Roofing Business Requirements

Lately, we’ve been talking about what it takes to be a well-connected, well-represented small business in our blogs. As we’ve been building our own new website, preparing for trade shows, and fighting the never-ending fight of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we’ve been thinking about what it takes to have a good web presence. Specifically a good presence in the roofing industry. This week we’ll take a hard look at the must-haves for any roofing company to survive and thrive in the current market.

Roofing Business Requirements

Wix Homepage
Our first small roofing business requirement is, of course, a website. Besides being an essential sign of credibility to customers, your site can be a lead generation machine when built and maintained correctly. Of course, most roofers are more familiar with Cedar Shake than CSS, but it’s never been easier to get a functional webpage that also looks impressive. Tools like Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress put the power in your hands, but if the idea of juggling a domain and CMS is intimidating, we’ve seen plenty of services that will design and manage your site for relatively low monthly amounts. 

If you’d like an example of a good roofing site, modernpros.com really caught our eye. They go beyond the idea of just offering a point of contact and take advantage of their website to tell their story. A little history and some short employee bio’s can go a long way in establishing trust with potential clients. Homeowners can be a skittish lot when hiring companies to work on their home, anything you can do before the actual appointment to lower their guard will help keep conversations open and make the sales process much more relaxed.

Our next absolute must for your roofing business is investing in what we’ll call “efficiency tech.” Obviously, we’ll put ourselves forward in this category, but every company needs to take advantage of the labor-saving technology that is out there currently. Whether that means purchasing a company drone and investing in training a qualified pilot to do inspections and estimates or investing in a Customer Relations Management (CRM) software to handle leads, job details, and payment processing. Avoiding technology or relying on that cousin that knows Quickbooks will hamstring your business in today’s market.

Today’s efficiency technologies often offer more than just one solution. CRM’s can allow you to manage customers all the way through the sales funnel and generate the documents (contracts, receipts, etc.) that those customers require. RoofSnap is known for giving our users accurate measurements, but our Estimation Platform similarly offers customizable documents and powerful integration of measurements across those documents to make selling, managing, and contracting jobs as easy as pushing a button. And if you want to take away even the button push, the API access we offer to customers lets them automate everything from project creation to ordering measurements from our services. In a small business, time truly is money, and finding ways to save both is always a smart decision.

Our last requirement for you today can be a combination of the first two, but it may also stand alone. Every business must have some customer-facing tools in place to handle brand-management, customer concerns, and post-sale support. This can be as simple as a Facebook page to keep customers updated on office hours, business events, and specials. It can also be finding an automated call-service that does more than just take voicemails, they can direct customers to specific extensions, forward them to cell-phones and more. Some CRM’s offer social media management as part of their packages. HubSpot is a personal favorite around our office, it brings all your company’s profiles all in one place and lets you post and respond from one page, saving your phone a lot of tabs.

We like to keep our lists short around here, so we’ll stop there for today. If you’ve got some resources that your business can’t live without, drop them in the comments. You never know who’s business you’ll make better. If you’re going to be out in Omaha this week for the MRCA, we’ll be at the expo both Thursday and Friday, make sure you stop by! And if anything you heard today made you want to give RoofSnap a try, schedule a live demo! RoofSnap won’t build a website for you, but it’ll cover almost every other base on this list.

We’ll see you next week!