How J.S. Brown & Co. coaches five remodeling reps without sitting in the room

“It was difficult to help them if something went wrong in a meeting. I wasn't there. Their manager wasn't there.”

J.S. Brown & Co. is a design-build residential remodeling firm in central Ohio. Monica Lewis is its president. Seven people on her team sit down with homeowners: five full-time salespeople, an interior designer and a director of business development.

Those five salespeople have very busy schedules, very different levels of experience, different personalities, and different ways of approaching the selling process. None of that was the problem. The problem was that nobody could see any of it.

When a meeting went sideways, there was no way to work out why. Monica wasn't there. The sales manager wasn't there. The team was left trying to reconstruct a conversation from memory in order to decide what to do differently next time — or whether the job could still be saved.

Two things were quietly getting more expensive:

• Coverage the leadership team could not physically provide. As president, Monica did not have the bandwidth to go along on every kind of client meeting. Neither could one full-time sales manager, across five salespeople, and be there for every one.
• Documentation that depended on a rep's evening. Monica had asked the team to log their client conversations in BuilderTrend. It is the right habit and the hardest one to keep.

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“What it cost my team was that nuanced sort of feedback. It really slowed their progression — particularly some of our medium-performing team members. It was just difficult for them to get over a plateau, because they weren't sure what they were doing wrong.”

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That last line is the part worth sitting with. The top performers were fine. The people stuck on a plateau were stuck because nobody could tell them precisely where they were losing the room.

“I love seeing their percentage scores go up.”

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J.S. Brown & Co. has only been on SalesAsk a few months, and the firm's sales cycle is long — typically two to four months in the design and estimating phase before a job goes to contract. Monica is clear that the revenue picture is only starting to come into view.

What has already changed is visible in two places.

Scorecards are climbing. Reps who were sitting in the 70s and 80s were getting very few shout-outs or exceptional-meeting call-outs on the weekly recap. Monica now gets quite a few.

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“It's great to see that percentage go up and know that they're confidently presenting what needs to be talked about, the process, our company, all of that.”

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The detail inside BuilderTrend is measurably better. Monica names this first when asked what is different, ahead of anything inside SalesAsk itself: the volume of detail her team documents against each client has gone up, and it costs them almost nothing to do it.

And the coaching load has come off the leadership team.

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“That third-party coaching they're getting is really making a difference, helping them refine their approach and refine their presentation skills without needing to pull in myself or their direct manager quite so often.”

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Looking forward, Monica expects the team to close 20–30% more retainers in the field, the first commitment a homeowner makes, well before a job reaches contract.

“I felt like it would be a really good assistant help coach for the sales team.”

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Monica first saw SalesAsk at a tabletop outside the hall at an industry conference this spring. It was a short presentation, and it happened to land on the two things she had been trying to solve at once: coverage she could not give personally, and documentation she had been asking her team for.

She did not run a long evaluation. SalesAsk went live at J.S. Brown & Co. about two weeks after she first saw it.

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“I didn't do it six months earlier just because I didn't know it existed.”

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Three things changed in the way the team works.

1. Every conversation became reviewable. Monica and the sales manager no longer have to pick which meetings to attend. The conversation is captured, scored against the firm's own sales steps, and available afterwards — so coaching happens on what was actually said rather than on what the rep remembers.
2. The coaching goes to the rep, not through the manager. Feedback reaches the salesperson directly after the meeting. Monica calls it third-party coaching, and the point is that it does not need her or a manager in the room to happen.
3. The documentation writes itself. Monica had been asking the team to log client conversations in BuilderTrend, the firm's project management platform. That ask competes with everything else in a salesperson's day. Now the detail already exists and can be pulled straight into the daily log.

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“They don't have to completely type it in from scratch. So I think that's a real win for them.”