The Secret to Roofing Production Efficiency: HubSpot Task Manager
Adam Sand shows how HubSpot's task manager helps roofing crews work faster by batching similar jobs instead of jumping between tasks. He walks through setting up task queues and workflows so a production team tackles installs in order, materials orders together, and follow-ups as a group, cutting the slowdown from constant context switching.
Chapters
Foreign. So in HubSpot you have this really cool thing. You go CRM and you hit tasks and you can jump in. And this is kind of for every role. So you kind of, you have your tasks, your all tasks, your overdue tasks. And the beauty of it is like what people do is they tend to look at a list of tasks and they kind of scroll up and down and they go, oh crap, I forgot to do this. Send out the video. And so then they'll go, you know, open this task or whatever. And I don't like that because what this does is you start to cherry pick what you're supposed to do, right? You start to kind of say, oh, I'm going to go do this. But yesterday you took care of today you and put these in a certain order because these are sorted by when they're due, by date and time. So what up spot has is the ability to say, okay, let's start our 20 tasks. So it puts this little screen up here. And then I have everything I need because I'm in the contact, right? So I've got everything I need to kind of work on this. If I had to like go through and get started. And then I have my associated tickets, I got my associated deals, I've got my playbooks. So whatever this task tells me I'm supposed to do, I can then do. And I can, so I can make a call or I can email or whatever, but then I can either reschedule it for tomorrow. Let's say I can't do this right now, or I complete it. I don't like skipping. I wish that I could eliminate this button here. What's either reschedule or complete. But when I complete the task, then it goes to the next one. Now I have to again associate this because these are just a bunch of dummy tasks. So then it would just jump immediately to this task because you would never have a task not associated with a contact. So then, same thing. I have another task I can either reschedule or hit complete. This is the first order of efficiency is I don't keep going, okay, I did this task back. CRM tasks come in here, look at my list. So scroll up and down, you know, pick this one, go do this task, complete it, come back, pick another one. You know, no, it's just all it is is you just come up here and say, yesterday me told today me what to do. So I'm just going to jump in and click and start my 19 tasks. That's the first order of efficiency is not Having to back cherry pick, do, back, cherry pick, do, back, cherry pick two. You just do. So. So this will actually be better to demonstrate with the iPad. So like I was saying, in any job role you're going to have tasks assigned. So if we just focus in on deals, for example, right? You have a create a deal. Well, maybe you have to order the member, you have to order the measurements, you have to create the company cam. You have to schedule the appointment like there's tasks, right? And then when you have contracts sent, you're going to follow up, follow up, follow up and then you sign. You're going to have to do your job file playbook. You're going to have to update some information, right? When you get a job file playbook completed, the sales manager has to read it, he has to approve it, right? There's different tasks. Same thing with production, right? They have a new lead. You got to review the job file playbook. You got to look at the number of squares, got to look at the company cam. You got to ultimately call a order of materials schedule, call the customer, tell them, hey, does the second week of October work for you? They're going to say, yes, you're going to schedule it. There's certain tasks, right? When install is complete, you're going to have to review the pictures, you're going to have to review the change orders, you have to update the deal amount. You're going to have to get everything ready for invoicing. So if we just simplify this and say that a production manager in his day has several workflows. So if we color code this, we'll have our blue tasks, which has steps 1, 2 and 3. Then we have our green tasks, which has steps 1, 2, 3, 4. Then we have our red tasks that are steps 1 and 2. And then we have our yellow tasks, just 1, 2, 3, 3, 4 and 5. So these are the things we have to do. And if we watch the behavior of a production manager, especially if they do this task playing view, because there's going to be different things. So they're going to say, okay, I'm going to set my tasks and how it's how their, their flow of the day. So if we look at their like their day. So this is 8am, this is 4pm if they're living in a dream world, well, they're going to go blue, green, red, red, yellow, blue, blue, red, green or blue, green, yellow, yellow, yellow, red, red, green. And what you're seeing is what might seem fairly obvious, but because if you guys have Been through my inside sales training. You remember my ABC 1, 2, 3 test and the Kohl's notes on that is if