Unlock the Matrix with Performance Dashboards

Pete: All right, we are live back again here on the Roofr Masterclass. I'm your host, Pete, with my co-host, Nic, and we are joined today by one of our internal product managers, Shruti. Welcome, Shruti.  

Shruti: Hey.  

Pete: And, excited to dive into this with Shruti. She is our resident expert on the performance dashboard, and so, she's joined us today to help run through some of this stuff.

I literally had a conversation yesterday with a roofing contractor about, kind of like the future of roofing, and he was saying, the biggest thing moving forward is that roofers are really going to have to understand their numbers better than ever before, right, Nic?

Mm-hmm.

Nic: When you're growing your business there's an 85% failure rate in two years and a 95% rate at five years.

And number one is process, and that's why we always have process Pete here. But number two is knowing your numbers. So whether it's, like, invoicing, profitability, job costing, but ultimately your comparables, understanding trends, understanding where things have been going, what's going right, what's going wrong, and identifying the root cause for both those.

It's important to identify what went right, but it's even more important to understand what went wrong, what are the root causes. And to do that, you need a CRM. You need a dashboard that's gonna show you all the information, and that's what, Shruti and the PM, team for the CRM side really kind of done for the last eight months is just build something really amazing for that.  

Pete: We find a lot of contractors still today when we talk to them, a lot of what they do is reactive, right?

Being able to recognize the trends, being able to see the numbers and the way they're responding to things that we're doing allow us to be more proactive in the way we do things and get out in front of some of this stuff, which ultimately will make life a lot easier.

We have to have a way to, to see that and get a good overall picture, and the new performance dashboard does a really good job of that.

Yeah, Shruti, I'm giving you a quick second here to introduce yourself.

Shruti: Hi, everyone. I'm Shruti. Some of you might have met me over a Zoom call when I must have asked bunch of questions when we were building-

the performance dashboard. the topic is very close to my heart. A big part of my job is, like, talking to you guys, the business owners, and understanding the questions that you're looking for, and we basically try to answer that.

So today I'm here to not present to you how things work, but just make sure that it answers everything that you're looking for in those four new tabs, new way of understanding your numbers.

Pete: Traditionally, like when we first started, our original performance dashboard was lacking a bit

so a lot of people were taking the numbers outside. And I think traditionally as a whole, CRMs have never really done a phenomenal job of reporting. I think it's something that a lot of CRMs have struggled with.

But I think you guys have done a really good job of incorporating a lot of that. Doing a lot of calls, looking at a lot of people's spreadsheets, you've been able to incorporate a lot of that into Roofr now in this new version of our performance dashboard.

Shruti: Yeah. And I would say we are still scratching the surface. So what we did is like very initial bare minimum version of performance dashboard. We have quite a bit coming already in our roadmap, right? Bunch of other areas that we don't cover reporting and some of the advanced features that would, if not remove everything, but eliminate your spreadsheets as much as possible.

So you build your own formulas inside the CRM rather than building it outside, correcting it or matching it, coming back and forth. Yeah  

Pete: Yeah, and I think the biggest thing for me, Nic, you know, talking about having to pull stuff out into spreadsheets is when you look at our performance dashboard in comparison to, like, Excel, right?

Mm-hmm. I think it's much more visually appealing and much more digestible from a visual standpoint when you look at it on our performance dashboard. The way the team has laid things out, the way the performance dashboard actually looks and feels, it's much easier to kinda get a feel for the information at a glance without having to really get super granular like you would maybe on an Excel spreadsheet.

Nic: When it's easy on the eyes and you can just see trends and understand where you wanna dive into and click into, that's gonna make a big difference.

And comparing things, as you can see in the, video that's going on in the background there, you can click in and actually see that metadata and understand. Sometimes when you're working with Sheets, you need to see where the trends are, where the ups, where the downs were, and sometimes graphs are easy to kinda identify where there's gaps, where there's outliers and everything else, and you can click in and kinda get that information from there.

It's easy to train on, and that's a big thing with our system. It's v- very robust in nature, the CRM, but at the same time, the UI and the UX have been done very, very, uh, well, and it's easy to show people what they need to do.

Pete: This is a great for a scaling operation but also great for, you know, a smaller operation that just wants to understand their numbers a little better.

