How to Ramp a New Roofing Sales Rep Faster: A 90-Day Playbook for Owners and Sales Managers

Most roofing companies hire a new sales rep, hand them a branded polo, a yard sign, and a vague instruction to "go knock," and then act surprised when that person quits in week six having sold nothing. The ramp problem is not a motivation problem. It is a system problem. A green rep does not know which doors to knock, what to say when the door opens, how to read a roof from the ground, how to write up a clean inspection, or how to move a maybe into a signed contract. You either teach those things on purpose, in an order that compounds, or you let the street teach them by attrition. The street is a slow and expensive teacher.

This is a ramp plan, written from the operator's chair, for getting a new residential roofing sales rep producing real revenue faster and staying past the danger window. It assumes you run a contractor business, not a lead-buying outfit, and that your reps make money by getting in front of homeowners who actually need a roof. The plan is organized by week, with the specific skills, drills, metrics, and manager checkpoints that matter at each stage. There are scripts, a ride-along framework, an inspection checklist, a comp structure discussion, and an honest section on the things that quietly sink new hires. Where a tool genuinely shortens the ramp, it gets named and explained. Where the work is just reps and coaching, that gets said too.

Why new roofing reps take so long to ramp (and why most never make it)

Before the plan, you have to understand what you are actually fighting. Ramp time in roofing sales is long for structural reasons, not because new people are lazy.

The sales cycle hides the feedback. A homeowner you meet today might not sign for three to eight weeks, especially if a claim or financing is involved. A rep who started Monday cannot tell on Friday whether their pitch is working. They get silence, and silence reads as failure. Without a manager interpreting leading indicators, a green rep concludes "this doesn't work" right around week four or five and starts looking at other jobs.

The job has five distinct skills stacked on top of each other. A productive rep can: pick or get handed the right doors, open a cold conversation without getting the door shut, climb and inspect a roof safely and accurately, document damage and scope so production and the homeowner trust it, and ask for and close the business. Most ramp programs teach maybe two of these and assume the other three by osmosis. A rep who is great at knocking but terrified of a ladder is stuck. A rep who can inspect like a pro but freezes at "so what's the price" is stuck.

The math is brutal early and forgiving later. Door-to-door conversion in roofing is a numbers game with a long tail. Industry door-knock contact and conversion rates vary widely by market, season, and storm status, but a useful rule of thumb a lot of managers use: a green rep might knock 100 doors to get a handful of real conversations, those conversations into a few inspections, and those inspections into one signed job — and the experienced rep on your crew does the same volume and gets two or three. The new person is not broken. They are early on the curve. If they quit before the curve bends, you never find out they would have been good.

Comp structures punish the ramp. A pure-commission rep with no draw is, in their first 60 days, working for free while learning the hardest version of the job. People with options do not tolerate that. People without options take it and churn under financial stress. Either way you lose. The comp conversation is part of the ramp plan, not separate from it.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks sales occupations broadly, and turnover in commission-heavy field sales is consistently high; roofing is on the rough end of that distribution because the seasonality, the physical demands, and the storm-driven feast-or-famine all stack on top of normal sales churn. Your job as the person ramping a rep is to remove as many of those failure causes as you control, in the order they bite.

The ramp scoreboard: what "ramped" actually means

You cannot ramp toward a fuzzy goal. Define the finish line before day one. Here is a concrete, defensible definition of a ramped residential roofing rep, with rough targets you can adjust to your market and average ticket. Treat the numbers as a starting frame, not gospel — set yours from your own crew's actuals.

The single most useful thing you can do is shift your attention, and the rep's attention, away from the lagging metric (signed jobs, which is slow and noisy early) and onto leading metrics (doors knocked, conversations had, inspections set, inspections run, proposals presented). Leading metrics move daily, give the rep a sense of progress, and let you diagnose exactly where the funnel is leaking before the rep emotionally checks out.

A simple daily activity floor for a new full-time door rep in a normal market might look like: 60–80 doors attempted, 8–12 real conversations, 1–2 inspections set, with inspections run and proposals presented climbing as their calendar fills in weeks three and four. Adjust hard for storm markets, retail vs. insurance work, and whether they are also working your existing customer list.

