Roofing Success
The Roofing Success Podcast is a show created to inspire roofing contractors to achieve optimal success in their roofing businesses. The host, Jim Ahlin, is the co-author of the book, "Internet Marketing For Roofing Contractors, How to TRIPLE Your Sales and Turn Your Roofing Website Into an Online Lead Generation Machine", and Co-Founder of Roofer Marketers, the Digital Marketing Agency for the roofing industry. On each episode, Jim will be sitting down with industry leaders to talk about their processes, the lessons they learned, and how to find success in roofing.
Roofing Success
AI Is Replacing Google: What Smart Roofing Companies Are Doing Instead with Marcus Sheridan
Is Your Roofing Business Invisible to AI? Marcus Sheridan Says It Might Be…
The old way of marketing is dying. And if you're still stuck doing what used to work on Google, your roofing company could vanish. Fast.
In this episode, Jim Ahlin sits down with They Ask, You Answer author Marcus Sheridan to uncover the NEW way to win in roofing sales and marketing. Based on his new book, Endless Customers, Marcus lays out a 4-pillar system for becoming the most known and trusted brand — not just with people… but with AI.
🔹 Why ranking #1 on Google doesn't matter anymore
🔹 How AI is changing everything (and what to do about it)
🔹 The 4 secrets that build brand trust with humans AND AI
🔹 Why the best brands “Say What Others Won’t Say”
🔹 The self-service tools you need to close more leads
🔹 How to use VIDEO to dominate your market
🔹 And what to do TODAY to survive the shift that’s already here
If your lead costs are going up… if your phone stopped ringing… or if you’re clinging to old-school sales strategies…
This episode will light a fire under your feet. It’s time to stop falling behind and start future-proofing your company.
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Are you building your roofing business on a marketing model that's about to collapse? Marcus Sheridan, the legendary author of they Ask you Answer, is back this time with a warning and a roadmap for contractors trying to survive the new digital era, and a new book Endless Customers. Ai is changing search, killing the old SEO playbook and pushing Google into decline, and if your roofing company isn't adapting, you're about to be invisible to customers. In this episode, marcus breaks down the four pillars of creating a brand. Ai will trust and recommend, starting with why you must start saying what your competitors won't, the video strategy that will separate winners from everyone else, why you need a self-service experience for your buyers today. And how to actually be more human in a tech-driven world.
Speaker 1:So if you're struggling with lead generation, watching lead costs rise or still clinging to old school sales strategies, this is an episode that will shake you up and get you future ready. Let's dive in to how to create endless customers with Marcus Sheridan. Welcome to the Roofing Success Podcast. I'm Jim Alleyne and I'm here to bring you insights from top leaders in the roofing industry to help you grow and scale your roofing business. Marcus Sheridan, how?
Speaker 2:are you today, yo Jim? It's going to be a good day. Excited about this conversation, buddy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it's always good, Really excited to have you on. You know you've been around the roofing industry for a few years now, speaking at Roofing Process Conference a few times.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good old Dimitri, for a few years now, speaking at Roofing Process Conference.
Speaker 1:A few times I've known you from the agency side of things also, and in your book they Ask you Answer what's been going on. Give the audience a little bit of an overview if they're not familiar with Marcus Sheridan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and let me take it all the way back just real quick for everybody. I started as a pool guy swing pool company called River Pools, 2001, just fighting to grow the business, just like everybody here that's listening. And 2008, 2009, we get the crash. Good thing about crashes and hard times is they create strong men and women. And so it was during that time that I really said you know, I got nothing to lose and let's really learn about this thing called the internet. And I did, and as I studied, I was like you know, basically what I'm reading over and over again is I just obsess over my buyer, their questions, fears, worries, concerns, and I'm willing to address those online through text, through video. I might save my business. So I said, well, again, I had nothing to lose here, because I was already looking at losing my home and I thought it was like a really scary time, but again, it was pretty exciting too. So that's when I said we're going to become the best teachers in the world when it comes to, in our case, fiberglass pools. And I brainstormed all the questions I'd ever received and there was hundreds of questions and then I started answering them, along with my business partners, and we did it through text and video, on our website mainly, and on YouTube, and, to make a long story short, we became the most trafficked swimming pool website in the world and it was quite extraordinary and we exploded Eventually. We started getting so many leads that we became a manufacturer, became the fastest growing manufacturer of fiberglass pools in the US, and then we became the first franchise of fiberglass pools in the US, and then we became the first franchise of fiberglass pools in the US.
Speaker 2:As I was going through this whole journey with River Pools, I started a coaching company that would teach other organizations how to do this thing that we were doing, and today it's called Impact and the book came out in 2017, called they Ask, you Answer, and it's done incredibly well in all things home services, home improvement. It came out again in 2020. But because of what happened in November of 2022, which you and I are very, very aware of, and ChatGPT and AI just really changing the world as we know it and certainly changing sales and marketing as we know it and the buyer's journey as we know it I realized I need to do something that's more modern and I want to do something that's more system-based, and from that came what is Endless Customers, which is the third edition of they Ask you Answer, but it's called Endless Customers and you know I wrote this so that it would be valid, ideally for at least five to 10 years, which doesn't sound like a lot of time, but today that's a lot of time.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as you know, jim, because it's very, very hard to write anything today that isn't outdated tomorrow. So, you know, you've got to be very principle-based, you know, with your stuff, um, but it's been a crazy ride. And uh, I am so deeply passionate about home improvement, of course, because you know, I grew up, uh, lower middle class. My dad had a, you know was a, was a builder and, um, you know, being a pool guy myself and living that blue collar world man, this is just runs deep in my veins and my son's a, my son's an electrician and now he's, he's 21. He has his journeymans and, uh, you know he's, he's off to the races. So, yeah, it just runs through me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's awesome, man, and it. What I, what I love about your story is that when the resilience came, or resilience came out of the pain in in the in the recession of 2008, right, and man, everyone was scrambling. Right, yeah, everyone was scrambling. What do we do, like you know, and and a lot of times it's it's when those, like you said, your home was facing foreclosure, there was like that was, that was part of it. It was just part of life for people that were around back then and in business back then. I love that it came from that, right, because it's like, man, you can't stop, you can't. Just, you know, you have to come up with creative ideas.
