Why Most Sales Reps Fail Without Inside Sales Support: A Brutally Honest Breakdown

So you ever wonder why your top sales guy, yeah, the one who can close a deal with a handshake, keeps missing follow ups and letting deals slip through the cracks. Here's the thing. It's not because they're lazy or disorganized. It's because expecting them to juggle admin note taking and scheduling is like asking a roofer to weld his own shingles. And trust me, this one mistake is quietly costing roofing companies six, sometimes seven figures every single year. Let's break down exactly why even the very best outside reps need inside support. How it transforms their results almost overnight, and the gritty real world proof that most companies only learn the hard way. Ready to see where the money gets lost and how to lock it down? Let's go. One big problem that we saw in the industry was the salespeople were not spending all their time actually selling. There's a lot of other stuff that they were doing, like managing jobs, commercial estimating. They would spend time in driving, they'd be doing sit downs with customers before and after the job, there'd be meetings. Like they weren't getting a lot of their time to actually be selling. And I thought, well, what makes a great outside sales rep? Like, what makes them great at their job? If you're doing a great job at sales, it means you're winning about one in three. So if you go out to three houses and do three pitches in front of three homeowners and you get one sale, you're doing pretty good. If it's one in four, you're average. If it's one in five, you're below average. But there's no such thing as 100% close rate. You're failing more often than you're succeeding. Let's turn that around a bit. What if the accountant got one out of three of the paychecks right? Every pay period, they'd be fired. What if a doctor was only able to help one of three clients or one of three patients? They would cry themselves to sleep at night with guilt. Yet as salespeople, we're like, that's good. I fail two for every time I succeed, and that's good. If you were 50%, you wouldn't barely get through high school, but you'd be one of the greatest roof salespeople ever. If you had a 50% close rate for an extended period of time, that is an incredibly high failure rate for someone who makes as much money as a salesperson can. So, so one of the traits that make a great salesperson is that you emotionally invest into your prospects. You go there and you give them your best pitch, your best proposal, your best presentation. You get rejection more often than you get success. Why would you continue to do that? Well, you have this innate ability to forget. Forget that failure, forget that rejection. Now the inverse of that problem is that you're also terrible at putting notes in the CRM and you're terrible at staying organized. And I don't mean this about you specifically watching this. I mean as a general rule, salespeople are not great at pipeline management and CRM and notes because it's all in your head. You connected emotionally with the prospect. It's too much notes to put in. Like you don't necessarily keep great documentation about that kind of stuff. And it leads to opportunities to forget important details. And anybody who's been responsible for producing the work of a salesperson has seen firsthand how salespeople forget to mention the porch in the back or that we're going to paint that window sill at the top or whatever. These little details that things that come up in your conversation. So, so we had to solve that problem. So then what does an outside sales rep still do? They drive to their appointments. They use arrive here, a field service management to process to create an Uber like experience. They follow the inspection process to the letter to set up the sale and build a foundation of a great production experience through the pictures that they take. Setting of expectations with the customers and they communicate with inside sales after their appointment. They do a post inspection debrief after every single appointment. And what this allows us to do is focus on closing deals. I have to ask you a question. Is it possible or probable that if you had a guy or girl in a chair working eight hours a day to skillfully follow up on your appointments, a clone of yourself skillfully means as good as you at follow up. If they were doing that eight hours a day with a shared incentive to close deals, would you make more money? Is it possible or is it probable? I've had numerous examples, but the example I like to share the most is our one of our customers last year he had an outside sales rep sold like 2.8 million or something like that. At the end of the year the outside sales rep looked at all the sales sales he had and then multiplied it by 2% to think of all the money he didn't get. And then he said, I don't want this inside sales rep anymore. Look at how much money I gave them. We went in and showed that outside sales rep here's the time where your inside Sales rep spent 18 minutes on the phone with Joe Biden's cousin, some 82 year old man that needed 18 minutes to figure out how to sign a sumo quote. Here's a lead that came in at 6:45 in the morning before you even got out of bed that she was already responding to and booking an appointment. Here's how you got on four appointments per day and while you were at that appointment is when that Joe Biden like dude called in asking for the 18 minutes of help on the quote. But you were on a roof when that guy phoned because here's the company cam picture you took at that exact time. Nope, still doesn't believe he needed it. I would have called him back quits and just a few weeks later he comes back and I've seen this play out several times. I've seen one company lose 15 sales reps because they didn't want to do this and they hired back eight and doubled their sales.