How Equity Roofing coaches seven reps in the field and on the phones

“It was honestly just a recording of how the interaction went.”

Equity Roofing sells roofs and siding, and it also does gutters, soffit, fascia, skylight replacements and repairs for all of those services. Ivy Ulrich is its Director of Sales. Seven people on her team sit in front of customers: five field inspectors and two inside sales members working from the office.

The company was not new to recording software. Before SalesAsk it had been through two in the field programs, and it had been running the second one for about a year and a half. Both of them worked, in the narrow sense that they did what they said they would do.

“We would turn them on, it would record, we would turn them off, we would get a brief email that would give us just a quick run through of the interactions our customers had, the conversation, we could go back and query it, listen to it if we needed to, but that was about it.”

Two things were missing, and both of them landed on the sales leadership:

• Nothing was pulled out of the conversation. “It didn't pull out objections, it didn't give us Coach Dean, that we could dial in and ask how we could have handled things a little bit differently.”
• Coaching was a manual job. “If we wanted to coach our reps, that required a manual touch, so we'd have to pull through, listen to it, ask specific questions, gather the answers, and then go back to the rep.”

That is a recording tool, not a coach. And it was not cheap.

“I couldn't believe how much money we're putting into it, because it didn't give us a lot.”

“Our average ticket size has really increased because our process is followed consistently, because it's monitored consistently.”

Ivy is careful about what she does and does not put down to SalesAsk. Equity Roofing was already closing well, and she says so plainly.

“I don't know that SalesAsk necessarily increased our close rate. It really dialed in on our process.”

Bigger tickets, because the process is actually followed. The close rate was high before and has stayed high. What moved was the size of the job. Ivy ties that directly to consistency rather than to any new selling technique, and consistency to the fact that somebody is now looking.

“So our reps know now that we're listening, we're gonna get the feedback. People tend to operate at a higher level at that point, and then that offers more consistency.”

Every interaction reaches the same three people.

“So every interaction gets the same prompt and spits out the same information to myself, to the GM and to the owner. So the team knows that they really have to follow their P's and Q's, because it's gonna go to everybody for every single interaction. And now it's the point where it's just a habit.”

A new hire was trained on Coach Dean. Ivy's inside sales hire came in while Ivy was still moving into the Director of Sales role. Coach Dean covered the company specifics, and then most of the actual sales training. The team saved playlists of real conversations, fed them into Coach Dean, and had him play the customer back.

“You can set him to be a difficult customer, a nice customer, a very curious customer, and it actually adapts to that personality and gives your team the chance to just try it out and perfect it before they go live on the phones.”

And the role play is now standard. Ivy found the feature by accident, when the new hire clicked into it. It is now used for every new hire, for phone coaching, and for production and billing team members through a seat that rotates around the office.

“My sales guys are even coaching themselves with Coach Dean. And if you work with sales guys, you know that when you have a top performer, for them to dig in and ask questions about themselves, you definitely have a really good product.”

“If you are shopping for a program like this, absolutely do it. And if you're not, you also should absolutely do it. You're going to need it.”

“Did a demo with SalesAsk and I was like, holy crap. It can do all of this stuff.”

Ivy took the Director of Sales role at Equity Roofing in about March. Part of coming into a new position was going through the programs the company was paying for and working out what each one was actually delivering. The in the field recording tool did not survive that review.

“So I did what anyone does. I hopped on Google and pulled up companies in comparison.”

She took the answer back to the incumbent before she took it anywhere else.

“Do you do this? No, we don't. Do you do this? No, we don't. Are you gonna do this? Not really.”

Three things happened before Equity Roofing switched.

1. She asked to talk to other customers first. Equity Roofing had already been through two programs and SalesAsk would be the third, so Ivy asked her contact for references. She got one, then asked for a second. “And it was just the same consensus. You know, the program works like it's supposed to work.”
2. They got out of the incumbent contract early. “We were able to get out of the contract early because we had needs and they weren't fulfilling them.”
3. They went live in about two weeks. “Believe it was like a two-week process, which in our company structure is very fast.”

“I wish we would have made this jump before I ever came into this role.”