Mike Goldenstein and Chris Morris - Grow your e-commerce Sales with Roofle! - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Mike Goldenstein and Chris Morris from Roofle. You can Read the transcript or Listen to the podcast.

Intro: 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.

Karen Edwards: Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from Roofers Coffee Shop. I'm your guest host, Karen Edwards, and today I am really excited to welcome the team from Roofle to talk about what contractors need to know about e-commerce in the roofing industry. Welcome, Mike and Chris. It's great to have you here.

Mike Goldenstein: It's great to be here.

Chris Morris: Thanks for having us.

Karen Edwards: Sure. So before we dive in, I'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what your role is at Roofle. Mike, why don't you start?

Mike Goldenstein: Yeah. I'm Mike Goldstein. I'm the chief revenue officer at Roofle or as I like to say, the court jester. I've been in the roofing industry since 1992. So I am an old, old dog to the roofing industry. Was a contractor for about 18 years and then 13 years in manufacturing and have been with Roofle for a year now.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Thank you, Mike. And Chris?

Chris Morris: Yeah. Hey. Chris Morris. Like Mike, been in and around this space for a couple decades now and mainly work with the partnerships.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. So the number one question is, tell us about Roofle.

Chris Morris: Roofle is giving contractors and homeowners alike a way to do business where the rest of the world is already steps ahead and do that business from an e-commerce standpoint, from a user experience standpoint for both on and offline as well and a really nice give to get where a consumer can put in a little bit of information and get back a pretty close price or some price conditioning on what that home improvement project, in this case roofing, would be

Karen Edwards: So how are homeowner sales changing? E-commerce, I buy lots online. How is this translating into the home improvement industry?

Chris Morris: Karen, great question and really, it's more about that Roofle and Roof Quote PRO isn't necessarily bringing folks into the e-commerce or roofers into e-commerce. It's the consumer demand that is and this is a platform that equips contractors, both large and small, with the ability to harness that customer demand.

Mike Goldenstein: So just to your point, Karen, about what you would buy online. Our family just recently bought a garage organizer that is 108 inches long and that weighs hundreds of pounds and it was done completely through e-commerce.

Karen Edwards: Wow. So the shift has already happened, right? The consumers are used to buying most products online and even large purchases as you just mentioned, but what's the adoption like? Are we seeing that homeowners like it, that they're using it more and more or are they still kind of a little hesitant when purchasing something as major as a roof?

Chris Morris: Again, another good question is it may not be 100%, but we've got a large 100 plus million-dollar contractor on the platform and they talked about, "Hey, I don't think this is for everyone, but I'm sure we're missing 30 to 35% of the folks that would like to buy this way." And so when you're talking about a contract that is 10,000 plus installs annually, while they said, "Hey, I don't think it's for everybody", it's definitely for a subset of the folks that we engage with and they didn't want to miss out. And then again opinions, but if you look too with 2020 and really driving even the older homeowners into the market, if you wanted to order a sandwich or a beverage of your choosing, you now had to take a picture and click a link and had to order this way.

You've seen Carvana and CarMax and all those folks come in to where they're giving the homeowner or the consumer in this case the chance to go do a bunch of discovery. And what we're finding is the folks that do engage, both from an on and offline perspective, are more project ready. They've gotten the information. And then it also reminds us a lot of, in the early teens and 2000, the onset of the consumer financing as it relates to home improvement and especially roofing. So the consumer already knew about financing. There's a high likelihood that they would've financed something in their life. And so it wasn't that you were necessarily explaining what financing was. It was that you were offering it and that's simply what our platform enables them to do. They bought things online, they understand and we're just giving our local roofing companies the ability to harness that demand.

Karen Edwards: Tell me a little bit about what you're seeing in the growth of e-commerce in terms of roofing.

Chris Morris: What we're seeing, Karen, is from search, you're paying or driving traffic to your site whether you want to believe it or not. So if you are a retail canvassing company, if you are a restoration business, you're either paying it for feet on the street, you're paying it from an organic or a paid search or a social standpoint. And what are you doing to convert that? Are you having strong call to actions or are you differentiating yourself from local folks, competitors, in your area? And quite frankly, are you giving a tangible thing to that consumer to make them go further down your funnel?

Karen Edwards: So that really speaks to the online experience for that homeowner who is looking for a roof because they do so much. Like you said, fact finding, information gathering, reading about it. So I guess what Roofle is allowing them to do is by the time they get to your site, what did you say, they're project ready I think was the word you used.

