Armadura Metal Roof reveals the behind-the-scenes of putting their prices on the website and the positive change in customer behavior.
Dave Young:
Welcome to The Empire Builders podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Steven Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Steven’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode word from our sponsor, which is, well it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.
[Armadura Metal Roof Ad]
Stephen Semple:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Empire Builders podcast. This is Steven Semple here, and we’re going to be doing something a little bit different. We’ve given Dave young the day off and instead I have a very special guest with me, Matthew Burns, who is a customer of ours. And I asked Matt to join us on today’s podcast for a really specific reason. I’ve had a lot of people asking the question or having the thought of, should they be putting their price on the website?
Stephen Semple:
And what I thought, I could go on my rant about my belief that one should, and instead I thought, you know what? This is a great opportunity to bring on Matt and have him speak about his experience at Armadura Metal Roofing about putting pricing on their website. Because when we first started working with Matthew and Armadura… And you’ve heard the Armadura ads and they’re fricking awesome. But when we first started working with Matthew over at Armadura they didn’t have price on their website. And that led for quite an interesting conversation, especially when you look at the background of the roofing industry, because, correct me if I’m wrong, the roofing industry really doesn’t like the idea of putting price on website, do they?
Matthew Burns:
Oh no. No. That’s a scary, scary thing to do, yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your awesome product over at Armadura.
Matthew Burns:
Armadura Metal Roof was born from a desire to make things easier for the installation guy, the guy who’s up on the roof working the 9:00 to 5:00 in the hot sun and the cold winters grinding. Metal roofing is not an easy product to put together, especially if you didn’t start in metal, if you started in asphalt and you had to learn the industry, and so a lot of mistakes get made.
Matthew Burns:
And the systems out there were built by an engineer in a room that has no idea what it’s like to be on the roof. They just know that, hey, if we do these things, it’s going to work, but you have to do five times the amount of work.
Matthew Burns:
So when Armadura was invented and we went through the engineering of it, we decided, well, let’s put more things together. Let’s engineer this thing so that when the installers touch it they go, “Wait a second, I don’t have to go as slow. Wait a second, I don’t have to remember to add clips.” So that’s how it was born. And then launched out in 2013. We got some really quick accolades for developing something that was really easy to use. Now it had to beautiful. It has to be amazing for the client as well, for the homeowner.
Stephen Semple:
It is an awesome product with texture and depth of color. It’s beautiful.
Matthew Burns:
In R and D we probably spent a year and a half, almost two years just in developing it out, just in making it perfect.
Stephen Semple:
And just so people understand, you guys had a background in shaping and forming metal because for decades you’ve been serving the automotive industry.
Matthew Burns:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So it’s not like, gee, we’re trying to figure a whole pile of things out. It’s like, no, you already had a lot of expertise.
Matthew Burns:
Yeah, 48 years in the automotive industry or stamping for automotive. I mean, other industries as well, but that’s still a big bulk of our business. But we were 48 years old when we started the roofing side and we just applied a lot of what we knew. But again, to make it better, to actually make it better, it had to be better. We couldn’t just say it. So that’s why we spent a lot of time.
Matthew Burns:
And then coatings and making sure that it’s never going to rust and making sure that we could back a 50 year warranty with no pro rating, right? That’s just an industry garble that says, “Hey, we’re going to only warranty it for a portion of the time.” We said, “No, we warranty it the whole time,” but it’s got to be built perfect to do that. So anyway.
Stephen Semple:
So then you launched the product, you had a bunch of success, and then you went through sort of a period where sales flattened out. And then you got involved with us. And what’s the last two or three years been like for Armadura?
Matthew Burns:
Complete upside down. So yeah, we went flat for about four years, literally flat, like every year the exact same number, give or take 2%, 3% up and down both ways. And then when we got you guys on board and we started to think differently about the communication pathways and we started thinking about the customer’s actual journey through the process of buying a metal roof versus buying an asphalt roof, because it is different slightly.
Stephen Semple:
It’s a lot more expensive. This is one of the things I want everybody to understand. Because sometimes the hesitation, because we are going to get into this whole idea of pricing on the website, sometimes the hesitation when you’ve got a high price product is a fear to put that price out there. We went through the very same conversation with a client that does private jets and we have their pricing on the website. You want to see scary pricing. You take a look at that pricing.
Matthew Burns:
Yeah. Wow. No kidding.
Stephen Semple:
But we got doing these things and the result on your sales is you guys have been growing really strongly the last bunch of years.