Whether your goal is to ultimately maybe sell to a private equity, the first thing they're gonna ask you is about your numbers, right?  

Nic: Yeah.  

Pete: If your goal is to avoid a sale from private equity, the way you're gonna survive is by really, keeping the numbers in check and understanding them.

Nic: Mm-hmm. And that's super important, like Process Pete speaks the truth.  

Pete: Amen.  

Nic: But that's, like, super important, too, when you're looking into doing whatever, selling the company, selling to PE, whatever the case is, you need to know EBITDA. You need to know your numbers, and they're gonna ask you that right off the bat.

Having it all sourced into one CRM is gonna make a big difference  

Pete: let's dive into it and let Shruti show off her work here a little bit, and her team's work.

Shruti: So the numbers that you see here is as good as the data accuracy in the background, right? So if you have the job value associated, if you have the statuses associated correctly, and if you have the close rate, then of course your star, your KPI cards, everything will show the exact numbers or close numbers as you must be having in your spreadsheet.

But for the job report, what we did is giving you guys the five KPIs at the top, right? And if you're not having any filters on, like how Nic is applying, then it's all in time reporting. But if you apply a filter, then you can of course just filter out the jobs for the last two years, and then you start comparing whether this year is better or the previous years were better, with this tiny little trend I would say, symbols.

And then it gives you much more understanding of those five KPIs. What's your total jobs looks like? What's your total value? And other cool thing is about that you can literally click anywhere on the chart, like what Nic did, and then it gives you the underlying data. And after that, you can actually go to the job, take actions, deep dive, whether you want to just look at if, if there's any unresolved task on it or if it's on the follow-up that was not done.

Multiple other things that you can do, which wasn't possible in the previous. So it's just looking... not just looking at the data, but looking at the data, actioning, and then if you want, you can also export it and attach it to your spreadsheet or any other reporting for, like, any advanced reporting that we don't support at the moment.

Yeah  

Nic: It's really cool too, like anywhere that you have, like when you're looking at trends. We wanna dig in and understand what happened here. We can just click into it, and like Shruti said, everything's there, and it's not just, like, a little bit of data.

It's a lot of data, and what's really cool is building out that hyperlink that's gonna open up that job directly to it so you can kind of inspect, understand, and everything else. And I really love the fact that from there you can filter again, you can dig into the stuff, understand where things are and go by week, months, quarters.

Let's just go to quarters real quick. Be able to filter and understand where things are in comparison is massive. Like we're talking about before, trends are important.

So not only is it visually appealing, it's easy to use. You can go right back to the original, reset this, and then just get back into work. So this is gonna help you out from day to day, time to time, and just get you to where you need to be with your business.  

Shruti: So when we were building it, we kept that in mind in terms of UI perspective, that if you're like a number person, then you have five numbers at the top of the screen that you can understand, take actions if you something that will respect the historical data understanding also.

Then you can see multiple trends from the past months, et cetera. And if you're more wanting to dig the data, then we also give the Export Data button at the top so that you can export the data and then go and really, like, create your own charts, right? If you're familiar with some other charts that, that you look at maybe in your daily meetings or weekly meetings.

Nic: It makes a big difference.  

Pete: I'm a huge fan of the granularity, right? At a high level, like if I'm a company owner or, you know, an ops manager or something like that, like I wanna be able to come in here and look really quickly, at the high level picture.

I can do that. I can filter a little bit, get a good look. But like Nic said, if I see an anomaly, if I see something that looks like it's off, I can very quickly click down very granularly all the way to the job level if I need to figure out exactly what we're looking at. So, that's a huge, huge advantage.

Nic: What's really cool is you're easily able to export that data with just a click. So if you do want that as backup while having this, to have that there to kinda store your reporting and everything, you get it real quick into a job report. You can dump it into whatever you need and then pull out some insights and stuff.

But this tool's gonna help you out with a lot of this as well.  

Shruti: Yeah, and the other note on the export is that if you want a filtered export then you can just apply the filters, and it exports only the filter data so that you don't have to refilter it when you are exporting the data. And if you want everything out of the system and to perform your own analysis or plug it into the fancy AI tools these days you could also do that.

