Without proper sales training, your roofing technicians may find it challenging to make sales pitches and close deals.
However, many training programs lack the vital details roofers need to become successful roofing salespeople.
In this article, we’ll discuss the key areas to cover in your roofing sales training programs, the full sales process, challenges, tips, and mistakes to avoid.
We’ve also gathered the top roofing sales training tools and resources to help you equip your roofers with the right sales skills.
Let’s get into it.
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Why Is Roofing Sales Training Important?
Properly training your staff in roofing sales helps your team book more jobs, close more sales, and boost revenue through higher customer lifetime value.
And roofing sales training benefits your business in other ways. Equipping your staff with roofing sales techniques helps them address customer concerns, close deals, and grow your business's credibility.
With in-depth product knowledge, sales representatives can accurately explain roofing materials, installation processes, and warranties, presenting the business as knowledgeable and professional.
Sales training also teaches sales representatives how to:
Build rapport with prospective customers, fostering trust and increasing conversions.
Handle objections and customer pushback over price or timing, providing reassurance, peace of mind, and other options when necessary.
Lastly, providing comprehensive training equips the sales team with the confidence to build relationships with homeowners, upsell, cross-sell, and close more deals.
What Should Roofing Sales Training Include?
Here are the top elements your sales training course should cover to empower roofing sales reps with the skills needed for successful sales.
Products: Ensure your roofing salespeople fully understand the products and services they’re selling. The roofing company likely offers multiple products, so include them in your training. Some important products to consider include asphalt shingles (3-tab, architectural, and luxury), synthetic or composite shingles, metal roofing (screw down and standing seam), cedar shake roofing, slate roofing, and roofing underlayment (asphalt-saturated felt, rubberized asphalt, and synthetic).
All these products have different price points and specifications. By understanding the differences, your sales team can help customers choose the best option that matches their needs and budget.
Estimations: Your roofing salesman should know how to create estimates for prospects. So, include the process your roofing company uses in the sales training.
This could include accessing and measuring the roof safely, determining necessary roofing materials, and using the software to create the estimate.
The (non-monetary) value of a new roof or roof repair: Your salespeople must learn to listen to homeowners’ concerns and communicate how the roofing business can solve them.
Insurance process: Filing a home insurance claim can be overwhelming. While your business can’t influence insurance adjusters or change outcomes, your sales team can provide guidance and support to help a homeowner through the insurance claims process.
Beyond knowing the products and technical aspects of roofing, your salespeople must be equipped with the right tools for fetching updated prices, creating estimates, and making sales presentations to customers.
Now, you can use standalone tools to handle each process—but your salespeople will not be very efficient as they switch from one screen to another.
That’s why we partnered with top roofing contractors, vendors, and sales experts to create ServiceTitan’s all-in-one platform Roofing Sales Toolkit, which contains:
A four-week training program on estimating and winning jobs.
Spec-based estimate templates for collecting roofing measurements automatically (with the help of integrations with third-party measuring tools) or manually by entering values into a pre-designed form.
Integrations with top suppliers’ catalogues, which supply real-time prices and accurate product images you can use to create good-better-best estimates.
Integration with GAF Measure, which can be used to request roofing measurement reports without leaving ServiceTitan.
A drag-and-drop interface for building professional proposal presentations you can email directly to customers.
While launching these features, Andrew Zackoff, Head of Residential Exteriors at ServiceTitan, accurately explained how this product affirms our commitment to helping roofing companies succeed.
“If you can get more jobs, build great estimates more easily, convert at a higher clip, get the materials, perform the work, and do it all with as little administrative burden as possible, that’s how we drive business outcomes for you and your families,” Zackoff says.
As we go on, we’ll reveal the other ServiceTitan products roofing companies use to close sales.
What Is the Roofing Sales Process?
There is more to sales than simply closing deals. Here’s the step-by-step sales process that your team should follow.
Prospecting
Prospecting or canvassing can take different forms depending on how your roofing business operates, but the goal is to get leads. Some methods are:
Door knocking: Pick a neighborhood where people might need roofing work and go door to door. It’s an effective strategy with persuasive sellers.
Cold calling: Calling homeowners to ask if they need roofing work may not be the most effective method, but combined with lead-generation tactics to increase efficiency, it can be.
Lead generation websites and tactics: Listing your roofing business on top lead generation websites can help bring in more roofing leads. It also lets you prospect passively, as it may not require much manual input to find leads.
