Buyers and Builders
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?
00:22:04 · Mikk, Sam Allsopp
[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? [00:22:12] S1: That first touch, that first phone call, we we like that to be human. I think what we've kind of outsourced a lot is the... Kind of that, like, repetitive consistent follow-up, especially through SMS. That can that can be outsourced to to AI or to, you know, an appointment setting software, whether that's built out within your CRM or you're using a a third party that specializes in that. The SMS and the email cadence is mostly for us handled by automation. The outbound phone calls and answering the inbound phone calls, we've kept that to be our our in house real humans. You know, we think that that's gonna book a better appointment. AI's coming pretty far and you've got, you know, your voice receptionist and maybe half the people can tell it's AI and half can't at this point, but we'd prefer to, for as long as we can, to keep that a human touch. I think it just helps a ton with the with the quality of the appointment and just their their overall experience from their first touch to last touch with the company. [00:23:15] S0: Now let's move forward when it comes to building this sales organization and maybe getting you to share this practical sales management playbook. Again, there has been different stages, but how is the sales team structured today? And maybe you can again share how has it been over different stages and what have you learned?
00:23:37 · Sam Allsopp
[00:23:37] S1: Yeah. I mean, when we first started, we didn't even know it's kind of embarrassing to say, but like, didn't even have constraints around like how they could price the job. We were just pricing it per square. There were no, you know, they were paid a percent on the total job and, you know, they can kinda... It's it's actually scary that they have the ability to do this, but they could pretty much sell the job at any price. Sure, they're a little incentivized to sell profitably because it's a percentage of the total contract, so they make more money in the commission. It wasn't until we, like, brought someone in and they started job costing and looking at our books that we're like, hey, these three salespeople sell half the price, you know, almost not even profit... Profitable. It's pretty wild that we we... I mean, that's like one of those, man, if we didn't catch, you know, if we didn't catch that, it probably could have really screwed us. The sales process, it's gone all the way from no sales process, just attire people that are presentable, can speak well, know how to put a roof on, give them a recommended price, let them go figure it out. When we first started to, we've got a pretty compelling comp model now where they're incentivized to sell profitably, they make a little bit more money if they can do that, they make a little less if they can't, so we're sharing the upside, sharing the downside. We do run a one call closed model now with our outside sales team, so that's something that's getting a lot of... It's been around forever. You know, you can speak to people that... It's kind of usually like one or the other. People really believe in it or don't. I was a little hesitant when I first learned about it, and it's it's really hard to, I should say, put the toothpaste back in the tube or the sales org if you're not running a one call close to transition into that. It's very hard to show them, you know, how it actually is better, how many more appointments you can run, right, if you just go ahead and get it done, and it's not a gimmick, right, we do offer, it is more efficient and it allows us to sell technically less less expensive to the homeowner if we're able to get that done in that first call. It increases the capacity for our sales team. We're able to pass some of those savings on to the homeowners.
00:25:45 · Sam Allsopp, Mikk
You know, my inside sales team's not having to work as many demos and as many outstanding quotes. So we're now a one call close sales organization with a couple asterisks there. There's ways that, you know, you can still keep your your appointment if you follow the process or your lead if you follow the the right process. [00:26:03] S0: I believe you posted a tweet the other day that the percentage when you guys have closed the deal and then the roofers show up and then the client, the homeowner, is canceling. Is it 15%, one five?
00:26:03 · Mikk, Sam Allsopp
[00:26:03] S0: I believe you posted a tweet the other day that the percentage when you guys have closed the deal and then the roofers show up and then the client, the homeowner, is canceling. Is it 15%, one five? [00:26:19] S1: No. We try to keep that... So we have different metrics. We have, like, full blown hard cancellations. I'd say that's, like, 10% right now. We're trying to get it lower, and that's just kind of a a byproduct of doing this one call close model. I think we can definitely get it down. We track net close though, and it might... You know, some people I talk to, for some reason, it's not super relevant to their business, but in South Florida, there's a lot of hoops you have to kinda jump through to have like a clean deal. You have to have the HOA information, you have to have the permit docs signed, it has to be a wet signature in a lot of municipalities, so you have to have the title selection, right, so there's... Getting a contract signed is like half the work, and then actually having a net deal is the other half, so the reason I'm explaining this is at the end of the month, sometimes there's deals that are contract signed, they didn't cancel, they're they're going forward with us, but it... We're not gonna net it and pay the commission front to the sales team if it's not netted by a certain time in the month. So maybe that was more the number, you know, gross versus net that I was talking about. That could be another 5%.