How to Build a “Zero Excuses” Sales Team

Your company is only as strong as your people are. So if you have a team who is just feeling like they're underperforming and not quite bringing your vision to life, even though you feel like you've put it all there, it might not be the people and it might actually be this one thing, the culture. And as you watch this interview I did with John Brose, who helped build, scale, and eventually sell MHI Roofing in just a handful of years, you're going to learn what it takes to build a culture of execution. So you can finally have the team that you can count on, that you can rely on, and who performs at the highest level. Enjoy.

When you scaled down to just roofing, obviously that allowed you to build what you put— what you call the playbook. Others might call an SOP or a standard operating procedure. Everyone's got different words in the—

in, in our world.

You know, it's a, it's a system, it's a procedure, it's a playbook, it's an SOP. All means the same thing. It's the guidebook. Do this, do that. Here's the manual.

Yep.

But what's interesting is I interviewed Josh Sparks, chairman of Infinity Home Services, a private equity platform, and you had shared with me you watched that video. And he said in there, and I'm paraphrasing now, he said, I can give you all the playbooks, but I can't give you the execution.

Yep.

That's where I see most people falling short because an ambitious leader or owner can access all of this. You can jump into RSA. We've got the GET system, how to build your dream team, the sales training.

Yeah.

Working with you and Cody, who's built phone selling systems, and John Abernathy, who's scaled roofing companies, and you who have an incredible closing system. All of it's there, but not everybody experiences the level of success. So talk to me what it means to execute.

Yes.

And how you build a culture that executes at a high level, because it's not just the systems.

So this might be unpopular. One of the things to think through is, as visionaries, also need to be operators. A lot of guys get stuck in, hey, I'm the visionary, I got to go find somebody to be the operator. If you can't visualize it and build it, it's very difficult to build the culture.

Right.

And what I mean by that too is you think about through inspiring, they can inspire, but they don't know how to implement it. So we've always gone from, hey, here's how to inspire the same team, and here's how you actually do it.

Yeah.

Right? So the what, the why, and the how, right? So I wanna give, give you the what, here's the why behind everything, here's how you actually do it.

Right.

So to me, the, the best entrepreneurs and the guys that you see that like really knock it outta the park are the ones that, that can do the vision and actually build the, at least the architect of it.

Yeah.

Can, can, can build the scaffolding around it. And that's what I think that we were really good at is we set the vision, but then we, we went in behind and built the architecture before we presented it to the team.

Mm-hmm.

And so being very careful of what you actually like roll out and only 1 or 2 big rollouts a year, like you, don't want very many big, huge changes, right? A lot of guys don't understand that. And we used to call it something different, but Brian Gottlieb in his book was really— I mean, we had this kind of a structure, but he lays it out eloquently. But you have business standards and then you have SOPs. So we started out with our business standards, right? Like this, like I win speed to lead, right? What does that mean? Well, the SOP can change. So the playbook can actually change some, but the culture was, hey, we win speed to lead. We collect when the job's done. We make sure the customer's happy. Like we started with a hierarchy of standards, if you will.

Right.

So that was your core values, if you will. Like this is how we go to— this is how we go into battle every time. We're gonna win. How do we win? Well, those roadways can actually change, right? Depending on the market. 'Cause I might make a market shift, right? I might be having one system that we use and like, hey, this software is too expensive. Now we're going to do software. So how I win really didn't matter about the SOPs. It's having the same alignment at the very top with the standards.

What were a few of those standards that allowed you to anchor the team around being a high execution team?

Yeah, so it's we win speed to lead, we win lead to appointment, we win close rates. Right. We want to, you know, and then when you get over into, into the production side, like, hey, we show up on time. I mean, just these little things that are just super simple, right? You know, we take care of the customer, we collect the job at the end. You know, I mean, those are just like some basic things.

Yeah.

That you just set this as like, hey, this is how we go to market.

Right.

Like, so we set it as, we call it our go-to-market strategy. I'm, I'm, I'm using Brian's term at State Bridge.

Yeah.