Qualifying
You don’t want the sales team to waste time on prospects—a homeowner who recently replaced their roof or a renter who doesn’t own the property— who aren’t going to convert. So, you need to qualify leads to identify who needs nurturing and who stands a better chance of conversion.
There are three components to qualifying a lead:
Pain: Does the customer need a new roof or repairs? Some prospects will know if they need roofing work. Better yet, note the state of their roof during an inspection.
Budget: Can they afford the roofing work they need or want? For example, if you only offer luxury roofing systems, a low-income household probably can’t afford the work. Offering financing can help.
Authority: Is the person you’re speaking to authorized to make purchasing decisions? For example, renters would need to direct you to the property owner.
You can gather the information you need to make these calls by asking open-ended questions to build rapport and find answers to your questions. It may be worth creating a script for your roofing sales training program to guide new salespeople on the right questions to ask.
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Pitching
Once you’ve qualified your prospect, you can start explaining your service, a.k.a. “pitching.”
The goal is to communicate what your company can do, how you can address the customer’s wants and needs, and the value your services will provide.
It’s important to train your salespeople on different pitching strategies and techniques for different scenarios. This helps them develop their pitching strategies.
Closing
Closing is the part of the sales process where you ask prospective customers if they’re ready to schedule the proposed roofing work.
Like with pitching, different roofing salespeople have unique approaches to closing, which typically depends on the prospect. In some cases, the prospect will be ready to close straight away. If this isn’t the case, train your people not to be discouraged.
When prospects feel uncertain or need to confer with their partner or other decision-makers, consider scheduling a second appointment rather than pressuring them to decide.
To close sales even faster, consider using our proposal builder, which features templates for creating branded proposal presentations. It contains:
Estimates you created in ServiceTitan at the start of the sales process.
Images from top suppliers.
Key documents such as the scope of work and licenses, insurance certificates, and brochures from shingle providers.
References from previous customers.
After creating the proposal, you can email it directly to customers to review and approve. This streamlined process and detailed proposals increase the odds of getting a favorable response from the customer.
Following up
Even after a sale is closed and the roofing work is done, the salesperson’s work isn’t finished. The next step is to follow up with customers, ensuring they’re happy with the work, and gather feedback to provide better service.
Do this by calling, sending emails, or texting customers. Listen to their feedback and thank them again for choosing your business.
Following up builds stronger customer relationships and improves customer satisfaction. In addition to valuable feedback, satisfied customers are more likely to give you referrals.
The traditional method for following up on sales involves going through sales processes in a spreadsheet, identifying the open ones, and sending messages to the prospective customer.
But, as your company grows, such methods become inefficient. Prospects slip through the cracks, key information like emails and phone numbers go missing, and your sales team spends more productive hours manually updating spreadsheets.
The more efficient alternative is to track follow-up opportunities using ServiceTitan. When you find a lead, use ServiceTitan’s Marketing Pro to:
Build an audience using the emails of the follow-up opportunities.
Create a unique tracking number that ServiceTitan uses to tell you when a customer receives, opens, and reads the message.
Deliver instant bulk SMS messages and follow-up drip sequences.
No delays, no manual entry, no delay—just an uncomplicated process a single employee can complete in minutes.
This ensures you leave no money on the table.
What Are the Best Roofing Sales Training Tools and Resources?
Roofing sales training tools and resources help provide your salespeople with the skills and confidence to become the best at what they do. In turn, this brings in more customers and closes more sales.
Here are some of the best tools to consider implementing as part of your roofing sales training.
ServiceTitan Sales Pro
ServiceTitan Sales Pro is an AI-powered sales coaching tool that helps roofing salespeople capture in-person interactions so they can learn from them and understand what went well and what didn’t.
Blanton and Sons, one of the 15 early-access customers who tried Sales Pro, reported a 20.8% increase in revenue (with three fewer technicians), as well as a 9.1% increase in close rates and an 8.2% increase in ticket size.
The tool automatically records interactions, giving you a more rounded understanding of how the interactions went compared to other coaching solutions where the salesperson cherry-picks the interactions to record.
After an interaction is recorded, Sales Pro uses AI to analyze it and note mistakes and objections. This helps roofers become aware of errors before they become habitual. Users can listen to the recording fully or use timestamps to skip straight to the flagged sections.
Leaders can also view a ServiceTitan dashboard that details the most frequent mistakes and objections. This insight lets managers spot areas where more or new training can be given, creating a data-driven sales training program tailored to your local roofing industry.
A standout feature of ServiceTitan’s Sales Pro is the social feed. Here, technicians can see short clips from top-performing technicians to celebrate successes and easily learn from each other. These real-life examples help create a collaborative learning culture where your team members help each other grow and develop their sales skills.
