How This Home Improvement Business Substantially Increased Their Closing Rate

By Ingage. 

Ridge Top Exteriors saw tremendous growth in their sales after using this software. 

In 2002, Larry Gebhart founded the home improvement business Ridge Top Exteriors in his basement. Since then, the company has grown to over 70 employees and continues to get bigger! Their success is largely owed to the addition of COO Beau Crawley who helped the business grow. They have also found growth in recent years after they started using Ingage software to present projects to clients. Since then, their average closing rate has increased by 3.58 points and their average ticket has increased by 12 points. 

Challenge: Building a brand that can beat local competition 

After working for several years in Ridge Top’s storm restoration division, Beau transitioned to a senior leadership role, with the company’s marketing, operations and sales divisions all reporting to him. Shortly after taking on the new role, he realized that they were facing rising competition and would need to revisit the effectiveness of their operations. Despite having four well-established offices — three in Wisconsin and one in Tampa, Florida — their brand recognition and sales effectiveness were not as strong as they could be. Beau knew that if Ridge Top Exteriors were to meet its ambitious growth goals, they had to take decisive action. 

“Ingage was built for what we do,” Beau said. “We don’t have to reinvent the wheel with PowerPoint when Ingage has already done that and more. Better yet, Ingage is user-friendly and brings additional capabilities that make presentations more effective.” 

Beau aimed to equip his team with the best possible tools to make them effective, but the PowerPoint presentations his sales team relied on were not delivering the results he had hoped. The process of distributing new versions of a PowerPoint presentation and ensuring that every rep was using the most updated version was inefficient to say the least. Beau also realized that PowerPoint had limitations in terms of sharing video content, which is one of the most engaging and effective presentation tools. That’s when he was introduced to Ingage, a tool that seemed to address all the challenges Ridge Top Exteriors faced with improving presentations. 

Solution: Interactive presentation software that makes it easy to communicate

After signing on with Ingage, Ridge Top Exteriors opted to use pre-built sample pages and presentations to get started. This ready-made content not only helped them save time — but also presented an opportunity for Ridge Top’s team to focus on creating custom-content that represented their brand and addressed their own specific needs. With the help of Ridge Top’s graphic designer who runs their media creation, they were able to create a comprehensive presentation that was built tailored to their company. 

“In a business...you have silos that you have to maintain. Ingage and Webrunner are easy tools to maintain in order to focus on other areas of the business that aren’t so easy,” Beau said. 

Their Ingage presentation has been an essential part of how they have handled customer communications throughout 2020 as they managed the slew of challenges facing the home improvement industry. With Ingage’s cloud-based interface, Beau and his team can quickly change material availability as the information comes in. The presentations automatically update across the organization, meaning reps sharing a presentation in the home will be able to provide the most up-to-date content to customers without inefficient manual updates. The ability to make quick updates also allows Ridge Top to focus on other areas of the business without having to constantly worry about their sales presentations. 

“Most reps’ reaction to Ingage was ‘This is the best thing since sliced bread,'” Beau said. “All of my brochures are right here. All of my selling points, all of the information. How could this not work?'” 

In a more holistic sense, Beau has found that adopting Ingage has helped Ridge Top Exteriors’ team become more consistent and address customers’ specific needs more effectively. Since Beau and Ridge Top’s sales managers are able to view the reps’ performance using Advanced Analytics, they can see exactly how each salesperson is performing and coach to best practices if that person’s numbers are down. “When it comes to Ingage, useability, maintenance and ease of use are key points for us,” he said. 

At the same time, Ridge Top Exteriors partnered with Webrunner Media to help them build out ads that would drive brand awareness and leads. That, coupled with a higher investment in a variety of marketing and brand-building initiatives, had the desired effect: By the time those leads started coming in, the new presentation platform was already in place and ready to put them to good use. A new training program — which does include Ingage — was also put in place to onboard new reps and enhance the effectiveness of the entire sales team. 

Results: Better customer experiences and higher close rates 

“We’re on track for a 40% growth in generated revenue this year,” Beau said. Following the new partnerships with Ingage and Webrunner, coupled with more intensive training and increased marketing, Ridge Top Exteriors has seen phenomenal results. In the last year their average closing rate saw a 3.58 point increase and their average ticket also increased 12 points, leading to an overall increase of 40% in revenue across all three of their Wisconsin locations. This is all while the team has seen a decrease in the number of actual appointments. Beau believes that because of the combination of their brand’s increased strength, improved training and enhanced sales presentations, they wow every customer they come in contact with, leading to higher sales.   

Learn more about Ingage in their RoofersCoffeeShop® Directory or visit www.ingage.io. 

Original article source: Ingage