Why would you pay for roof leads when you can generate leads for FREE?

Roof Leads. Good leads. Crap Leads. Glengarry Leads. Non-exclusive Leads. Exclusive Leads. No wonder most contractors heads are spinning with this kind of stuff. I want to lay down a few markers today and help you learn a few keys to sorting through your roofing lead generation system to ensure it’s working at a high level. The obvious thing is foundational to the whole discussion. If you’re in the sales business you need prospects to talk with, who might be interested in your offer. So, you need leads.

Where Do “Good” Roof Leads Come From?

Roofers need roofing leads, cabinet makers need remodeling leads, landscapers need leads of people who want to improve their lawns. No news here, right? My primary focus today is to get you clear on the differences between non-exclusive lead gen sites and setting yourself up to generate your own leads for free. There are ‘countless’ lead generation businesses – large, medium and small guys. Each has a story that makes it possible to earn business. Lead generation services, however, are similar to when the old scribe discussed “giving a man a fish versus teaching a man to fish.” As you recall, one feeds the man for that day — the other feeds the man for his lifetime. If you participate in these programs, your cost per roof lead is almost always higher than it needs to be. If that’s not enough, the leads you get are by-and-large non-exclusive. Meaning when you get notified of a prospect, many of your competitors will get the notice at the same time.

The Hidden Costs of Non-Exclusive Leads

Each of you pays for the same lead, but most of the time only one contractor will make the sale. If you are not the winning bidder, you still have to eat the cost of every unconverted roof lead in your next sale. Next, when you’re presenting your services to prospects in a non-exclusive lead gen model, many of those prospective customers will ask for your lowest price. Your competition offers low price in hopes of getting the sale, so if you want to win, cut your price! NO. Not if you want to be around for a long time. What are the alternatives? Well, you can skip using “the network” to get leads and instead, build and operate your own network. If you’re considering this idea — or just realizing that non-exclusive leads are rarely anything close to those great Glengarry leads, your timing could hardly be better. See search engines have been implementing artificial intelligence – “AI” for short, into their businesses. Sadly, most of the search engine experts and SEO roofing leads guys failed to keep up with the changes.

Quality Score and Its Affect On Roof Leads

Gone are the days when SEO or building backlinks would allow you to gain visibility in search results.  Now it’s all about your “quality score”. When you spoke to your marketing team about this — what do they tell you? In this (scary) new world, your website content is as or more important than the backlink profile you have. If your SEO team is still focusing on backlinks — your efforts are in trouble or at the least you’re bleeding cash. Beyond that, your reviews are screaming loudly to your prospects what kind of experience they will get if they hire you. Would you hire and pay someone who either has no or limited Google reviews? What if there’s a few but some of them are poor? In this situation, search engines are also voting against your roof lead generation efforts — they will most likely ‘hide’ your site from getting visibility, meaning you’ll have a difficult time turning it all around. My analysis of the whole lead generation business model is that Google and the other search engines all want to offer those who search with them the “best” answer for whatever they search for. I suspect they find that consumers searching for a roofer have too many choices. Way too many choices. So with internal scoring they eliminate those roofers who indicate risk to the consumer by making it harder for those guys to attract customers. This leads to the fulfillment of their pledge to reduce choices significantly.  This leaves only the best companies with an excellent history still in place. I’ve been leading my clients and customers in this direction for almost 7 years now. I suspect it explains why one roofing contractor went from $2.6M to $8.6M in revenues in one year, installing 504 roofs that year. It’s also what drive this customer to say just last week that “Scott, you have catapulted me at least two years ahead, in a period of a month.” We didn’t do that with luck — and we didn’t manipulate Google’s search results either. It comes from an application of principles about how people buy things that have been around forever to this new online world. I’m also at the point of being sufficiently busy that I’m considering only taking new customers by referral. In other words, you have to know someone I’ve worked with to be able to hire me at all. If you’d like to know more, set up a time to talk here.