This tool is suited to businesses of every size and growth stage. Unlike traditional sales training, where new salespeople are brought on a “ride-along” — a great learning approach that isn’t scalable — you can access all the same insights and more through automated recordings and AI analysis.
The Roofing Academy
The Roofing Academy is a roofing business skills coaching academy that helps roofing contractors learn all the skills they need to become successful in the roofing industry.
Founder and Head Coach Randy Brothers has significant experience in the industry. He worked as a building company superintendent and licensed insurance adjuster before opening his own roofing business, Elite Roofing and Solar, which brings in nearly $20 million annually.
Brothers uses his own business success and substantial industry experience, along with three other coaches, to train contractors in successful roofing business operations.
Roof Sales Mastery
Roof Sales Mastery is an online training program for storm restoration salespeople. Developed by storm restoration saleswoman Becca Switzer, it helps roofing contractors become skilled salespeople.
The programs are accessible to everyone, regardless of whether you have experience as a salesperson or in the roofing industry.
Top Rep Training
Top Rep Training is “The Sales Accelerator for Home Improvement Professionals.” They offer courses, boot camps, and tailored coaching sessions that teach leadership, sales strategies, skills, and confidence. They also dive into products and services, ensuring your roofing sales team has the knowledge they need to sell well.
This training program also covers marketing strategies and business management.
D2D Experts
D2D Experts is a commercial roofing sales course, focusing on door-to-door sales. The program includes lessons on:
Roofing fundamentals
Pitches
Objections
In-home appointments
The roofing process
Litigation
Supplementation best practices
Area management strategies
Mentalities of door-to-door sales reps
10-step referral training
According to testimonials, D2D experts can help experienced sales reps quadruple their revenue.
Roofing Sales Training Tips To Boost Your Revenue
These tips can help you close deals and generate more customers for your roofing business.
Listen to customer preferences
Ignoring your customer or not listening to their unique pain points will not land you a sale. Remember, you’re there to fix their issues, so you need to know their struggles, needs, and preferences.
Ask your prospects questions that help you figure out the best options to offer them, such as:
What aesthetic do you want for your new roof?
Are you looking for a fast, low-budget option or something more long-lasting?
Do you have any important considerations regarding the roofing contractors you choose?
The exact questions to ask will depend on the customer and your roofing business. Keep them open-ended and ask for more details if necessary.
Speak like the customer
Complicated industry-specific jargon can be confusing as a majority of your customers are not in the roofing industry. It’s better to replace the jargon with simple words and analogies to ensure everything is understood.
If you need to use industry terms, explain them clearly and check the prospect's understanding before you move on. You need the customer to be on the same page throughout your pitch, so check in with them regularly.
There should be no confusion about your products, services, and options. If the person is confused about what you’re offering, they won’t buy.
Educate the customer
Clearly explaining the process of repairing or replacing a roof and the differences between materials empowers your customers to make informed buying decisions.
Educating the customer helps clear up any confusion and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Some important things to explain are:
The best roofing style for their home and why
Budget and financing options
The condition of their current roof, including problem areas
The impact of weather on the aesthetics and lifespan of their roof (such as bleaching from the sun or weather erosion)
This helps customers know what to expect from your services and trust you more.
Share similar happy customer stories
Customer stories are an excellent way of establishing credibility and building trust with your prospects.
You don’t have to give a long, complicated speech about how happy a past customer is with their new roof. Keep it simple and choose a story relevant to the specific prospect.
If possible, include tangible, quantitative benefits the customer has seen since they repaired or replaced their roof, such as energy savings and increased property value. You can also include qualitative benefits like enhanced peace of mind.
Tie benefits to your services
Prospects can find it difficult to see why they need your services if they don’t understand the benefits. As you explain each service, tie it to specific benefits.
For example, if you’re talking about an energy-efficient roof, you can explain that it can reduce energy bills because it has better insulation. If you’re explaining gutter repair, mention that it prevents water from entering the building and causing mold and water damage.
What Are Some Common Sales Training Mistakes Roofers Should Avoid?
Here are common mistakes to steer clear of to avoid shaky confidence and a lack of technical knowledge.
Focusing too much on closing: Closing is important, but so are the other steps in the sales process. If your roofers don’t know how to pitch properly, they’ll be unable to close successfully. Relationship-building is vital for creating customer loyalty.