But our go-to-market strategy was like, hey, this is, each department owns their own Their own SOPs after that, right? But having that vision to be able to implement that. So each little mission was a little bit different in every department. Sure, the true mission was to go take care of the customer, right? You know, and become the best roofing contractor in Pittsburgh at the time.

Yeah.

So that's the mission, or to be known as the best. And but each each department had to have their own mission statement as well. So being able to break that down, having that that that hierarchy of a standard, which you know, was our go-to-market strategy is I would say, yeah, we win, we win the speed to lead. You know, we, we collect when the job's done. So what happens when, when we didn't collect when the job was done? Well, there's something else that happened. Sure, an SOP broke, broke down. The standard was this, right? So like, that's, that's, that was the go-to-market strategy, if you will.

Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. And with each of these, and I just, I'm taking copious amount of notes if you haven't noticed.

Awesome.

Speed to lead, lead to appointment, Um, close rates, showing up on time, taking care of the customer, and then collecting money when the job's done. So we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Yeah.

Kind of main anchors, uh, or go-to-market strategies, as you put it, or standards, as, as, as you also shared. So now each of those are measurable in some capacity. So speed to lead, time window, lead appointment time window, close rates percentage, showing up on time. I, I, I, I come back to that in a minute. Taking care of customers can be evidenced by reviews.

Correct.

Obviously. And then collecting cash is Looking at and taking care of the customers, it shows up in collecting. Yeah, it does.

It does. Let's be real, right? Yeah.

How did you measure the showing up on time piece?

Yeah. So our whole rule and law around everything was being 15 minutes early. So we were never late to an appointment.

You were military, weren't you?

I was. Yeah. Yeah. Came out of the Marine Corps, so went to boot camp and all that fun stuff. But like, so being 15 minutes early. So that was one of the standards that we set. There's a bunch of reasons why we can jump. We jump to the sales process. One is just to really get your mind set. Yeah, because things happen. Like you know, like our whole thing about our reps is like we wanted them to be better husbands and brothers and you know, and and and and friends right at home. Like in better fathers. Like that that was the goal. If they did that good, they'll be great here. But to be able to do that too, they had to be able to have this little moment of reset. So we call it like a light switch moment. You got to get in your truck. You know, you're driving there. Your wife just called, the water heater blew up. You got to actually get that stuff out of your mind. That's hard.

It's very hard.

That's very hard to do. But if you're late and you're also rushed to get there, I don't have that time to really do my little reset. And so we would literally have a reset. And you literally just stop, you put your phone on do not disturb. I got to go to work, right? So we helped coach through those things. But being early was really part of everything. So if they would come to the sales Meeting's late, we lock them out of the meeting.

Yeah.

It was that—

oh my gosh. So, I'm sorry to interrupt. I shouldn't have. I did. So, I'm going to keep rolling with it. You opened up just something so beautiful on accountability.

If they show up, the door's locked.

We got to go. How did this go?

Because there's folks that are tuning in that are probably like, I would never do that. And some guys are late and then what if this happened? How do you handle that? Especially since there can often be an excuse and there can often be reasonable excuses, which I'll talk about reasonable excuses and my opinion on those. But how did you create this level of rigidity that also got people feeling good and be part of this where they weren't just being slapped on the wrist all the time?

Well, yeah. So, that's a great question. There's a lot to unpack there in your question. So, one is reasonable excuses. I don't think there's such things as a reasonable excuse. There's either a reason or an excuse. I don't think they go together. That, that was me first.

I love it.

It's either a reason or an excuse.

All right.

Challenge accepted. Now I, now I agree. You changed my mind on that one. So, but I think there's layers here, right? So yes, there are reasons why that they could be late. Yeah. If they weren't communicative or if they didn't let the sales manager know, right, what was going on or what happened or, you know, things do happen. Like, we're not totally, let's like, don't ever show up. Right. But it's really, it's the standard of like, The whole team is expected to be there on time.

Yeah.

If we show up on time, then we show up on time, right? Things do happen, right? Don't get me wrong. It's not even that it was like nobody ever got in the door after that time, but they had to communicate and let us know the reason why, right? Because there's no such thing as excuses, right? We don't have excuses around here, right? So I don't want excuses. And so when you break it down to being true, being kind, and being helpful. So that's one of the things that was part of our core values as well. But we had dos and the don'ts. Yeah.

