10 ChatGPT Prompts for Commercial Roofers, From the First Call to the Roof Walk

ChatGPT can do a lot of the desk work that comes before a roof walk: who to call, what to say in the first thirty seconds, and the one-page summary you leave behind. Here are ten prompts a commercial roofing company can paste in today, each with the blanks to fill in.

Most of the prompts passed around for contractors ask for something like “a cold email for my roofing company.” What comes back is the same email every other roofer in your market received last week. The tool had one word to work with.

The prompts below work differently. Each one hands the tool your facts first, meaning the building, the title of the person you are calling, what they told you on the phone and what you saw when you were up on the roof, and only then asks for one specific piece of work with limits on length and tone. Fill in the brackets. The output starts to sound like your company.

In short

• Ten prompts, grouped by the job they do: finding the building, the first call, the roof walk, the follow-up and the math.
• Every prompt starts with your facts. The more specific the brackets, the less the result sounds like a template.
• The last prompt works out how many roof walks your revenue goal takes each month, and the dials it takes to book them.

Three rules before you paste anything

1. Never trust a name, a phone number or a statistic it gives you. These tools invent company names and contacts that sound real. Use it to think and to write. Use your own list for who to call.
2. Paste in real text whenever you can. A property management company’s website, your notes from a call, the line items from your own report. The tool is far more accurate summarizing something you gave it than recalling something it half knows.
3. Read every script out loud before you use it. If a sentence would sound strange coming out of your mouth on the phone, cut it. Facility managers can hear a script.

Finding the right building and the right person

1. Map the buildings worth calling in your market

I sell commercial roof replacement, repair and maintenance in [your metro area]. List ten types of commercial buildings in this area that commonly have low-slope roofs larger than [20,000] square feet. For each type, tell me how it is usually owned or managed (owner-occupied, property management firm, REIT, school district, hospital system) and the job title most likely to own the roofing budget. Do not name specific companies or people.

The last line matters. Ask for building types and titles and the answer is useful; ask for company names and you get a list that is partly made up, with no way to tell which half.

2. Read a property management company before you call it

Below is the text from the website of a property management company I plan to call: [paste the About page and the property list]. Summarize how many buildings they manage, what kinds, and which ones are in [your metro area]. Tell me which job title on their team appears to handle facilities or maintenance. Then give me three questions I could ask that facility manager which show I have read about their portfolio.

The first call and the voicemail

3. Write the first thirty seconds

Write the opening of a cold call from [your name] at [company] to the facility manager of [building type] in [city]. Keep it under 70 words. No “how are you today.” Say who we are in one sentence, give one reason we are calling this building in particular, and end with one question about when roof work next comes up in their budget. Do not claim a problem with their roof that I have not seen.

For a full call, line by line, see our commercial roofing cold call script.

4. Leave a voicemail that gets a call back

Write a voicemail under 25 seconds when spoken, for the [title] at [company]. Give my name, my company and my number twice, slowly. Give one specific reason to call back that is about their building, for example that we are already working nearby on [street or area]. No pressure language and no “just following up.”

The roof walk and the page you leave behind

5. Confirm the roof walk in writing

I spoke with the [title] at [company] about [building]. Here is what they told me: [your call notes]. Write a short email, under 90 words, that confirms the roof walk on [date and time], says who from our team will be there and roughly how long it takes, and tells them they will receive a one-page summary with budget ranges within two business days.

6. Turn your roof walk notes into a page they can forward

Here are my notes from a roof walk at [building]: [paste notes and line items]. Rewrite them as a one-page summary a property manager can forward to ownership without me in the room. Use these sections: what we saw, what needs attention now, what can wait and for how long, budget ranges for each item, and what we could not confirm from the surface. Plain language. No sales language and no price for the full job.

Buyers trust that last section most. It shows you reported what you found, including the parts that do not need money. The sections themselves are laid out in our commercial roof report template.

When they already have a roofer, or the proposal goes quiet

7. Answer “we already have a roofer”

A facility manager just told me “we already have a roofer we are happy with.” Give me three different responses, each under 40 words. None of them may criticize the current roofer. Each one should offer something useful to keep on file, such as a second set of eyes on the roof or a written budget range for next year, and end with a low-pressure question.

8. Reopen a proposal that went quiet

I sent a proposal to the [title] at [company] for [scope] on [date] and have not heard back. Here is what I know about their situation: [notes]. Write a follow-up email under 80 words that gives them a real reason to reply, such as a question about whether the budget timing changed or an offer to split the work into phases. Do not use “just checking in” or “circling back.”

Preparing for the meeting, and doing the math

9. Get ready for the questions they will ask

I am meeting the [title] of a [building type] about [scope]. List the questions this person is most likely to ask about disruption to tenants or operations, scheduling, warranty and how the cost fits their budget. For each one, draft a plain two-sentence answer that I will edit with our real details.

10. Work out how many roof walks your goal takes

I want [$ amount] in new commercial roofing revenue over the next twelve months. My average job is [$ amount]. I win [%] of the jobs I propose on, and [%] of the roof walks we book actually happen. Work backward and show me, step by step, how many new jobs, proposals and booked roof walks that takes, in total and per month. Round up at each step.

This one tends to change plans. Say the answer comes back as four booked roof walks a month, which sounds manageable until you ask the next question. How many calls does it take to book four? Across Abstrakt’s sales center, booking one commercial roofing appointment takes 140 dials on average, so four a month is about 560 dials, or roughly 27 every working day before anyone has walked a roof.

Our Growth Calculator runs the same math with your numbers, including the dials for your trade.

What changes when someone else makes the calls

Your estimators stop spending mornings on the phone. Abstrakt sets more than 100,000 appointments a year across the trades, and our callers work from the same kind of list prompt 1 starts: the buildings worth calling and the title that owns the roofing budget. You get the appointment on your calendar. The roof walk, the report and the job are yours.

One more thing. We work with one roofing company per market, so if your territory is open, we will tell you on the first call.

Questions roofers ask about using ChatGPT for sales

Is the free version of ChatGPT good enough for these prompts?

Yes. A paid plan helps mostly when you paste in long documents, such as a full property list or a set of roof walk notes from a large campus.

Can ChatGPT find facility managers’ names and phone numbers for me?

Do not rely on it for that. It will produce names and numbers that look right and often are not. Building a clean list of the right buildings and the right titles is its own job, and it is a large part of what an appointment setting team does every day.

Will facility managers notice an email was written with AI?

They will notice a generic one. An email that mentions their building, what they said on the phone and a date for the roof walk reads like it came from a person who listened, whoever typed the first draft. Edit it anyway.

Does this work for other trades?

The structure does: your facts first, one job per prompt, limits on length. The titles, the site visit and the document you leave behind change by trade.

Keep going

• Commercial roofing lead generation
• The one-page commercial roof report, section by section
• Who actually owns the roofing budget in a commercial building
• What to say when you cold call a facility manager

About this article

Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial roofing contractors and the wider trades, and the patterns here come from that calling.