Transcription
Hey guys, so you clicked on this video because you're a roofing contractor, a roofing salesman, and you're wanting to learn how to get more leads for basically free. Now, I am not here to sell you SEO. I'm not here to, uh, sell you any website services. I am not doing any of that. I'm going to teach you a great way to build a referral system that's going to basically feed you free leads for years to come. Let's get started.
It's all of our loyal subscribers out there, guys. I really appreciate you subscribe to the channel. We've grown a lot faster than I thought we would, so thanks a lot for coming back and watching more videos. If you're new, I just wanted to introduce myself really quick, and we'll get started with the video. My name is Zach Lingenstop, and the owner of company called Digital Roofing Innovations. I'm a US military veteran. I'm a licensed general contractor and roofing contractor in over nine states, so I promise you came to the right place to get your information. Now, we've done projects from Billy up the street all the way through the United States government.
Now, you're probably wondering, if I'm a roofing contractor, why am I going to give all of our competition our secrets on how to get more or basically unlimited leads in their market? Well, guys, we we don't do a whole lot of residential anymore. We've, as a company, we've shifted almost entirely into commercial and federal government. But I know there's a lot of really good residential contractors out there that are overpaying for leads, that are getting crappy internet marketing services, and they just, you're just struggling on how to, you know, continuously bring in good leads. And that's what this video is about.
All right, so let's get started. Okay, so I want to give you a YouTube tip too, and if you like this tip, like the video because it helps us out a lot. So there's a little, I don't know if it's on this side or this side, but there's a little gear icon. If you click on that and click playback speed, a lot of times I speak a little slower because we have obviously a lot of Hispanic people that is in our industry. So I try to speak a little bit slower and clearer, and I'm a redneck from Alabama, but I, I try to speak a little slower so we can make everybody can understand the content. But if you feel like I'm speaking a little too slow and you want to save some time, you can click on that gear and you can change the playback speed to 1.25 or 1.5, and you can watch the videos a lot faster and get the information. That's what I do when I watch other people who speak a little bit slower than, uh, than I would like. So anyway, just a tip for you.
Okay, so what we're going to talk about is a insurance agent referral program. Now, as most of you guys out there do, even if you're someone who does a lot of retail work, uh, in in the United States, and we used to do a lot of retail work as well, we all have to be able to do storm work. And I learned a long time ago that you can either fight with the insurance companies all the time, or I will just say say be on their side, but work with the insurance company. So to sit against work with, and in my opinion, now you can, you can, you know, make a name as a contractor, it's particularly in a local market. And, uh, we're not necessarily, this isn't going to apply so much of storm chasing, like a true storm chasing company, as much as is building long-term referrals into a market. Um, so that's what really this video is about, and how to get leads that way. But you still need to do storm work, and you need to know how to do it correctly. And the biggest thing, and you guys know there's a lot of, there's a lot of good insurance agents out there, there's a lot of good adjusters out there, but there's also ones that make our job a hell of a lot harder than it has to be, right?
So what we did, um, we started our company, and we were the, we were the people to call that if your insurance company wouldn't approve for your, approve your roof, call Digital Roofing Innovations, they'll get approved. Wouldn't do anything dirty. We just knew, uh, we knew, you know, how many hail hits you needed per square. We knew how to mark wind damage. We knew how to, you know, get Chris shingles approved. We knew what disco shingles was, all the stuff that we learned in groups like, uh, you know, Storm Ventures Group, and, you know, you meet these people from Roof Con at these conferences and stuff. These are, you know, all people who do a lot of storm work. And we were in our market, we were kind of known as those people as being able to get those things approved because we knew the system, and we knew how to, we knew how to navigate the the waters of the rules. The problem was, is we never, we never got any type in leads from the insurance agents, and we always felt like we were kind of fought in an uphill battle.
So what we decided to do was go around to all the different insurance agents and just start introducing ourselves. And because we were not a company that would go in and ride up a claim every single time that there was just a little bit of damage, we had no problem telling an adjuster, hey, this roof doesn't have any damage. You know, the homeowner called you out here. We didn't, or we would obviously tell the homeowners not to call the calling to claim in the first place. So what we decided to do is come up with the marketing strategy, and I'm basically going to break this down into three easy steps so you guys can remember it.
