The Power of Referrals: Turn This Summer’s Jobs Into Next Season’s Leads

Pete: And we're back. Welcome everybody back to the Roofr Masterclass. I am your host, Pete McKendrick, with my co-host Nic. A really great topic today, right? Like this is something that Nic and I preach almost constantly, on just about every masterclass. I think it comes up, talking about referrals.

In presentations that I've done up on stage at events, talked about how powerful the referral is and how it's still the number one source of leads and still the best converting lead too.

We are super excited today to be joined by Ethan from Get the Referral. So welcome Ethan. Thanks for joining us.  

Ethan: Thank you for having me.  

Pete: I'll give you a second here, Ethan, to just explain exactly what you guys do and then, we'll jump into it here.

I wanna give you a chance to intro Get the Referral real quick first.  

Ethan: [00:01:00] Okay. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining. Referral. We give you a tool. We have a CRM tool that makes it easy for you. The biggest problems everyone has is leads, right?

Oh, how much are leads, leads aren't coming in. These aren't good leads and bad leads. The best lead to have is from customers that you meet with, right? So we have a platform and a tool that you can utilize and it's not only getting referrals, it's actually connecting your company with the homeowner. It builds rapport with the homeowner.

Another issue, operations, right? We have an app that tracks the projects. Another thing is reviews. You are like, oh, how do I get reviews? We have a tool in the app. That way the customer can share reviews as well, and they can get paid through the app depending on what your platform, how much you wanna reward them, additional to your sales reps, and it really gets everyone engaged in the community.

When you're going ahead and installing a roof, I guarantee this, 30% of roofs need to be replaced in that subdivision. How would you like it if you went to one subdivision and you closed 30% of those roofs in one year? It's amazing. So we have a tool, [00:02:00] you can set a consultation up, but we can go over all the details with it and it's dashboard tracking.

It's really the best engagement tool on the market right now.  

Pete: I mean, it's an awesome tool. I've experienced it firsthand. I actually tested it with a contractor one time and acted as the customer. So I've been on the receiving end of it. And, it is a fantastic tool. It does a really good job of managing customer engagement.

What I really liked is it really helps to close the loop at the end of the job and kind of bring things full circle back around. A great example was if you had your Get the Referral type of system set up to feed people back into the instant estimator that we have, it just creates this never ending loop of leads coming.

Excited to talk with you today about that and dive a little bit more into the power of the referral. Nic, we got some housekeeping stuff here first though.  

Nic: We'll dive into it. I'm super pumped for this topic as well, but, as always, we got Pete leading the charge here. Pete is your host. You could always reach him at pete at roofer dot com. You could reach me if you need as well at [00:03:00] Nic at roofer dot com, as Pete says, the easiest emails in roofing.

If you have any questions, please put them in the chat. We're gonna do our best to answer those as we always do.

And if you have any feedback, we love the feedback. There's a survey at the end, but we also have Joel Castelli at roofr dot com, joel.castelli at roofr dot com, for any feedback that you might have.

Our next masterclass is September 2nd with special guest Corey Combes, back to back guest days. I'm super, no, that's three masterclasses in a row with guests, so that's gonna be sweet. We're gonna be talking about the storm season. How and why to adjust your pitching process. Corey is a great owner of Jerry's Roofing and South Shore Construction down in the Tampa, St. Pete's area. Also is a trainer at Business 4 1 1. And then if you wanna win more work, meet our roofer of the month. Brad, from Capital City Roofing. He holds an awesome 75% close rate on qualified leads with Roofr. Talks about speed to lead throughout that process and definitely talks about that referral process as well in there.

And, if you're looking to grow, and not sure where to [00:04:00] go climb the digital ladder of growth, it's our guide to help you find the right tech one rung at a time. If that was your pun there, 10 outta 10. I'm a fan. I like it a lot. But we'll dive into everything here and, we'll start off with our agenda.

We're gonna meet Ethan a little bit more, dive into referrals, reviews, follow-ups, how to grow with tech, and of course our q and a. So, why don't you start it off there. Ethan, tell us a little bit about you. We heard about get the referral, let's hear about you.  

