Troy Marshall: We’ve done a couple new things. The day a customer calls for an estimate, we send out an introductory letter with the date and time of the appointment and the estimator’s cell phone number. We also mail the homeowner a copy of our company DVD, which shows one of our sales representatives doing a detailed roofing estimate, including an attic inspection. More and more of our customers have actually watched our DVD and gone to our Web site. Another thing is that we tell people in the proposal package that if they have questions they can call me directly. I give them my cell phone and e-mail.
Gary Kearns: We service them to death. Customer service is not the norm these days. So I believe that anybody who’s attempting it — especially those who have been working on it for years — is way above the grade.
RC: How much of your business is generated from referrals and how do you get them?
Lance Smith: We converted our telemarketing room to a warm-lead room. So we call back all previous customers in our database once or twice a year and ask if there’s anybody they might know who needs a roof. We still get about 10% of our leads from cold-calling, but we also get about 20% of our business from referral.
Brett Hall: Roughly 70% of our business is referral-based and 20% is repeat client. We can expect to roof five or more jobs a year from 20% of our business base, whether they’re builders, remodelers, or rental property owners. This partly goes back to branding.
Two things: I tell the customer I don’t just want to make them happy, I want them to be ecstatic about what our company did. I tell that to them before I make the sale, so they can tell me what their requirements for being super-happy are. The other side of branding is civic involvement. We’ve created a company known for its involvement in the community.
Gary Kearns: In metro Detroit we don’t like spending a lot of money on advertising. Three sources of leads constitute 75% of our lead flow: referrals, repeat customers — between them we get about 60% to 70% of our business — and then coming in at No. 3, prior leads where we gave them an estimate but they were not sold. We track them with a database management program. We put out a quarterly mailer and send it to those folks.
RC: Do you have a referral reward program?
Gary Kearns: We used to do a graduated referral: we’d pay $25 for the first job, $50 for the second, and up to $100 for the fourth. So you top out at $100. Then you start looking at your lead costs. If a leads costs $250, why not spend $100? So we went to a flat fee of $100 per referral to a prior client who refers us or who gets another job worth more than $1,500. On the quarterly mailers I include information to the effect that you can get $100 by referring us to someone who buys a job. Last month I wrote checks for $6,000 — 60 people [referred us].
Troy Marshall: We don’t reward customers. I get people calling me, here and there, and asking me if we pay. I tell them that while we do appreciate the referral, if we were to give them $100 we’d have to charge their friend an extra $100. Although I’m thinking more and more about using a reward referral program.