Speaker 1:You know there's this.
Speaker 2:It's like I find, Jim, whenever I know that things are going to get hairy with the economy, there's a part of me that quietly gets very excited. Yeah, and the reason is because you don't see innovation when people are fat and happy. You know, for example, from a marketing perspective, during COVID, you didn't really see any innovation. The only innovation we had was, let's say, some virtual selling, but that was because demand was so crazy, and so what happened is Home Improvement, home Services, was so fat and happy. It's like the opposite of the bubblegum shrimp storm. Right, it's like things are good and let's just ride this wave, but in the process of riding that wave, oftentimes you just don't see very much innovation.
Speaker 2:There's actually a name for this, and I talk about it in the final section of Endless Customers, something that's really personal to me. What it's called is the pride cycle, and the pride cycle affects companies, industries, cultures, civilizations. It's all over the world. But basically, if you look at it like, everything in life is a cycle, a circle, if you will. At the bottom of that circle, we have pain. At the top of that circle, you have prosperity, and so when we find ourselves in pain, we say, well, I don't want to continue to be in pain. What can I do to change? Well, I need to do things that I'm not currently doing. I need to think outside the box. I need to do the little things, make the extra call, send that video or get over my feelings or opinions or whatever.
Speaker 2:And so we start to come up the left side of the circle and we're doing the little things because that we get momentum. And as we get to momentum, we get to the top of the circle, which is that place of prosperity, and because we reach prosperity, we get happy, we get excited. But if we're there for a while, oftentimes what's very human is suddenly we stop doing those little things, stop making the extra call. We stopped producing that piece of content Now, we stopped going the extra mile with the homeowner and, you know, we stopped looking for ways to do it better on the job site, whatever it is.
Speaker 2:And because of that, we start to lose momentum. And as we lose momentum, we come back down the right side of the circle and then, lo and behold, we find ourselves right back to where we started, in the place of pain, and that's why, if you look at 2025, a lot of folks right now are literally back down the circle in the place of pain and they're saying tag on it, why, why? During COVID, did I not plant the seeds so that I could reap the harvest later? But instead all we wanted to do and I'm not saying everybody, but all the majority wanted to do was harvest during that time period. But eventually the field runs out and you've got to have a new one that's growing and that's ready to be harvested, and if not, you find yourself in a serious predicament.
Speaker 1:And that's the pendulum called business and the pride cycle I love that man and it is so impactful for today. Right, we're recording at a time where the stock market is hitting record lows, from the tariffs, you know, stuff going out, there's a lot of things going on. But even moving into this spring, you know, talking with a lot of roofing contractors in the RSRA and other places, friends of mine, everyone's like, well, what happened to the phone ringing so much Like why is this happening? What's going on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've got a lot of folks that are spending more on Google ads than they've spent in years and they're getting less results, which, if you look at it, can we talk about Google for a second For sure, yeah, I mean, if you look at one of the biggest byproducts of what happened in November 2022 with chat GBT, you know, within days as I was using it, I said, oh yeah, google's in trouble. And Google, within days, was saying, oh, we're in trouble too. This was the first time in years, was saying, uh-oh, we're in trouble too. This was the first time in years, google was meeting in the boardroom late at night Because, generally speaking, the leaders of an industry are the slowest to adapt or adopt new practices, right, and so the reason for that is because we don't wanna replace existing business models. For 25 years, google has been really fat and happy and a lot of businesses and a lot of marketers could take advantage of this beautiful little tool. Two things it gave us it gave us search and it gave us ads, and if you knew how to play the game, you could do really, really well. But what happens if that game is no longer the game everybody wants to play, if you look at it too, for a long time just being ranked number one in search engine results, like if you 10 years ago as you very clearly know, jim somebody typed in best roofing contractor, buffalo, new York Well, if you showed up number one in Google search results, 80 plus percent of people would click on you. You ruled the world.
Speaker 2:Today, if somebody searches that, what's going to happen? They're going to see an AI summary. It's going to take up more than half the screen. Then they're going to see a Google you know your local map. That's going to take up more than half the screen. You're going to see related questions. That takes up a bunch of screen. You might see some videos and then, finally, you might see the first result in SERPs, which basically means now you've gone from an 80% open rate to less than 20% open rate if you're number one. So it's not the end game to be number one.
Speaker 2:And, of course, you've got all these sponsored ads that are showing above that as well. I don't think I even mentioned them and Google's doing everything they can to continue to milk those sponsored ads, and they know that a lot of business owners are getting desperate and so, in my opinion, somewhat nefariously, showing them like they're real organic results, even though they're forced to call them sponsored ads. They want it to appear as much as possible that this is essentially old school organic search results, and so you've got all these factors working against you. This is why, if you are building your house on Google and Google ads, you're building it on a house of sand. We've known for 2000 plus years that you shouldn't build your house on sand. This doesn't mean that Google is at the end of its road, but I will tell you this it is on its decline in terms of user ability. And whenever I hear and I know you've probably heard this too, and I don't even know your opinion on this yet, jim, and so we might disagree, but that's okay, because that's what these types of pods are for Whenever I hear an SEO company saying this is not really going to be, ai is really not going to affect Google.
