If you’re one that guns for 100% team excellence, training your sales reps would be top priority. No one wants to botch-up a sweet deal due to sales rep inexperience or ineptitude!! This is where roofing sales roleplay comes in. You can improve your sales’ team competence by teaching them different “homeowner-centric” approaches to roofing sales.
Reading through this post, you’ll learn different types of roofing sales roleplay, and get practical keypoints to help you launch out on roofing sales roleplay. Chuck Thokey (The Expert Roof Salesman) helped to break down everything – from the basics of lead generation and follow-up, to closing the sale and beyond, this article will give you the skills you need to increase your roofing sales.
Enjoy!!
What Exactly is “Roofing Sales RolePlay?”
Roofing sales roleplay is a valuable tool that allows sales professionals and rookies in the roofing industry practice and hone their selling skills before selling to actual homeowners or agents.
Unlike your garden variety training exercises, roofing sales roleplay simulates real-life conversations and situations your sales reps might encounter when selling roofing products or services to customers.
By participating in roleplay exercises, your sales representatives can:
- build confidence,
- enhance their negotiation skills, and
- learn to address homeowners’ objections or concerns in the roofing sales process effectively.
There are several formats for roofing sales roleplay, each offering unique benefits to your salespeople and their manager or trainer. Below, we will explore three popular formats commonly used in the roofing industry.
1. One-on-One Roleplay
This format usually involves individually pitting your sales representatives against their sales manager or trainer, who plays the role of a potential customer. The participants can focus on specific areas they want to improve, such as closing a deal, handling objections or creating compelling pitches.
Aside from honing your sales representatives’ skills, the one-on-one roleplay allows for personalized feedback and guidance, allowing sales representatives to refine their approach to sales in a supportive environment.
2. Team Roleplay
Unlike one-on-one roleplay, team roleplay exercises involve multiple salespeople acting as sales representatives and customers. This format illustrates the importance of collaboration and allows participants to learn from one another.
By observing and analyzing their colleagues’ techniques, even million-dollar “Sales gurus” can gain new insights and broaden their sales repertoire. When you have your sales team engage in team roleplay, you’ll find that they’ll begin to develop a healthy competitive spirit, motivating each salesperson to perform at their best.
3. Scenario Roleplay
This roofing sales roleplay format involves setting up specific scenarios that salespeople commonly encounter in the roofing sales process. These scenarios can include situations like–
- Working with dissatisfied customers
- Helping decision-dilemma, homeowners make educated decisions
- Negotiating complex contracts
- Dealing with common objections like budget constraints and competing bids, etc.
When dealing with scenarios like price presentation, that’s where the butterflies come in and where most sales reps tend to screw things up. Ultimately, price presentations should be one of the top scenarios you need to be roleplaying at your company!
However, note that you shouldn’t take more than three seconds to pitch yourself in scenarios where you’re meeting a potential client for the first time.
How Do You Present Prices to Your Homeowners?
When presenting your different prices to undecided homeowners, it’s way smarter to use follow the order “good, better and best“. Most salespeople present their “best offer” first, while the “good offer” comes last. This is because most homeowners prefer to choose the good offer since it is more budget-friendly.
However, if you play your cards right, you’ll be able to get your homeowners to opt for an offer that includes more value at a relatively lesser price. This is where the “better offer” comes in! You can design your better offers to be a mixture of both your best and reasonable offers. That way, you’ll be able to close better deals.
To successfully sell your better offers, you have to explain what you have to offer vs what your competitors have to offer and take your clients through a trial close.
General Roleplay Guidelines For Your Team
Regardless of the format, effective roofing sales roleplay requires careful preparation and detailed structuring. As a roofing business owner, it’s crucial that you:
- define clear objectives for each exercise,
- establish ground rules and,
- provide constructive feedback throughout the whole exercise.
Depending on the time you allocate for your sales meetings and how big your sales team is, you can encourage your participants to take on different roles and perspectives to help them understand clients’ points of view and develop empathy.
Even better, you can incorporate roleplay exercises during your company’s early morning power hour and sales meetings. Organizing impromptu roleplay sessions will also help your salespeople think on their feet! Most roofers roleplay about once a week. And who says you can do it daily? No hard stereotype!
FAQs on Roofing Sales Roleplay
1. How Many Hours to Roleplay?
One hour should be enough time to roleplay during your power hour. However, remember there’s more to your power hour than just roleplaying.
The most important piece of the power hour involves going through your sales activities for the day prior. Then you get into the training piece, which can either include roleplay exercises alone or roleplay exercises complemented with regular lectures.
You can even use your failed sales efforts and why they didn’t work out as a scenario for your roleplay exercises. That way, your sales reps will know what to say when faced with similar real-life situations.
2. How Long Should a New Salesperson Roleplay Before Actual Selling?
With consistent roleplaying, most new sales reps sell their first roof in about three weeks. However, their training duration also depends on their learning curve and interest in roofing sales.
P.S: Until roofing sales trainees can successfully roleplay every scenario without a hint of fear, they shouldn’t be allowed on the field. Even if they’ve mastered the art of roofing sales roleplay, it’ll be safer to serve them cream puff leads first before going on more challenging jobs.
You can even have a sales manager go with them for the first couple of times because you’d want to make sure you’re not wasting any appointments for the sake of training.
3. Why Do Many Roofers Avoid Roleplay?
Most roofing sales representatives or roofers still don’t engage in roleplay sometimes because they don’t have confidence in themselves or their sales leader. Sometimes, sales leaders also avoid roleplaying because they don’t want their team members to see them as weak or critique their performance.
Imagine a sales leader that doesn’t participate in roleplay exercises but expects his team members to do the work; this usually becomes a big problem among sales team members.
That’s why you need to open yourself up to criticism and allow feedback to motivate your team and improve your performance in sales. You know, it’s way better to be imperfect and participate in roleplays regularly than be “artificially humble” about your ability to roleplay.
Finetune Your Sales Skills With Roofing Sales Roleplay!
With proper structure and preparations, roofing sales roleplay can be a transformative experience for roofers and salespeople alike. That’s why you must learn to roleplay from the MVPs of the roofing industry.
To aid you in your quest, you can register with Topreptraining.com. Unlike your typical “seminar, sit and learn style”, Toprep runs an intense boot camp on roofing sales using roleplay to train roofers on the roofing sales process. Even better, you’ll get to meet and learn from renowned “sales-smiths” in the roofing industry. You can also contact us at Hookagency. We’ve the skill and expertise to 10X your roofing business 📈.