Ethan: Yes. So my experience in the past was with a solar company that grew from 6 million a year to, got evaluated over a billion a year, and our growth was a big impact.

What helped us grow was the referral app with GTR. That was the biggest thing I would say is what helped us, because, what do we do? Ask our sales reps, get referrals, get referrals. Get self gens. Get self gens. How does it work out for us? Right. It doesn't really work out too well. You got. Top performers, how they gonna keep up with the leads?

How are you [00:05:00] gonna call 'em? Plus now you got phone compliance and stuff like that you have to deal with. So when they're running and gunning and going appointments and door knocking and selling sales, they don't have a lot of times to call those people back.

So the biggest thing about it is a customer can download it. And then when you do that, you're getting referrals. And what happens, it motivates the sales reps because they get rewarded more from a self gen and a referral sale. So therefore they're getting more leads and they starting to notice.

I mean, got up to 1900 reps. In that growth period of time. Started out with 8. To 1900. What happened was more and more reps were getting off of company leads because they didn't have time to go to 'em. They were getting three or five appointments a day through their own referrals. And they were just happy as can be. They would drive in less.

I had one rep to close 135 sales in one subdivision one year, and it's amazing tool. So. I would say my impact and growth is learning how to utilize the referral app, see the referral app. What GTR has is that they give you this awesome, amazing, let's just put it like a [00:06:00] race car.

They give you this tool to use, but it took time to figure out how to make it work, right? Because you can't just give a sales rep, Hey, by the way, download this, get this and expect them to do it. You gotta find out how to use it. It starts with a talk track. It starts with justification and that's really what my growth was.

And I went to another company. They had a 7% closing ratio on referrals. When I utilized the things I learned from my previous company with my team members, by 42 days we got up to 45% in referral sales. Wow. It's amazing tool and I can't stress enough. So I live it, eat it, sleep it, and breathe it and believe in it.

This is the best thing ever. I promise you. It takes care of all your pain points. And, it helped me be very successful, I'll tell you that. So that's a little bit about GTR and myself.  

Pete: Yeah. What I really liked about it, Ethan and when I experienced it, is it's very proactive.

It's getting out there, it's asking for the customer. Like you said, you guys have the app keeps the customer in the [00:07:00] loop throughout the job. That's a white labeled app. You guys can actually white label it through GTR and actually have your own app. When I, tested it for the contractor, it was actually like his company's app.

It was really cool, linked straight to his CRM, so his CRM was feeding status updates to it. And all of his documentation was there. And then at the end of it, it became an app that allowed the customer to process their referral right through it. So it really closed the loop nicely.

Talk a little bit about how all that stuff works and how you guys have essentially set up this referral situation where you can reward your customers for referrals. Which incentivizes them to go ahead and kick more referrals your way.

Ethan: Yeah. Great question. So first of all, we're starting off. We meet with a customer. We have an onboarding process of course. And, I think we can sync with like 72 CRMs. So we sync with any CRM you have. We set it up. Engineers work with your engineers. They connect and sync up the app with that. And then we customize the app. The app has a stable platform, but we customize the [00:08:00] app to any size company. Somebody has two sales reps or somebody has 20,000 sales reps. We customize that to your needs.

Let's say for example, that you reward your sales reps on commission. So just leave that alone. However, you wanna reward your sales reps in closing referrals, but you incentivize the customers. The sales rep will have a QR code.

Okay, so if I'm at your house and I want to get referrals, you pull your phone out and download the QR code. Now I'm your sales rep, and guess what? Any referrals you come in, I get those referrals. They don't go to house. So that's the most important thing right there.

Now, the company can have a house QR code to get referrals as well, but yet I met you. Then I get those customers as a sales rep. And then if my company decides, Hey, by the way, Pete, anybody that you referred that gets a roof, I'm gonna give you $200. So let's just say I go meet with your friend Pete. And then I close them. Well, in the app there's a payment portal and we actually set that up for you as well.

The customer chooses to go ahead and get a [00:09:00] deposit in their bank account, a virtual debit card, a credit card, and has 200 gift cards they can get rewarded from. And then the companies also don't have to worry about w nines. That's set up internal as well. So we take care of all the headaches.

