Gutter Sales Management

Discover the art of managing a successful gutter sales team with the Rain Gutter Association's insightful guide. This comprehensive article explores the unconventional yet effective strategies for hiring and nurturing a high-performing sales team in the gutter industry.
Jan 19 / Noah Lantz
In the fast-paced world of gutters, growth isn't just about installing more; it's about mastering sales. But what happens when you, as a business owner, find yourself needing to hire a salesperson? When it’s time to expand beyond your personal efforts, navigating the hiring and management of a sales team can seem like a daunting shift.

Welcome to the challenge of managing a gutter sales team. Here, experience in sales isn't always king. Fresh faces, like eager high school graduates or former technicians, are often your best bet - while experience in the role - often a requirement for hiring managers - can actually be a trap.

Be prepared to change your thinking a bit. Whereas you want high performing installers to stay with you as long as possible, sales in the gutter world works differently. Long-term tenure isn’t the end goal; success here is about fostering a sales team that thrives while they’re with you. In gutter sales, turnover isn’t a setback: It’s part of the game. 

In this newsletter, we’ll dive into creating a sales system that works for your gutter business. You’ll learn how to shape a team that’s not dependent on individual talent but flourishes thanks to a well-designed, repeatable process. We’ll cover the importance of tracking crucial metrics, regular team meetings, and how to create an onboarding system that turns novices into seasoned pros. Embrace your role as the architect of a sales system that turns even the greenest of recruits into effective salespeople.

Who to Hire

The right people for your sales team aren’t necessarily the most experienced. Rather, they’re the ones you can shape into the salespeople you need them to be. This means that you’re probably better off going with someone with less experience and more capacity to learn rather than a grizzled, seasoned, gutter vet who has always done things a certain way.

If an individual has been in the gutter sales game for a long time without moving to higher-ticket sales, it’s likely a sign of stagnation, not expertise. 500 sq. ft of a floor runs about $3,500. A new roof? $10,000. Kitchen remodels? Over $20,000. Gutters? For the average house, around $2,000 - $3,000. Gutter sales is an entry level sales job. It's a relatively low ticket item.

If a gutter sales rep hasn’t moved up to higher ticket items where there’s more room for profit - and therefore more room for commissions - that’s a red flag instead of a point on their resume. So rather than rely on someone’s past experience in gutter sales, your goal should be to create a process that molds everyone into high performers, regardless of where they’re starting from.

The RGA recommends looking for people without much sales experience to work as your salespeople. Think a young high-school grad, a former construction worker, or someone thinking about making a transition into sales. Gutter sales is a perfect stepping stone for these individuals into a larger career.

Onboarding

So what kind of system do you plug these individuals into? Specifically, how do you onboard people new to sales?
Ideally, you’ll want to onboard them by teaching them on the ins-and-outs of gutter sales and installation before they run their first leads. RGA certifications cover how to design and install basic gutter systems so new hires have a body of knowledge to draw from before their first day on the job.

After certification, you’ll typically want to have two to three days of a “ride-along” where you (or a more experienced member of your team) goes with the new hire to show them the ropes, answer additional questions, and provide hands-on training.

Your onboarding process should include:

  • RGA Sales Certification
  • A review of your company’s internal processes
  • Training on tools, software, etc they’ll need for the job
  • Memorization of some kind of sales script
  • Expectations and standards for performance (we’ll cover this in more detail later)

Mind the season - you’ll want to make these hires before the rush of fall or spring so when it gets busy, they’re prepared.

Ongoing Training

Being an entry-level sales position, gutter sales requires an ongoing investment to ensure that sales staff operates at a high level. Once a week sales training covering sales scripts, sales principles, objection handling, prospecting is recommended to help develop newer sales people “cut their teeth.” 

While this may seem like overkill, gutter companies at the national level have daily sales trainings before they send reps out. Consider reading through some popular sales books and teaching the material to your reps on a regular basis.