The pre-start checklist: ramp begins before day one

The fastest ramps start before the rep shows up, because nothing kills week-one momentum like a person standing around waiting for a login, a polo, or a list of who to go see. Have all of this ready the Friday before they start.

• Gear: ladder they can actually handle, fall-protection if your process requires roof access, branded shirts, business cards, magnets, yard signs, leave-behinds, a tablet or phone with everything installed and logged in.
• Identity and access: CRM login created with the right pipeline visibility, email, phone, and any field app they will use — all tested by you, not them, before day one.
• The first list: this is the big one. A green rep should never spend a single hour of their first weeks deciding where to go. You hand them a defined area and, ideally, a ranked set of homes worth knocking. More on this below — it is the highest-leverage thing you can prepare.
• A written 90-day plan: literally print the week-by-week below, customized, and give it to them on day one so they can see the whole arc and trust that the slow first weeks are by design.
• The comp plan in writing: base/draw, commission tiers, when and how they get paid, what happens to a deal that cancels, and what the draw recovery looks like. Ambiguity here breeds resentment exactly when they are most vulnerable.
• Compliance basics: your state's contractor licensing rules, any local door-to-door solicitation permit or Do-Not-Knock registry requirements, and your storm/insurance conduct rules (covered in detail later). The FTC's Cooling-Off Rule gives consumers a three-day right to cancel certain door-to-door sales — your rep needs to know it and your contracts need to honor it.

Week 1: foundation — product, ladder, and the first conversations

Week one is about removing fear and building a base. A scared rep does not sell. They are scared of three things: looking stupid in front of a homeowner, falling off a roof, and getting yelled at. Knock all three down this week.

Days 1–2: classroom that is not boring

Do not lecture for two days. Mix short teaching blocks with immediate doing.

Product and process literacy. They need to be able to speak plainly about: the roof systems you install (asphalt shingle layers, underlayment, ventilation, flashing, the difference between a repair and a replacement), how a roof actually wears out (UV and thermal cycling on asphalt, granule loss, brittleness, seal failure, then wind and hail accelerating all of it), and your company's process from inspection to install to warranty. A homeowner can smell a rep who does not understand roofs. NRCA and shingle-manufacturer resources are good grounding here, and you should build a one-page "how a roof ages and fails" sheet they can study.

The why-now of roof age. Asphalt shingle roofs in most of the country run a usable life in the rough range of 15 to 25 years depending on product, install quality, ventilation, and climate. A rep who understands roof age can have an honest, non-pushy conversation: a 20-year-old roof is near the end of its service life and worth planning for, regardless of whether a storm ever hits it. Teach them to frame age as a fact, not a scare tactic.

Ladder and roof safety, hands-on. Before anyone climbs a customer's roof, they climb yours, or a training setup, under supervision. OSHA's fall-protection standards exist because falls are the leading cause of death in construction; a new rep getting on roofs needs real instruction on ladder setup (the 4-to-1 angle, three points of contact, securing the ladder), recognizing an unsafe roof (steep pitch, wet, brittle, deteriorated decking), and when NOT to get on a roof at all. "I'm not comfortable walking this one safely, let me get our production team out" is a professional answer, not a failure.

Days 3–5: shadowing and the first scripts

Get them next to a producing rep on doors immediately. Watching beats role-play for the first contact. But give them a job while they shadow so they are not a passive observer: have them track the vet's outcomes, write down every objection they hear, and note exactly what the vet said back.

Then drill the opener. The single highest-leverage script a new rep needs is the door opener, because most green reps lose the conversation in the first ten seconds by sounding like a salesperson. A workable, low-pressure structure:

"Hi, I'm [name] with [company] — we're a local roofing crew. I'll be straight with you: we're going through the neighborhood because a lot of the roofs around here are getting to the age where they're worth a look. I'm not here to sell you anything today — I just wanted to introduce myself and offer a free, no-pressure look at your roof while we're out. Have you had anyone up on yours lately?"