Speaker 2:Google is as busy as it's ever been. You know, business is rocking. Blah, blah, blah. I'm like you either are very ignorant of your own industry or you're intellectually dishonest, both of which is, to me, a serious issue. That is not acceptable, because you can't tell me right now that if you have used ChatGPT or Clot or any of these main LLMs as a as a, as a what is essentially search replacement tool. You can't say it's not a better UX.
Speaker 2:Most of us, people like you and me we like we're blowing the dust off of Google when we go back there right now. You know what I'm saying. It's just not something that we're doing, and so we are not necessarily laggards, but everybody's going to catch up, and so that means that you're just going to see that it's going to go down. The momentum is going to go down, which further says all right. For 20 plus years, we had to get recommended by two parties, essentially as contractors by homeowners and by Google, by homeowners and by Google. And now there's a third, and that third is really going to ultimately become the most important, and that's AI. And if AI is not recommending you, you're going to be screwed in a few years.
Speaker 2:And this is more challenging, though, because you're not just going to be the. You know you can't just stroke a check and say I want to fix this with ads, because unless the business models change dramatically and I don't think they will, because they're a subscription model and they're making their money in different ways you're not going to have the ability just to rely on ads, like you used to have, and you're not going to be able to say well, I can just manipulate a couple of keywords and show up for search. You're going to have to become a known and trusted brand in the market and you're going to have to be willing to do things, from a sales and marketing perspective, that haven't really been done in your space before. You've got to have courage, You've got to be bold, you've got to be brave. That's what Endless Customers is really all about. I know I'm going on a little bit of a rant here, jim, but I just think this is a very big deal. A lot of people are sleeping on it Suddenly they're going to be.
Speaker 1:um, if you do not adapt, you will, uh, get your resume ready. That's right, as a business owner if you, if you are not willing to adapt, get your resume ready because you are going out of business. Brand is going to be the most impactful thing that you can do Now on the AI side. What I love about AI is you can ask it why it told you that.
Speaker 1:So, some of the fun for everyone. Go to ChatGPT, go to Gemini, go to Cloud, go to Perplexity, go to all of the AI tools, go to Metas AI, go to Grok. Go to all of them and type in best roofing company, city, state for your, where you're located, and then ask it why it came up with those results and it will tell you. And it and and it is part of the fundamentals of of the fundamentals of SEO over time are correlated in those results in terms of it wants to know how many times it saw you online, how many pages are on your website, how many citations are built across, when is it seeing your name, address and phone number across the internet from a local SEO perspective, number across the internet from a local SEO perspective. And also on how many reviews you have across the internet on all of the platforms, not just Google, but all of the platforms, mainly Google.
Speaker 1:Still, I will say it's mainly Google, but it's telling you. It's telling you what you can say. How could I improve my presence? And it will tell you and I guarantee it's going to tell you. And so the tactics and things that you did to rank in Google may still work for a period of time, as ChatGPT is using those signals. That's right. So if you haven't, my goodness, you are behind the curve. If you have not been working on those fundamental things over time, man, you better work on them really, really hard. But from a little bit different perspective. That trust and that brand are going to be much more impactful in going into this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really to essentially wrap up to a degree what you just said. To me it's like all about signals, Search is all about signals.
Speaker 2:The more signals that we can send out in this case to AI and to the rest of the world that we're a known and trusted brand, the more likely we are to be recommended by AI. And so, to your point every review is a signal, every comment is a signal, every video is a signal, every piece of content you produce is a signal, every piece of content somebody produces about you is a signal. These are all signals. This is what we mean when we say brand, but in the, in the past, brand really was a very human thing. Yes, and now you've got your brand with humans, but you also have your brand with ai, and that's hard for people to understand, but it's, and one could say well, they're essentially overlapping.
Speaker 2:Okay, find that to a degree, but this is where we now are. And so the question becomes well, how do I send out more signals and better signals? And that's really what I'm talking about in the book. And specifically, the book is a system. Endless Customers is a system that will show you how to become the most known and trusted brand in your market for humans, for search engines and for AI. All right, now, with that being the case, we have built it around four pillars. Four pillars of a known and trusted brand.
Speaker 1:And, if it's cool with you, I'll lay those out here real quick. We talked about that the other day and I love the way you frame this, so yeah please.
