Adam Sand explains why roofing sales reps underperform: they waste time on non-selling tasks, lack resilience after rejection, and neglect pipeline management. His fix: use a field-service tool like Arrivi to streamline inspections, then hire an inside-sales person to handle follow-up calls and quotes full-time, freeing reps to close deals. Companies using this model doubled sales and cut turnover.
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 1 in 3. So if you go out to 3 houses and do 3 pitches in front of 3 homeowners and you get 1 sale, you're doing pretty good. If it's 1 in 4, you're average. If it's 1 in 5, 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 1 out of 3 of the paychecks right every pay period? They'd be fired. What if a doctor was only able to help 1 of 3 clients or 1 of 3 patients? They would cry themselves to sleep at night with guilt. Yet as salespeople, we're like, that's good, I fail 2 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 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. 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 they were going to paint that windowsill at the top, or whatever— these little details that things that come up in your conversation. So we had to solve that problem. So then what does an outside sales rep still do? They drive to their appointments, they use Arrivi or 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 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 8 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 8 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 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 4 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've 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 wanna do this, and they hired back 8 and doubled their sales.