Right.

So some of the don'ts are don't be late, don't lie. So if you're going to be late, tell me about it.

Right.

I'd much rather you give me one don't that you did wrong instead of having 2. Yeah. And so that's just how we built everything. And we started that. It really goes all the way back to the recruit hiring training process. So some of the things that we did was we really recruited pretty hard. Like 20 people would come in. We only brought one through or 2 through. Very rarely did they ever make it. Right. Not being mean. It's just like I wanted to break down the ego prior to even coming in. So We actually avoided a lot of the stuff because we already had the standard in the interview.

Right.

So as you're interviewing, one pro tip, if you want me to give a pro tip on this, is I always ask the question at the very end, and we coach on this now. It's like, so Adam, just tell me about a time you got to give somebody bad news. And again, I don't care if they've been in the roofing industry for 20 years and they were the top sales rep and they sold $10 million last year. I'm doing the same standard with everybody. And so I say, so Adam, so just tell me about a time that it there's some bad news, and Adam was the one that had to give that news. How did you handle it? What did you do?

Yeah.

And you walk them through that, right? And then they start telling you, well, there's this and this. Tell me some more about that. Look, I'm just open-ended questions, just getting to the bottom of it, right? And I want to see, one, can they talk about bad news, right? Can they deliver bad news? That's part of the interview process. But the other thing is I'm getting ready to break their ego. And so it's like, once he gets done, I'm like, okay, listen, Adam, so thank you for sharing that. I'm in the same situation now where I gotta give you some bad news. I don't know if you can make it on our team here. I really, I don't know if you have what it takes to actually meet our standards and then just be quiet. I'm literally trying to close them because the worst part about interviews is everybody's at their best behavior at an interview, the company and the sales rep or the company and the person you're hiring. Right? Yeah. I hate that. I hate the, I hate the lens of that.

Yeah.

Like, let's just get it outta the way.

It's like a first date.

It's like a first date.

It's a first date. Yeah.

Because it, it, it, it only goes downhill. So, We just did a takeaway close is what, and I learned that out of them, out of the Marine Corps too. Like it was a takeaway close, but it's like, I just don't think you can make it here. I don't think you qualify. Right. And just be quiet and let 'em talk. So as a sales rep, if they don't start fighting for it at the kitchen table, they're not gonna fight for it at the kitchen table either.

Right.

I just want them to ask me a question. Well, John, where'd it go wrong at? That's my guy, right? Yeah. If, if it's a guy that stands up, well, you lost out. That was ego I didn't need anyway. I don't lose here.

Yeah, that's true. That's very true.

So we broke the ego before they ever came in. And then I would explain to them, listen, because the reason is we invest into every person we bring in. It's $10,000 to $20,000 of an investment. And we have a process that's strict that you have to stick to. I just don't know if you can handle that or not. Just tell me some more if you think you can't. Help me understand why you feel you can handle that. And so that's why we didn't get a whole lot of guys that were already in the industry because they had too big egos.

Yeah.

And so I give that as a preface of like, we didn't have that bad of an issue with that of being late, but we didn't lock the doors, but we didn't have that issue because it was broken in the interview. They already knew that that was the standard when they came in. And so even between then and going to training class, right? And so we're going down a fun road here. But so we gave them online course to go take. It was literally Roofing 101. Here's the parts and pieces. This is the eave, this is the ridge, this is the drip edge.

There's online course. It took them about 8 hours.

So we strategically would hire them at least 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time, and then they started on X date, right? So let's say they started on May 1st, and that was Monday. Well, part of the rules that they got was this training that they had to go through on their own, right? Self-study course had to be done by end of day Friday the week before, or the Friday before Monday. And the reason for that was I didn't want them to crash it out on Saturday and Sunday. So if it wasn't done by 5:00 PM the Friday before, they had 3 weeks to do it. It's going to take them 8 hours. They're not going to invest in time and energy to go learn and study.

Right.