Speaker 2:So number one you've got as a business, you've got to be willing to say online what others in your space aren't willing to say. That's number one. I'll go through these four real quick and maybe we can come back to each one. Number two you've got to be willing to show with video others in your space aren't willing to show. Number three you got to be willing to sell in a way that others aren't willing to sell. And then, number four, you've got to be willing to be more human than others are willing to be. On the surface, jim, they sound really like basic, but when you get to the nuts and bolts of it, most companies are not doing these things in a truly different or extraordinarily different way than their competitors are doing it. So let's talk about the say one Say what others aren't willing to say. In your space, people say all the time it's like well, what are you referring to, marcus? So one thing that hasn't changed since I wrote they Ask you Answer the first edition. That is stronger than it's ever been since I wrote they Ask you Answer the first edition. That is stronger than it's ever been, and I was way ahead on this. One was there's five subjects that buyers want to know about before they buy something. Five subjects. These five subjects have ruled SEO over the course of 20 plus years. They have ruled the economy of just search in general, in terms of the way you and I get comfortable with reaching out to a company. The things that we want to learn and understand. Here's the five subjects. We call them the big five. Number one as buyers, consumers, we want to know everything about cost and price. We want to know it, and if we can't find it, we get pissed. Number two we want to know, as buyers and consumers, what could go wrong, the negatives, the problems We'll just call that the problems. When somebody's very serious about buying something, they want to know what could go wrong. Number three we're obsessed with comparing stuff online. When we are thinking about buying something, when we're researching something, we're comparing that thing versus another thing, because we want to make sure we've done our due diligence. Number four reviews. We all know we look at reviews. The thing about reviews, though, is we want to know the good, the bad and the ugly, not just the good. We want to know who's a four and who's not four. And then, finally, number five, we want to know best, best, most top, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I was talking about the big five about 13 years ago. What's wild. If you go to, like, let's say, an Amazon page today on Amazon, you will literally find all the big five. You're going to find all the cost information. You're going to find the problems by looking at the frequently asked questions, okay. You're going to find reviews. You're going to see comparisons of this product versus that product, right, and you're going to see best or rankings, and this is what this is like. This is they.
Speaker 2:They have understood that this is what drives psychology in terms of the way people think, and that's the big five. So I would ask someone, if they're listening to this right now, I want you to think about the content that you have online. How much of it relates to these five things? How much are you addressing these five things? Because if you're not addressing these five things, I can tell you somebody is, and your potential customers are going to learn it from them. They're going to learn it from them or they're going to learn it from AI or both, but that's what's happening, and so you've got and whoever they're listening to is the expert.
Speaker 1:So remember that, because if you are talking about the cost of building a roof and everything that goes into the cost of it and why your cost is where it is so that you could take care of future warranty issues, so that you can have the best team members, so that you can have the best customer experience, so that you can actually market your business versus the cost of chucking a truck that is something that a lot of people won't say is what I'm kind of to what you're saying, you know. And then, before we carry on with the episode, let's give a shout out to one of our sponsors. I talk to contractors every day that feel stuck, not because they're not working hard, but because they're missing the structure to grow without chaos or their cultures falling apart, because their team's unclear, unaligned or just burned out and when change hits, they're reacting instead of leading because time and priorities aren't under their control. Day 41 Thrive helps to fix that with proven strategies for growth, culture and leadership that actually work, ready to thrive beyond the storm. Visit the link in the description or visit the Roofing Success Podcast website on the sponsors page to start your journey today.
Speaker 1:Your cost is where it is, so that you can take care of future warranty issues, so that you can have the best team members, so that you can have the best team members, so that you can have the best customer experience, so that you can actually market your business versus the cost of chucking a truck. That is something that a lot of people won't say is what I'm kind of to what you're saying, you know. And then the problems. Why don't no one wants to talk about the problems, marcus?
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, I got so many different examples. I've got a company that I've worked with I talk about them in the book actually called Sheffield Metals. What they do is they produce metal roofing. They're a metal roofing manufacturer and when we started working together we said okay, one of the most prominent questions anybody has about a metal roof is what are the problems with a metal roof? You see, metal roofing is not as popular in the US as it is in other places. People are still learning about it, there's still doubts and fears about it and there's a lot of ignorance. And so they agree okay, let's go ahead and produce this video. So we produced that video about five years ago. Today it's got about 630,000 views for that one video 630,000 people researching problems with a metal roof.
Speaker 2:Now, if you're researching the problems of the metal roof, there's only two reasons A you have a problem with your metal roof. B you wanna buy a metal roof. Those are the only two people that are researching that. That's how you own a conversation. And when it comes to cost and price, to your point, a lot of people completely misunderstand this. And in the new book which, by the way, you can find it endlesscustomerscom, if you're listening to this endlesscustomerscom and you should order it because it's going to change your life if you read it and apply it. That's key word. Got to execute right.
Speaker 2:But when it comes to pricing in the book I give what is the example of a perfect pricing page of your website. And then on a perfect pricing page of your website there's like all these different things that are covered, but there's five fundamental things. Number one what drives cost up for your product or service? Number two what drives cost down for your product or service, like the factors? Number three why are some companies so expensive? Number four why are some companies so cheap? Chuck in the truck. And finally, number five roughly where do you fall? Generally speaking, not exactly.
Speaker 2:The problem is, jim, everybody hears you need to talk about cost and price. Well, I don't want to give my exact prices or I can't give my exact prices. Nobody is saying that. For the love of all, that's pure and holy. What we're saying is that if you do not educate them on what defines value when they're trying to research, how much does it cost to replace this new roof? They won't know unless someone talks about it. And the issue is a lot of us have been asked before to explain what drives cost up, what drives cost down. Well, you gave me a quote. This other person gave me a quote. Some of you are more expensive, some of you are less expensive. Help me understand why there's a delta in the industry. You see, every contractor that's listening to this right now has answered that question before. The problem is, you oftentimes don't answer it until you're asked. Stop waiting to be asked when the whole world wants to know.
Speaker 2:80% of the buyer's journey happens before they reach out, before they talk to you. So it's your job to meet them where they are, not where you want them to be. That's a losing game. This is not your sales process. It's called a buyer's journey for a reason.
