How to Coach Your Home Improvement Sales Reps When You Can't Be in the Room

The rep pulls up on the drive after a two-hour appointment, sits in the van and rings the office. "Lovely couple. Really keen. They just want to have a think." The owner says "Did you ask for the order?" The rep says "Course I did." Both of them put the phone down feeling a bit better. Nobody's learned a thing.

I hear about that phone call all the time from owners who've built a sales team and can't be out with them any more. They're stuck sorting fitters, suppliers and the van with the warning light on. They want reps who can stand on their own two feet.

If you want to know how to coach home improvement sales reps when you can't sit in on every appointment, this is what I'd tell you over a cuppa. Listen to their real appointments. Give every rep the same structure for the conversation and let them bring their own personality to it. Fix one thing at a time. Then hold them to actually doing it, every single week.

I can't coach what I'm guessing at

Most owners coach from the rep's version of events. And the rep's version is always kind to the rep. The customer was difficult, the price was too high, the partner wasn't there.

I can only coach what I know. I can't coach what I guess. So every rep I work with records their appointments. Phone in the top pocket, ask the customer if they mind, done. Then I listen back, line by line, and so do they.

More often than not, the deal was lost somewhere other than where the rep thinks. They'll swear it went at the price. Then you play it back and you can hear it went in the first five minutes, when they walked in, said hello to the dog and went straight into telling the customer about the product. They never found out why the customer wanted it done. The sale gets made in the why. By the time you reach the close it's already won or already gone.

Reps don't love being recorded at first. It shows up the weak bits. That's the whole point of it. Tell them you record yours as well, because you should. I still sell every job at my own conservatory roof business and I'll happily listen back to where I went wrong on one of mine.

One rep I coach closed 17 of 22 appointments in one stretch, 12 of them on the day, by listening properly and building the sale around what the customer told him mattered.

That's one person's result, not a promise. But you only find out whether a rep is listening properly by listening to him.

Same structure, different people

I don't want a team of robots reading off a card. Customers can smell that a mile off. Your quiet, careful rep and your loud one who's been in the game thirty years are going to sound different, and they should.

What has to be the same is the order the conversation goes in. Set out why you're there and what happens next. Find their reasons. Show them what fixes it. Deal with the worries before the price comes out. Check where they are. Ask. Make sure it sticks. That's the 7 Steps to Sales Mastery, and when every rep follows the same steps, you can compare one recording with another and see straight away which step went missing.

Bite-sized, not force-fed

The worst thing you can do is sit a rep down on a Monday and pour the whole lot down their neck. They won't cope with it. They'll go out on Tuesday and do exactly what they did last week, just more nervously.

Pick one thing. If the start of the appointment is weak, that's the week's job. Nothing else. Next week, the questions. And when you go through a recording with them, don't do all the talking. "Where do you reckon that one went?" gets you a lot further than a lecture. If they spot it themselves, they remember it.

You'll coach some reps differently to others, too. A lad who's eighteen months in needs something different from an old hand who's been selling the same way since before that lad was born. Same structure. Different conversation.

They will slip

This catches owners out. A rep has a few good months, the commission's lovely, and then it quietly goes. I've listened to a recording from someone doing really well and thought, this sounds like the conversation before we ever started. Straight into the product, no why, no idea if the customer was in a hurry or just shopping around.

It's not unusual. A lot of people drift back into old habits. Your job is to drag them out of it, not kicking and screaming but with a bit of enthusiasm, and the recordings are where you start.

Watch out for the second visit as well. The rep's qualified the customer on the phone, feels like the hard work's done, turns up and dives straight in. They've qualified them for the conversation but not for the sale. I tell reps to warm them back up first: "I talk to a lot of people in a week, so just remind me why you want this sorted, and why now." The customer tells them again, and the urgency comes back into the room.

Coaching nobody uses is a nice chat

I'll be blunt. The coaching itself won't sell a single job. What they do with it on the next appointment will. You can show a rep the way, but you can't make them do it in someone's front room.

So book the same slot every week and keep it. When the session moves around, sooner or later it gets missed, and then it stops. Come to it with a recording, pick the one fix, and next week check whether they used it.

And be honest with yourself about who gets your leads. A weak rep sitting on good appointments is burning the money you spent getting them. You wouldn't let a fitter you didn't trust loose on a customer's house. Same goes for the person who sells it.

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