there. And then it starts to become fragile, right? In that it's very easy to break the CRM or get roadblocks. You start removing roadblocks, you start removing constraints that are there to create healthy friction, to ultimately make it so you follow your process better. So what I mean by that is if you're going to open up a McDonald's, if you went and bought a franchise, well, they're going to tell you to make the burgers a certain way, they're going to tell you to hire the certain kind of people, they're going to tell you to make the coffee a certain way, they're going to tell you how to greet the customer, they're going to tell you what the layout of the store should be. They have all these proven success formulas. And if you said, well, the burger is like, we put the bun, then we put the lettuce, then we put the cheese, then we put the burger, then we put the, know the tomatoes and the pickles and the like, whatever the order is of putting it together. If you were not getting good adoption of that and you're like, hey guys, just put, like put vegetables and meat and cheese in a bun in a bag, right? Well, the product quality would start to go down, right? Because you made ultimately your business fragile by making your CRM fragile. So then you're trying to figure out, well, we don't have a way to prioritize what we should focus on our CRM because you can't trust that it's going to be followed anyways. And so you're trying to figure out, well, what other tools do we need? So you start trying to get all these things to plug into it, and then because you have all these things that are trying to plug into it, then you have a lack of support, right? You don't, you can't get an equal level of support from say, sales rabbit as you can from the job Nimbus or HubSpot or CompanyCam or Sumoquote, right? You're really reliant on all of these teams being willing to work with each other. And then ultimately when you get bad data in your CRM, you just stop using it and it just becomes this thing that you're pushing your customers through rather than feeling like it's pulling your business. And in the macro, this is where the CRM doom loop starts. And you want to watch for something like this in your business, which is that you have an implementation period, which is where you're implementing your CRM over about six months. Then you have this period of 18 to 24 months of decreasing usage. And I've watched this happen with our own clients, which is why we've implemented things like the monthly check ins, the quarterly business reviews, annual renewals, because we're trying to maintain the quality of our builds over time. And I've watched as customers are in here for 12 months or something and all of a sudden all the processes start to fall apart and we have to go back and be like, no, remember this, remember this, remember this. But if you don't manage it and you have this decreasing usage period where those five things start happening, well, then you go CRM shopping for a couple of months. So that's what's going to happen here in October. I'm counting on it. It's as sure as the rain's coming and the snow's coming, which is that people start saying, what's the best CRM in the roofing Facebook groups? And then they start to make business decisions by votes from people who have biased opinions, people who have the wrong opinions, or people who are in such a vastly different position than you that you shouldn't be taking their opinion and making business decisions on it. And I won't get into the biased and the wrong. I'll just take the difference in position. So we talk about our breakpoints or our income bands that every roofing company has to go through, which you have to know where you lie in here and what is the problem to be solved. Because sometimes people try and solve a people problem with a technology, right? Or vice versa. They try and solve a technology Problem with people and their revenue per capita goes down. So a rule of thumb is you want to make $650,000 in revenue for every $85,000 in payroll, right? So 650,000 revenue per capita, right. That includes sales commissions, by the way. In there you're gonna have your income bands that you're gonna go through. So from 0 to 3 million, you're really just finding service market fit. You're just a startup. Not just a startup, but you are a startup and you're getting your service market fit from there. From 3 to 8 million, it's, it's no longer about what do you do, but who does it, right? You have to duplicate the human DNA that, that made you get to 3 million. And you're really creating your processes at this point. So why do we sell CRMs to 3 to 8 million dollars companies? Because one of the hardest parts about setting up your systems and processes that made you successful to 3 million is having a system in which to manage them. Then this is also kind of feeds into the CRM doom loop, which we'll get into a second, but then you get 8 to 15. And now you're figuring out how to grow the company. And so now it's the how. And this is where you start to develop core leadership in the company. Because at 8 million, if you're doing 650,000 revenue per capita, well, you've got like 13, 14 employees. It starts to get really hard to be a great leader to that many people as a direct report. And so that's where you have to set up court leadership. And it goes on and on and on and on all the way up. And I paid a lot of money to a consulting firm to get access to all this information because they, it's like a, basically a $200,000 study on the roofing industry that we did that delivered us a bunch of this information. Now from there we have to think again. How does the doom loop start? So we're going to get into some cool HubSpot stuff in a sec. But I want to talk about if you're trying to use technology, right? If you came here to say, what are some cool things I can do with my CRM? It's important to understand where you might be in this decreasing usage phase. So usually the first stage of the CRM doom loop is where you hire an admin. Essentially you get a CRM babysitter, right? Someone whose, whose job it is to just babysit the CRM and to yell at people for not putting their damn notes in the damn CRM. Then usually a CRM software will get some kind of update. This happens to us in HubSpot all the time. Time, right? I mean, if we go and look at HubSpot here for a quick half a second and I go up here and go into product updates, we're just going to filter this down by AI@chat spot. So we're just going to go into chat spot AI and just if I go to page four, I'm on August 26th. Okay, this is the live one. So this isn't in beta. Are coming soon. And you just look and you see like there's constant updates coming to the software, which is the point I'm trying to make, is that the software is continuously updating with new features. And so these new features are generally created based on the users giving feedback to the people who make it. So you want to be taking advantage of those things. But then things start to break because you're not treating this like a piece of factory equipment that requires maintenance, that requires you to be looking and saying, hey, how can we make this little piece of factory equipment work better? So when you don't, then things start to break. When things start to break, people stop necessarily, they don't use the button or this data exists in the wrong place. And so then reports stop being accurate. If you have inaccurate data, then you start to go, oh, you know what I'll do, I'm going to export this stuff and make a rogue spreadsheet. So then you start manipulating data in that spreadsheet. And ultimately now your CRM is not the place that you go for the right data. And then new users don't get proper training, right? So you stop. So now the new users get like this kind of watered down version of the training. And so now even the spreadsheets have bad data because they're not, they're not even seeing the importance of entering certain information because there's nowhere in the CRM where that data becomes relevant because somewhere in the company is just exporting it to a spreadsheet that they don't see. And finally you have no documentation on process. And as process changes, the CRM is not updated to match that process. And now the CRM doesn't line up with the training that we were doing. And I've seen this happen where for example, a client that was on HubSpot and then they went to Market Sharp and then they went to Jobnimbus and then they came back to HubSpot and so they went through the doom loop here. They went through the doom loop here. They went through the doom loop here. So the tool does not matter as much as the process, and the process does not matter as much as adoption. This is why it's so important to understand this.