Adam Sand breaks down the post-inspection follow-up process that keeps deals alive. Inside sales calls within 24-48 hours if no sale closes, outside sales documents details immediately, and a 40-60 active-deal pipeline keeps the team focused. Response time under 5 minutes and on-time appointments are the metrics that predict closing rate.
So did you know the number one process that kills inside sales results the fastest? It's not the pitch, it's not pricing, dude, it's sloppy. Post inspection follow up. You might think your team is nailing it, but the second that discipline slips, you're leaking deals every single day. Let's break down exactly how your inside sales can take control, keep every lead tight in the pipeline and start landing more wins. Because I'm walking you through my proven post inspection follow up process step by step.
Right now, this is the first thing that goes to die in an inside sales department. Owners, if you watch this process and never let it fall off and kind of choose how you lead, manage, hold people accountable, hire, develop and fire people around, maintaining a high level of discipline around this activity, you will be successful. You want to connect with the outside sales immediately after they leave the house. You're going to collect and document the relevant deal details to create a successful sale. You're going to perform the post inspection follow up call. So we kind of call this the post inspection debrief and then the post inspection follow up call. This is where you call the homeowner to either try and sell them again or thank them for the business. If there's no sale, 24 to 48 hour follow up happens immediately after. So it's another human effort. If they don't answer or you don't get a hold of them, then you enroll them in a sequence. So if you don't know what a sequence is, ask your customer success manager. But it's essentially a sequence of emails and call tasks that make it so that your follow up goes on autopilot. You will have to pick up the phone a few times. But the what do I do today? Decision making criteria is taken care of by this because it's going to email and then you're going to call and that's going to email. So you just have to follow the process and then there's a high degree likelihood that you're going to complete that sale, the signature on the proposal and you're going to complete the job file playbook. But this part is where it falls apart and I'll tell you why. So outside salespeople, they are like horses, okay? They spook easy. So when they're out there in the field, they have a button that says ready to present. Which means, you know, they finished the quote in the truck, they pushed a button, they're walking in the house now, you know they're going to take what, like 40 minutes, right? Because they're going to go through their pictures for 10 minutes. They're going to go through the proposal for 10, 15 minutes and then they're going to do the overcoming objection. So maybe a little bit more, probably about an hour. And in doing that, you know that when they're done, they're going to come out. And the instructions that we're going to give them is that you're going to leave the house, you're going to tie the ladder down so it doesn't hit a school bus and you're going to get in your truck, you're going to call the inside sales, then put your navigation in for your next location, then put the truck in reverse and back out of the driveway. But the weird thing that we have to make sure outside salespeople do is they don't start driving away and get stuck in suburbia and then decide to call 15 minutes later. We want them to do it in that order. But when they call you, if you're on lunch break and you're not there to answer the phone, they're going to go, oh, they're never there. And then they're never going to call again. So we have to train two behaviors. Them hitting the ready to present button and the calling as soon as they're in the truck. And then your behavior set is monitoring the activity of your outside salespeople so you're there when they call you. And so the skills to be good at this one is you got to be situationally aware of the time and location of your outside sales. But then you also have to negotiate present value and parrot the outside sales word tracks. And I mean parrot like the bird. This is your writer downer of the day is to model, mimic and master the language of outside sales. You want to model your talk tracks after them, you want to mimic what they say and then eventually master it so it becomes your own. It's kind of like Bruce Lee, right? Study everything, take what works, remove what doesn't, add what's yours. So you want to model, mimic and master so that you can then have that second crack at the can. Then you're going to type quickly. You're going to be talking to an outside salesperson talking a mile a minute like I am right now. You have to be able to extract the key points. Then you're going to learn how to use arriving sumo quote because you have to be able to modify quotes. You're going to understand HubSpot and the follow up tools and sequences and you got to know how to complete a job File playbook. So that's stuff that my team will teach you. So that's a general overview of the responsibilities, skill sets and activities that you're going to have as an inside sales. Then there's leading indicators to your success. The lagging indicator is money in the company's account and commission in your bank. The leading indicators are what causes that. So you want to have a lead response time in under five minutes, get the outside sales on time for four appointments per day. Now there's obligations from leadership to get those leads, but they have to make it so when you get those leads you don't go, oh my gosh, there's too many leads. We're so busy. This is so hard, I'm overwhelmed. Right, you can't do that. You can't complain about leads and then complain about too many leads. Just doesn't make sense. Then you're going to look at the closing percentage overall of the POD and the feedback from outside sales. This is the feedback that you get having that process of that post inspection debrief. And that is measured by knowing the objection, the close date, the deal amount, the next step, and putting a task on every deal, every time, every day that you touch it. And so what that looks like is essentially saying you got to be able to answer the question, how much can I make? When can I make it? Why don't I have it yet? What are we going to do about it and when are we going to do it? And from a pipeline management perspective, you can't have more than 40 to 60 active deals at any time. If you have 60 active deals and you're putting 30 minutes of effort into follow up for each one of those deals per week, well, 60 times 30, 30 minutes is half an hour, 60 times 0.5 is 30 hours. You don't have any time to develop your skills, to do lead intake, to do job file playbooks. You want to make sure that you are not holding on to baby birds that take up your time and clog up your pipeline. So you want to be actively removing people from your pipeline.