Nic: Building this stuff out is so much fun. Like, I can get super in the weeds with this. We can do the same period from the 1st to the 30th of this year to last year, and we can see exactly where things changed, where we have different kind of categories for our workflows, top revenue and everything else.

Pete: Maybe you're a new business. Maybe you don't even know really what numbers you should be looking at, right?

Shruti's team has done a really good job here of building kind of like a highlight reel in this first section of the performance dashboard to where you can go in and kinda see the numbers that you really should start to look at. It has a good baseline of data that I can go in there and just look at and kinda get, an idea of what I should be watching on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, on a year-over-year basis.

Nic: Guess that kinda leads us into our next stuff is, like, where are my leads coming from? Mm. And that brings us into the next part, which is our lead performance dashboard here. This one's super fun, and something that Pete, and I, I think it was on our wishlist forever, is just having a heat map kind of built in so we can understand exactly where your jobs are coming from and where.  

Pete: Yeah.

Nic: A lot coming from this- I love,  

Pete: The map functionality- Yeah ... is something we've talked about for a long time, so this is really cool. I love that you're able to leverage it on a map. I'm sure this came from some significant feedback, right, Shruti?  

Shruti: I think e- every customer I talked to and they mentioned about the heat map or some sort of a map that they can zoom in and see where their leads are coming from. And also you can see we've put color coding, so if you have multiple workflows, you can, yeah, pretty easily look at and find out, okay, okay, this area where I'm performing well may be for the insurance type of workflow, where the other areas are retail.

So maybe I have some opportunity areas that I can, yeah, change my strategies. ...  

Nic: And it's cool. It still shows all, like, the comparisons when you build that up. If you're up, if you're down, what the percentage you're up or down at, if I really wanna just click on one of those dots, then I'm just gonna get that lead data, and that's gonna help me understand, see where things are.

When you're looking to talk with a customer as well, and you're like, "Oh, I, I need to know. I, I need someone who has, like, a dual brown shingle." It's like, okay, cool. I know that this one over in Markham was. I can see the three jobs that are in that area and really open that up. So you can start to get the information very quickly and start to compare and contrast where everything is, along with all the performance indicators.

Average won value, total won value from each lead source, leads over time, unqualified breakdowns. It's just a really powerful performance dashboard now that's going to have you set up for success no matter where you- where you're diving in from.  

Pete: Yeah.  

Shruti: And many of the business owners also mentioned that the couple of KPI cards at the top, specifically, like, average speed to lead, is giving them indicator how good they are responding to a lead when it comes, because if we're taking, let's say, longer than whatever the KPI is that you have, then it must have gone to a competitor.

So yeah, that thing is very powerful.  

Nic: Yeah, I think- I'm so curious on this Hawaii job, but go on.

Pete: And I think one of the things to note here too is that, being able to see this information can really help steer your marketing, right? If you're on a tight budget with marketing, maybe you're a smaller company, having this information and being able to see, hey, this is what's performing really well.

Like you said, Shruti, it even will color code it. Like, hey, my insurance is performing really well right now, like we should push there. Being able to kind of see all this stuff visually and be like, "Hey, you know, this is what's performing really well. These are where all of our leads are coming from this specific time of year," allows you to then steer your marketing a little bit better and, and be able to focus your money in the right places. Nic just loves the filtering  

Nic: I'm just playing around with it.

Shruti: And we are adding one more data point for filters. So this is just filtering the job created dates, but we are also adding job close dates. So if you're curious understanding when a job is closed, and then you wanna just filter out last month's, all the jobs that were closed, you would be also able to do that, and apply comparison.

Nic: When you were doing some of those site visit, Petes how much was the conversation about reporting on, like, this year's actuals versus projection versus last year's numbers?  

Pete: Yeah, it's always import- I mean, every place that I've ever been, somewhere in the office, there's some type of a goals board, right? Like, here's our goals based on what we did last year, this is our goal for this month, this is our goal for the year, right? Maybe it's based on the trades you've added. Whatever the case may be.

Most of the time it has been manual in the past, right? Where, you know, you come in there and there's some type of a board, a whiteboard or whatever where they're keeping- Yeah ... track of that stuff.

Having it digitally and updating in real time, I think that's the biggest thing, right?