Ignoring customer needs: You must train your sales reps to listen. This provides insight into the customer’s needs and helps you spot opportunities to upsell, cross-sell, or create a better-suited product or service offering.
Lacking product knowledge: Your customers expect your sales reps to be able to answer their questions. Failing to train your reps on your products and services can leave them floundering, damaging their credibility, and breaking any trust they’ve established.
Poor objection handling: Reps must be able to respond to common objections like pricing, timing, and competition. It should be included in their training to ensure they’re not unprepared, resulting in lost sales.
One-size-fits-all approach: Selling does not fit one single mold. Ensure you include different approaches and teach your reps how to analyze a situation and choose or define the right approach. Role-playing exercises are a good option.
Minimal compliance and ethics training: Roofing sales reps should know building codes, relevant permits, and ethical selling practices. This information makes them better salespeople and prevents damage to your business’s reputation and potential legal issues.
How ServiceTitan Can Help Roofing Businesses With Their Sales Process
ServiceTitan is an all-in-one home services software solution with dedicated roofing software for contractors. It has a suite of features that help improve conversions. They include the following:
Call recordings for coaching and performance assessment
When a customer calls a business using ServiceTitan, the call booking software system automatically records the audio. This way, when a roofer is ready to visit, they can listen back to the call and uncover all the data insights they need to make an efficient, thorough roofing assessment.
In addition, once a technician reaches the job site, ServiceTitan’s Sales Pro starts recording their interactions with the customer.
Managers, business owners, or supervisors can use these recordings to spot areas for improvements. Technicians can listen to recordings from their top-performing colleagues to learn how to handle customer objections.
ServiceTitan CEO and Co-Founder, Ara Mahdessian says this helps increase your technician’s average ticket and closure rate.
“You'll see somewhere around a 10% increase in your average ticket, 10% increase in your close rate, and if you do both of those things, you’ll see a more than 20% increase in your actual revenue,” Mahdessian says.
“That’s what we believe is the power behind Sales Pro, and it'll only get more powerful. This has been by far the highest adopted Pro product that we've ever launched in such a short period of time.”
Digital forms for increased accountability
Imagine you have a proven process for closing sales. How can you ensure field techs follow it? By using digital forms.
With ServiceTitan, you can create digital forms containing special sales instructions and program them to appear at the last stage of the job cycle, just before the technician leaves the job site.
To ensure they’re followed, you can design it so they must acknowledge that they’ve followed the instructions before moving to the next stage.
This ensures they follow your sales instructions and have a reference document to refer to when stuck.
Customer-facing interfaces for sales presentations
For customers to agree to a sales pitch, presentation matters. That’s why static templates, PDF documents, and clipboards sometimes don’t produce the desired result—they look unappealing and may obscure key information.
Even worse, bland sales pitches can put off customers who may have heard the same pitches multiple times.
To resolve this issue, ServiceTitan allows sales reps to create appealing proposals with crystal-clear images sourced from top manufacturer catalogs.
After creating the proposal, they can switch to the presentation mode, resembling traditional shopping platforms. Customers can then swipe, read the description for each option, and pick one that matches their budget.
By using this presentation mode, you place customers in charge of the sales process, reducing the effort the sales rep must put in to convince the customer.
Financing options for closing high-ticket projects
Roofing projects are typically very capital-intensive. So, customers may sincerely not have the funds for it at the moment. That’s where financing comes in.
By partnering with top financial institutions, we allow technicians and sales reps to present financing options to customers. If they agree to the offer, customers can apply for financial assistance on the tech’s tablet and get instant approval.
This increases the closure rate for high-ticket jobs.
Tools for executing projects
After closing a sale, you want to execute the project and exceed the customer’s expectations. This way, you can earn a referral or repeat business.
To that end, ServiceTitan provides a suite of tools that streamline key aspects of the project execution process. This includes:
This helps you complete the project to the customer’s satisfaction, securing their loyalty.
Over to You
Comprehensive roofing sales training equips your technicians with the skills they need to close more deals. By ensuring you cover vital aspects like product knowledge, flexible approaches, and how to explain benefits clearly, you can empower your technicians to bring in more customers and revenue.
ServiceTitan Sales Pro is an invaluable resource for giving your technicians the best sales training, and the robust ServiceTitan feature suite lets users enhance their business management processes to handle the influx of new customers.
Book a ServiceTitan demo today and learn how it can optimize your roofing sales training program.
ServiceTitan is an all-in-one roofing contractor software solution with AI-powered sales training resources and a broad feature suite designed for businesses in the trades. It is trusted by over 100,000 contractors across the country.
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
