Kate Ratcliffe - Your Secret Sales Pro - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of an live interview with  Kate Ratcliffe of Leap. You can read the interview below or  listen to the podcast.

Voiceover:
Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Hello, and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. My name is Heidi Ellsworth, and I am here today road tripping virtually clear across the country to visit with my dear friend, who I love spending time with at the trade shows, Kate Ratcliffe, the marketing manager at Leap.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Kate, welcome to the show.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Thank you. I'm so excited. You're right, it is completely across the country.

Heidi Ellsworth:
It is, Oregon to Virginia, it's a little ways. We kind of go, it's a long way, right? Virginia, Washington, DC?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Baltimore, Maryland.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Baltimore. Well, I knew it was across the country, and we see each other at the trade shows all the time, and your whole team.

Kate Ratcliffe:
We always meet in the middle.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I know.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we always meet in the middle in between us somewhere.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I know. Well, today I really just wanted to spend some time and talk about sales and technology. For those out there who are using Leap, I know you realize how amazing it is. Kate, your growth has been off the chart with the software. Why don't you tell everybody out there just a little bit about... Actually, I always get excited. So let's start with you. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself and then about Leap.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I am the marketing manager for Leap. I've been with the company for just over a year now. Our team, since I joined, has just grown astronomically. I was employee number 41, and last week we hit three digits.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wonderful.

Kate Ratcliffe:
So yeah, yeah. It's just such a wonderful environment to be part of and experience the growth both internally with our team, but then externally watching our customers really, really grow and magnify their business, using what we are so passionate about here at Leap.

Kate Ratcliffe:
So for those that don't know what Leap is, Leap is a iOS based software. It's an app that allows you to run your entire sales process from the iPad or from your phone. That means we integrate with your CRM. We bring your customer data in, and then you're able to just kind of go through that meeting... or the sales appointment... completely virtually or on site but digitally. You can send it out for signature. We have our own proprietary signature capture system. You can collect payment there. You can apply for financing, and you can just really... the big, beautiful part is the big, robust document generation. So contracting, estimate building, proposals, even just your inspection sheets and things like that.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. The software was actually developed by a roofing home improvement salesperson who really understands the whole thing. We've had Steven on before on our podcast. It's been awesome. That, I think makes a huge difference.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. Yeah. It's always funny too. I joke, because when he tells his story, he'll say something along the lines of, "I was just lazy and I didn't want to do the Excel spreadsheet." I don't know about you, but I've never met a lazy person who builds an app, so I don't subscribe to the "I'm lazy." I think it's ingenuity. So he wanted a better way of doing it, and here in Maryland we are seasonal, so he took his winter time, when he was doing absolutely nothing, and he built an app. Then it kind of made its way up the food chain to his CEO, Patrick Fingles and Tom Bury, and they decided, "You know what, we are using it here. It's really successful. Let's share it with the world." So that kind of was the beginning of Leap. It was called something else back then. But now it's just something that our CEO, he is still the CEO over at his other company, but he's here all the time. He just walked by my office. I just love that those that were there at the start are still here.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. Yeah, and so knowledgeable. We've had them both on our show, on Roofing Road Trips, and I love... Well, I love sales, talking about sales in the first place, and they're always just so excited about how technology has really changed everything. But let's start out, I want to talk a little bit about... and I love how you say this, I've seen it before, old way for sales call. What is that old way of doing things?

Kate Ratcliffe:
It's antiquated. We all know that. It is ingrained in every sales culture. You think about the guy that came around selling encyclopedias. That's what we're still doing, and I don't know about you, but I've never bought an encyclopedia from a man coming to my door.

Heidi Ellsworth:
No.

Kate Ratcliffe:
If a man shows up at my door selling encyclopedias, I'm a hundred percent going to shut the door. It's so ingrained in the sales culture of, we're going to go to the house, whether it was an appointment or not or if it's just door knocking, and you're going to bring a bunch of documents and papers. You're going to do a sales pitch that's not customized. It's just what you usually do. You're going to probably hand write a lot of the information. Then you're going to eventually get it back to the home office if you managed to get the contract, and nine times at 10, nobody's going to be able to read your handwriting, because you did it real quick because you had to get to the next appointment, and there's going to be missing information. That is how it is. Now, it's worked obviously, but can it be better? I believe very much that every process can be better. Any process can be better, and that's what Leap does.