Matthew Burns:
Yeah, I would say we’ve grown 25 to 50% year over year for the last three.
Stephen Semple:
Which is awesome.
Stephen Semple:
So one of the things, when we first got exploring this idea of putting price on the website, well, first of all, you have slightly different products, but really more importantly, there’s quite a range because there’s a lot of things that impact price. So it’s not like you can sit there and say it’s $25,000.
Matthew Burns:
There’s no roof that’s ever going to be $25,000.
Stephen Semple:
Right. There’s quite a range. And there’s a bunch of things that impact price. What are some of the things that impact price?
Matthew Burns:
Well, there’s a lot that impacts price. So roofs used to be these really awesome gable to gable. And by gable to gable I mean it looks like A frame roof and then you’ve got your walls underneath it. And those are simple. It’s easy to do. We could price that much more concisely if that’s what they all looked like. But architects got in the way and they were like, “No, it’s got to look beautiful on the outside.” So we got to have all these shapes and extra valleys and these hips.
Matthew Burns:
And so the steeper a roof gets the more valleys and hips that it has, the more expensive it gets. Dormers, the things that pop out of a roof for no reason, make it more expensive. Anytime that you have to do a little bit of extra work or go slower, anytime the two things are really close together and there’s tons of cutting of metal, it slows it down and makes it more expensive.
Stephen Semple:
So basically when we started this exploration of putting price on the website, there was a couple hesitations. So the first hesitation, and I hear this a lot with the construction space work with renovators, people like yourself, is I can’t provide a price because, to your point, there’s no such thing as a $25,000 roof. So the first thing that we did then is we explored, okay, basically what’s the variation, right? In terms of what is the least expensive roof, what’s the most expensive roof that we did? And so you went back and you took a look at that. And then where did that lead us next, Matt?
Matthew Burns:
It led us to realize that we could break it into a smaller chunk. We just took a look at, if we’ve got, this is the very low end and this is the very high end average roof. And with guidance from you guys, we decided that we were going to break it into three chunks. And we gave ranges from kind of if we took the very middle and we went from the bottom to halfway to the middle, from halfway to the middle to halfway to the highest, and then from halfway to the highest to the highest. And we just decided to chunk those out. They’re fairly big ranges, but people can identify now I’m in the small range, I’m in the medium range, or I’m in the high range.
Stephen Semple:
And one of the things that, Matthew, that you did that I thought was brilliant was the suggestion when we were building up the website, that what we did is we actually actually on the website, we have a picture. So when we sit there and say, “It’s for a home of about this square footage, two story with dormers,” we took a picture of a home of that size, two story with dormers. So somebody could look in and go, “Yeah, that’s my house or that’s close to my house.” And then as you said, even though it’s a wide range, we have this range.
Stephen Semple:
Here’s the interesting thing. I’ve had people go, “Yeah, but if it’s a wide range, is that helpful?” And what’s been your experience speaking with clients after they’ve looked at the website?
Matthew Burns:
Oh, okay. So this is incredible. So what happens is that we actually get web form comments. So we get the people requesting a quote through the web. And in the comments it’s always, “I think I’m level two, but I want to make sure.” That’s right in the comments. They’ve gotten to the webpage. They’ve seen the price range. They know what the price range is. And they could be at the very high end of whatever they believe is their price range. They’re still calling us. They’re still trying to figure whether they fit inside.
Matthew Burns:
And so when the installer company goes out and does the measurements and they give them a price and the price falls in that price range, the customer’s like, “Okay, good. I’m glad.” It actually builds a whole bunch of trust that we didn’t expect to build with a client because now all of a sudden we delivered what we promised. We said it’s going to be between these two numbers and it landed between these two numbers. Which means before we even worked with them, we were able to build some trust, which was huge. I mean, it put us from closing like 10%, 12% of those deals up to 50% to 70% of those deals, right? That’s huge.
Stephen Semple:
Right. Yeah, because all of a sudden the customer realizes there’s no price game being played here because I went to the website, I asked, is this my range? You ask them a couple of questions. You confirmed, yes it is.
Stephen Semple:
Then when the final pricing happens and it lands in that range, especially where one of the things, Matthew, that I know you guys can do and that you do do is when they ask that question, you might go, “Yeah, but you’re going to be at the top end,” or “Yeah, you’re going to be the bottom end,” or, Yeah, you’re probably going to be somewhere in the middle.” And then when it comes out as that, it’s this confirmation that there’s not this pricing game going on. So the surprise that you guys got from this is that you’ve discovered it has built trust through the sales process, which you weren’t anticipating. That’s been an extra bonus that you got.