What makes that work: it is honest about why they are there, it leads with the homeowner's roof not the company's services, it lowers the threat ("not here to sell you anything today"), and it ends with a question that is easy to answer. Have the rep say it out loud fifty times until it is theirs, not a recitation. Then drill the three most common door responses — "my roof's fine," "not interested," and "how much" — until they have a calm, non-defensive answer to each.

End of week one, the rep should be able to deliver the opener naturally, has been on a roof safely, can describe your process start to finish, and has personally watched at least 20 doors get knocked.

Week 2: the field — knocking with a vet, then solo doors and the first inspection

Week two is where the rep starts producing activity. The goal of the week is one solo-booked, solo-run inspection. Everything points at that.

The ride-along framework: I do, we do, you do

The classic apprenticeship model is the right one. Run it deliberately across the week:

1. I do (early week): The vet knocks, the new rep watches and takes notes. The vet narrates afterward: "Notice I stepped back off the porch when she opened the door — never crowd the threshold."
2. We do (mid week): The new rep knocks with the vet standing back, ready to step in only if it goes sideways. After each door, 60 seconds of feedback: one thing that went well, one thing to change. Specific, not "good job."
3. You do (end of week): The new rep knocks a block solo while the vet works the next street, then they compare notes over lunch.

The feedback discipline matters more than the script. Vague encouragement does nothing. "You talked for 40 seconds before you let her say a word — cut your opener in half and ask the question sooner" is coaching.

The first inspection, end to end

When a homeowner says yes to a look, the rep needs a repeatable inspection routine so they do not freeze. A clean residential inspection a new rep can learn in week two:

Ground-level walkaround first. Before the ladder, walk the perimeter. Note roof age clues (curling, cupping, missing shingles, granule piles at the downspouts), sagging lines, gutter and fascia condition, and any obvious storm damage. Take wide photos. This builds the case and warms the homeowner up.

On the roof (if safe): systematic, not random. Pick a corner and work in a pattern. Document: shingle condition and granule loss, seal/adhesion failure, cracked or creased shingles, flashing at chimneys/walls/valleys, pipe boots and their seals, vents, and any impact marks on soft metals (gutters, downspouts, vent caps, AC fins) which often show hail before the shingles do. Photograph everything, with a few wide shots for context and close-ups for evidence. A chalk circle and a tape measure in the frame make a photo legible later.

Write it up the same day. The single biggest unforced error a new rep makes is a sloppy or delayed write-up. Photos with no notes, no measurements, no clear summary — useless to production and unconvincing to the homeowner. Teach a standard inspection report format from day one (covered below) and require it before they leave the appointment in their mind.

By the end of week two: one inspection set and run solo, a clean written report produced, and the rep is hitting roughly half the daily activity floor on their own.

Week 3: the pitch and the close — turning inspections into signed jobs

Now the bottleneck moves. The rep can get on roofs and document them. The new gap is converting a documented problem into a signed contract. This is where most technically-competent reps stall, because asking for money feels different from inspecting a roof.

Present the findings without pressure

The presentation is a structured conversation, not a pitch deck. Teach this flow:

1. Show, don't tell. Walk the homeowner through the photos on the tablet, at the kitchen table. "Here's your roof — see this here? That's granule loss, the shingle's losing its protective layer. Here's a cracked one near the valley." The photos do the persuading.
2. State the condition plainly. "Based on the age and what I'm seeing, your roof is near the end of its service life" — or, if it is storm damage, "there's impact damage here, here, and here." Facts, not fear.
3. Lay out the options honestly. Repair vs. replace, the trade-offs, and the cost of waiting (a roof that's leaking does damage to decking, insulation, and drywall that compounds). Honesty about "you could get another year or two out of a repair" builds the trust that closes the bigger job.
4. Present the proposal and price clearly, then stop talking. New reps talk past the close out of nerves. Teach the silence.