And then another thing is, let's say you went ahead and purchased the roof from me, Pete, right? We have project tracking, so we sync with your CRM to where you don't have to worry about calling me or calling the office, find out when my roofer material's getting delivered, what's going on.

That's project tracking in that as well.

Then there's also shares on social media. All the social media platforms are on there, so you can share your experience with me on social media, like in your neighborhood or whatever. And you can go ahead and share it in that.

And it's also another button on there. You can share reviews, so you can get reviews, share social media. And then me as a sales rep, I also see you in my backend dashboard. I can see how many referrals you have, and here's the best part. Is that when you put advocates in your app to refer, what happens is those people you refer get a text [00:10:00] message from you, not me and not the app.

They get it to verify we in compliance. So they'll get it from your personal phone to accept it, and then that therefore, however your company's set up, it can go to your call center to call that person and set an appointment or however you wanna set it up.

We also have a app called GTR Pro. You can also send this app to every existing past customer and just blast them out and they can download the app and put referrals in now as well.

We pretty much cover all the sides. It's amazing.  

Nic: Super powerful, man. That's unreal. It's a lot of the stuff I didn't even know about that too, which was pretty amazing to see.

Pete: It creates this nice package, right? Especially, it's very complimentary of your existing CRM. If you wanna hook it up there, like Ethan said, your CRM will feed the information into it so the customer's getting constant updates.

It's very proactive and it just completes the whole package, the communication package, the referral package, the review [00:11:00] package, all these things that potentially we struggle with. Maybe we're relying on our sales guys to ask and they're probably not asking. One of the things I really liked that you said, Ethan, is with the QR code,

it feeds those referrals right to that specific sales rep. If that's not incentive enough for you to actually use it as a sales rep, I mean, I don't know what it is, right? Those are my referrals coming back specifically to me. And that's just super powerful. Like how am I not gonna be incentivized to use that as a sales rep?  

Ethan: The biggest thing we found out that works and everybody can come up with their own number, but everybody gives customers discounts to purchase the product.

Right? But to a customer, you don't call it a referral app, a referral, you call it a rewards program. Sounds better. Used car or pre-owned car, right? They're both used cars. The thing is, helps people be more successful is,

you go ahead and justify what you're giving them. Like Hey Pete, guess what? By getting a roof with us today, we can give you $200 off your system or $300 off your roof. And all you have to do is pull your phone out real quick, hit this QR code, and [00:12:00] guess what? Go ahead and just put three people in there that wanna have the same experience that I'm giving you today.

So now. I hadn't closed Pete yet, but I got three referrals. Which is amazing. Any person you come in contact with, whether they purchase or not, you should get referrals. And unfortunately, some people can't afford their credit's not good, or they can't afford to purchase something, but guess what?

They need money. They can be your advocate for you. You can choose how you pay your referrals, right? So of course you're probably not gonna pay somebody til the roof's installed, right?

In case they cancel, which technically with the referrals, that's also less cancellations. 'cause somebody's less apt to cancel a roof if they already referred their friends and they're gonna get money from their friends. It's another thing, it helps. So what happens is that money sits there pending, so they see it.

Now it might be dispersed. Might be a month out from installing a roof, but they still see their money pending, so that motivates them. And as a sales rep, you can call 'em back and say, Hey Pete, guess what? You see that $200 sitting there? Two of your friends didn't verify yet.

How about you call 'em? So on, so forth. So it's a [00:13:00] communication tool. And as far as the marketing department or HR department within your organization, now you have real estate on the customer's phone. If people don't have a smartphone, which pretty much everyone else does, there also is a web portal they can use the referral app on just to let y'all know for people that are 89 years old or whatever.

You have a tool where you can have constant communication. For example, we mentioned storms right now. you've been using referral app for a year and you have a thousand advocates, you can send a blast out to every one of your customers that have the app downloaded.

It's a streamlined communication and people more subject to look at an alert, a text message on your phone than they are to check a email. So then it's also huge communication portal for you. Advocates, customers.  

Pete: Love it.  

Nic: That's awesome. No, this is exciting stuff to talk about.