Matthew Burns:
The built trust through the sales process. And what I like better is we don’t field as many phone calls or requests because people who are very price sensitive or are shopping price only, they don’t end up calling us. And I know that sounds negative because people are like, “Oh no, no, get them to call me,” because they’re going to tire kick and they’re going to take away my time. And what we’ve found is we’ve gained in sales. We’ve made more money, we’ve closed more business, and we’ve had less people just showing up to ask questions. I know it sounds like we don’t want people to talk to us, but no, we want buyers to talk to us.
Stephen Semple:
Well, you bring up an interesting thing and there’s two sides to this coin. So one is, there’s this belief that if I can just get on the phone and I can value stack this, I can make that person fall in love with my product and want to buy my product. And if we are on video here rather than audio, everyone would see Matt shaking his head. And I’m telling you it’s side to side. It’s not up and down, right>
Matthew Burns:
Nope. Yeah. Nope, nope, nope.
Stephen Semple:
Look, if you’re close on price, yes. But then if you’re close on price, they’re still going to call. The people where there’s a big gap like “They’re $25,000. I can get Joe down the road to put asphalt on for 10. I’m just not doing it.” You’re never going to talk them into doing it.
Matthew Burns:
That’s right 100%.
Stephen Semple:
But I also think there’s another thing that we don’t think about. And I know when you and I had this conversation, especially when the owner Sebastian was involved, is I asked you guys a simple question and Sebastian relayed it because he loves audio. And he actually relayed a story that he had when he was thinking about buying some audio equipment.
Stephen Semple:
I said, “Have you ever gone to a website and there’s no price on the website? How does it make you feel?” And Sebastian went on a rant about how it drives him nuts, and it upsets him, and it blah, blah, blah. And I was like, “Okay, great. We all experience that, right? We all experience the frustration of going to a website and there’s no damn price.”
Matthew Burns:
I know I interrupted, but if you remember correctly, he actually said, “Why can’t they just make it easier for me to make the purchase?”
Stephen Semple:
There you go. I forgot about that. Right. And it was like, “Okay, so Sebastian, when somebody comes to your website, look to buy a roof, that’s what they experience.” Now, of course there’s well, there’s all these reasons why we can’t do it. And I’m sure if I was talking to the company that sold audio stuff, they would have the same line of excuses.
Stephen Semple:
What we tend to forget is what drives us nuts as customers drives our customers nuts when they work with us. If people are driven crazy by the fact that price is not available, they’re going to be driven crazy when they come to your website when price is not available. Figuring out price for yours, it took us time. We had to go in. We had to pull numbers. We initially started with a range that was far wider. And then as we got experience, we were able to narrow that range down. It’s not an easy slam dunk exercise for roofing or renovations, but what we’ve discovered is it’s worth doing.
Matthew Burns:
Yeah. And I think too what you had pointed out at one point or another was we didn’t need to show a range of the super high end, right? So our super high end are these mansion type massive things. People realize, hey, wait a second, that’s going to be more difficult to price and you really need to price it on the spot. People get that. People that have that much money who have that kind of a home who are used to spending big dollars, understand that, you know what? I really want you to measure my roof so that I get a really exacting price.
Matthew Burns:
The other thing that you guys had said to us was self-identification. I talk about this all the time to as many people as I possibly can. I can self-identify the picture to the price, to the features of the roof of their home. As they go through that they’re going, “Yeah, that’s me. That’s me. That’s me. That’s me.” All of a sudden they go, “You know me. You know who I am.” And the price is the benefit of getting the right person to call at the right time. That warm and fuzzy feeling, “You know me.”
Matthew Burns:
We have the best customers. Now we enjoy getting all of our phone calls. Our sales people just love to talk to these customers because they all feel like we’ve done our best to know them. I mean, we’ve changed everything about the website because of the pricing page. You guys have helped us a ton. It’s been fantastic.
Dave Young:
Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.
[Empire Builders Ad]
Dave Young:
Let’s pick up our story where we left off and trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.
Stephen Semple:
If you were sitting in front of a renovator a roofer, any sort of business, what would be your recommendation around price on the website?
Matthew Burns:
Figure it out. Make it work. Find a way to make it work. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re the low cost provider or the high cost provider, put it on there. It is definitely going to make the right customer call you when they need their product. Everything you guys have done for us drove them to the website. So the marketing has to be there, but once they’re there help them make an easy choice. Put the price on.