Handling the real objections

Drill these the way you drilled the opener. The big four:

• "I need to think about it." Usually means an unspoken concern. "Totally fair — most people want to. Just so I can leave you with the right info, is it the price, the timing, or something about us you're weighing?"
• "I need to get other quotes." "Smart, you should. When you do, make sure you're comparing the same scope — a lot of the cheap numbers leave off [underlayment / proper flashing / permits]. Want me to write mine itemized so it's easy to compare?"
• "It's too expensive." Separate sticker shock from financing gap. Present financing options if you offer them, and reframe to cost-of-waiting and the value of the warranty and install quality.
• "Just give me your best price." Hold the line. "This is our real price for doing it right — full tear-off, proper underlayment, and a workmanship warranty. I'd rather give you the number I can stand behind than a low one I'd have to cut corners to hit."

The mock-close drill

Before the rep goes live on closing, run table-top mock presentations where you or a vet play the homeowner and throw real objections. Do it ten times. It is uncomfortable and it works. The goal of week three is the first signed job. If they had a strong week two, it often lands here.

Weeks 4–8: consistency, pipeline, and building the habit

The skills are now present in rough form. Weeks four through eight are about turning bursts of effort into a durable daily habit and a self-sustaining pipeline. This is the stretch where reps quietly quit, because the novelty is gone and the early luck (or lack of it) is wearing off. Your job shifts from teaching to coaching and protecting momentum.

Install the daily and weekly rhythm

• Daily activity floor, tracked in the CRM, reviewed by you. Doors, conversations, inspections set, inspections run, proposals out. If a rep is short on the floor, you catch it that day, not at month-end.
• A short morning huddle and an end-of-day number. Five minutes. What's the plan, what got done. Reps who report a number every day do not drift.
• A weekly one-on-one that looks at the funnel, not only the outcome. Where are deals stalling? If they're setting plenty of inspections but closing none, that's a presentation problem and you coach the close. If they're running plenty of inspections but few are converting to even a maybe, the targeting or the inspection quality is off. The funnel tells you what to fix.

Diagnose the leak with funnel math

This is the manager superpower during ramp. Build a simple per-rep funnel and read it weekly:

You cannot fix a ramp you cannot see. A rep who "isn't selling" is never just one thing — the funnel tells you whether it's the door, the inspection, or the close, and you coach the specific stage instead of generically pushing them to "try harder."

Protect the rep from the wrong doors

The fastest way to break a green rep in this window is to let them spend days knocking streets full of recently-replaced roofs. Nothing destroys confidence and pipeline like working homes that have no reason to need you. This is where targeting stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the difference between a rep who builds momentum and one who burns out — covered in the next section.

Give the rep the right doors: targeting as a ramp accelerator

Here is the lever almost nobody pulls hard enough. A new rep's biggest enemy is wasted effort — hours spent on roofs that are five years old, on streets where most homes were re-roofed after the last storm, on doors that were never going to need them. Every one of those is a confidence hit and a payroll dollar burned. The single fastest way to shorten ramp time is to make sure the green rep spends their limited, fragile early effort on homes that actually have a reason to need a roof.

This is exactly the problem RoofPredict is built to solve, and it maps cleanly onto the ramp. Instead of handing a new hire a map and saying "work this ZIP," you hand them a ranked due-roof list — RoofPredict scores every home in your service area by roof-age band (recent, mid-life, due, overdue) combined with each home's actual storm exposure and an opportunity score, then produces a house-by-house target audience with a "why this home" evidence chain. The rep is no longer guessing which doors are worth their time. They knock the overdue and due homes first, in a defined area you drew on a hex-map, and skip the new roofs entirely.

What that does for ramp specifically:

• It front-loads the rep's pipeline with real conversations. When the doors you knock are skewed toward roofs that are genuinely near or past the end of their service life, more conversations turn into inspections, and the funnel math that was demoralizing in week one starts working in the rep's favor in week four.
• It gives a green rep a credible reason for being there. A new hire who can say "a lot of the roofs on this street are getting to the age where they're worth a look" — and is actually standing in front of an overdue roof — sounds like they know something, even on day three. The "why this home" evidence chain (roof-age band plus storm history) is the back-pocket confidence a tenured rep has from experience and a green one does not.
• It lets you measure the rep against a clean input. When two reps work equally good lists, the difference in their results is the rep, not the luck of the street. That makes your coaching diagnosis honest.