So the first thing is, it's cold calling. And so the easiest way to go ahead and get in front of these insurance agents. Now, you can do, there's two types of cold calling. There's drop-ins, and there's just calling on the phone. Now, uh, but they're both basically a cold call because you don't have a warm lead-in. Now, I was fortunate before I started this company to have a B2B or a business to business background in sales, so I had done some of this thing, some of these things before. The advantage of you calling people before is you can set up appointments. So the first thing you want to do is cold call to set appointments. So the way you do that is you're gonna, let's say you start with, you like, we're not gonna use Allstate necessarily in a negative way, we're just using Allstate, his first insurance company came to mind. And let's say you want to contact all the Allstate agents in your area. Well, we all have Google, so you're just going to get on Google, you're going to look up, um, you know, insurance agents, Allstate, and near me, and it's going to pull up all of them.
So what you're going to want to do is you want to call the office, okay? And it's an easy script, guys. You're going to call the office, "Hey, this is Patrick Reed with, uh, ABC Roofing. Um, we're local in the market. I don't know if you guys ever heard of us before, but is there any way I could set an appointment with your agent?" Because most of the time, you're not going to talk directly the agent, you're going to get the gatekeeper, when the girl's up front. So once you, if you can get him or her on the phone, the actual agent, that's great. But if not, get an appointment scheduled that you want to come in and be one of the preferred vendors for roofing. So basically, anytime someone calls in a claim, a lot of times these insurance agents, they want to send out a roofing contractor to go out and check out the property before they put the homeowners put in a claim. And I promise you, if you show up as the insurance, excuse me, the the roofer recommended by your insurance company, or by their insurance company, I'm not going to say you're going to get the lead nine out of ten times, but you're going to get the lead a lot of times, okay?
So the first thing again, we're gonna cold call to set an appointment, either with the agent or the people that, whoever's in charge of the office that is supposed to be calling out the contractors to go look at the roofs. Now, not every insurance agency does it like this, but you'd be surprised on how many actually do. So again, cold call to set up an appointment.
Two, you need to go to the appointment and meet with the agent. Now, when you go, you want to bring in, uh, brochures if you have it. You want to, you want to go meet with the agent like you're going to meet with, like a property management company or a homeowner that has multiple properties. Because the biggest thing is what these insurance agents are going to want to know is, do you have the capability to go out? Whether you're just a one-man show, and there's nothing wrong with that, or you're a company, but they want to know because Miss Susie may have a leak in her roof and she's wanting to file a claim. They want to know that, and she wants to file claim today. They want to know they're going to be able to call you, you're going to call the homeowner, set up the, uh, an inspection, and then get out there as soon as possible, a lot of times that day, to see if she has a leak on her roof. And if they leak on the roof, is it caused by storm damage or is it just old age, and they need to file a claim or not? And again, there's no, the homeowner doesn't have to select you, but man, I'm telling you, you're talking about an 80, 90% closing rate on these leads. Because when you showed up as the preferred contractor from the insurance agent, who most of these people have a relationship with, it's just odds are you're going to get the job.
So the insurance agents are going, and said, you have the capability to be able to run these leads that we give you. And and remember, when you meet with these insurance agents, never make it, but don't, do not go in there and trump it about how what a great company you are and that you do this and do that. When you meet with these insurance agents, ask them a million questions on ways you can help them. If you, if you go in and approach it like you're Mr. King Dingaling contractor and you're the best roofing, you're going to turn them off. They may even know who you are already, and you may be, you know, the best contractor in your area, but you're going to turn off a lot of people. The way to sell people in these B2B businesses and get repeat referral business is fix their needs, solve their problems.
So one of the questions I used to always start off and ask and say, "Hey, do you have a referral program for contractors that you trust to go out and do an honest inspection on a roof?" And a lot of times, if they said yes, I would say, "Okay, what, uh, what problems have you had in the past?" Because obviously you're letting me have this meeting, so, uh, there, there has to be some type of void, uh, that you have. And then most of them would have, sometimes either a roofing contractor retired, or they lost a contract that they'd been using, or somebody started slipping up in their service. But they're going to tell you exactly what they need. So instead of telling them what they need, they're going to tell you what they need, and it's your job to decide if it's a good fit for your company or not.
Then on the flip side, if they don't have a program, simply telling them exactly all the things I just said, you know, you can go out there and make sure that people aren't just following claims for no reason, that you're going to do honest inspections, that you're going to take a lot of pressure off their local adjusters and off their office staff. If you give them all the positives of you being the one who's getting called to go out there, or your people at your company, again, you are going to get most of those leads.