Chris Morris: And we really see it, and these analytics vary depending on which search engine and what study you look at, but if you're looking at most home improvement companies, they're going to spend a sub one minute and a lot of times we're seeing like 26, 27 seconds on site. So to get a number or to go look and it's really the folks that engage. So if you think about from a Roofle standpoint is they're able to go put in just a little bit of information, return something that's very personal, right? A price to that address or to that property. Furthermore, now once they start understanding and conditioning, then they're able to go see colors and product cards. They're able to see themselves inside of that project. And then we combine that with a finance offer as well. So now you've got someone that's conditioned to that building, that property.

You've got someone that's looked and designed. So when you say, "You know what? I need a roof. Boy, this looks good. It's a reputable company. Here's sort of the budgetary guidelines that I'm getting for it. Now let's start looking at colors or is it a class four if it was in some inclement weather type or exposure." And so we're seeing them stay on site exponentially longer. We're seeing a lot of folks, a lot of longtime users, they're seeing somewhere at excess of seven, eight, nine, even 10 minutes on site. And you can imagine, because we use what's called UTM where we're passing through the analytics so that you can go see from your digital providers, you can go see where they're going, you can imagine that they're going in, they're saying, "Ooh, this is a give to get. Ooh, this is a color. Oh, they're a master elite, platinum preferred, select shingle master, Atlas Pro," you name it. And now guess what?

They're going to the about us page. And we know that they're converting or they're converting into get price now. And so we're seeing that conversion rate go up and we're seeing people actually not need to drive more traffic. They're just being more efficient with the traffic, which is already being driven to that site or that property.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. So Mike was having some technical difficulties. Do we have you back, Mike?

Mike Goldenstein: Yeah. I'm back. I can hear you guys perfectly now.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. Excellent.

Chris Morris: He wants to be in the software game, Mike.

Mike Goldenstein: Right.

Karen Edwards: Well, we talked about this online experience and this conversion rate. I'm not sure if you have anything to add. I think seven, eight, nine minutes on a website is just phenomenal. What are you hearing from contractors as well about this?

Mike Goldenstein: Yeah. The conversion rate is affected so much by giving homeowners a compelling reason to click on that ad, that compelling reason to click on the widget, the reason to give them the contract or the contact information to start that relationship and that's really what we're seeing is those conversion rates multiple times over and at the end of the day, it's really helping with their cost per lead is going down as well. So it's all of these things that not only is your audience growing because now you're looking at doing business with the 80% of consumers in America who are doing their shopping or at least their information gathering online so that your pool is growing significantly, but your cost per lead is also dropping simultaneously.

Chris Morris: Yeah. It's interesting too, Karen, just to compound what Mike was saying is when you look at it too from a Google My Business. So if you're to Google your name and you see your Google My Business card or Google Local Services or all that, and now they start talking about, "Do you offer online pricing? Do you have online sales? When are you open?" All these things are just going and working in concert. So again, where our platform isn't necessarily creating consumer demand, we're harnessing consumer demand. It's already there.

Karen Edwards: Wow. That's really powerful. I wonder, I don't have information or stats on this, but how many contractors are focused on or even know what their conversion rate is?

Chris Morris: Well, we've given classes on this and Mike and I have both given talks on it too. You don't need to be a developer, you don't need to be a digital marketing expert, but you do need to have a rubric or an understanding of what you're paying for and what you're getting to be able to be in control of your business. So the days of I'm going to ask the Google machine or I don't mess with the book of faces or the inner web, those excuses need to go by because it is a big part of your business whether you want it to be or not. So let's use someone again that says, "Hey. We have a low marketing cost because we're only direct marketers canvassers." Well what do you think if someone loses the card or they see the truck show up or the yard sign? They're going to search and they're going to typically search mobility and they're going to search or they're going to say, "I forgot it and I'm going to look for the name,' and they're going to land on something.

And you need to be ready to be able to convert that and you need to understand who's coming to your site and you need to understand things like abandonment rate. Where are we missing out? Where are they going to the funnel? And then you need to overinvest to make sure that you're completing and like I said, it's more of efficiency. Everybody wants more leads, but just imagine a place where you're converting what you have at a little bit higher frequency.

Karen Edwards: Wow. And it goes hand in hand I think if you do want to still do door knocking and canvassing and maybe they do lose the card, but if they didn't and they want to go visit the website, then that's just going to enhance the experience for them.