So, looking into this, why don't we start off with this, Pete, and get into some of the stats that we're going into.  

Pete: Yeah, let's dive into 'em. This is one that we talk about quite often, is referrals and word of mouth being the number one [00:14:00] producer.

71% of roofers rely on referrals. This is straight out of our insights that we did. 71% of roofers said referrals from past customers are their top source for leads. And not only are they their top source, but they're their top converting source. If you have someone referring people, odds are that that's essentially your job to lose at that point, right?

You're probably got a slam dunk there if it's coming from a referral. Not only are you getting the most leads from there, they're costing you the least amount to get them. As far as marketing dollars go, and they're the highest producing.

They're gonna be the highest closing leads that you're gonna have.  

Nic: Not only are the referrals going to be your highest closing leads, but they're gonna be your lowest cost for acquisition.

If you're a business owner and you're hearing those two things, that's just money in your pocket at the end of the day. So these kind of referrals, word of mouth is going to help out. And then from my team's perspective, the ones that talk to you guys on a day-to-day basis here at Roofr, whenever we ask like, Hey, what are you guys doing for marketing?

Are you doing SEO and everything? The first thing always comes out [00:15:00] is referrals, word of mouth. And that should be your number one source. You should supplement it with other things that you can add into it. But those referrals and word of mouth at a 71% reliance rate on there is huge.

And this is exactly what we see in the day to day.  

Ethan: And it makes it easier for 'em 'cause they getting paid so subject to go ahead and do it right? Mm-hmm. It makes it easier. Somebody wants it, they know they're gonna get extra money from it. Think about this. If you went ahead and did a massive mailout, just say a thousand postcards, how many people gonna call for that?

Maybe less than 1%. When you meet with a customer and they share in their social media platform, maybe a HOA, the Facebook HOA or whatever, look how many people you touch from just that lead and that house. It's amazing.  

Pete: And what I found very interesting, when we did this survey, the majority of roofers said that referrals are their highest producing leads.

But the number of people who said that they have a formal, and I've done this in presentations too, ask people to raise their hand. And when you ask who has a formal referral program in place? It's [00:16:00] hardly anyone.

Nic: Yeah.  

Pete: Most people say yeah, we ask for them when we remember, or we ask for them sometimes, or we have some sales reps that ask for 'em and some that don't.

But here's a perfect example of how much you're potentially missing, right? From a conversion standpoint by not having some type of a formal process in place around referrals and getting that word of mouth lead.  

Ethan: And oh, by the way, another thing you have to worry about when you're writing stuff down, sometimes, whether the sales rep or even the customer, people write messy sometimes. You can't know if that's a nine or a eight. But the thing about the app, when you add 'em referrals, you sync on the app, it syncs with their contacts.

Now, granted, they have to select who they wanna put, but it comes straight from their phone. No one has wrong numbers in their phone.  

Nic: Hmm.  

Ethan: So it makes that even easier too.  

Nic: A really good point. Ultimately, like that's the thing.

You're gonna forget those numbers. You're gonna write them wrong. Look how badly and poorly I write here. That's going to make a big difference when you know that that data is correct. Think [00:17:00] about the data integrity of those referrals.

You wanna make money on those. 71% of us clearly rely on it, so it's a big, big part of it.  

Ethan: And you think about it, you're hiring employees but not having to pay 'em. Your customers become your employees. Yeah, exactly. And you think about it, gas stations supply like plumbers, electricians or whatever.

You know how many homes, plumbers and electricians, HVC people in a day, three to five, 10. You don't have to be a customer. You can get them to download you a QR code and just tell 'em, Hey, by the way, if you are at a customer's house and happen to know they need a roof, you get paid $200.

You go ahead and just download 'em in an app. So you create more employees and networking stronger than you ever have. It's pretty amazing.  

Nic: Awesome. Diving into the next one here, qualities of a great referral program. Well we hit it here. Ethan kind of named it all out by just describing what Get the Referral does.

But you wanna create something easy to use. Something that's for everyone, including your sales team. Nobody has to work for it. You gotta respect the customer's time. [00:18:00] And your sales team time and you gotta make it worthwhile for everyone. So when we talk about in the past, Pete, on how our automations can be tied with the referral program and review program, that's a big thing.

