Day in life of a Sales Representative - in home:
Get 3 appointments at 11:00pm the night before.
Earliest appointment at 10:00am and latest at 7:00pm.
Appointments are frequently a 2hr drive often over 70 miles from home, one way. No fuel reimbursement. The base pay is $500/week before taxes. As you can imagine all of that and more is spent on fuel and maintaining your car. So, for all practical purposes you are a 100% commission based employee.
After driving this long distance to the appointment you may expect a highly pre-qualified prospect. No. You frequently show up to appointments where the prospect has been promised a FREE product or was told that they can buy ONE window. Company acknowledges that on these appointments you will not make any money. But they still want you to sell it so they can make money.
One legged appointments are common and the company openly admits to it and forces you to pitch them anyway. And it's still counts against your numbers. This is quite contrary to the norm in the industry where one legged appointments are not pitched and do not count against you.
They do not confirm if the homeowner is at home before sending you out. Quite frequently you arrive at the appointment where the homeowner has entirely forgotten about the appointment they made or have scheduled something else or simply not home. You are expected to pitch them regardless. For example you can take your 2-hour drive to the appointment and then the homeowner does not answer the door because they're not home. You are also not allowed to call the homeowners before you show up to confirm if they are home. They send you to the appointment even if the homeowner has called them and canceled the appointment. Which is why you are not given the homeowner's number. You only get their address.
It's understandable from their perspective as it is your gas and car that is being used and it doesn't cost them anything to send you out there.
You are required to secretly record all your interactions with the homeowner on your personal phone. These recordings are then listened to and nitpicked back at the corporate office in Madison, Wisconsin. If you don't record, you're fired. An unheard of practice in the remodeling industry.
The leads are bought by Nathan Richmond, the President and the CEO of the company, himself. And therefore, criticizing the leads is a fireable offense (we were told this outright by management). The leads are collected mostly through online forms. This is no different than if you ran a Facebook forms campaign and had someone (you, in this case) go visit everyone who submitted their information. The leads are never asked about their credit scores or financial situation. Which is the norm in the rest of the remodeling industry, before a sales rep is sent out. For example, if someone has a credit score below 600 Renewal by Anderson won't even bother to send their sales rep out to that home. As they know that their sales rep has zero chance of making any money. Because even if the homeowner did buy they will get declined for financing.
Before you sign on with them it would be a good idea to ask them specific sales numbers in your particular market. Do not go for the numbers listed on indeed or other job boards. The sales people who are bringing in the money that is listed there are concentrated in a very small territory of their market. Primarily in and around Madison, Wisconsin.
Because of all the reasons listed above they have a very hard time keeping employees. In some of their markets their teams are as small as three sales people in the entire office.
Because of how far the appointments are from your home and from each other, most days, expect to be home around midnight.
At this point you're tired and you can barely keep your eyes open. So, there is nothing to do but to sleep.
You're doing this 6 days a week from Monday to Saturday. Working 14 hr days. You are also encouraged to work on Sunday. Needless to say that there is no life, only work.
A bit about the product you are selling:
They primarily sell windows and bath remodels. With a dash of, what they called kitchen remodeling, but it is basically refacing kitchen cabinets and adding new countertops to existing counters. Personally, the demo window that I was given was not particularly high quality. As in the latch on this brand new demo window was already failing.
In the bathroom model they only handle the shower area. They do not do the rest of it.
I did price out the remodel for the shower area from other sources and I found out that they charge three times more than a remodel from your local contractor. Using the exact same materials.
While there is no law against selling a product three times the price of what someone else might be selling it for, in fact, it's a great strategy used by the likes of Apple, however, I give this detail because this is where pre-qualification is extremely necessary.
If you're going to charge someone three times above market rate then for you to have even a chance of selling, your prospect needs to be in a position to afford your product. Which as I mentioned above is usually not the case. As the leads are not pre-qualified. This problem is specially magnified if you do not live in a particularly rich market. For example, because of no pre-qualification, you may find yourself in front of a prospect who is on social security. Try selling them a $15,000 shower remodel!
I do have to warn that they are extremely good with their marketing and PR. They're good at controlling the narrative online, manipulating numbers and reviews on job boards as well as Google.
One of their many strategies is to respond quickly to any online reviews.
This is a PR strategy to make job seekers feel that the company is "listening" and therefore improving.
While this is excellent marketing, understand that you as a Sales Representative will NEVER interact with the people who are responding to reviews. Neither are the people who respond to these reviews Sales Representatives themselves.
They're marketers.
I, on the other hand, am giving you facts straight from the Sales Department. Which is where you will live.