Managing Gutter Salespeople

Success in sales management, broadly speaking, is about tracking and rewarding behaviors that drive results. So your success hinges not just on the people you hire, but more critically on the behaviors and metrics you prioritize.

For this reason, we recommend a series of two “check-ins” with your salespeople - one daily, and one weekly. A daily check-in is a series of questions you ask your salespeople, individually, so they can self-report their sales activity and results. Your weekly check-in will review important metrics, like won/lost ratio and average deal size, to see where improvement is needed and where you can adjust your processes to drive revenue.

Here’s a sample daily check-in list, used at a Rain Gutter Association member’s business (and used with their permission).

Daily Check-In

Estimates

1. How many homes did you measure yesterday?
2. How many estimates did you deliver yesterday?
3. Out of those, how many were delivered during your first site visit?

Meetings and Interactions

1. How many people did you meet with yesterday?
2. Did you use Ingage? (presentation software)

Closing Deals

1. What did you close yesterday?

Lead Management

1. How many leads came in yesterday for you?
2. How many leads did you self generate yesterday?

Future Planning

1. How many leads do you have to run today?
2. Do you have enough leads?

Additional Questions

1.What obstacles or challenges did you face yesterday?
2. How did you overcome them?
3. What do you need help with?

Answers to these questions can be tracked in an excel sheet to measure results over time and to compare one rep's answers to another. 

Because this list relies on self-reporting, responses can be fibbed. This is resolved through the weekly check-in, which relies on reporting from your CRM system, instead of your sales reps.

Compare your reps weekly performance with the following goals in a one-on-one:

Close Rate: 50%
Profit Margin: 40-60%
# of leads run per day: 4
Annual Revenue Goal: $1,000,000 per rep (high performers should get closer to 1.5 mil)

If a rep’s performance consistently runs underneath these metrics, consider letting them go. If they run quite a bit higher, dive deeper with the rep to see how you can systemize their approach. 

Other important metrics

Time to estimate: Time to estimate tracks the time between when a lead is received to when your salesperson delivers their estimate. If a lead has been sitting for days and days on end, the odds of it closing go down significantly. A long time to estimate is also a sign that a rep is not managing their time well.

Average Sale: A rep’s average ticket price. This is most useful to determine who on the team is effective at upselling customers. The higher the average, the more effective the rep.

Number of Self Generated Leads: Encouraging your team to generate their own leads fosters initiative and diversifies your lead sources. Reps should have a handful of self-generated leads a week. Be prepared to offer additional compensation for these leads should they close.

Response Time: This tracks how quickly leads are responded to by staff (not just salespeople) when they submit an inquiry or call in. This should be measured in minutes (or even seconds), not hours or days. How these calls are handled should be scripted and memorized.

A robust CRM - like Jobber, Housecall Pro, or Jobnimbus - will help track these numbers for you.

What to Pay

Standard compensation for gutter sales is 10% of each job sold at full price without discounts. Discounts offered to customers are typically reflected in commission percentage.

It’s also recommended that you offer a profit sharing arrangement for jobs sold above full price. For W2 Salespeople, this could be 30% of the additional sum. For 1099 salespeople, that could be 50%. This profit sharing arrangement encourages your sales rep to actually sell their jobs (spend time with customers, walk through a presentation, negotiate, etc)...rather than simply leave estimates behind and compete on price. If you are worried about a rep price gouging customers, you can simply cap additional compensation.

Conclusion

Managing a gutter sales team is much like guiding a ship through uncharted waters. It demands a shift in traditional hiring perspectives, a focus on nurturing raw, often inexperienced talent, and a commitment to refining your sales process continually. Your success doesn’t necessarily rest in the individual talent of your salespeople, but in the robustness of the system you build around them.

Our mission at the RGA is to empower the seamless gutter industry through innovation and education. If you find content like this valuable, consider becoming a member. Your membership includes access to certification coursework for gutter installers and salespeople, valuable savings through partner vendors, access to 50+ gutter specific safety talks, and valuable networking opportunities. Join today to shape the future of the seamless gutter industry!
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