Chris Morris: Well [inaudible 00:11:56], we were going to talk about offline because I think a lot of times, we want to bucketize all these stuff and really if you think about marketing, there's this old phenomenon called lift and it, "Hey, nobody's calling my billboard," if we can go back a few years. "No one's calling my billboard, but all of the sudden my mailers go up when my billboard is active." So it's looking at that marketing portfolio in totality so you start thinking about, "Okay. Well where's our offline and how may a platform like this affect offline?" Well let's say that you do what they call a six-pack or a 12 pack around a job that's currently going on and you hang a door hanger that has a QR code that says, "See how the Smiths got their instant price in less than 27 seconds."

If we're at a home show, you can now have a booth or a kiosk where someone can type in on your site a couple pieces of information and they can set an appointment and get a price right then and there. Your mailers can have the same thing. And again, this isn't just for retail. This absolutely has implications in the restoration space as well. See what your claim could be worth, get an idea. And so they can go in and you can do that as a very passive but highly converting offline strategy as well. Yard signs, truck wraps, all that. We have some of our platform users that would say, "Louisville's home of the instant quote." We have some that, "Get your price in less than 30 seconds."

And then they're able to satisfy that. And then lastly too is we've seen a lot of your more traditional roofing companies, their words, but they call it semi e-commerce to where somebody goes down and they go in, they find, they set an appointment, but they still want to see somebody and we still want to check to see how many layers that they have on their roof. We still want to go walk and see if they have any soft spots. We still want to look in the attic to see if there's any underlying issues. But those people now have picked a color, they picked a manufacturer, they've got an idea of what the price is and now you're really going in more of an educator and less of a salesperson.

Karen Edwards: I like the education part of it. I'm going to ask a question that's not on our pre-planned. Just out of curiosity, help me understand how one, every contractor probably has got a different negotiated price for their materials from their suppliers. So when we're presenting that 30 second quote to a homeowner, how close is it and how do we customize that for each different contractor?

Mike Goldenstein: Yeah. We really want to make that very close. So we want to have, as far as a tech company for us, when we're doing the measurements and we're determining the pitch already, so we're not putting anything into the hands of the consumer to make those decisions for us uninformed. So we want to make sure that those are accurate. And the contractor, what we were talking about earlier too is you have to know your numbers and not all contractors really know their numbers until they sit down and really figure that out, which leads into exactly the next step is are you comfortable with making that public, being transparent about your pricing and putting it online? So that's where the bigger concept to that we are dealing with Chris and I and the entire Roofle team is this roofing industry ready for transparent online pricing?

And when you read books like Marcus Sheridan and says, "Any industry is." As soon as you start looking into a transparent pricing that's online, what are the fears that contractors are going to have to work through as this evolution happens? Number one, my competition can see my price. Am I okay with that? And number two, my goods and services are complex. How do I actually present that? And number three is what if my consumer sees the price and is immediately scared off? That's not roofing specific. That's every single industry that's gone through this evolution has had to deal with those issues and it's something that I think they all will because when we're entrepreneurs and we own a company and we have our processes and maybe we've been in business for five, 10, 20 years, we have to move past the, "This is how I do business," and into, "How does my consumer want me to do business and how will they continue to do business in two, three, five, seven years from now?"

Chris Morris: Yep. And Karen, I want to be crystal clear on this too. It is 1000% white labeled for the contractor. It is their pricing, their inputs. We don't dictate, we don't tell, we don't give suggestions. This is what they're putting in. They can put in things like solar array. They can put in things like ice damming. They can put in things like piece pricing and they can put things like repair and triptychs and all the different things in there that they want and create custom product cards. While we have a huge extensive library everywhere from metal all the way down through synthetic, they can do that.

They also can put just their finance offer. So they could put their three, four, five, six, whatever they have so they can have payments. It actually factors in what their payment would be say on 120 month plan with the interest rates at 599 or 9.99. So they can do all that. As well they can do lump sum. What do we see, Mike, probably 90% of the folks would just do per square pricing on there and then we do have a huge release coming up in 30 days or so to where they'll have some more flexibility on price ranges and bottoms and tops and highs and lows.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. And how easy is it to change an update?

Chris Morris: Well, it's real-time. So if you were to go change and let's say you've got a price increase from a supplier or manufacturer that you'd want to pass on to the homeowner or you want to have a good, better, and best, it's click of a button. It's drag and drop as well. So if you want to think about the legal ease that you may want to have or you may have a plywood furnishing installed price. So unforeseen things that you don't know you may say, "This is this," and you can literally take from your contract and drag and drop it in and it will populate for the detail screen for that end user.

Karen Edwards: How does the consumer receive their price quote and is that customized as well, branded for the contractor?