Heidi Ellsworth:
We've got a new generation too. I talk about this a lot. Even if it's not the new generation, if it's my generation, Gen X, I've learned from my kids how to do things different and a set of expectations. I always tended to be a little bit ahead of the curve anyway, having been in the business. From Gen X'ers all the way down and probably even some Baby Boomers, that old way is not going to work, that we have new expectations, especially since COVID and everything is out there. So I'd love some of your thoughts on why it doesn't work in today's world. What are some of the things that contractors are missing out by doing it that old way?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Well, first, and this is an almost selfish way of saying this, I'm a millennial, and I will not work with anyone that does not use Leap. Why? Because I don't want any of that paper documentation in my house. First off, I don't have a big house. I have nowhere to store that. It's going to get thrown out. Then, I actually talked about this recently. My one friend, I was out traveling on the road, road warrior, and I get a text from a friend who needed some mason work done, and she knew that I had gotten some done about a year ago. I'm out on the road. If he had given me all of his paper stuff, I would've been like, "Well, you're going to have to see me in three weeks when I get home," but because it was digital, I was able to get all of his information, send it over to her, and he got that sale and that contract because of it. So it's one of those things where you've got to know your audience. Over 50% of new homeowners are millennials. We are the first true digital age. If you are not meeting them in the market that they are in, you are already behind. It's true.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. I see it all the time. So let's talk through this new way of doing things, starting with appointments, setting appointments. What are you seeing out there, and how can they be using the technology to make it so much nicer?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. So setting an appointment's not really going to change much, right? It may change how you go about getting it, whether you're calling, showing up, emailing, texting, whatever it is. It may change that way. But the main point that I think is important is making sure that you are maybe understanding a little bit of who you're going to go in and see, asking simple questions, instead of, as a woman, if I'm meeting, don't ask me about my husband. Don't ask me about it. There's a better way of saying that. It's, "Okay, you're our primary contact. Who's the secondary contact," things like that, just kind of setting those expectations of knowing who you're going to meet and then kind of getting that level of trust.

Kate Ratcliffe:
When you are setting your appointment in your CRM or whatever, you want to make sure that you're filling out as much data as possible, because when you're using a software like Leap, when it comes over, you have all of that information at the palm of your hand. So even if you forgot, hey, this person is living with 17 other people in this house, you can now look and see. Or something that's very important that I think in the intake process is understanding what their schedule in life is like. A lot of us work from home now, and I can tell you right now, I have two friends with brand new babies. You do not want to be waking that baby up during nap time, because that baby and that mother will hurt you. You don't want to do that.

Heidi Ellsworth:
No.

Kate Ratcliffe:
It's knowing the information, knowing your customer a little bit better, a little bit more personalized.

Heidi Ellsworth:
There is a lot of discussion out there about setting appointments and that you have to have two people there, right? You have to have both decisions. The husband and wife is the traditional way of looking at it. That's totally changing. What are you seeing along that stretch?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. When I was doing a little research on that... First, proudly, I am here to say that the majority of single homeowners are women. Chances are we aren't going to have somebody else with us. It's just kind of interesting, there's a lot more single homeowners. Dual income homeowners are still very much popular, obviously, because you have two incomes. But a single income property is probably one that's going to need more renovations. It's probably going to be the one that needs a little bit more work. So in that mindset, you probably are only going to meet with one person, the homeowner. If they have a secondary person, that person probably has expertise in the area, and that's why they're there. It's not because they're a decision maker. It's because they're there to guide the decision maker.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. I'm going to just come right out and say it. When I'm talking to people, if they say, "We both have to be there," it's probably not going to happen. Because our schedules are just... it just doesn't work. I think that is a big change in everything that's going on, is you have to be able to, like you said, I love that, ask questions and find out really what's going to fit for the consumer, what's that customer's main decision.

Heidi Ellsworth:
So once you do get the appointment and you get it with the right people, how is Leap really kind of helping the sales reps to better utilize the presentation and to maybe even speed it up?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Oh yeah.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Kate, I was the subject of sitting at a table with the flip boards and two-hour sales call, that I just was like, "I'm never going to do anything with you," and couldn't get them out fast enough. How has that changed?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. No, that is completely changed with Leap. So you're really only walking in with your iPad. So just starting with contracting building and proposal building. All of your estimates can be done within seconds. When I say seconds, obviously talk roofing, we integrate with three of the measurement providers, EagleView, HOVER and RoofScope. Those three integrations pull those measurements directly into Leap. You've already put your pricing in the back end of things when you set up Leap, so it makes your contract estimate or proposal in about 30 seconds.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wow.