We wanna make sure that it's as automated as possible. And Ethan just mentioned how well it can work there and ultimately make it worth your time. Put some incentive in there. Create a feedback loop where someone can get put into a draw for a gift card or get paid for every successful referral done. Those things are gonna be a big incentive for that customer and for your sales team to run those.  

Pete: I had a podcast guest on the other day that said, W-I-I-F-M. What's in it for me?  

Ethan: Ooh.  

Pete: That's what everybody wants to know, right?  

Ethan: I've had reps network with HOA groups, you know, HOAs have meetings, I've had 'em do it with church groups.

Any kind of organization they've got to where the person, like the HOA can download the app. If you want to go ahead and get approved through your HOA to [00:19:00] speak about your product, your roof, your services, and they let you in there and let them download the app where they get credit for that.

And then you meet and talking to people in the neighborhood letting you know, hey, you're pretty much become the approved roofer, an HOA subdivision, and it blows up. So there's so many different avenues and so many different tactics to utilize this. And it's again, the top one says easy to use.

That's awesome.  

Pete: So on average, roofers who ask for reviews book more than five times more jobs in a year than roofers who don't.

And the obvious reason for this nowadays is how people are shopping, right? I think it was Jeremy Simpson in his podcast said 70% of the customers that come to him are already sold before they pick up the phone and call his office.

This is why you want as many reviews as possible because everyone is doing their homework before they're even picking up the phone and talking to you. They know about your company. They know everything they need to know. They've pretty much chosen you before they pick up the phone. It's not like five, 10 years ago where I'm just randomly, dialing for dollars [00:20:00] here with seeing what contractor answers the phone.

I've done my homework, I've checked these people out, and now I've picked one or two and that's who I'm calling. Reviews are more important now than they've ever been, because they're essentially your about us, right? Mm-hmm. They're how the customer's finding out everything they need to know about you.

So why not ask or have a formal process to ask for reviews? This stat shows exactly why you wanna do that. You're gonna get five times the amount of jobs, be able to run five times the amount of appointments, why would you not ask for those reviews.

Nic: And we even look at it in regards to acquisitions and what private equity's looking at, if your goal is to exit your company and grow to a point where you exit, those people are not only just looking at your EBITDA and everything else, they're looking at your reviews.

They want a social proof company so that they can scale it up. So whether you wanna sustain and grow your company internally. Look at that number right there. Five x more jobs per year than roofers that don't. And if you wanna exit it, [00:21:00] just know that as well. They're looking for those reviews, so that when they try to go and build it up even more, that there is a way to attract it.

They won't even look at you if you have under a hundred reviews. So if you have a tool like Get the Referral, if you build an automation into your CRM to get that stuff, those things are important. We also have the Roofr Unlocked Facebook group. For anybody who hasn't joined, go in there.

We just saw this week, two different posts of Roofr users talking about how they generated reviews just off a simple automated text. That stuff works. It builds up the thing, and ultimately, going back to this last slide here, ease of use, set it and forget it.

Pete: Yeah. And you'll be amazed at how many reviews you get if you ask. Most people don't ask, and that's why they don't get reviews, right? It's just that simple.  

Ethan: Yep.

And it works a lot of times. 'cause you know, let's be honest, a lot of people don't like salespeople. Why? 'cause salespeople, they can try to get more money out of them. And number two, they ain't gonna see 'em. Once that contract's [00:22:00] signed, they don't see 'em again.

And we found be more successful is you gotta find time, make time, but you pay attention. That's what's good about the project tracking also additional to your CRM, you can actually see when that customer's gonna be installed and when I would recommend, a lot of my reps have done this. They've gone back to that homeowner's house and showed up.

Hey Mr. Smith, how you doing? I happen to be in your area. How well of a job did the roof come out? And right there, you're gonna get a five star review 'cause they're gonna be married to you. You're gonna get 'em to take a picture and GTR has a button to share your review.

It's an easy process, and then while you're there, you get more referrals. It's a great platform to have.  

