Roofing Business Coach: What You Actually Get, and When Software Does the Job Instead

Roofing is 22 percent of our revenue and we never planned it. $683,000 across 70 roofing companies, out of $3.09 million, on a product we built for HVAC and remodelers. Roofers found us, which tells you something about what roofers are looking for and not finding elsewhere.

The question roofers ask us more than any other trade is whether they need a coach or software. The honest answer is usually both, for different problems, and the rest of this page is about which is which.

What a roofing business coach is for

The good ones fix owner problems. Pricing that has not moved since 2021. A commission plan that pays reps the same for a $9,000 repair and a $38,000 full replacement. Hiring a sales manager who has never sold roofs. Whether to chase storm work or stay retail. A cash position that cannot survive a slow spring.

Those are real, they are expensive to get wrong, and a coach who has run or sold a roofing company will see them in a week that you have been staring at for three years. I would pay for that.

What a coach cannot do is be in the driveway at 6pm on a Tuesday when your newest rep is explaining a roof to a homeowner who has two other bids on the counter. And that driveway is where the roofing sale lives or dies.

The problem coaching does not reach

Equity Roofing has seven reps, some in the field and some on the phones. Ivy Ulrich, who tells their story on our site, said nobody likes to roleplay with their boss, so her new hires were not getting practice. And nobody can sit in on seven reps' appointments. That is not a strategy problem. A coach cannot fix it with a better commission plan. It is a visibility problem, and the only fix is to hear the appointments.

They went from decision to live on SalesAsk in two weeks. The number on their story is not close rate, which she says was always high. It is average ticket, because the process got followed once someone could see whether it was.

Mr. Roofing's story is about a two-call close and a 23 percent close rate increase. Connell Roofing reports 32 percent, and their headline is "coaches reps without more ride alongs", which is the sentence every roofing owner reading this should underline. The ride-along is the roofing industry's coaching method, and it costs a sales manager a day to hear three appointments.

The honest comparison

A coach gives you a person. Usually a monthly call, sometimes a quarterly visit, and a phone number for the moment you are about to sign a lease you should not sign. Coaches publish their own rates and I am not going to quote them here, because they vary by an order of magnitude and the expensive ones are sometimes worth it.

Software gives you every appointment. Recorded, transcribed, scored against the process you say your reps follow, with a summary you can read at the kitchen table that evening. It does not know whether your pricing is right. It knows whether the rep presented the full replacement or only quoted the repair, whether financing came up, whether the homeowner said "we're getting three bids" and what the rep did with it.

Most roofers who buy both use them differently than they expected. The coach ends up spending less time on "how do I get my reps to follow the process" because the owner can now see who is following it and who is not, and the coaching conversations move up to the problems only a person can solve.

Book a demo: hear what a recorded roofing appointment sounds like, scored

Questions to ask a roofing coach before signing

Have they sold roofs in the last five years, in a market like yours? Storm markets and retail markets are different businesses wearing the same shirt.

Will they listen to a recorded appointment with you? The ones who say yes are the ones who coach sales. The ones who say "I focus on the business side" are being honest, and you should hear that as a scope limit, not a weakness.

What do they measure at ninety days? If the answer is "we'll know it when we see it", keep looking.

Do they take a percentage of revenue? Some do. Decide how you feel about that before the first call, not after.

Where software is the wrong answer

A five-rep roofing company with one sales manager who already rides along twice a week and reads every CRM note does not have a visibility problem. They have a scale problem, and the coach will help with the scale part. Software would show them what they already know.

A company whose reps are closing fine but the jobs are losing money in production has a pricing and estimating problem. Recording the sale will not fix a bad margin on a job that was sold correctly.

And a company where the owner is the only closer does not need to coach anyone. It needs to hire, and that is a coach's job too.

I have one reservation about our own category that I will say plainly. Recording appointments changes how reps behave for about two weeks, before it changes what they do. The first fortnight is stiff. Owners who quit in week two see the stiffness and not what comes after. If you are going to try it, commit to sixty days or do not start.