Kate Ratcliffe:
It's so quick. It's also transparent. That's the part that I think a lot of people are missing. In this day and age of we can Google anything at our fingertips, you don't want a random lump sum number that says $35,000. I've never bought anything in my life that didn't have uncertain sense, you know? So having that transparency of looking and seeing all those line items, where the measurements came from, how much each of those was going to cost, ""Oh, we inflated this number a little bit to account for some maybe over usage or something like that." It's something that creates this bond between the salesperson and the homeowner. It's letting them know we value you enough to tell you the absolute truth here. So there's that.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Then we have what I love is the resource section, and that you can put pretty much anything in there. You can put your price guides. You can put your brochures digitally. You can do your engage presentations. We integrate with them. You can have your company CAM account linked so you can bring in all those photos. I also love that as another touch point. We talked about only having one person there, and maybe the second decision maker needs to be informed. It is my favorite way of circling back of, "Hey, you remember that YouTube video I showed you? Here, I'm going to send it out to you just as a reminder." You send that three days later. It's a reminder that they were there, because believe it or not, you are not the most important person in a homeowner's life, but you can at least be in the back of their mind.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right. Right. Right. Also, it's all digital. Say you can't be there together. One of us is on the road traveling. You can share that digitally back and forth and have those kind of decisions. I just also think, and maybe this is just me, but I just think the days of the real pressure sell, I know it works with some people, but ah, I keep hoping we're beyond that and that what you're talking about, that transparency, is really so key in building trust.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. I bought my car from someone because I walked in and I said, "I want..." This was back in 2014. "I want a 2014 Jeep Patriot, black, heated seats, sunroom and sunroof package. I do not want the extra sound system," because I had done all the research.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right, you knew.

Kate Ratcliffe:
I knew exactly what I wanted.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah.

Kate Ratcliffe:
When I walked in and said that, the only person that respected me in that moment was the one who got my sale. Every other place I went, they were like, "Well, let me show you the Deluxe X, Y, Z chrome package with a golden toilet inside." I was like, "I don't want that." There's something to be said as just being... You have to remember that you are still talking to a human. Whether or not is your grandma, your brother or the person you're trying to sell to, they all are people, and they're going through the same human experience.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I think the thing too, is that things are changing in how we do things, and we need to actually, from the roofing industry and home improvement overall, we need to look at other industries and see how that's changed. So speaking of cars, I bought my car, the first car I'd gotten in decades, new car. During 2020, I never stepped onto a car lot. We did it all digitally, and they delivered it to me. So I never had to go. I didn't even have to go pick it up. They delivered it to us. That's the kind of service I think people are going to start demanding. So if you think, "Well, that's fine. That's the car lot. That's not going to compare it to roofing." Yeah, it does. It's the experience that you're going through and how easy you can make it for that consumer.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. Our CEO, Patrick, always talks about Uber all the time. He talks about how, "Why is it that we as people trust an Uber driver more than a taxi cab?" You are, in theory, riding in someone's personal car versus a issued car from the cab company. The cab company has a license. The Uber does not have a license to operate like that. It's a different procedure, obviously. It's not like it's illegal, but the whole thing is, it's because it's transparent. You know his ratings of, "Oh, this guy John is picking me up," his rating, why he's rated that way, what his car looks like. His car has to be a certain type on a certain type of checks and things like that on that. He has to have a valid license, and you can send your location to your friends so they know where you are, and you can split the fees. There's just more customer facing ability there. I think that can be said for buying a car, buying a roof, buying clothes. I mean, they're buying clothes. They have the reviews now.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Anything on Amazon.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. I always look for that. "It runs small." "Oh, that's not what I wanted."

Kate Ratcliffe:
Oh yeah. It's not going to happen for [inaudible 00:17:45].

Heidi Ellsworth:
I love it. Well, and I think too, the other thing that is really important on this is, like you said, people are doing their research. They know their numbers. They know kind of what they want to spend. They even sometimes know what they can finance or what they're going to do. So when contractors are using Leap, like you said, you're integrated with all these different companies, just talk a little bit about how important the numbers are and how easy it is to have inaccurate numbers when you are constantly reentering them.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. When talking about inaccurate numbers, I always go to financing. Because I don't know about you, but I don't trust myself with even a calculator. I'm bad at math. I'm not going to do the formula right. Excel spreadsheets are my life, but if I could have a system that figured it out, I would, and that's where Leap jumps in.

