We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Becca Switzer a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Becca, appreciate you joining us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

When I started my online sales training company at 26 years old, the long story short is that I had entered the storm restoration roof sales industry at 21 years of age with absolutely ZERO knowledge of roofing, storm damage, or insurance. I had just 1.5 years of direct sales training from my prior position selling Cutco Knives through Vector Marketing as a 19 year old college dropout prior to this, and while Cutco excelled tremendously at providing incredibly comprehensive and effective sales and recruiting training that made it easy to follow the program and succeed, the roofing industry had nothing of the sort.

After my first season in the business, I attended what was at the time literally the ONLY roof sales training event I could find in the entire country, which ended up being a very lackluster, far below average presentation by some guy in Frisco, Texas that 22 people attended in a small hotel conference room for $500 a ticket. When I left there totally underwhelmed by what was “taught,” I was certain beyond a doubt that I personally had a LOT of valuable information to offer salespeople and business owners in the roofing industry from my own knowledge, skills, and experience and I was eager to share it.

I went home and immediately began “word dumping” in a word document on my laptop. My roof sales took a back seat during this process. I was in the zone! I spent hours writing and recording material every single day. Creating was my sole focus.

It was messy at first with no particular order. I simply began unloading information in sections: what I knew about canvassing, my word for word door pitches, exactly what I said to handle specific customer objections, do’s and don’ts on appointments, my closing sales script, verbatim.

I made bullet point lists of all the topics I knew I would be elaborating on, and each day I would spend hours and hours typing. This would later become the material for my first completed project, an ebook titled “Diamonds in the Sky: Introduction to Storm Restoration Sales,” and what would later be sections and lessons in my online courses.

After I had enough material for my first online course, I ran a $9 webinar showcasing what kind of incredible, quantifiable results my sales and supplementing strategies created. The $9 helped cover my ad spend and the ad itself had an upsell to my ebook for $27 which further helped me profit on the marketing campaign.

From there, the webinar invited interested individuals to a 30 minute strategy session phone call with me where I sold them the online course for $1997 (back in 2014). This was considered a “beta group” and I also sold 60 minute personal coaching calls for $697/month to several clients.

Throughout the duration of this process, I had an undeniable fire in my belly. I KNEW with 100% certainty that this was a million dollar idea and it kept me extremely focused on creating valuable, game-changing content. Every ounce of material I created felt like gold nuggets and I was so excited to release it to the industry and launch my online sales training and consulting business.

I truly felt like I was firing on all cylinders and I stayed in this flow state for a couple of years as information, videos, blog posts, marketing emails, lessons, and copywriting flowed out of me.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Before I launched my online sales training courses and wrote my ebook, I had been in direct sales for six years and roof sales for four years. Prior to getting into storm restoration roof sales, I sold Cutco Cutlery through Vector Marketing; a company well-known for its incredibly effective formal sales training and recruiting process. I actually did so well my first summer selling Cutco Knives (earning roughly $30,000) that I decided to drop out of college after my sophomore year at age 19 to continue pursuing a career in direct sales. I went on to sell over six-figures in knives as a 19-21 year old and was one of the top salespeople in the country, earning the Sir Lancelot Award and doing multiple “sales push contests” of over $20,000-25,000.

My performance caught the attention of someone who at the time was the vice president of the 2nd largest national storm restoration roofing company in the country, who was on a mission to poach top Cutco managers and salespeople for a company he was breaking off to start on his own. After showing my former husband and I several large commission checks, wining and dining us, and elaborating on the income opportunity that roof sales provided, we decided to take the leap and leave Cutco for the roofing business.

I was told selling hail damaged roofs was going to be “like shooting fish in a barrel,” but when I arrived to my first storm location in Connecticut after selling basically everything I owned and moving halfway across the country with all my eggs in the roofing basket, that was not the case. There was no formal training whatsoever, and the owner of the company – while an incredibly talented salesman – was so frazzled, pulled in so many directions, and stretched so thin with the entire operation that he was unable to provide us more than a quick door pitch suggestion and take us on one inspection (that got denied). We were then sent out into the field with another rep and told to “listen to him a few days” and then “knock 100 doors a day – it’s a numbers game!”