Pete: Yeah, and if it's already in your process to do a final walkthrough on a job, or potentially you have guys going back to do one last pass as far as cleanup goes or any of that stuff.

Maybe you got a project manager just running back by to make sure everything is buttoned up. That's a perfect time to ask for these things, right? To say, Hey, are you guys happy with the way it came out? Let's get a review in. Here's the QR code.

Let's go ahead and submit a referral. Do [00:23:00] you know your neighbor? He looks like he could use a roof. Maybe he could throw his info in.

You're already going there. So take advantage of that time, not having to even make an extra trip. We're already going there to wrap up the job and just leverage that time to potentially land some next jobs.

Ethan: And as a business owner, that's where the communication comes in. You can also blast customers after and say, Hey, how was your experience with installation? Are you happy? Can you please submit a review?  

Nic: Well, a perfect jumping off point.

It's like you knew what was coming up next, Ethan.  

Asking for reviews, have a script or email. Have it there, have it set, have it easy to do. It's seamless. That's built in there.

Ask confidently. But don't be pushy. And then also mention that this makes a real difference for your company. This makes a big difference.

I can tell you a couple weeks ago I was at a restaurant. I had a really good conversation with this waiter. The guy's like, Hey, would you mind leaving a review for me? It really makes a difference for what my boss sees and like everything else, I was just like, yeah, because you asked, I'll do it right now.

You gave me a card with the QR code. I did it while I was sitting there. [00:24:00] So make mention that it makes a real difference. If they had a good experience with you and you tell 'em it makes a big difference. They're going to do it because it doesn't take a lot out of them. You're not asking 'em to go run 10 miles.

You're asking them just to open up their phone and just type in a couple words.

Customer follow up speed.  

Pete: Yeah, you're going there to the house, but like Ethan said, you can still follow up behind yourself and try to land some repeat work. Try to get those reviews in and those referrals.

So roofers who follow up by email after a job are 25.5% more likely to land repeat work. It can't hurt anything, right? Roofr has automations now where you can set this up. It's automatic, once a job hits, job complete, you can even set a delay if you wanted to wait a couple of days and then blast an email out to that customer that says, Hey, we completed your job.

Being a nice templated email, you can set that up ahead of time. You can set it as an automation. You're not relying on your sales guys to go back and do it, 'cause we know most of the time we can't rely on them to do that kind of stuff. So go ahead and set up that automation so that you don't have to worry [00:25:00] about it. It just becomes a no brainer. It's automatic. You'd be amazed at how many leads just come right back through that  

Nic: you're looking at these big percentage points.

You set it and forget it. Like you said, Pete, do not put any friction in that pathway. You can set up an email, follow up right out of Get the Referral, or at Roofr, you can set up those texts, which we went over the last masterclass.

A big part about reviews is not just about asking them, but it's about how the customer communication has been throughout that job. So automate that process from the time that you talk to them, from the follow ups on those quotes, from the delivery of the materials, the setting up of the roof install day, and then afterwards to see how everything went.

Those things are going to lead to more reviews, and it will a hundred percent. Like I'm confident in that 100% mark. It will lead to more referrals, which is going to make you more money.  

Pete: Yeah, I think that's one thing, Ethan, that you guys do really well with the white labeled app. It's through the entire process, right?

Because so many times we're [00:26:00] very attentive to the customer on the sales portion, 'cause we want to close that deal. Our salesman is very attentive and he's there to answer any questions, and we're very proactive in our communication. And then once they sign that contract, they just go in the pile of, to be scheduled or whatever the case may be.

We lose that proactive communication, and that's where you start to build that level of frustration with a customer. If they have to call you to find out what's going on, or maybe there's a weather delay or whatever the case may be, if you're not proactively communicating that stuff, or setting up automations that keep them in the loop, you can very quickly start to lose a customer's trust that way, because if they feel like they're doing the work to find out what's going on. There's gonna be a level of frustration that you don't want there.

So why not create a world-class customer experience? Nothing that we've shown you here today from a stat standpoint can't be handled with an automation.

None of it is manual. Everything that we've addressed so far can be done through an automation, and that's through the entire process.