So when they showed up to class on Monday morning and they hadn't done it by end of day Friday, they didn't get in the class. So the standard was already set there. And then every week in class was— they had a test out at the end of every week. There's a test out on Friday, test out on Friday. The 3rd week was ride-alongs with the sales manager or the sales trainer. The 4th week is ride-along with other senior reps. The 5th week, they get to go run a lead by themselves and come back to the office. So it was very rigorous of how we trained it, and it was our process. Here's the process, here's how we do it. And it wasn't the robot thing. It was more of like them understanding that it's not even about the script, it's about the tonality. And we taught the body language, the tonality, the whole part of it. But they had to graduate every week. But we gave them an onboarding salary as well. So they would have like a 12-week onboarding salary. And then after the 12 weeks, it was commission only. So they would have an onboard salary plus half commission. So it put pressure on us as owners, right? And as a management team to, hey, will these guys make it or not? If not, let's get rid of them as fast as possible. Didn't have a whole lot of that, but there are some guys that just couldn't cut it, the non-hackers. And we let them go at week 6 or 7.

Yeah.

That we didn't have to worry about them. But again, it was an investment. Most guys that make it through the interview process made it because we were super tough in the interviews. I'd much rather hire one guy than 15 and have that one guy that's going to win. And so that's how we built it. So you go with the end in mind and you work backwards, right? So if I can do 100 roofing jobs, how many reps do I need to go sell 100 roofing jobs? Then I knew what I need to hire. Right. So next year I'm working on getting to 500 roofing jobs. Well, now I need 3 reps or whatever the number is. You work your way backwards. And so we knew when to hire, how to hire, and those types of things. So yeah, it kind of came back into the start— we started, we started, start at the end to understand how to hire.

So, so when you, when you, you just said I can work backwards to know how many sales reps I'll need to sell 100 roofs, whatever the number is. And I know, by the way, there's people tuning in that are, you know, knocking doors on their own. They're like, I could sell 100 roofs myself easy. And then others that are in the retail environment, and I get that it depends on— I just want to share this for those who are like less familiar with— I know we're in the roofing space and it happened to me. It was like, this is how roofing is. But like, if that's that way for you, but there's regional differences in running a roofing company, right, in LA in a wildly retail market, super competitive, really high cost of living. is different than the company that's living and dying on storms in Dallas, Texas.

Yep.

Um, which is also different than a company that's in a less competitive market that, uh, uh, you know, is in either retail or storm. So there's a lot of variations, but, um, conceptually speaking, you can reverse engineer the plan. But this is where I see roofing companies falling short, and I'd love your input. One is they'll say, well, you know, in their— in the owner's or manager's mind, Well, one person or 2 people should be able to do this, and then they'll hire and they're like lagging indicators. They look back and they're like, it's been 6 months and sales are 25% of what they should have been. How do you, again, going back to execution, how do you ensure that they hit that? And how did you have a quota? Some people call it like the make or break line.

Yeah.

How did you manage the team to execute at that level and know when to let people go that weren't a good fit?

Yeah, great question. You start with junior, senior, like a team lead. Like there's like 3 levels for a sales rep. So when they first come in their first year, they're a junior rep, right? They're, they're, they're learning it. They're, even if they've been in the industry for years, like they start as a junior rep cuz they're learning our process. They're learning how our good go-to-market strategies, how we do things. And so the expectation, right, and what we had them agree to is going to be less than what the senior guy does, right? Or what the team lead guys does. So, so if in my market, again, this is market specific. So like in the Pittsburgh market, like a main, a main dollar guy or main half guy is really good because, you know, the average ticket to them was like $12,000, right? And so, you know, your average roof size was 19 squares, you know? And so like, that's a really Decent sales rep, right? $1 million to $1.5 million. Down to Cape Coral, it's $2.5 to $3 million, right? Because your average deal is $25,000 to $30,000. So like, you got to understand deal size and those things. But understanding— so you got to start with, what is my average ticket going to be? How many roofs can this person produce, right? As far as like on the production side. So if he brings in 100 roofs, I just use that as easy math.

Yeah. Thank you.

Right. So Thanks for that.

Yeah.