Nic: What I've seen on those whiteboards as well is, like, the sales approaches, like, and the sales team and understanding, like, how they're doing it and how they're performing, and that's just as important.

You want the same filters. Understanding where your team is ranking, what their close rates are. Shruti, I love that you built this in to, like, have things as granular as qualified to close rate and average job size because close rate, I even do it with my team internally, my sales team here, is, like, there's close rate, but close rate's misleading.

Sometimes the lead is not good, and it should not affect your numbers, so a better, more accurate number is qualified to close, and that's going to give you a little bit more information. So out of those actual real appointments that you had, how many of those did you close? So it gives you a good understanding of where things are, where the team is, and who's performing well.  

Shruti: And I think the credit goes to all the contractors I've talked to when we were doing the interviews. They're like, "This is very important. We also try to understand how well our marketing channels are performing versus how well our sales team is selling." So if you have both the numbers side by side or percentage, that will help us having the conversations with them or coaching or whatever needs that's for, specifically for sales rather than punishing them for something that is more like a lead source issue.

Pete: We used to always say lead to close shows a process opportunity, and qualify to close or appointment to close shows, a sales opportunity.

Nic: That's a big thing that I've seen not only plenty of roofers go through, is this a situational issue, or is this a process issue, or is this a personnel issue?

And having something like this, being able to really understand it, it's going to help you out so much in understanding exactly where we need to be, who's my top producers what are the biggest jobs, where are the most assigned jobs in, and what are the most qualified?

And just seeing how that changed from month to month, year to year, it's gonna save you so much time and energy.

Pete: Yeah, and I think one of the things you note here too is like, let's be honest. I mean, and when we're running these small companies, a lot of times we throw these people into the fire very quickly.

There's not a ton of training. This is a way to look at this and say like, "Hey, you know, maybe this person needs a little bit more training." Not everybody's gonna pick it up super quick, you know? So maybe we need to, recognize an opportunity and say, "Hey, maybe we spend a little bit more time with this person to get them up to speed."

If we're looking at their numbers and being able to see it, we can, like we talked about in the beginning, be more proactive rather than reactive and be like, "All of a sudden this guy's numbers are down. What the hell?" Right? Like, now we can be a lot more proactive about it and, and potentially save that person or turn that person around early. Protect our culture and protect our performance a bit.

Nic: And protect our customers too, right? Like, if you have, like, a crappy experience from a sales rep and they just ... They're selling, right? And so you don't really notice, but the underlying numbers might be off, and you wanna protect that aspect. Your business is your brand. It's everything that you have, so that's a super important aspect to it too.

Pete: Yeah, I love the numbers and the visibility that you get here.  

Nic: I think the next thing too that's really good to kind of dive into,

when you were building this, so our original performance dashboard, it was fine. It wasn't anything special, but it had the data in, the numbers that you needed to know.

But there was so much more that we wanted, that we needed, that our customers were looking for as well, and this next piece, there was so much more that you added in.

I would love for you, while we're talking about and showing this, where in your company are you losing jobs? What are you looking to track?

How are you looking to track things? What are the data that you're looking to see? Especially having an entire section for just lost jobs.  

Shruti: Yeah. So I think initially we were just bundling it as part of the job report, but at some point, after having multiple discussions, we looked at a pattern that many of our contractors put a lot of effort into understanding the lost opportunity just in general, so because those are the strategies that they build for next years or upcoming quarters, or even all the time to course-correct it, right?

So we thought then it deserves its own space in performance dashboard, so you do not have to put extra effort into filtering the data out of the job report, right? Because I saw contractors definitely had a spreadsheet or a formula built explaining them, "Okay, these are your numbers that you potentially lost, but you lost it because of those reasons."

So yeah, that was the thought process.  

Nic: What I really like too, and I don't think I ever realized this, is that you guys get so granular down to the hours, day, minute, everything, so to really understand exactly when something happens so that nothing can slip through the cracks if you're looking to filter.

So if you're looking here at this, a competitor seems to be my biggest problem, 'cause I had 38.5% of my jobs went with a competitor. But if you look at the value, 66% of your lost revenue actually is not marked, right? Is it about pricing?