Speaker 2:And the second you realize that you're not as nearly in control of the buyer's journey as you were in 1995, that's the year I graduated high school and that's the year the internet just started to kick off. Then everything changes. Everything changes and you start to become way more buyer-centric. I'm obsessed like obsessed with human behavior, buyer behavior. That's what I think about in stupid ways all the time, and everybody's listening to this when they're on a website and they're looking for cost and price information and they can't find it, they get annoyed, they get pissed and they move on, and they move on and they keep searching until they find someone that was willing to talk about the thing.
Speaker 2:Now, by the way, some of you say, well, I can't talk about it because we tend to be more expensive and that will scare them away. Nope, sorry, home slice. The thing that scares someone away is not when you educate them well and explain to them value proposition. What scares someone away in the buyer's journey is when they're ignorant and they can't get an answer. That's when they say I'm out, just like. That's the reason why you say you're out With my pool company.
Speaker 2:We're the first fiberglass swimming pool company in the world to talk about how much does a fiberglass pool cost, and I wrote an article in 2009 that is still up to this day. It just modified. Every single year it's made, for just my company in Virginia, over $35 million in rev that we've tracked back to that one piece of content. Can you believe that, joe and Jim, $35 million in rev from one piece of content and I'll still have contractors to this day say, yeah, that's not something I want to talk about. Until I'm in the home. You are not eating your own dog food. You're certainly not following the golden rule, because that's not how you want to be treated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, and you're going to lose because guess what AI is going to do.
Speaker 2:Yes, going to give that answer, that's right.
Speaker 1:And so you're going to lose. If you're not willing to do that, if you're not willing to say what others won't say. Say the hard things, explain it, explain the value. You can do it at the kitchen table, that's right.
Speaker 2:That's right you can do it at the kitchen table, that's right. That's right, you can do it both places.
Speaker 1:Now the next one is showing what others won't show.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, home improvement and home services are now a video-first industry. We have to swallow that pill. We have to swallow that pill and, whereas I could do mostly text in 2009 and dominate the world of pools and really any place in home improvement and you remember those days, jim we can't do that today. You've got to be very, very aggressive with video, and that video needs to be on YouTube as long and short form. Instagram, facebook Reels TikTok across the board. We need to be doing more video, long and short form, on a multiplicity of platforms. Why? Number one AI can now read video like it reads text, right, and it's getting better every day at that. Number two, like it reads text right, and it's getting better every day at that. Number two, these are massive signals, again, signals to recommend your brand. You take one video and you can repurpose it in a multiplicity of areas, more so than you can do a text. By the way, right, you're not gonna go through that article you wrote on freaking TikTok, but you can absolutely take that video and you know you can reedit and you can put it across the board in many places, right? So that's, that's like how you need to be thinking on this. You need to think like a media company. Everything you do you could be showing and you could be showing better.
Speaker 2:If you're not doing before and after videos on every single job, you're just being flat out lazy and you're saying I don't want business, I don't want more leads, I don't want to become more known. With your cell phone, you have a better camera than anybody in Hollywood had 20 years ago and the problem is you'll see people say things like well, videos is not my thing. Really, do you believe that Because you go into people's homes and you ask them for money, they got to see your face, then they got to hear your voice. Then Wouldn't you rather that they have seen and heard you and already feel a level of trust towards you before you're walking up their driveway? Of course, that's a no-brainer and you've got to be willing to show the extra mile. You can tell people. You know nobody has attention to detail with the way they do their roofing like we do, but that doesn't mean anything until you show it.
Speaker 2:You know I started manufacturing fiberglass pools around 2017. We were the first manufacturer to have a full-blown demo of a series of eight videos, 10 minutes long each, showing exactly how we manufactured our pools, no other manufacturers were willing to show it because they were like this is proprietary. I'm like proprietary, my butt, are you kidding me? There's nothing proprietary about slapping glass on a mold Come on, get out of here. And so we finally showed it. And because we showed it, homeowners around the country were like they're the only ones that show how they make the saying. And that's how we just exploded from a growth perspective. Nobody was showing that. We showed it.
Speaker 2:What could you be showing that the majority of your competitors aren't showing? Think about when you do tear-offs. Think about all the ugly things that you see that you're like how did they do that? You should be showing that, showing it to the world, and that's how you're going to get a lot of attention. That's how you're going to get a lot of traction. You know, I mean the hardware. You use the methods that you do. Show those things because seeing is believing. That was true 2,000 years ago, it's going to be true today and it's going to be very, very true tomorrow.
Speaker 1:That's not going to go away. And when you're doing this, understand what you're talking about. What you've talked about, marcus, is that buyer's journey. Understand what they're thinking. Right, the foundation of marketing is who, what, how, right, and so who you're speaking to, so who your customer is the message that you are saying to them and that message and what resonates with them is that right.
Speaker 1:They don't want to just hear we're the best. They don't want to just hear we have an exceptional customer service If you're able to show them, if you can show them. So one of the one of the main things I went back through this you know we've we've released over 250 episodes now of this show and we went back and we were. I had to do. I did a presentation for the National Women's and roofing organization recently and I went back to find common threads between all of the all of the successful contractors that I have interviewed, and it was the most common thread was that they cared so much about their customers. Like it was it's phenomenal how much they poured into and fixed problems and like did so much, for sometimes it wasn't their fault, right.
Speaker 1:They did a lot right, they pour into their customers. So when they say on their website, we have a great, you know, we're customer focused, we have a great customer experience, it's just words. But what you're saying now we take that and we show it and we show the problems. Show the problems and show how you fixed it, show the solution, show how this was a problem and now this is how we that there there will be not like the power in that is is outrageous, right, like. But your words don't matter, right? The words on your website, the words we are well, we're better business bureau rated a plus Well if everybody's seeing it.
