Pay for the process, not the close

For years I paid attention to the wrong number.

Close rate is what everybody watches. It is also the thing a rep cannot control on any given night. The homeowner's brother is a roofer. The wife is out of town. The insurance check has not cleared. None of that is coachable.

What is coachable is whether the rep ran the process. Did both decision makers sit down. Did he do the inspection before he talked money. Did he call in before he left the driveway.

So we started scoring the process instead of the outcome. Every appointment got graded against the same steps whether it sold or not. A rep could sell a job and still get a bad score. A rep could get beat on price and still get a good one.

Two things happened.

The first was that reps stopped arguing about leads. When the grade is the process, "I had a bad night" stops being a defense, because the recording says what happened.

The second took longer and mattered more. Close rate came along behind it. Not because we talked about closing. Because a rep who runs the same appointment every night gets better at it, and a rep who improvises gets better at nothing.

I used to tell new people the same thing in week one. I do not care whether you sell it tonight. I care whether you were on process. Do that enough times and the money finds you.

Nobody believes that in week one. They believe it by month three, because by then they have watched somebody with worse instincts and better discipline pass them.

The hard part is not the idea. It is that a manager has to sit through a rep selling a job the wrong way and still mark it down. Most will not. Revenue came in, everybody is happy, move on. That is how you end up with nine people running nine different appointments and no way to fix any of them.