You want to grow your roofing business and expand your customer base – but you’re facing lots of competition from other contractors in your area. How can you stand out from the crowd and increase your sales?

When there are many roofing contractors all competing for the same business, what will set you apart is the quality of your work and the way you treat your customers. Here are a few roofing sales tips to help you provide what homeowners are looking for and outshine your competitors.

Read: 3 Ways Automations Can Help You Take Your Customer Service Game to the Next Level

5 Tips for Increasing Your Roofing Sales

Tip #1: Stay Organized

Organization is the foundation of a successful roofing business. Keeping important information in an easily accessible place enables speedy follow-up with leads, improves communication, and reduces errors. If your roofing business has been disorganized in the past, improving your organization can help you increase your roof sales and work more efficiently.

One way to help your business stay organized is to use a system like AccuLynx. AccuLynx roofing sales software benefits contractors by enabling them to access important job information from anywhere. You can create digital files in AccuLynx for each job, so it’s easy to find documents, notes, photos, and more related to a specific job. The dashboard in AccuLynx gives you an overview of how all your leads and jobs are progressing, so that you can keep track of your sales pipeline at a glance. Using these and other tools in AccuLynx can help your business stay more organized and ensure that you reach out to leads and customers before your competitors do.

Tip #2: Communicate Often

Homeowners want to stay informed about your work on their home. When you communicate clearly and often, you help them understand how work is progressing, give them and opportunity to ask questions and express concerns, and establish a reputation as a responsive business. Go beyond just informing customers when a crew will come to their home or if you will need to reschedule an appointment – check in when a part of the job is completed and ask if they’re satisfied with the work so far.

Just as important as communicating frequently is communicating in a way that your customers prefer. Some customers want to be contacted via email, others prefer phone calls, and a growing number would rather receive updates over text message. Make it clear to your customers that you offer multiple communication options, and ask which one they prefer. This is one more simple way that you can provide the highest-quality customer service.

With AccuLynx, you can email and text your customers directly from the platform, so you can communicate using the same system you use to organize the rest of your business and keep a good record of all the times you’ve reached out to your customers. You can also set up automated messaging that is triggered by a specific event, such as the creation of a new appointment, to make it even easier to keep customers informed.

Tip #3: Make it Easy to Sign Off on Documents

Delays in the approval process frustrate both contractors and customers and can impact job profits. These delays often result from a time lag between when a document is created and when a customer can sign off on that document. In order to reduce delays, it’s important to make it as easy as possible for your customers to sign documents.

If your business has the capability to accept electronic signatures, you can speed up the approval process significantly. With electronic signature and digital document management technology, you can email the document to be signed on the customer’s own time or get it signed on the spot with your mobile device. Customers will appreciate the convenience and ease of this service, and it will simplify the process of collecting signatures. AccuLynx offers eSign technology, as well as tools to create all your documents electronically, so you can give your customers this simple option for faster approvals.

Tip #4: Share Pictures

The old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is especially true when it comes to roofing. Seeing a picture of the damage—and receiving photo updates as repairs are underway—can help homeowners understand why repairs are necessary and stay informed about the progress of your work. Since homeowners can’t get on the roof with you, photos give them the view of their project that you see. If you’re trying to close a sale, sharing photos supports your claims about the urgency of the work and the types of repairs required. And if you’re in the midst of working on the project, sharing photos gives customers a sense of how things are progressing.

Since your teams are already taking photos for their internal use, you can simply pass along those photos to homeowners, with any annotations or additional information needed to facilitate understanding. The photo tools in AccuLynx make this process even easier. With AccuLynx, you can save photos to their corresponding jobs and add tags to keep them organized. The AccuLynx photo tools also offer a variety of ways to annotate your photos to provide clarity to your customers. And since AccuLynx is a cloud-based platform, your photos are always accessible whenever you need them. Using photos as a tool for increasing roof sales is simple with AccuLynx.

Tip #5: Offer Financing or Credit Card Payment Options

Some of the most common objections that roofing salespeople encounter are related to payment and cost. Whether the full cost of repairs is too expensive or the payment methods you offer are inconvenient for the homeowner, issues with payment and cost can impede a sale and cause your business to lose out to your competitors. Offering multiple payment and financing options will help you win more business and improve your customer service.

In particular, giving your customers the ability to pay via credit card, debit card, or e-check will help you get paid faster and demonstrate to customers that you are committed to their convenience. Electronic payment processing is simple and secure, allows you to offer a preferred payment method to homeowners, and eliminates delayed or lost payments. Homeowners who are reluctant to pay by paper check will be much more willing to work with you if you can accept their credit cards. AccuLynx recently introduced AccuPay, a secure online payment processing feature that allows you to accept payments directly from AccuLynx. AccuPay helps you process credit, debit and ACH transactions from anywhere without having to leave the system you’re already using to manage your business.

Read: New Payment Options in AccuLynx Streamline the Sales Process

Offering financing to homeowners will also help you overcome common sales objections. Instead of having to pay the full cost up front, homeowners can take advantage of financing to get the funds they need to pay for your work. This can be especially helpful for selling larger jobs, such as total roof replacement. AccuLynx has partnered with GreenSky®, one of the leading consumer financing companies, to help contractors offer loans and payment plans to their customers. The financing options are integrated directly within AccuLynx and make it easier to overcome cost objections when selling.

Outpace Your Competitors With Better Roofing Sales Techniques

The roofing industry continues to grow every year and see an increase in new roofing companies—which means more competition for your business. But with these simple techniques, you can serve your customers more effectively and increase your roofing sales. To learn more about ways to grow your sales, download our eBook “Best Practices for Better Roofing Sales.”