Speaker 2:It's just noise. It's just noise.
Speaker 1:And so going that level deeper is what you know, is what I'm hearing from you. Take it that level deeper. Like this is what everyone's saying, and they're saying it for a reason because the message resonates with the buyer, right. It resonates with that customer avatar, that buyer persona. But now take that message and film it right. Create additional content around it. The other part is the repurposing of content that you mentioned. This is my favorite thing in the world. I am a repurposing addict. Like I think you could take that blog post, create it into a, turn it into a video script. Now you have the video. Now you have, like, now you have, you know, so many pieces of content from that one, but all with the intention that you're just talking about. Like you said, those core five the cost, the problems, comparisons, reviews and who's the best right, like those are the you know. Bringing it all back to that Next one you talk about is selling in a way that others won't sell. What are your thoughts on this? How are people not selling?
Speaker 2:So there's a few different ones here you and I were talking about. I'm going to give you some examples. We were talking about one before the call. I don't think most people realize that if you can get back to a lead within five minutes, there's a 900% greater chance that they'll become a contact. So one of the most important things you can do right now is speed to lead. Speed to lead, in other words, how quickly do you reach out? It's pretty stunning how many leads come through through paid, through, organic, whatever it is that we never talk to. And that's because if you wait more than five minutes, heck who knows what happens. Maybe their HVAC broke, or maybe they got a call from their kid at school and now all of a sudden, they're thinking about something totally different and they won't get back into that train of thought for another few weeks, or if at all. That's just the way. That's the world that we live in. It's your job to immediately have a conversation with them.
Speaker 2:So, like my swimming pool company, right now, we have an AI that and this goes live like within the next few days actually for us. But and this is something that you, that you personally do, jim, and I think it's really, really awesome and I didn't know this beforehand which I think is a tremendous service. It can be really I mean, you're going to be inundated with demand for this, but with demand for this, but you know, just being able to have an AI, immediately call the person and then the AI and, for those that haven't heard it, ai can have voice conversations that will shock you, that come across as very, very human. You can even hear breaths. I mean, you can hear like it's just wild. So, anyway, the way that it works with Riverpools is the lead comes through, we immediately call them and we say hi, this is Alex. I'm an AI assistant with Riverpools.
Speaker 2:You just filled out a form on our site saying that you want to talk to a salesperson, and the purpose of this call is for me to schedule a time for you to talk with that salesperson. That's it. It's really really simple. They have the calendar for the salesperson that they can sync with automatically. And now our conversion rates, our conversation rates, can go way, way up, because the first company has a conversation with a prospect generally wins three out of four times. So you want to be the fastest company to have that first conversation. Email doesn't count. You need to have a conversation first, but in order to do that, you need to make sure that you get them in the moment that they're hot, and the way to do that is to use something like AI, and I know you've got feelings on this. We're going to talk about another one here in a second, but I'm sure you wanted to say something on that one, jim, because you're pretty passionate about it too.
Speaker 1:We went through the data with our old marketing company and 40% of leads that we generated for our clients were not answered or responded to. Yeah, that's outrageous, marcus, and we built out a lot of technology to do that, like originally like when a lead comes in, we would trigger a phone call to your company If you didn't answer now text messages and emails and things like that. So we've been working on this speed to lead for years, but with the implementation of voice AI, it's so much better and so much faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah and again, somebody can't understand how good it is until they hear a well-trained system do it. And then, all of a sudden, you're like your whole world is like the world that I previously knew is no longer the world I'm living in once you hear it, once you see it in action. Another example of this comes from a stat that Gartner recently shared with me, which is 75% of all buyers say they would prefer to have a seller-free sales experience, which basically means we don't want to talk to salespeople at this point until we're very, very ready, until we're comfortable, until we're confident, until we feel like we're not going to make a mistake. And the key to that, therefore, as a business, is what we call self-service. In the book and in Endless Customers, there's five self-service tools that we teach that essentially are interactive tools that you might have on your website or online, or something that's affiliated with you, that someone can get an answer that previously, or take an action that previously they would have had to have done through a human, but now they can do it themselves on their own terms.
Speaker 2:People love that. Let me give you some examples of how this might work, one that we've had a ton of success with and it doesn't work for every company, because not every company has multiple salespeople but self-scheduling tools where they can go to your site and they can schedule time with a salesperson if they're interested. But here's the super catch to this. That in and of itself isn't super interesting. What gets crazy and we've experimented with this a bunch, jim is if they can see the salespeople at work for you their images, their bios, maybe a video about them, and then they can choose which one they work with. Closing rates double every single time we implement this.