Is it about realtor? Like, that's a bigger issue that you wanna go to. 'Cause, like, sometimes you can't control that lost reason, but finding the ones that you can control, build up training, build up objection handling, all that stuff, makes it much easier to kinda dive in with.

Shruti: Yeah. So data accuracy is more important when you're looking at any dashboard, any reporting for that matter, because then it's just going to grow your unknown or other bucket too big that would look like a dinosaur that you don't want to deal with.

Pete: I think a huge piece of this too is understanding, like, where people are falling off, right, in our process. You learn way more from your failure than you do from your wins, right? It, it always sheds light on where you need to work harder, things you need to get better at.

And so I think this report could be one of the most telling of all the reports, right? When you're looking at how to streamline the business, how to improve the business potential areas of opportunity. Understanding where are we losing people? Where are they falling off?

Are they getting to a specific part of our process and falling. You know, is it financially based? Is it competitor based? Like, what is going on? From a quantity standpoint, but also from a dollar amount standpoint, how is it affecting us?

Just I think there's a lot to learn on this specific tab alone, you know, that could really, really impact the business and allow us to clean things up really, really quickly actually.  

Shruti: Yeah, and I see Nic is obsessed with the, with the filter again. Yeah. So I'd say that's the reason we added as granular filters as possible, because we understand that- I  

Nic: didn't notice this custom one.

Is this one new, the custom?  

Shruti: No, no, it has been there since forever.  

Nic: Oh,  

Shruti: I  

Nic: just missed it. This is a lot more fun now too. I can get really into this, getting in to the hours, the minutes, the days for fixed or relative.

Pete: Yeah, and Joel actually makes a really good point here, guys. If, if you're new to this dashboard, get in there and just mess around with it, right? Mm-hmm. Like, there's just, there's so much. I mean, you can see, like, we're just, like Shruti said, this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as what this thing is capable of, and Nic's, clicking around and, and showing you all these filtering and all these possible things you can do with it.

But, there's just a ton of opportunity in here of the way you look at the data and the amount of data that's in here. If you do have a down day, you know, maybe some pouring rain or something, it's a great opportunity to get in there, sit down, and just mess around with it and see, what it does, like the capabilities of it, and you really get to see how powerful it is.  

Nic: It's playing with it, but feeding it data consistently, like Shruti said.

I saw a comment in the chat too about, I'm need to have some more hands-on training about reality in, in real life situations and stuff like that.

Our implementation team can help with that too, but also, like Roofr Unlocked, ask questions in there. We're all in there, Shruti, myself, Pete. We answer questions in there from our perspective, but we also let the users do that. So if you don't see me or Pete jump in, usually it's just, like, we're letting the users talk to each other to find a solution there, 'cause it might be a different solution than we bring, and then we can bring our perspective afterwards.

Pete: Yeah, we got a question here from Bobby that, Shruti, I'll let you kinda take a crack at it. S how can we see total revenue collected?

Shruti: Yeah, so it's not possible with the current dashboard at the moment, but we are adding, as I said, bunch of new reports.

And one of that report that you can actually see the revenue that was collected or due, et cetera. All those things are coming very soon, before the summer is over.  

Nic: Nice. Oh, damn. That's even quicker than I thought. Like, that's a cool part, too, is, like, how quickly we add things on, and every month, every week we have some new stuff coming.

And Shruti's been on fire with a lot of this stuff, including some data migration stuff. So we'll just keep that as a tease to you guys for the future.  

Shruti: There's one question from Derek saying, "Is there an option to make the map larger- Oh, yeah, yeah ... on your screen and the KPI smaller?" So I think that is not possible again at the moment, but when we build a custom reporting capability, then you can set up your own charts, your own KPI, and every modules or widgets, you can size them, but yeah, that's in the roadmap.  

Nic: Great question here. "We have a high need for more fields via API. Will you entertain surfacing more fields in and out of Roofr via Zapier so that we can have Roofr hold more marketing data?  

Shruti: Yeah, so for the Zapier, I know there's some initiative where we will be adding more fields, and performance dashboard can literally pull in any data that is available in Roofr. So I think as soon as we have the data available, we will be able to report on it, and then, yeah, you can do anything, literally.

That's the goal.

Nic: I can't believe Joel has not tried to mute us with the wheel. Shruti, what you don't see behind the scenes is, Joel's very abusive to me and Pete.