Chris Morris: It is. So we've got some best practices built in, but it's 1000% customizable. So typically what we see is a return to the customer. At the moment that customer hits get details, it sends them an email right away and it is customized to that contractor typically with another call to action, a video about the company and then all the details. So it would actually populate the product that they pick, the color that they pick, finance option that they picked as well, programmatically or automatically, returns to that end user and then they see it on screen as well.

Karen Edwards: Are we actually making the purchase then? Is there a click to buy in that email?

Mike Goldenstein: There will be. That's the next step clearly. We're in the adoption phase of it. Not just the adoption from the contractors, but that's consumer as well. And yes, that will be an option by the end of the year and some are already fixing their processes to include all the way to final proposal, signable contracts, and it's doing everything online without ever seeing the person or the project itself.

Chris Morris: We talk about, Karen, too. It's again in concert. So we know that reviews are the new referrals. So now you start thinking about all the good work that these contractors are doing. They're just leveraging the same point just in a different manner. It's the same customer, it's the same area of town, but now you're saying, "Hey, we've got these Google reviews, we've got these Facebook boats that we have in," and sometimes they're going to read your story about you like we talked about. The next thing, they go up to design, they learn a little bit about the company, how long they've been in business, that they give back to this charity, that they do habitats or whatever it is and then they go and see, no different than what we call the Amazon effect. Right?

I'm not asking my neighbor about the new whatever we're buying. I'm going to go look at the product reviews. And so now we're seeing all this goodwill and all this online stuff being used in concert with that. So now we're delivering them price and then now the company's able to go warrant that price, that credibility that they have in that local marketplace.

Karen Edwards: That's really interesting because it really speaks to having your brand, your online brand and brand reputation, in order and how important that is 'cause that's just, like you said, this is one piece of the pie, but you have to look at the whole pie and everything that you're doing that compliments each other and works together and that's definitely, definitely one. I'm excited-

Chris Morris: It's amazing too just in the tech space too is we're not necessarily disruptive to the contractor's workflow, and I'll use a word you just said previous, but we're complimentary to their workflow. So we're complimentary to how they get reviews, how they rehash. Now you can imagine we've got a great company that we work with and proud partners with, but do you think about from a rehash standpoint. So a demo no sell. Since we have that first party data, meaning their information, can we go send an email blast with, "Hey, get your pricing now," and old prices that we have or maybe we've got a special out there as well and so they can interact and interface with that too.

Karen Edwards: Excellent. So if I'm a contractor and I want to try this out, what do I do? How do I get started?

Chris Morris: Imagine this, you could actually sign up online. Hey, who knew? What we did find though is we've invested in a customer experience. So we have reps that go and help because really any attrition or things that we have historically has been from failure launch. So I saw you at IRE Roof Con. I see my competitors doing it and then we simply don't get it installed. And so we put a team of folks together to go through and help the contractor learn the platform and then also customize it. So whether that's an embedded form fill, right? So you imagine a lot of people say, "Get free estimate." That doesn't convert at a very high rate, but if it said, "Get instant pricing now. Get your roof quote in less than 60 seconds," and it's real. It's not just another form fill that sends you to a return and someone will be with you shortly and all that. It's true.

We've got the slide out widget, all those different things that go that we want to make sure the contractors get installed so they can use it to its fullest. Also, you're able to use it at point of sale. So you can go in front of a homeowner and type in the address and use it. We even had folks that are using Bluetooth printers in their trucks and vehicles that would say, "Sorry, we missed you. Here's your quote."

Karen Edwards: Oh, wow.

Chris Morris: Yeah. It's interesting. I think there's probably more use cases than we would've ever hoped and dreamed of that our creative contractor partners are coming up with.

Karen Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Right. They could be driving around a neighborhood and see a roof that is looking like it's in need of replacement and just leave the estimate on the door. That's a whole new way of door knocking. I like it.

Chris Morris: And Mike said something interesting too is worried about your competition. Mike's a recovering contractor, myself included. Do you not have everyone else's price? You do. So I would be more fearful of instead of what if my competitors see my price versus what if the owners don't? I'd be more worried about the size of the prize with the ones that don't versus the ones that do.

Karen Edwards: Right. And it's about more than price, right?

Chris Morris: Absolutely.

Karen Edwards: It's about comparing apples to apples. It's about why I like one company over another. Maybe one is a smaller business and that appeals to me. Maybe one is more involved in the community and that appeals to me. And that's why from a marketing perspective, you have to make sure that you've got yourself in order and that you are telling the story about you and your company because a roof is a roof, right? Under layman's underlayment, the shingles are shingles, and yes, there's small things that can make a difference, but at the end of the day, you want that customer, that homeowner, to choose your company not based on price alone.