To make a long story short, this presented a brutal learning curve and the only way through it was to fail as many times as possible as fast as possible to begin to develop a system that worked for selling roofs. Within four months I had sold 65 roofs, $650,000 in revenue, and had earned $105,000 in commissions. If I was able to do *that* well without ANY formal training, what would my results look like if I DID have some training from experts in the industry? How well would others be able to do with better training resources?

This led me to create Roof Sales Mastery, write my book “Diamonds in the Sky,” and begin coaching and consulting salespeople and business owners. The industry was quite frankly desperate for door to door sales training, word for word scripts, organized methodology, and step by step guides to help salesmen succeed in the roof sales game, and business owners were all but lost on effective recruiting techniques, repeatable, standardized sales training, and direction on how to actually manage a sales team and drive sales. There was and is a huge blind spot for contractors dealing with supplementing insurance claims and negotiating with insurance adjusters, which is one of the things I’m most famous for teaching. The roofing business was in the dinosaur ages, for lack of better terms. They needed systems and processes to help scale their companies and ensure their salespeople had the resources and training they needed to succeed in what is otherwise an incredibly lucrative position.

What sets Roof Sales Mastery apart from other coaches and programs out there is for starters, the quantifiable results my clients create by simply following my systems. My clients average anywhere from a $2500-4500 average supplement (supplements are additional funds we get the adjuster to agree to pay on homeowner’s claims to improve profit margins and ensure the homeowner is getting all the proper materials, code requirements, and labor requirements met on their project as insurance companies tend to nickel and dime contractors as often as they can). Contractors utilizing my Recruiting Machine system for hiring average anywhere from 50-100 applicants for the sales position within the first week of using my word for word hiring ad. Salesmen close anywhere from 70-90% at the kitchen table using my closing script and get at least 1 out of 10 inspections at the door. These are just a few incredible results clients see using my techniques and turnkey programs.

I’m most proud of how comprehensive, easy to digest and understand, and effective my online courses and turnkey systems are. They REALLY work. The hundreds of results-focused testimonials clients have left on my Facebook company page is a testament to this. I love receiving the feedback that I make otherwise difficult concepts very easy to understand with my use of analogies, and that my content is engaging because of how it’s delivered with humor and my natural personality.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

When I began learning about marketing my expertise, I attended several conferences and read books by people like Brendan Burchard, Jeff Walker, and Ryan Deiss. One of the biggest takeaways I had at that time was that “content is king.” They said to give away some of your best content for free. A lot of people resist this because they feel that if they give away their best stuff, what’s left for customers to buy? But the opposite is true. When you show your best cards, people get to see the quality of your material and they end up wanting more of it. They’ll buy anything and everything you put out because they want to know what else there is.

For me, this began with YouTube. I put out literally hundreds of short YouTube videos showcasing quick gold nuggets that got people hooked and constantly having “aha!” moments. I also shared a lot of roofing specific memes that I made on Facebook that got a lot of traction, comments, and shares. My advice is use your personality, don’t be afraid to offend some people, be yourself (don’t water down your brand or how you talk, etc. to try to please everyone, because as they say, “You could be the sweetest, juiciest peach in the world and there will still be people who don’t like peaches!”), and consistently post. Remember, content is king!

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

Without a doubt, the efficacy and quality of my material and content that I share in my online courses built my reputation along with the thousands of hours I have spent speaking with contractors in depth on the phone about their businesses to truly listen to what was going on with them, what they were struggling with, and how I could provide solutions. The results people got using my strategies from my courses was proof in the pudding that they were more than eager to share about via testimonials, reviews, and commentary in online forums, and just getting to see that I was a real person who genuinely cared about their success has gone a long way. I receive feedback often that people appreciate that I’m “real, down to earth, authentic, and a good person” and that’s why they love doing business with me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.roofsalesmastery.com
• Instagram: @roofsalesmastery
• Facebook: Roof Sales Mastery
• Linkedin: Becca Switzer
• Youtube: Roof Sales Mastery