Stephen Semple:
What do you feel though? Because sometimes there’s a hesitation to do this because you go, well, if I put my pricing on my website, all my competitors can see my pricing. What’s your thoughts around that?
Matthew Burns:
What my competitors think of me is none of my business. Before you guys we worried a ton about our competitors and we were flat. Since you guys I haven’t thought about my competitors. I just keep thinking about how do I make myself better? How do I make our brand better? How do we make our company relate better? And I stopped worrying about whether or not our competitors see it because what I also know is not one, Steven, and because I knew we were doing this interview, I went to look, not one of our competitors has put price on the web.
Stephen Semple:
Right.
Matthew Burns:
They’re afraid. They’re afraid like we were.
Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Look, sometimes this is a really hard decision. Sometimes we have to do something that can open ourselves up to our competitors. But I always go to, if this is better for the customer, always do what’s better for the customer and you’ll win at the end of the day.
Stephen Semple:
And sometimes we make things where we worry about the competitor rather than worrying about the customer. And as you said, your frame of mind now has flipped to, how do we make this experience better for the customer? How do we make our business better? How do we do all of this and keeping endlessly focused on the customer and saying, you know what? Screw the competitors. And then guess what? You’re now actually crushing your competitors.
Matthew Burns:
We’re not happy for them, but we’re happy that we have less competitors in the market over the last couple of years.
Stephen Semple:
You guys have grown. You guys have grown inside of what has been a challenging and tough market environment.
Matthew Burns:
Absolutely.
Stephen Semple:
So any last thoughts that you want to share with folks who are going down this path of building their business empire? And one of the things I also want to share is a lot of these ideas such as putting price on the website and things along that lines also actually makes your business more scalable. Because now if you think about it from a long term perspective, as you grow and as you add sales people, it’s way easier to find sales People that are able to work with customers who have already pre-selected their product and are already qualified themselves on price. So this also actually makes it easier for your business to grow long term.
Matthew Burns:
That’s interesting. You know what? My last kind of thought on this specifically thing about scalability is we have dealers asking permission. Can we do the same thing? So when you say scalability and sales people, like we sell to dealers, like we take in leads and we pass those leads out to specific dealers. But we have dealers who aren’t in our lead program and those guys are saying, “Hey, listen, you guys do the thing. How does it work for you?” So I answer the questions and, “This is what we’ve done.” They say, “Can we emulate that? Can we do the same thing?” And I’m like, “I would say you’re stupid if you don’t.”
Stephen Semple:
So the answer is yes.
Matthew Burns:
The answer is, “Oh please just copy verbatim. Put your colors on it. Copy verbatim. You’re good.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we want them to be successful and we know it’s successful for us. And if they’re doing it as well, it only adds to our value. If we had a sales team environment, instead, it’s so easy to teach this. It’s just do this again, right? You plunk it on their desk. Do this again.
Stephen Semple:
Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. That’s what makes a business infinitely scalable. It’s also easier to retain salespeople because let’s face it it’s a far more pleasant conversation when somebody calls and they say, “You know what? I really like this one. And I think I’m in this price range.” And you go, “Yeah, you kind of are.” And then when you present the price, there’s not this, “Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s that much,” shock. If it’s not, you can tell in their body language and you just go, “Oh my God, I just wasted a whole pile of time.”
Matthew Burns:
Yeah.
Stephen Semple:
So it’s also a much more enjoyable sales process, which means you’re going to also retain your people longer.
Matthew Burns:
Absolutely. 100%.
Stephen Semple:
Awesome. Matthew, thank you for taking the time. And people have heard the ads. So you know that the ads are great. Take a look at their website for two reasons. One, if you want a metal roof, it’s awesome. If you’re a roofer and you’re wanting to get into the metal roofing industry, absolutely who you want to work with. And even if you’re just wanting to see some ideas of how to present price in a really effective manner, go check out the website. What’s the website there, Matthew? It’s your business. You got to promote your website.
Matthew Burns:
It’s Armadura.CA.
Stephen Semple:
Thank you very much for taking the time today.
Matthew Burns:
Hire the Wizard of Oz. Hire Steven and his team. These guys are crazy because they think completely different than your competitors, which is what’s going to make you win. Do that. Follow the podcast. Listen to the podcast. Follow the business world guys. You guys are… Thanks so much for everything you’ve done for us.
Stephen Semple:
Thank you very much for the endorsement, Matt. I really appreciate that.
Matthew Burns:
No problem.
Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to [email protected].