Chris Morris: Yeah. Absolutely. And we find a lot too, and people say, "Well what if it's too high? What if they they're turned off?" I would ask any sales rep that potentially maybe listen to this. Do you want to drive across town for a $15,000 roof where they think it's going to be 4,500?

Karen Edwards: Nope.

Chris Morris: That's a tough road to walk through or walk down. So really just conditioning them and what we're finding, and this is anecdotal 'cause we don't have the metrics, but what we're hearing is the sales reps are like, "Ooh. That's a Roofle lead. I want to run that." And they're preparing and it's funny, they probably have a higher close rate 'cause they're preparing more, but they also have more data. So when we talk about the metrics that we do have, we do know how long they stayed. We do know what they clicked on. We do know what products they looked at. We do know what colors they like. We do know if they wanted to convert to a financing customer. We know all that going in so I can have a better conversation with you, Karen, based on what you've already picked out, what you've already selected, and then I can really drive my talk track around the interest that you have, hopefully making that a better selling environment.

Karen Edwards: Oh yeah. Yeah. If you're going to talk to me about things that you know I'm already interested in, that's going to be better for me, more interesting for me as well. Yeah. I like the 15,000 versus 4,500. I think it's an educational tool as well. Maybe it's a homeowner that really has no idea what a roof costs and this does give them a point of understanding that, "Ooh, okay. Maybe I better save some money for another year before I'm ready to make a purchase.'

Chris Morris: Yep. Absolutely. And then that also allows you to really expand that educational part of your site. So we're seeing not only do we have the rep version that you could do, like I said, a point of sale, but also too is you can use your site now as a conversion tool. Meaning like you, the rep or you the representative of that business can talk through it. And then another just note that we had for you to, commercial structures, multifamily, low slope, it does all this different thing. So it's really, really interactive in what you would call the UI or UX, that experience both for the homeowner as well as for the contractor.

So you're able to go and if you have a shed that you don't want to get done, you can delete that and not get it or maybe you have a metal roof on an ag building in the back and you just want to do the shingled roof in the front or maybe you have a compound. So you can go do all that and the price changes dynamically as you add, subtract those as well.

Karen Edwards: Oh, I like that feature. And I did not know that it was for low slope as well for commercial. I think the consumers and homeowners, those people that own those buildings and manage those properties, they're also homeowners and consumers too. So by putting that out there for them, you're reaching that whole other market.

Chris Morris: Yeah. And it's something just to dive on too. So we work across a ton of digital marketing software. We have Webhooks that go push into CRMs. We pass on the analytics so that folks that are controlling your overall portfolio of digital assets are able to go see and work inside that. And so it really is complimentary to the work that they're doing as well. And then the crazy part too as Mike can tell you, we have realtors that are on the site as well. A big part of negotiation too or you see different laws, and Mike's our expert on codes, but you see different things that change in states like Florida to where a real estate transaction can't happen until the roof meets inspection and all that. Well wouldn't you want to know, is that 25,000? Is it 250? So we actually have realtors that are on the platform that use it in their everyday business because they're able to pull as many prices, as many addresses they want for a low monthly fee.

Karen Edwards: Wow. Yeah. Didn't think about all those pieces that go along with it. So that's fantastic. Anything else that our listeners should know about Roofle that I forgot to ask you?

Mike Goldenstein: You're only limited by your own creativity. So once you have this, you can keep between QR codes, door knocking, canvassing, online, everything is in play here and you can start doing business in an entirely different way.

Karen Edwards: I love it. I love it and I love that the folks who are using it are discovering those new and different ways and things they can do with it and it's not just for someone really coming to the website, but you can do it at a home show, do it on a flyer, do it in an email blast, use it in your pay-per-click advertising. It really is a well-rounded tool that, like I said, compliments other stuff that you're already doing and really enhances it. So I want to thank you both for being here today. Roofle has a full directory on rooferscoffeeshop.com so please visit their directory.

It has their contact information, links to their website, how to get in touch with them. It's been fantastic. Thank you both for being here. And as always, we want you to listen to all of our podcasts so you can stay on top of the latest news and happenings in the roofing industry and learn about new technologies and new solutions just like Roofle. So be sure to visit Roofers Coffee Shop, check out our read, listen, watch initiative. That's where you will find all of our podcasts. And you can also listen on your favorite podcast streaming platform, but be sure to subscribe, set those notifications so that you don't miss an episode, and we'll see you next time.

Outro: 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.