Feature Article
Exterior Replacement: Can Installers Actually Sell?
Companies that have rolled the dice on installers seeking sales positions find it can pay off big time in today’s selling environment
By Jim Cory, Senior Contributing Editor
At 43, Jody Keefer, who’d been banging shingles on roofs since age 16, began to have some ideas about a career change.
Keefer was an installer at Brothers Services, a Baltimore roofing, siding, and window company, and he’d been talking to some of the sales guys whose jobs he completed. He already had a pretty good idea of what they earned, which was considerably more than an installer. The reps told Keefer that he would make a good salesperson and encouraged him to apply.
“I kept saying no,” recalls Keefer’s boss, Dave MacLean, who is Brothers’ vice president of sales. “I’d say, ‘We’re a little light on leads right now,’ or ‘Maybe we’ll talk about it.’ I was taking the Don Draper approach. I wanted him to want it more.”
Keefer’s year-long perseverance paid off with a job as a roofing salesperson. He sold a $36,000 roofing project on his first appointment. After his second full year, he was named Salesperson of the Year by Certified Contractors Network (CCN), a national educational and consulting group.
The Great Divide
Home improvement companies seldom look at their production staff to fill open sales positions. They’re far more likely to seek a “professional closer,” someone who can learn the product one week and run appointments the next, says Jim Lett, owner of A.B.E. Doors & Windows, in Allentown, Pa.
For his part, Lett is certainly open to hiring that type of individual. At the moment, all four A.B.E. salespeople are former installers, and all have taken a Dale Carnegie course in selling. “I don’t mind bringing in someone from the field,” Lett says. “As long as they have selling skills or are coachable.”
The problem: Rarely do they have selling skills, and often they’re not perceived as being coachable. More typically, someone in production indicates an interest in a sales position and management balks because those two types of jobs—sales and production—often draw different personality types. Installers typically “are not extraverts to begin with,” says Tom Capizzi, owner of Capizzi Home Improvement, in Cotuit, Mass. “They get a job done, and they go.”
That said, Capizzi notes that some of the best salespeople in his company’s history came from the field. One was previously a carpenter, the other a siding installer, and both became million dollar-plus salespeople.
What motivates installers to want to make that change is usually money. The fact that Keefer, a single father of three, could double his salary had him dreaming about a sales job. “I’d been banging shingles my whole life,” he says. “I didn’t know if I could do anything else.”
Making It Work
Moving someone from production to sales is extremely risky, according to Capizzi. To make it happen, he says, you need to create a “bridge to the other side.” You can’t simply hire people from production to sales, hand them a pitch book to memorize, and wait for the signed contracts to start rolling in. Communication is key to making any new sales hire work, but that holds doubly true for someone whose sole experience lies in production.
“The owner should meet with [the installer turned sales rep] three times a week, always at the same time,” Capizzi suggests. “Don’t just let him go sell. You’ve got to be committed to his success.” That means investing hours in training, coaching, ride-alongs, and lots of one-on-one time. With no experience in sales but plenty of motivation, Keefer went out on his first lead after a week of training. Brothers Services eventually sent him to a Sales Boot Camp offered by CCN, a five-day course that teaches a low-pressure, consultative, two-step sales system. In addition, MacLean says, “I ran leads with him every day.”
What made MacLean more receptive than many home improvement sales managers would be to Keefer’s switch was the fact that MacLean himself started out in production. On rainy days, he says, he’d come into the office and watch the sales guys put together pricing and proposals so he could see how it was done.
Moving into sales from production, he points out, requires not just motivation, but the ability to communicate well and to think on your feet. To control a sales presentation, “you have to feel comfortable talking to people, and you have to be comfortable in your own skin,” he says. “You have to have a little bit of the chameleon in you,” that is, the ability to take on the emotional color of the homeowner.
Finding that installer who can sell requires being open to the idea in the first place, and then letting everyone in the company know when a sales position is available. It’s a good idea to post all openings, including any in the sales department, within the company.
A few years back, a carpenter’s helper came forward to apply for a sales job at Callen Construction, in Muskego, Wis. The candidate took a personality profiling test (in this case the DISC assessment)—which measures assertiveness—and a sales aptitude test, and was hired. He was also told, at the time, that it was do or die—that if he couldn’t cut it in sales, there would be no going back to production. “He did well for us,” says Phil Callen, company vice president. In this case, “well” means generating more than a million dollars in sales for several years in a row. In his fourth month, the installer-turned-salesperson was closing at 51 percent on issued appointments.
After several productive years at Callen, he left for another sales position elsewhere.
Sales Success for a New Breed
The Internet has given consumers access to almost limitless information, and homeowners are increasingly making use of that resource.
Consumers are informed about your company and products before they even contact you, and their expectations of a salesperson have evolved accordingly. For the home improvement industry, this has completely altered the marketing and selling paradigm. (See our March 2016 cover story, “Game Changer,” for more about this shift.)
So in this new selling landscape, how would an installer-turned-salesperson fare? Potentially very well, simply because of his or her deep knowledge of the product and practical experience with its installation.
Today’s homeowner doesn’t want to be sold. Homeowners can see the close coming, and all they want is for the sales rep to provide the information they need—to go deeper into specific solutions for their home, thereby providing the information that they couldn’t get online. They want to see real expertise, and the installer-turned-salesperson is well-positioned to provide just that.
Anything akin to high pressure results in the prospect feeling that the salesperson is trying to get them to buy something they may not actually need.
And, most importantly, he’s wasting their most precious resource: time.
Advantages & Disadvantages
Though many company owners began as installers who had no choice but to learn to sell their own work, home improvement companies such as Brothers Services, Capizzi Home Improvement, Callen Construction, and A.B.E. Doors & Windows are the exception, not the rule. Habit, preconception, and convenience tend to be operant when it comes time to make a sales hire. “I don’t think [salespeople and installers] are two different species,” Dave MacLean, Brothers’ vice president of sales says. “The reason people get caught up in that paradigm is that most people only see what’s in front of them.”
With their knowledge of product and how the house works, what installers can bring to a sales position is credibility. And because they know what works and what doesn’t, Jim Lett, owner of A.B.E. says, they don’t over- or under-sell a job. A.B.E. salespeople, for instance, both sell and measure. The professional sales guy, Lett says, “may know how to sell, but someone has to come behind him to finish up the order.”
The biggest challenge for the installer-turned-salesperson, MacLean says, is pricing. What they know can actually make them feel timid when it comes to asking the company’s price for a replacement project. “Developing a thick skin and taking all those no responses, not being afraid of price—that’s the biggest hurdle,” he says. “I have three or four guys who used to be installers, and I tell them up front: ‘I’m going to ride you nonstop about how much things cost.’ These are guys who always did every home improvement themselves.” He points out, “If homeowners had any idea how to do it themselves, they wouldn’t be calling us.”
Once the installer-turned-sales-rep gets past that—something that sales training will enable him to do—he can use his considerable knowledge to advantage. Credibility brings with it higher close rates and project prices. The increased sales that made former installer Jody Keefer CCN’s Salesperson of the Year, he says, came from convincing homeowners with just a year or two left on the life of their roof that they should skip the pointless hassle of late-life repairs and simply replace.
This article was originally published in Professional Remodeler 2016.
