Your best and worst reps are 25 to 35 points apart

How far apart are the best and worst reps?

25 to 35 points on close rate, across the conversations SalesAsk analyzed.1

Twenty-five is the low end. Put a 25-point gap on a team whose average sits in the thirties and the rep at the top closes roughly twice as often as the rep at the bottom.

The spread isn't a home services quirk. In a 2020 study by RAIN Group, a sales training firm, of 472 respondents at B2B sales organizations worldwide, the top 7% won 73% of proposals and the bottom 80% won 40%.3 Those are whole organizations rather than single reps, and B2B rather than kitchen tables. The size of the spread still looks familiar.

I'd read the gap as good news. The reps at the top prove the sale can be made on these appointments. Everyone below them is the upside.

Do reps at the same company even run the same appointment?

No. At the median company, the rep with the longest appointments runs 48 minutes longer than the rep with the shortest.2

Within the sample, we looked at 55 companies with at least four reps who each recorded 20 or more appointments, 666 reps in all. Same company, same products. At 65% of them, one rep's typical appointment was at least twice as long as another's.

Length isn't skill. A 25-minute appointment can be a clean close, and a 140-minute one can be a rep who never asked for the order.

The cut that ties length to outcome, which appointment lengths win most often in each trade, is on our list below.

What is that gap worth?

$585K a year for a 10-truck operation, about $58,500 per truck.1

That money comes from appointments the company is already paying to run. No new leads, no new hires.

Treat $585K as a ceiling. Nobody closes the whole gap, and I'd be suspicious of anyone who promised it. Close a third of it and it is still roughly $195,000.

Run it on your own numbers

Put in your own appointment count and average ticket. The example below uses $10,000, the median homeowners reported spending on roofing in the Census Bureau's 2023 American Housing Survey,4 and 10 points, about a third of the gap.

How long does an in-home sales appointment run?

51 minutes at the median. Half of all appointments run between 30 and 81 minutes.2

That is across this report's sample: 80,887 in-person appointments recorded by 1,763 reps at 255 companies between March 13 and October 11, 2026. One in five ran 90 minutes or longer. 4.7% ran past two and a half hours.

By trade

Kitchen and bath runs longest, at a 73-minute median, and 38% of those appointments pass the 90-minute mark. Plumbing and restoration run shortest, in the mid-thirties. HVAC sits at 42 minutes, closer to plumbing than to roofing.

If your HVAC reps are averaging 90 minutes, that isn't automatically thoroughness. If your kitchen reps are averaging 30, I'd want to know what they're skipping.

What is one closed appointment worth, by trade?

From $2,435 for a steel entry door to $82,793 for a midrange major kitchen remodel.5

The same point of close rate is worth wildly different money depending on what is on the table. One extra point on 500 major kitchen appointments a year is five more jobs, or $413,965 at the Cost vs Value price.

Cost vs Value prices a defined spec project, so it runs high. What homeowners report paying is lower. In the Census Bureau's 2023 American Housing Survey the median was $10,000 for roofing, $5,500 for HVAC, $8,000 for a kitchen remodel and $5,000 for a bathroom remodel. Those medians include DIY jobs.4 Houzz's 2026 survey of its own users who renovated in 2025 lands in between, with a median of $13,000 for roofing and $6,000 each for heating and cooling upgrades.6

Cost vs Value's asphalt roof, at $31,871, is more than three times the Census median for roofing. For your own math, use your own average ticket.

When do in-home appointments happen?

Spread evenly across the workweek, peaking midweek. 12% happen on a weekend, and those run about seven minutes longer.2

Weekday appointments run a median of 49 to 51 minutes. Saturday's run 57.5 and Sunday's 58.2. We can't see from this data who was in the room, so I'll only offer a guess: weekends are when both homeowners are home, and two people ask more questions than one. The decision-maker cut in Chapter 03 will test it.

How many appointments does a rep record in a week?

In a week where a rep records at all, the median is three appointments. A quarter of rep-weeks hit six or more, and one in ten hit ten.2 These are recorded appointments only, so a rep who forgets the button looks lighter than they are.

Do home builders follow the same rules?

No. Their yes is a reservation or a contract appointment, not a same-day signature, so they get measured on their own.

The best public benchmark for builder online sales comes from Do You Convert, which runs online sales programs for builders. Its top-performing programs turned 53% of online leads into appointments in Q1 2026, and 22% of those appointments into sales. It does not publish the sample.7 Its Q2 2024 report put lead-to-appointment at 39% and appointment-to-sale at 23%.8

Different quarters, so read it loosely. Still, the top builders booked far more appointments and closed them at about the same rate. For builders, the gap may open before the first meeting.

Does the season change the sale?

The demand side does. Whether close rates move with it is still an open question.

On the ServiceTitan platform, which sells software to contractors, 14.1% of inbound calls to residential HVAC shops in June 2025 came outside weekday business hours, falling to 9.8% in October.9 Samsara, which sells fleet tracking, looked at 65 million HVAC service trips and found October busier than July for trucks on the road.10

The money behind all of this is flattening out. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies projects yearly growth in homeowner remodeling spending will slow to 0.5% by the second quarter of 2027.11

A furnace sold in October to someone whose heat just failed is a different conversation from a heat pump quoted in April. I haven't seen anyone publish close rates by month for the trades. Our own appointment data only starts in March 2026, and the customer base grew through the year, so we can't separate season from growth yet. That is one we plan to publish once we have twelve months.