It's all [00:27:00] building over the course of the job, you're building that trust, you're building that relationship. Like Ethan said earlier, they love you now, and then when you go back and you ask for that stuff, it's easy. It makes it easy to go ask for a referral or ask for a review if that customer experience has been top notch.

Ethan: GTR, I mean, it helps tremendously. One thing I left out is you can also store your contract spec sheets and docs within the customer's app as well.

Yeah. So you get the push notifications, you have constant communication, constant reminders, because what happens is they go a week without being communicated with, they start getting frustrated, they forget you told them two weeks, three weeks, a month out, they still get to get home from work on a Friday.

Well, and all of a sudden the rain comes and the roof starts leaking again. They're mad at you now, communication's key. Absolutely.  

Nic: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Dive into the next one here. Use emails and ask for referral reviews and keep your business of line.

You can see a snippet right here bringing everything in, you have a link to refer a friend directly in here. You have that instant payoff for the, instant $50 off [00:28:00] and a $50 digital gift card. These things in texts and stuff like that are going to make a big deal.

And then ultimately with this, the tech tools that you're using, roofers using CRMs and digital tools, close 2.9 days faster and save an average of five to 10 hours a week. We saw that with Amanda when we're talking about the Instant Estimator. A couple months ago when we did that masterclass with her, she was closing her instant estimator leads on a much faster basis and at a higher average ticket size than she was from a regular source leads.

So using tools like Roofr, like Get the Referral is going to allow you to close faster, which is going to allow you to build faster and also save those five to 10 hours a week. So it's gonna make a huge difference in your day to day.

Pete: I'm lagging a little. Can you guys hear me? I'm good. Yeah, I can hear you good. First thing that I thought of when I saw that stat Nic was, Amanda's conversation, right? And how much mm-hmm. The Instant Estimator was helping her to close leads so much [00:29:00] faster. It just streamlines the whole operation, if I can get to these customers and close them faster, that's just freeing up my team to do so much more, five to 10 hours a week. You add that up over the course of a month, a year, maybe two, three years, you could be saving months.

She said, over the course of your business, you could be saving years.

Ethan: And it becomes measurable, if you're failing in an area when you using tech tools, you can actually start measuring it now and find out where you need to improve, right?

It's trackable and it's measurable, which is huge on growth.  

Nic: So looking at getting your tech set up there, automate those follow ups, get your whole team on board. These things are going to help you streamline that entire workflow from end to end.

You don't wanna be thinking about this stuff. You've got so much stuff going on on your day to day. you have to be able to spend more time working on your business than in your business. These automations, these referrals, these everything else are going to help you focus on that stuff.

If your goal [00:30:00] is to spend more time with your family, this is stuff that's gonna allow to do it. I saw it firsthand with my family business, my dad running his roofing company, being able to streamline that, but I also saw it with the customers that we work with. From an end-to-end perspective, this gives you more time, back in the day so that you can work on that.

I'm telling you, it might not be a direct correlation, but you're getting more jobs because of those reviews that you generated with those automations, with the Get the Referral app. Pete, anything else, on the key takeaways here?  

Pete: The biggest thing, for me, the biggest takeaway is if you guys do not have a formal process in place around getting referrals and reviews, today's the day to implement that.

You wanna look at your process and figure out, okay, what do we need to do, internally? To get a formal process in place. How proactive am I being in my communication and how proactive are we being in asking for these things, like referrals and reviews.

So that would be my biggest takeaway in this is [00:31:00] if you guys haven't addressed that situation, put a formal process in place.  

Ethan: It gets you away from a lot of the pain points you deal with.

Move away from paid leads. A lot of y'all on here. Go through the seasonal things, right? It goes up and down, some people are non-exclusive leads, so you're getting multiple people and people are selling leads left and right, and you driving farther and doing all this and all these headaches.

A lot of no shows. A paid lead is someone going most of the time on the internet and just searching late at night and sometimes forget, and you have a lot of no-shows. And having referrals, a referral process and a CRM process helps eliminate a lot of that. It takes about, one to three months to get it going.

Once you're doing that, you would never look back. Definitely.  