Okay, so the last step in this is maintain your relationships. Now, in this scenario, you've cold called, and let's say you, you, and your staff has cold called a hundred different insurance agents, you got meetings with 20 of them, and out the 20 people that you closed meetings with, or you had meetings with, you closed 10 of them, and now they're going to start putting you on the list to start getting leads from them. Now, you might have to start off and be number three on the list, you might be number four, you might be number one, but the point is, you just want to get on the list. So the thing I used to always say was, "If you give me a chance, that's all I want. Just give me a ch, just give us a shot. See if we're good. You know, we're a good fit for you as well." And just get on the list. Because once you're on the list, all you have to do is continue to do a job and then maintain your relationships.
Now, the way we would maintain our relationships, look, insurance agents like get taken to lunch. They like to go golfing, um, all kinds of stuff, right? You can still give them perks without it being illegal, like you working together on filing claims and you get them getting a kickback and stuff like that. I am not advocating, you know, that route. But I do think that, you know, you can take the agent out from time to time to lunch if they're, you know, then their staff are giving you a lot of leads. But part of maintaining that relationship is not only just selling the agent itself, but all those women, typically women that work up in front of the office, a lot of times they're the ones who's actually calling out the contractors. They're the ones who's deciding who's getting the call for Miss Susie's roof. So, and one of the things I recommend always doing is, we, we built these things called care packages. And inside they had, you know, pens with Digital Roofing Innovations on it, notepads with Digital Roofing Innovations, hand sanitizer before we knew that COVID was going to hit, just little knick-knacks that they would like. Her in the office, every now and then we would bring them donuts, uh, things like that, just to continue to smoosh the girls up the front of the office. But you're talking about these little care packages we put together, cost like 20 bucks, right? And then you talk about taking out an insurance agent once a month for, even if you've got 10 of them that you're working with, and you're paying 30 bucks a, a dinner, I mean, or a lunch. I mean, you're, you're gonna have to eat anyway. Um, so you're talking about a very low cost. And some of these insurance agents, they get calls daily about new roofs from multiple people. So you build enough of these relationships, and guys, other insurance agents talk to other insurance agents. And there are plenty of times where, you know, we got phone calls from some other agent and they're like, "Hey, we know that you work with so and so and said you do a really good job on roof inspections, and we want to know if you would be interested in doing something for us as well." And the relationships just continue to grow.
Guys, in my opinion, there is no better lead in roofing than the ones that you get directly from insurance agents. I think that the best leads out of all the ways we brought in leads when we were doing residential, I felt like this was absolutely the best. And as you know, there are a lot of agencies, and as of course, you can work your way up and to actually start doing commercial, uh, just working through agencies as well, building that relationship. And another thing you're gonna notice is the adjusters are gonna be a lot more favorable to you. Okay? So you can still get your, uh, supplements if you need supplements for the job. You can still, uh, haggle with the, with the, with the insurance companies if you know there's certain things they're not paying for. But you may, you're not going to try to, you know, rip their teeth out on every single job. But the advantage is, you're going to build a relationship with the insurance companies, and they're going to give you free leads, give you free leads. And then again, as you build these relationships with these adjusters, when the homeowner is like, "Hey, how is this a roofing contract you doing?" "Oh yeah, he's great. We work with them all the time. Him and I've probably done 20, 25 roofs together." And Phil, you're all, you can still disagree. You know, you can still disagree with the adjuster, and you can still call for reinspect. You just have to be right and make sure you're doing the right thing. But the biggest thing is, if you get to point, uh, point or number one, you know, do the cold call to actually land the fish and get your, get your insurance agents. And then finally, you got to maintain, you got to maintain those relationships with those people. And you have to approach the agents and their agency in a whole as a customer, right? Because that's really what they are. And if you maintain that relationship, it is far easier. The, the number that most MBA programs teach is, it's 10 times harder to sell to a new customer than it is to sell to an existing customer. So the thought process for me is always, why are you going to go out and try to catch a fish every day when you can just literally go up to a place that's stocked full of fish and you just go pick one out? Kind of like feeding a man once a day or teach them how to fish, kind of dual. But even if you're an owner and you don't want to do this yourself, you need to be teaching your salespeople to do this. This, this tip will transform your business within a year if you just do it.
Guys, I really try not to stay long-winded on some of these, but I really want to emphasize a few points to you on this video. But anyway, we talked about the three different ways to be able to land a insurance agent referral program and how to just blow your sales out of the water and transform your business with basically almost free leads. Guys, if this video was helpful, please give us a thumbs up. It really helps out the channel. If you enjoy our content, please give us a subscribe. It really helps out us a lot, and I promise you we're going to continue to give you great information. We hold nothing back. Anything that's helped us be successful, we're going to share to you guys. Make sure you check out our website at digitalroofingcompany.com. And as always, at Digital Roofing Innovations, we believe in using a modern approach with traditional values. Have a great day.
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