Speaker 2:So if someone chooses a salesperson versus is given a salesperson, there's literally literally 100% greater chance that they will buy from you. Crazy, huh. So that I think it's no different than there's a reason why we like Uber more than taxis because we don't know if the taxi is going to stink, if it's going to be a terrible experience, if it's going to be beat up. Uber's very consistent and we feel like we had a choice in the game. Well, being able to choose your salesperson is the future of selling. Okay, I can tell you that right now. Another example of this, which is a mega trend and this is already a trend in roofing we're going to see it throughout home services. I am completely invested in this kind of like. You're invested in agents. I'm very, very invested in this next type of self-service tool, which is a self-pricing tool, all right, and I call them pricing estimators. So the first question somebody has when they know they need a new roof, first question like they look up at the roof or they look up their ceiling and there's like a leak coming through, or they look up and they're like my shingles are shot, whatever it is, first question is, roughly how much is this going to cost? What's this going to set us back? Are we in the game? Can we even afford this? Like? These are all the questions that somebody has, and so if you don't address it in that moment, many of the people, if they can't find it, they'll stop the journey right there and they don't do further research. If they're allowed to get that initial question answered are we in the game here financially? Then they'll start to research companies. They'll start to get further questions answered. Then they'll fill out a form or make a call and then the sales process starts. Then they'll talk to a salesperson and then the final question of the buyer's journey is the same as the first, with one deviation. First question was, roughly what's it going to cost? The final question is so exactly what's this going to cost? So they're the same questions. You bookend with cost questions when it comes to the buyer's journey.
Speaker 2:So what a pricing estimator does and I have a ton of data on this why? Because I started a software company called priceguideai, and priceguide allows someone to quickly and easily, with the help of AI, of course, put a pricing estimator on their website. Now there's different types of these tools in the. In the roofing industry I made this tool for that was specialized for anybody in home services. And so if you wanted to have an estimator on your website for a new roof, let's say you want to have an estimator on your site for replacing gutters or I don't care what it is. I mean, like literally anything for solar, you can create multiple estimators with this tool.
Speaker 2:It's a series of questions, just like if someone came to you right now and said to you what would it cost for a new roof, you'd say, oh, I can answer roughly, but I got to ask you some questions. Okay, what are the questions? You're going to ask questions like square footage. You're going to ask questions like materials, you know, and there's going to be a series of things that you're going to need to know in order to give them a general estimate. Now, once they get a general estimate, man, they are really feeling good because they're like oh, finally, I have a sense for things. They're much more likely to do business with you.
Speaker 2:Now, here's what we found and here's the kicker to it all. If someone puts an estimator on their homepage and they use the call to action phrase get instant estimate, that's the magic phrase get instant estimate, all right, could you say, quote yes, but I don't really see it like a quote. I see it as an estimate. I think they're different, because a quote is pretty close Whereas an estimate is a range, and this keeps it very, very safe for you as a contractor. So get instant estimate. What we see is they experience, from that day forward, a three to 500% lift in conversions on their website. So if you're getting five leads a week right now from your website, you'll start getting 15 the moment you put a pricing estimator on your homepage with Get Instant Estimates.
Speaker 2:That's why it's so powerful, crazy, super effective, super super effective. That's priceguideai. And here's what's really really cool about it less than $200 a year. There's two types of pricing estimators. There's the kind that you custom build, which, as you know as a developer, generally costs well into the thousands. Like I got a company Impact. We build custom estimators too, but they usually cost somewhere between 15 to 25K. Now, sometimes that's what a company needs. They're great and they can be even more customized, but you could have one working for you in 30 minutes or less and it costs you $200 a year, and it immediately, immediately, generates leads. You wouldn't have gotten.
Speaker 1:It drives me crazy, the pushback that people have about this. So I have a background in the mortgage industry. I've owned mortgage companies and maybe it was legislatively forced on the mortgage industry. But there is something called a good faith estimate and it's been a part of the mortgage industry for decades now and it's because that's what people want to see. They want to see what's the. This is a big purchase. That's what people want to see. They want to see what's the. This is a big purchase. A pool, a roof, you know, remodeling your kitchen, you're building a deck Like these are big, big purchases, man. Like this isn't an impulse buy, you know. And so having that good faith estimate, um and so, so having that good faith estimate, for me it's like, yeah, that's what you do. Like you, you can create this good faith estimate. Like you said, there's a lot of tools that are starting to to be able to do this. Yours and Roofful and and and other ones out there that are like the in the roofing industry. They're starting to do this.
Speaker 1:But like that's what people push back, like I don't want, I don't want the customer to know. Well, what if something's different? I know you're enjoying the episode, but let's give a shout out to another one of our sponsors. As a roofing marketing agency owner and coach, I've seen it all Great marketing wasted because no one follows up fast enough. That's why I built Power Up Agents, not just a receptionist. Our AI handles the entire customer journey, from answering the first call to booking the job to post job surveys and reviews 24-7, inbound, outbound, even multilingual. If you want leads followed up instantly and customers nurtured automatically, visit the link in the description or visit the sponsors page on the Roofing Success Podcast website. Your full AI team is ready. People push back like I don't want the customer to know. Well, what if something's different? What if I go out there and the decking's rotted? Well then, the decking's rotted and you tell them you couldn't see it right.
Speaker 2:That's why it's called an estimate An estimate. It's like. What's wild to me is you literally have a chance tonight, if you add this tool, to get 3x the number of leads you're getting right now. So if you said to me, marcus, we have more leads than we can take right now, I'd say fine. But if you're saying at all, we want more leads and you're out there spending who knows how much on paid ads, on paid ads, why in the world would you not create such a simple experience that you would triple the leads just from your existing traffic?
Speaker 2:It is beyond my realm of understanding and I feel like I'm pretty open to understand a lot of things. That one I don't understand, so it's a no-brainer. You should do it. There's three other types of self-service tools. Those are two of them, but I can tell you this and I'm going to make a promise Everybody's listening to this right now Within the next five years, 90% of roofing contractors that have a website okay, in other words, real businesses that have a website are going to have a pricing estimator on said website. 90%, mark my words. Take it to the bank. It will be a part of home services. Every homeowner will expect it, and if they can't find it, they'll move to the next website that does.