He yells at us. He threatens to come to our house to hit us.  

He-  

Pete: The pressure put on us- Yeah ... from Joel.  

Nic: He rolls up a newspaper and snaps it on his hand  

A lot of people at Roofr don't see that, but, it's happening. He cracks the whip.

Pete and I are afraid.  

You're gonna get some good stuff, including...

carhartt hoodie, really warm, nice. I'm in a cold basement right now, so it's been my saving grace along the way.

Clarify: Reporting is based on job created date. If a job was created last year but does not close until today, when will the revenue for that job be attributed?  

Shruti: Yeah. Exactly that is where we decided to add the job close date also as a filter so that you can really filter between, those two data points.

So it's coming. Okay, I'm not going to say a time, but it's coming very, very soon. Um- ... in a so yeah, you will be able to filter exactly when the job was closed.

Pete: Perfect ... and that even helps month over month, you know, 'cause a lot of people- Yes it does ... will have jobs that, crea- are created at the end of a month. They don't close until the following month. I know that's always been kind of a bone of contention with some other reporting and some other CRMs.

It's like, "Hey, it's not reporting correctly because we're rolling into a new month," so that'll solve that problem. So- Yeah ... that's a huge update.  

Nic: What automations can be triggered by a proposal engagement, lead status, or workflow changes? So many. Let me share my screen and dive into that real quick. So when you're looking at automations for everything, Nic's automation station. But yeah, the, with automations, you can go in. We also, we have a recommended by Roofr section. I always like bringing that out 'cause it's such a awesome little touch with everything else in there.

We got about 10, 15 different automations in here. But with the way we can build them out now, you don't even have to give it a name up front, but if we're talking about just triggered by proposal engagement, so if a proposal status remains in, let's just say that it's in viewed For more than five days, then what I wanna do, and I could figure out what workflow, then I could either choose a communication or a job.

So if I'm looking at a job, I can create task, I could change job stage to, change job owner, add assignees, remove assignees, change value, add tags or remove tags from it. Whenever I'm talking about proposals, I'm always looking at the communications aspect. So either send a text or an email to them, and you can have everything kind of set up, built in with the templates.

You could have timing and frequency, delays, immediate, everything else. And then as you can see, the name is already built in. And then you can actually add in different members as well so that they're aware of it.

And then save that automation, and we're ready to rock and roll. Now, what's cool about this is that you can see when the last time it was run. You can see all the information at a quick glance. If I wanna make another one in here, I can duplicate it, I can enable it, I can make that super easy. So now I can say if it was sent or viewed in five weeks, then I wanna do a different one.

Pete: Yeah. The automations I think are probably some of the most underutilized tools- Yeah ... on Roofr, right? Our automations have gotten incredibly powerful, and there's a whole bunch more stuff coming with with regards to automations that are gonna make them even more, way more powerful than they are currently.

So yeah, if you guys are not leveraging automations, there just is a ton of stuff.

I saw this firsthand w- a couple of weeks ago when I was at the contractor, is how many times are your customers looking at these proposals, viewing these proposals after hours, right?

Mm-hmm. And then here's a way to reach out to them, be proactive, "Hey, s- you know, if you have any questions, we'll be back in the morning," whatever the case may be. I mean, I literally saw one where a customer viewed it at midnight, right? So, if you can jump on that customer first thing in the morning, if they're up thinking about their roof and looking at that proposal at midnight, odds are there's a pretty good chance they're ready to go or, or have some questions at least.

All right. Well, thank you everybody for joining us. Hopefully this has been insightful and motivates everybody to go take a look at the performance dashboard and, and try it out for yourselves. We're happy to field anything, any questions that you have or at least route you to the right people. I know Shruti talks to customers almost every day probably, right? A part of... As part of her gig. So, if you guys need to or wanna talk directly with Shruti about something or you have some feedback, I'm sure she'd be happy to hear it.

Shruti, thank you. I appreciate your time, and thanks for jumping on with us.  

Shruti: Yeah. Thanks a lot. It was fun talking about what we built.  

Pete: Yeah. You guys have done a fantastic job. Thank you everybody for joining us today on the masterclass, and we will see you next time.  

Nic: See you, guys.