I ask you to go count from A to J. So you've used right now A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, right? That takes two seconds. If I get you to go from 1 to 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Takes you two seconds. But if I tell you to go a 1, b 2, right, you're gonna go a 1, b 2, c 3, d 4, e 5, f 6, g 7, h 8, I 9, j 10. All of a sudden that takes 11, 20 to 14 seconds. And sometimes you make mistakes. The reason being is that most people make it to E5, and then their brain has to go A2F and then go plus 6. So they have to go ABCD, F6, ABCD, FG, G7. They have to do that in their heads. That's called context switching. Proven thing about humans is that we suck at context switching. We're better at at doing repetitive tasks. It almost becomes like a working meditation. So the goal is to say, okay, well, let's figure out the smartest way to group our work. So let's do our four blues. Then let's do our 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 reds. Then let's do our three greens. Then let's do our three yellows. Well, now all of a sudden, we finish it in less time. And now there is extra time in our day to complete this because we did what's called batch work. Another thing you could think of it as is an assembly line. But you're not hiring factory workers who are just putting a bolt. You have people. Your production manager is doing a lot more. He is the factory, not the worker. So what he has to do is deploy himself in batches of work where he says, from this time to this time, I do my job file playbooks, because some of these then become reds. Well, now I actually got two more reds to fit in here because I took two of these turned into reds. He does all his reds. And then because he scheduled jobs well, now he ended up getting a bunch more greens because he had to get all he has to order all these materials. And so then, because he's ordered all those materials, now he can go into scheduling jobs or, like managing jobs or like kind of working with crews. And it fills in his day because it's an order of work. So in HubSpot, we create what's called a queue. So queue is a queue of things to be Done right. So install complete review for billing or job files to complete. So each one of these tasks, any tasks I can put in here, I can say okay. And we do this with workflows. We can say, okay, fill in job file playbook. So currently that's not on a queue, but a job file playbook should technically be job files to complete. So we add that to the queue and so then now it doesn't show up on my all list, but it is going to show up on my job file playbooks list if I have any there. So now what I can do. So as a salesperson I would have my post inspection follow ups. So I would start those eight tasks. Then I do my job. Now sometimes when I do post inspection follow ups, somebody is going to buy see if we can match 15,240. That was my task. So when I can get to this task I go, oh, we can match 15,240. So I say, hey Mr. Customer, yes, we can match 15,240. They say great, I'll sign right now. So they sign. So what happens by completing that signature? They're going to move into my job files to complete. So not only am I going to have this one, but I'm also going to have this one here move into my job files to complete. So we have all these views that we've created that allow us to kind of keep our flow of work in order to. So then because then a sales manager is going to review those job file playbooks, salesman is going to review them. Then the production manager is going to have intake and they're going to have to do their intake. Then they're going to have materials to order. Then they'll have jobs that are two days out. Then they'll have completed jobs where they have tasks so they batch their work together. Again, this is just a demo account, but I wanted to kind of show you guys what you can do. And whenever you're in any business and in like any CRM, if you can find a way to create task queues or task types to batch your work together, this allows you to do. What I was just drawing before was the ability to create that flow of work. And so it's very simple to do. We would just go into our manager queues and we create these. So we have like follow ups. Install complete review for billing job files to complete materials to order post inspection follow up sales manager job file playbooks review unscheduled jobs, production liaison jobs two days out. So this is install day, a workflow basically says, when the install day is two days away, set a task for the production liaison to call the customer to say, hey, your job's two days out. You should probably know. And so that way, they have their own views and their own cues. And this allows us to go from having a big, giant list of bunch of things to do to saying, being able to queue it up not just by assignee, but by flow of work so that we don't have to go step 1, 2, 3, 4. Then green task, then red tasks, and blue tasks and green tasks, then red task, then yellow, then yellow, yellow, yellow, green, green, blue, red, green. We batch our work together, and it makes us a second order of magnitude of efficiency that we create.