Kate Ratcliffe:
We do have integrations with about 13 lenders of financing. We also have something called a finance calculator. I definitely recommend people take a look on our website, we have information about it, and we'll also be happy to share it with you guys at any point. But basically what it does is, all you have to do is put in the total project cost and the down payment, and based on the lenders that you're integrated with, it'll show the homeowner exactly what the lowest interest payment is, or deferred interest, or what have you, and from which lender. So it allows them to choose it quickly.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Now, imagine if you did all that math by hand, and then they say, "You know what, but, okay, what if we put a little less on the down payment?" Then you have to do that again, and the customer is not going to be pleased when you gave them a quote of what the monthly payment's going to be and you were about a hundred dollars shy of it. They're not going to be happy.

Heidi Ellsworth:
No, no, not at all. No.

Kate Ratcliffe:
While we're talking about financing, I think this is another thing that I think our industry is needing to adopt on a higher level, and they're not... We're getting there, but you need to do more. Why? And I'll tell you why. I'm a millennial. I do not have the money to do my roof.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right.

Kate Ratcliffe:
I don't want to put it on a credit card. That's the devil. I want to finance it.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah.

Kate Ratcliffe:
I want to go through those ways, because that's the only way I'm going to do it. Long gone are the days. If I own a home, I'm lucky to have a home. The amount of student debt I came out of school with and the interest rates of the economy when I had to buy a car, I was lucky enough to get a house right before the pandemic. Anyone who's buying a house right now, they just spent their life savings.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Kate Ratcliffe:
It's just kind of meeting them where they are, right? Find the financing. Find the ones that you think would work best for your demographic, and then just offer it. I bet you it'll close more.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I think so. I know this sounds like a crazy thing, but even thinking about millennials and how important is their credit score, right?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Credit score is so important. Well, financing helps them build their credit and helps build a better credit score, because it's done and it's the right way. Plus, you don't have all the interest or the huge interest of credit cards. So yeah, meeting them where they're at, I love it. I think even when you're talking about Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers, that's happening across the board right now, where people are kind of looking at things and trying to figure it out. So great advice. So how does Leap tie it all up for the company, the customer and the sales rep? Because we haven't talked too much about the sales rep.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. So first, and this is my controversial opinion for the day, I believe that the death of your CRM is having sales folks in it. Why? Because your CRM is your data hub, right? Just like anything, if you have a bunch of people operating in it, data's going to get deleted, data's going to be misinterpreted, and data is going to be put in wrong. It's the level of variability that happens with anything.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right.

Kate Ratcliffe:
So what I love about Leap is it immediately takes your sales rep out of the CRM. They don't need to be there. Why? Because it brings all of that customer data right into Leap, and that's where the sales rep starts his day. They open up their iPad, and it has a list of all of their appointments for the day. It has a list of the appointments that they just had last night. It's easy for them to navigate, and it pushes the information into Leap, and then we can push it back out. So you can result your appointment and send it back to the CRM, which means it sends back to home office. You could even have production on that, and it sends it all back, and it starts the process immediately. Then you don't have to worry about, "Oh, I sold this, I sold this shingle or something, and it's out of stock now," because we've already processed it. It's done. So that, it really wraps it in a bow for a sales guy. It allows... I keep saying sales guy. As an actual women, I should stop saying that.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. Salesperson, salesperson.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Salesperson, yeah. It really wraps it up for them. They have their resources available, no more shuffling with paperwork and all of the brochures. One of my favorite jokes, but it's absolutely serious, I went on a date one time with a contractor, and when he picked me up in his work truck, I had to move all the brochures. I think now back to it, and I'm like, he was probably looking for those the next day. I just threw them in the back, just threw them in the back. I didn't know what to do with them. But it's simple things like that. You go through your daily life.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Then the other thing too, it shortens, and this is kind of the heartfelt moment of Leap. How many times, "Oh, I just got to submit this contract and then I can go to my son's baseball game." "Oh, I just got to submit this contract. I'll be a little late for dinner," things like that, because you're trying to meet the number, and we get that. Leap will just streamline that whole process for you and give you your life back, because you're creating more time for you. I think that's a big shift in every industry right now, is using technology less to get rid of jobs, as the quote goes, and more to just give you your life back.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right. I was thinking that when you were talking about earlier, so I'm so happy you brought that up, because I was thinking, "How many times do you even..." I think about it, I go through the day and I'm like, "Okay, I've got to finish this, this and this. I just have to get these finished before I can leave." Whereas, if it was just part of the process in the software and it just happened automatically, that just for everyone, for everyone, for production, for your sales team, for the customer service, where are we at on appointments, across the board. It's so easy.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I want to go back, Kate, just to kind of tie all this up. The customer. The customer really wins overall by having this all so succinct. I'm thinking about those two-hour-plus sales calls, where someone can come in now with it all on a laptop, qualifications done... not laptop but iPad... and qualifications done ahead of time, and maybe it's only 30 to 45 minutes, right?