So if, if, if we say it's 100 roofs and, and he, and his average ticket is, is $12,000, well, he should be able to, to do $1.2 million in sales. And so then we work our way backwards. Well, he's starting in April. Well, I can't expect him to do $1.2 from April 1st to December 31st, right? So we also have a 90-day ramp-up period. So then we also would set the KPIs based on that 90-day ramp-up. At the 91st day, he should be sufficient and proficient at everything he does. So now I want to set it, you know, so if you start April 1st, May 1st, right into June 1st. So July 1st through the end of the year, they've got to sell $600,000 because it's based on that 1.2 number. But up until then, it's going to be a modified version of that all 3 months.

Mm-hmm.

So, so the first month, I don't expect him to sell anything. So that's a wash. The, the second month would probably be like 20 to 30, 30% of a normal goal. The third month is probably 60 to 80% of the goal because they're because they're getting their their traction. By their fourth month, they should hit 100% of the goal of a junior rep. So having that expectation and we're working the KPI that way. And what what does that mean? So like from July first to to the end of the year, they've got to sell 50 roofs. So you break you just work it way backwards. So between you know month two and month three, they should be selling five roofs in month and in month two, and they need to be selling. 10 roofs into month 3, right? So 2 and 3. So they should have 15 roofs sold by the time they really launch. So I don't have the expectation they got to do 100 roofs because I hired them on April 1st. So I set the realistic expectation and we worked our way backwards knowing that, okay, I hire him, he'll be proficient by month 4. So I expect those KPIs at month 4. And then you started to reduce the KPIs as you go backwards.

Gotcha.

That, that's how we executed. And like, and we held 'em to those standards because you can see that growth as they go.

What happened if they didn't hit the standards?

They were gone.

Was there any sort of probationary period or was it—

That's 90 days. Yeah.

Okay. So, so the 90-day was probationary.

That's the probationary.

And then when they're a junior rep.

When they're a junior rep.

And can you just explain again the junior rep and senior rep differentiation?

Yeah.

Junior, just the 90-day stretch.

So, So it's onboarding, right? Is that first 90 days, right? As a junior rep. So that's the first qualifier. They can only sell certain products. So only like shingles. They can't sell metal and tile or those because they haven't learned that yet.

Master the basics. Master the basics.

So it's the basics. They all had to work every Saturday, right? So there's other things like when they become a senior rep, it's 2 Saturdays a month with their team lead, then it's 1 Saturday a month. So they got some extra, like, not time off, but they were able to move their calendar around more.

Yeah.

So, so coming as a junior rep, like you had to work, you know, every Saturday, every Tuesday and Thursday evenings were like, those were the requirements. Right. You know, cuz we just, we knew that those were our 3 best close days. Right. So, so they had to work. And so that was part of it. Right. And so once you became a senior, well then you were able to, your, your sales goal went up, but your pipeline got bigger and your referral network got bigger.

Right.

You know, those were those types of things. So we were able to, you know, kind of keep those as KPIs as well. But like, yeah, yeah. But like you would go from junior to senior and now they could go sell, you know, metal and tile or whatever it is. Right. And then the team lead, really, they would have like a team of like 3 or 4 people that they were just the mentor of that group.

Mm-hmm.

If, if that makes sense. They, they weren't the sales manager, they weren't, you know, but we would do competitions every month with team 1 and team 2 or team 1 and 3 and 4, like whatever, like however many teams you, that you end up having. Yeah. And then each team would be running their own group. The team leaders would actually switch every month and have new people. So we ran a batting order. It's like my number 1 sales rep, right? Let's say he's gonna be team lead 1. Well, we'd put the least performing guys in his team for that next month, right? And then, so if my number 1 became number 3, well, now he's leading team 3, and then he would get— so we ran it bracket style. So if you have 10 guys, so number 3 and number 6 are in this group, groove together.

Yeah.

Right. So you can actually, so everybody can actually win that one.

Yeah.

Right. So there's a poten— the potential to win in revenue and close rates and all that stuff. So we try to keep it as even as possible once we brought those out. But those are some of the advantages of, of being a team lead.

Gotcha.

If you like this interview, you'll love working with John and I inside the Roofing Strong Alliance. Click the link in the description or go to rsa.pro right now to learn more or apply to join.