Speaker 1:Definitely. And just on another point, on the pushback, if you're a contractor, you have done a change order. That is a difference between your original bid and what happened right, like it can happen at any time. Don't be, don't shy away from it. And it's what people want right? Don't shy away from it, and it's what people want, right. So now we talked a little bit about AI, but now we're saying that the fourth component here is be more, be more human.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:You can use technology to be way more human, and I think that's a big misnomer out there that using tech means that we're less human. It's not. Let me give you just some really, really simple examples. When we get a lead, it's assigned to a salesperson. The salesperson then immediately sends a one-to-one video to the prospect. Okay, so the prospect immediately sees their face, immediately sees their face, hears the voice, gets to know them early, early in the game. That's an example of something that's different. What's wild to me is the amount of contractors that the homeowner doesn't know what the salesperson looks like until they're walking up the driveway. Come on, y'all. We could do so much better than that.
Speaker 2:Also, when somebody thinks about your company, name your brand, what face do they see? Who's the Colonel Sanders of your brand? If you don't have one, well then you. If you're listening to this, you probably should be, but if you don't have one, it means that you're not putting yourself out there. Get from behind the desk, get from behind the camera and put yourself on the camera. That's your fiduciary. Listen. You ask people for their money in exchange for a good or a service. The least you could do was to show them who they're going to give their money to. So like, literally, that's what you signed up for as an entrepreneur, and so put your face out there much more with video. That's just one more example to it, and there's other examples as well.
Speaker 2:One of them, which is hard for a lot of people to fathom, is going to be digital avatars. When you come to the Riverpool's website, probably six to 12 months from today, you're going to be greeted, instead of that traditional chat bot in the bottom corner, by what is a person that looks like they're on Zoom and you can expand it and they'll talk to you just like you're having a Zoom call. But that person is going to be one of our digital avatars. Might look like me, might look like one of my business partners of our digital avatars. Might look like me, might look like one of my business partners, and it's going to say to you literally, it's going to say to you and I can say this to you, jim, because you get it, you see the vision. A lot of folks here still can't fathom it, but as soon as you come to the site, it's going to say hey, welcome to River Pools, I'm Digital Marcus. I'm not the real Marcus, I'm his AI avatar. I'm using his brain all the information that he's ever put online about pools to answer your questions right now.
Speaker 2:So we've got two options. You can ask me any question. You can say it out loud, or you can type it in the little box below and I'll just give you the answers. Or, if you'd like, I could even give you an estimate right now. Or, if you'd like, I could even give you an estimate right now. That's where we're headed. Now somebody listening to this might say, well, that's not very human, that's an AI. Okay, look at it like this. If somebody comes to your website and just reads a bunch of words on a screen, or if they talk to someone that looks literally just like you, sounds literally just like you, has your mannerisms even because you've trained it well is using your brain, in other words, the information that you've produced on this subject, and is having full-blown conversations with your leads before you ever meet them, you tell me which one's more human with your leads. Before you ever meet them, you tell me which one's more human. So, yeah, that's where we're headed and that's hard for people to understand, but that's where we're headed.
Speaker 1:It is, and it will come faster than you think. So now let's get people real. Like we both went through the 2008 times and the crash. Both of us were about the same age. We saw the tech boom. We saw the internet explode. We've seen the changes over time in it. Right now, we may be in a recessionary time period economically. We're also combining that with this enormous change, enormous change from a technological perspective. You know a lot of these contractors. A lot of contractors are going to fall right. There's going to be a lot of challenges for them. If you could wave a magic wand and guide them through three to five things that they could start working on today to make sure that they are here in five years, what would that be?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd say number one change your mindset. Your mindset needs to be there's tremendous opportunity right now, and the technology is a beautiful thing that can help me. If you want to sit there and say this is bad and this is the terminator, I can tell you. I learned a long time ago don't let personal opinion screw up smart business decisions. And so, even if this thing's the Terminator and it's going to end the world in 25 years, well, I want my business to be successful between now and that point in time. So let's make sure that our mindset is such that, hey, I am going to learn these things, I can learn these things and I am going to get in the AI sandbox. It's one of the first things that you need to do. And you say, well, what do I even do when I get there? Just do this Go to ChatGPT and say, hey, ChatGPT, here's my name, here's my business, here's my name, here's my business. I have no idea how to use you to help me. Can you help me understand ways that I can use you to improve my business and my life? And then just let it go, baby, and you're going to start to learn a lot and learn every day.
Speaker 2:So get in the sandbox, start to play, start to build. That's number one. Number two start seeing yourself as a media company. Every job site there should be video coming from it. Your phone needs to become your best friend and just fall forward when it comes to video. It's not going to be perfect, it's going to be clunky, it's going to be messy, but you have to do a lot more video and all of its facets than you're doing right now. You must think that way. And finally, number three embrace self-service. Just do it. Put that pricing estimator on your website with a tool like Price Guide or something like it.
Speaker 2:Whether it's a roof hole or something else, these are the game changers. It's what homeowners want. This is how you can start to generate immediate leads. You're the game changers. It's what homeowners want. This is how you can start to generate immediate leads. You're going to do it. The question is, are you going to wait until your competitors do it and then you react, or are you going to do it first and they're going to react to you? Because one last thing I'll say about this the rule breakers always become the rule makers and everybody else becomes the rule followers. And I can tell you, that's not a very fun place to be.
Speaker 1:Awesome man, Thanks for your time today. This has been another episode of the Roofing Success Podcast.
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