Residential roofing happens to be one of the most competitive industries in the nation. With hundreds of roofing companies competing for homeowners, it can be tough to nail down a sale. If your roofing company doesn’t offer something unique, like an extended warranty, for example, you’re no different than Bob’s Roofing Company down the street.
Because of this, it’s important to generate quality leads and put in the work to close them. Even if you’re able to get your hands on these leads, you won’t be the only roofer calling. Homeowners are constantly bombarded by businesses trying to sell them on a service. With roofing, you have the advantage of being a necessity. Leverage this knowledge and utilize other tools we’ll discuss in this article to make sure you’re calling a homeowner when the need is greatest for a new roof; such as after a storm or natural disaster. Let’s dig into the different types of lead generation services and what each one offers.
Pro Tip: Don’t want to read all of this?
Watch the video above to get the tricks of the trade.
Types of Lead Generation Services
If you are still generating leads with cold calls or door to door sales, consider opening up another avenue. Many lead generation services offer qualified leads but you won’t be the only roofer they’re selling to. These services cater to thousands of roofing contractors with similar or larger budgets who are ready to convert them to sales. The top roofing lead services we have used in the past are:
HomeAdvisor: As a home services search engine, homeowners trust HomeAdvisor for quality companies. Your reputation on HA is based on reviews listed by homeowners which boosts your ability to get more leads. Because they also own Angie’s List as of Fall 2018, reviews and leads from there will be coming to your HomeAdvisor profile soon.
Goodzer: For $1000, Goodzer gives you 10 leads. However, if you are in an area that had a storm blow through, the cost of a single lead goes up. Customer service can be a bit tough due to slow response time from representatives. For a lead based on roof repair, it’s about $65/lead. If other roofers will pay more for the same lead, though, the higher paying roofer gets the lead. The good part is if a customer has extensive damage, you could turn a roof repair lead into a replacement. They don’t have contract terms, so you aren’t stuck with them.
Smart Leads Lab: The leads they offer are competitively priced at about $100/lead, but they send a good amount of leads often (2/day). Their responsiveness is better than Goodzer, but the quality of leads they send is comparable.
Best Storm Leads: These folks have pre-screened and qualified leads as well as an in-bound/out-bound call center. With 5 tiers of packages, Best Storm Leads caters to roofing companies of varying sizes. Their “Trial Package” is inexpensive at $550 for 10 leads, with a more robust package called “Platinum” for $7500 offering 150 leads. If you can turn 2 of those leads into sales at $5,000-$10,000 each, you’ve already made your money back at least three fold.
Web.com: They build your company’s brand reputation on their site by creating a presentation for your services. It is structured differently so homeowners call you. Unlike most lead generation services, they help your business be found on the internet. Web.com also consults with your existing site and helps you understand what you need to focus on to generate leads organically.
DIY: It’s no secret that generating your own leads can be time-consuming, tedious work. However, it is a great way to keep your thumb on the pulse of your industry. From door-to-door sales to leveraging your office staff during the slow season, you can conceivably create 300+ new leads for your sales reps. Using apps like MojoDialer and HailRecon (which we’ll get into below) can help speed up the process.
Manage Your Roofing Leads
You have roofing leads now, so how do you organize and manage them? To manage leads and increase my chance of closing them, I use a few different apps. Spotio and HailRecon are two of the big ones and here’s how I utilize them:
With the Spotio App, a world of benefits opens up in terms of lead generation and management. For the management end of Spotio, you can build out different parameters such as “1st appointment” or “Needs a Quote.” This helps you track who you’ve contacted and the status of the lead. The interface is user-friendly and you can take a look at how I’ve set mine up here. Organizing your app parameters and entering in leads may be time-consuming, but once it’s done you can start making calls and annotations to keep track of the lead status. This is especially helpful for roofers with multiple sales reps. If the lead has already been contacted, it should have notes of what was discussed and what the lead said so your other rep has a starting point. You can also set up different territories within the app to avoid competing sales reps. I would highly recommend Spotio for roofers who prefer field sales and need to organize their canvassing efforts.
Another tool in my arsenal is HailRecon, mentioned above for generating leads. It is a paid app available on iPhone, Android, and desktop. They have interactive hail maps and work beautifully in conjunction with Spotio. HR’s interactive maps have color codes depicting where the highest incidences of hail per inch occurred. Users can then click on these areas and navigate to certain neighborhoods. This doesn’t necessarily help manage roof leads but it creates another avenue to generate roof leads. Once you have these areas of need, you can actually click on each individual house and search for contact information. If the contact information is available, you can import it to Spotio and voila, a new lead is in the pipeline.
Let’s talk about how having all these leads may actually become a negative for the smaller roof companies. Unlimited roofing leads may sound great, but if you don’t have the manpower to handle the volume of calls needed to close them, they’re useless. For situations like this, I take advantage of MojoDialer, an application that automatically calls phone numbers.
With a high volume of leads (such as the 300+ you should be trying to generate), MojoDialer acts as your own “call center” while also managing the leads in a tidy, built-in CRM for later use. Although it is similar in functionality to Spotio, MojoDialer is more tailored to the outbound sales leads versus field sales.
Whether you are generating your own leads or you’re buying them from one of the services above, the sooner you reach out to the homeowner, the better. This eliminates the opportunity for competitors to close the lead before you can.
Final Thoughts
For a highly competitive industry with a lengthy lead to production time, roofers may be hesitant to spend money on leads that may not end up sold. Regardless of how “qualified” or “pre-screened” a lead might be, once you purchase it, the sales end is up to you. Hiring knowledgeable reps for your sales team and providing them with the right tools makes all the difference.
If you’re not quite ready to hire a sales team and just want to take a stab at it on your own, all of these tools will help make the process simpler. Do you have some leads but you’re not finding much success closing them? Stayed tuned for next week’s post about how to close more roofing leads with minimal effort so you can focus on running a successful roofing business.
