Buyers and Builders
00:15:04 · Sam Allsopp, Mikk
[00:15:04] S1: Yes. They've changed. They've gotten maybe a little... We have more data now. Right? So, like, moving one KPI a few points just does a lot more than it used to. You know, when you're bringing in 10 leads a day and your booking rate goes up 2%, 3%, like it's not moving the needle a ton. Right? So maybe booking rate wasn't as much of a focus as it is now. Yeah. KPIs, I mean, you're... You need to know your average ticket, your close rate, your booking rate, your cost per lead, cost per opportunity, we call it, sits right above a demo, your demo rate, your sales capacity, how many appointments can you actually run. You wanna go do this big revenue target, but can you even run that many appointments without, you know, kinda cannibalizing your your close rate. Your production capacity, same thought process around the sales capacity, we wanna do this much revenue, can we even do it? Do we have enough field supervisors, project managers? Is our business services team built out to be able to support that. So, yeah, you're definitely getting at this stage a lot more in the weeds, and it's and it's just daily feedback and then tracking those KPIs and making sure that you're on track. [00:16:08] S0: Now when it comes to competition on this space, what maybe shows shows the the fact that the competition has been going up? Is it is it customer acquisition cost? Is it is it something else? What have you seen? Can you give us some data?
00:16:22 · Sam Allsopp
[00:16:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, like, definitely, just in general more competition. Right? There's more... I believe, I don't have the data to support this, but my my gut says that there's definitely more roofing companies out there now. Just in my market, there's some private equity comp... Backed companies. There's some companies that were maybe sub $1,000,000 in revenue for forty years, and then some guy, you know, went and bought them, and he's trying to run a playbook to grow it and then sell it to a private equity company. Right? So, like, it's definitely getting more competitive, and then inevitably, that's going to drive up, you know, lead cost and and marketing spend. You know, for us though, it just kind of forced us to get more creative and try to hold everything pretty constant. Maybe it's a little bit more work, and we have to be, like I said, a little more creative, but, you know, I'm not sitting here like... I think anything that anyone does, like, there's going to be competition. So I don't think that it's necessarily something that should deter people from doing something like this. Start a clothing company, you start a roofing company, you start an HVAC, you start a SaaS tech comp... Like, there's always gonna be competition. Do I think that it was maybe you could go get $20 Facebook leads when we first started versus now maybe a 120? Like, yeah, definitely. But, that's all all the more reason to get better with with your booking rate and increase your close rate and try to, you know, kinda neutralize that that increased cost and leads.
00:17:52 · Mikk, Sam Allsopp
[00:17:52] S0: How have been the the the marketing channels over the years? Door to door, Facebook ads, I don't know, Instagram, TikTok. Can you share more about about this? How has it changed? How many of those are you doing today? What hasn't been working well? [00:18:06] S1: You know, I I started with Facebook ads, and then I went on a little bit of a hiatus. We actually dropped it for a few years because I was just convinced that, you know, it wasn't performing as well. We actually recently brought it back and it's doing really well. It's more about the creative and the kind of nurturing process pre appointment, you know, whatever your tech stack you're using. Are you sending out confirmations? Are you sending out a VSL, videos? Are you kind of like building the hype for that appointment to get them to stick? So, I mean, that's just specific to Facebook, but, I mean, we're we're on like everything. So if you named a aggregator or, you know, whether it's PPC, LSA, Facebook ads, all the main aggregators that you can think of, we're on all of them, and that's kind of what I was saying earlier. It's like a lot of it is just looking... Because it changes month over month a ton, so it's really just making sure that you're allocating your advertising budget properly into channels that are getting you the best return on your ad spend. But it's it's everything, man. It's it's... We're we're literally on every channel, and we're constantly looking for new channels to add and test out.
00:19:15 · Mikk
[00:19:15] S0: I was doing a bit of research. Maybe I was right. You mentioned something that once a lead comes in, takes it thirty seconds for your team to get back to them. Has it always been like this? Is it is it required in order to grow for you so fast? And and maybe you can overall explain once a lead comes in, maybe you can walk us through what's... What happens next.
00:19:36 · Sam Allsopp
[00:19:36] S1: Yeah. And I think a lot of people, you know, just kind of blanket state. Right? Like, speed to lead is important. Right? Speed to lead, it's gonna increase your booking rate. It's gonna... And you might be wondering why. Like, think about the customer journey if you're filling out a lead form on Angie's. Right? You put in your information, and all of a sudden you have... And everyone has done this. Right? All of sudden you're getting texts, you're getting calls. The person that reaches out first is going to... And say they want three quotes. The first three people that reach out and connect with them are the ones that are going to be able to go, have them, you know, attempt to sell that job. The people that call two days later, three days later, four days later, they're just ignoring the call because they've already gotten their three estimates. Right? So it's it's especially important if you're running a big portion of your budget to, you know, I say aggregators, but, you know, these lead sources where there might be multiple people trying to reach out to these leads and book these appointments. Was it always that way? Absolutely not. You know, we we weren't even tracking speed to lead, to be honest, until a few years in. And, again, it's kinda one of those data points where it's like, hey, we we need to... We're doing so much more volume that increasing booking rate by 5% is going to move the needle a ton and drive a lot more revenue. So it's definitely something worth building out and and getting the right tech stack into the company to to be able to do that consistently. Whether it's a phone call or a text, yeah, we are reaching out within a minute.
00:21:00 · Mikk, Sam Allsopp
[00:21:00] S0: What happens to a lead when when they don't answer? They don't answer a call, they don't answer your your email, what's next? [00:21:07] S1: We do have a cadence that we run, whether it's phone call, text, email, voicemail drops. When it gets to a certain point, it goes to a stage in our CRM where it's just they get nurtured and, you know, maybe they eventually convert, but am I having my in house team focus on leads that came through ten days ago? No. But that's just because of the volume that we we currently have coming through. Right? But we know that we're much more likely to convert leads if they're earlier in their in their life cycle in our CRM. So we're mostly working, you know, kind of the newer stuff. We dish out some of our leads to, like, an appointment... A third party appointment setting team. Like, they can kinda go in and and pull some more out that we didn't quite get to. But, yeah, I mean, having that process set up is is super, super, super important. You know, everyone can go spend more money, but if you've got leaks in the business, it's just pointless. [00:22:04] S0: There are those AIs, chatbots, you name it. What do you think and what do you see? Like, what should a roofing company automate versus what they should keep human?