Kate Ratcliffe:
Oh yeah, definitely under an hour. Yeah.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, and now my time's back.

Kate Ratcliffe:
I had one contractor come in and take a look, and he was using Leap, because I definitely looked up to make sure he was using Leap, and he was sitting there. We were sitting there because we were kind of going over the options, and he said, "Hey, look at this brochure while I do some measurements." So it was right there, and it was a perfect use of time, space, and giving me my autonomy to take a look at some things. So I was just flicking through. Mind you, I know the app inside and out, and he did not know that. But I was flipping through the brochure and taking a look at it, and he was just taking some measurements. He didn't need to. I also happened to know that he didn't need my measurements, but he was just creating that-

Heidi Ellsworth:
Space.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. Yeah, that experience.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Okay, one last thing. You just made me think of this, and so I've got to add this at the end. I think that there's also going to... I know a lot of contractors did a lot of Zoom sales calls and online sales call during COVID, and I'd hear all these folks saying, "Well, we'll go back to how it used to be beforehand," but I don't see that. Personally, me, I'd much rather have it over a Zoom call than having somebody come into my home. I'm just kind of weird. I think a lot of people are feeling that way.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Yeah. Yeah. We've started doing a little of research on that and some intake on that, and it's definitely 50/50. Honestly, during the pandemic, there was still 50/50 in that people were still going to the house. They would just do their checks before, but now it's giving the option for hybrids. So it's opening up your customer's base, because maybe there are people that are not comfortable you doing it the old way.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right.

Kate Ratcliffe:
If you're processing everything through an iPad, you can plug your iPad into your computer and you can show them.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. I love it. It's easy, and I think it's the future personally.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Totally.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I really think it's the future.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth:
With aerial measurements and everything. Of course there has to be inspections. Of course all that has to happen, but there's ways around with this hybrid way, so I think Leap is really leading the way for contractors to be able to make this happen, and customers are going to demand it. So any last thoughts?

Kate Ratcliffe:
No, no. Leap is just one of the most robust softwares I've seen. I've been part of a couple different software companies, and I think one of those things that we hear a lot on the road is those that have looked at Leap before and thought it wasn't right for them then should take a look again.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Every six months or so we are doing something big, not just little enhancements, big enhancements. I can't tell you how many people I've had come up to me at the show and say, "Oh, I looked at you guys four years ago," and I'm like, "And what does it look like now?" And they're like, "Very different." I'm like, "Yeah." That's the way. We're constantly developing. We're all in house, always working together to make sure that it's the best product for the customer.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I tell you what. With the integrations that you talked about, a company can engage, EagleView, RoofScope, HOVER, all of these folks are also involved with Roofers Coffee Shop, and when you can bring all of that together and keep adding to that, it just makes it so easy for the contractors to start really making it fit their business.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Oh, absolutely. It's so customizable. It's built for the customer, not for us, not for me at Leap.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I love it. I love it. Well, Kate, thank you as always so much for being here today and everything you do. You're always out there. You're always... I don't know. I'm so happy you're part of the roofing industry.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Aw, me too. Thank you so much for having me. It's always good to see you.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. We'll see you hopefully Florida or Western states or something coming up here, but definitely.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Something. We're getting back on the road soon.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's right. Definitely another Roofing Road Trips. We will have you back again later. Thank you again.

Kate Ratcliffe:
Absolutely.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Thank you all for listening. I want to make sure you don't miss a single Roofing Road Trips, so be sure to go to rooferscoffeeshop.com. Check under the RLW section and find all of our podcasts, but mostly be sure to check your favorite podcast channel, subscribe, get those notifications so you don't miss a single one, and we will see you next time on Roofing Road Trips.

Voiceover:
Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the rooferscoffeeshop.com.