Nic: Big thing here too is what's your plan? Write down your process and break it down. Write down your pains, the things that are blocking you for that growth, the things that are blocking you from getting those reviews. Write it down on a piece of paper. Rank them and see which ones you think you can solve.

Do you think that automations [00:32:00] and emails and texts are going to help with that? If you do, reach out to Roofr, reach out to Ethan. We'll be here to make sure that everything is dialed in for you. Makes it a little bit easier on your day-to-day basis.

Personally, I'm a huge proponent of those automations, of those reviews, of those referrals because ultimately that's how my dad built his business for 31 years.

I visibly saw it. Maybe not the automation part until recently, but those referrals and reviews, that's what kind of got him to where he has to be. And that's where I've seen it work time and time again. He never, ever had to, in 31 years, have to go out and buy leads. It was always from referrals and everything else that's been built out.

He still works on mainly referrals, be that neighborhood roofer, like you say, Pete always in those social groups and having that one company that always sticks out in those community, Facebook groups. So makes a big difference overall for sure.

Ethan: Huge. People, always think on price, right? When they purchase [00:33:00] things in construction, no matter what things you're purchasing, they find out the hard way. Unfortunately, that's sometimes cheaper ain't always better. People will pay more to have a better experience and less headaches.

The more you're communicating with someone, the more you're supporting 'em and knowing that you care about them. They're gonna refer you like crazy and they're not worried about the project. If you're communicating with them, Roofr and GTR. If they have an issue that happens, for example a roof just got installed and they've been communicated the whole way through and a shingle blows off, they're not gonna call and yell at you. They'll say, Hey, by the way, I had a shingle blow.

Can you come take care of it? You already opened up the communication and process with that homeowner, therefore you already built a relationship and it's a big deal. It's huge.  

Pete: Ethan, it looks like we have a question about the pricing packages at Get the Referral.

Ethan: Yes. They vary. It depends on the size of your company. We have packages as low as like four or $500 a month, but it depends on the seats. We have larger companies like enterprises.

[00:34:00] We don't charge for seats. We have one set fee. And for smaller companies, there's a small set fee monthly. For the larger companies, we work out different ways. Depending on what your needs are, you just pay per referral that's been verified or pay for performance. And it can also be a cap as well.

I mean, some companies, doing 50, $60,000 jobs, we're not gonna do that. We'll put a umbrella cap on certain percentages. So pretty much we cater to what works best for you. 'cause we're not just here to make money. We are here to help your company grow and we wanna be part of it. That's the main thing. So there's so many different ways.

That's what's important about going online and setting up a consultation. We're not there to sell you. We are there to talk to you and find out what your needs are and what your pain points are, and we can go ahead and propose something that caters to your needs.

What's the best way for someone to reach out to you, [email protected]. E-T-H-A-N at. Get the referral.com.  

Nic: For everybody who's interested, I highly recommend you taking a look at their stuff. Really [00:35:00] cool. Been beside you guys at a bunch of events in the past, and see people rave about your company all the time.

One that comes to mind is, your relationship with Roof Max. Huge national brand that has. Hundreds if not thousands of installers across the nation. And I always see you guys at their events setting up for everything.

And everybody raves about you guys.

Ethan: Let y'all know if anyone's attending Win the Storm in Dallas. Tomorrow through Friday. We're gonna have a booth there and we'll be there as well. So love to meet y'all and take you out to dinner.  

Pete: Well, thank you Ethan. Thank you for jumping on and, lots of good information and some good takeaways here. Really take a look. Like Nic said, write down your process when it comes to your reviews and your referrals. See what you got going on today. See what you can do to potentially improve that.

Thank you everybody for jumping on. Thank you again, Ethan, for jumping on and, chatting with us.  

Ethan: Thank y'all for having me. It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Absolutely man, and I hope everyone benefited from this.  

Pete: Yeah, if you guys are interested in Get the Referral, be sure to reach out to Ethan and his team.

Like I said, a great [00:36:00] product. Definitely give it a look. I saw some people saying they've already booked demos, so that's awesome. We will see you guys next time on the Roofr Masterclass. Thank you everybody.  

Ethan: See y'all. Thank y'all. Have a great day.

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