A few honest limits, because overselling this would be a disservice: the scoring is a roof-age and storm-exposure heuristic, not a guarantee that any specific home needs a roof, and roof age is delivered as a range, not an exact install date — a home in the "overdue" band is a strong reason to knock, not proof of damage. The rep still has to get on the roof and document what is actually there. But pointing a new rep at due and overdue roofs instead of a random street is the most leveraged thing you can do to compress their ramp.

You can also seed the rep's first weeks from your own customer book. RoofPredict's lead pipeline and two-way CRM sync mean that past customers and old, never-closed estimates already sitting in HubSpot, JobNimbus, AccuLynx, ServiceTitan, or whichever of the supported systems you run can be surfaced as warm targets — a green rep calling a past customer whose roof has now aged into the "due" band has a far easier first conversation than a cold door. Warm reps ramp faster than cold ones.

Mail and microsites: warm the doors before the rep knocks

The other way to shorten ramp is to make the rep's knock warmer, so their first weeks are not pure cold contact. Cold door-knocking is the hardest possible version of the job to learn on. If the homeowner has already seen your name, the conversation starts several steps ahead.

RoofPredict turns the same ranked due-roof list into a tracked direct-mail campaign: personalized mail proofs (so the brand, copy, and address are checked before anything ships), vendor release, and per-piece delivery and return tracking, with the cost quoted up front. Every targeted home also gets a personalized report — roof profile, storm history, and a plain cost-of-waiting view — delivered as a PDF and a public microsite with a lead-capture form, plus per-home QR codes you can print on the mail piece and on door leave-behinds.

For ramp, that changes the rep's job in two concrete ways. First, a homeowner who got a piece of mail with your name, or who scanned a QR code and looked at their own roof's microsite, is a warmer knock — the rep is following up, not cold-opening. Second, the leave-behind QR gives a nervous new rep something to do at a no-answer or a "not now" door other than walk away empty: "No problem — here's a card, you can scan this and see a quick rundown of your own roof." That turns dead doors into trackable, capturable opportunities, and gives a green rep a graceful exit that still moves the ball. The point is not to replace the knock; it is to make a new rep's knocks land softer while they are still learning the hard parts.

The storm and insurance lane: what a new rep must and must not say

If your work includes storm restoration, the ramp has an extra, non-optional module: the legal and ethical lines around insurance claims. A green rep who says the wrong thing here can expose your company to serious liability and, in many states, accusations of acting as an unlicensed public adjuster. Teach this on day one of any storm training, in writing, and test for it.

The safe frame is simple and you should make every rep recite it: a roofer documents the roof, writes an accurate repair estimate for their own scope of work, and hands it to the homeowner. The homeowner files the claim. The insurer decides coverage. The rep's job is thorough documentation and an honest, well-built estimate — never claim handling.

Here is the do-not-say list. Drill it as hard as you drill the opener. A new rep may NOT, for a fee:

• Negotiate, adjust, or "handle" the claim on the homeowner's behalf.
• Interpret the homeowner's policy or tell them what is and isn't covered.
• Promise a specific payout, approval, or that the claim "will go through."
• Promise the deductible will be waived, absorbed, covered, or "taken care of" — waiving or absorbing a deductible is illegal in many states and is insurance fraud.
• Advertise or imply a "free roof."
• Represent the homeowner against the insurance company — that is unlicensed public adjusting.

What a new rep absolutely CAN and should do: inspect thoroughly, document damage with clear dated photos, write an accurate repair estimate aligned to standard estimating practice for their own scope, explain the homeowner's options honestly, and hand the homeowner the documentation so the homeowner can file. "I'll document everything I find and give you a clear estimate. You file with your carrier, and they decide what's covered. If they approve it, we do the work right." That sentence keeps a green rep — and your company — on the right side of the line.

A practical reason to get this into the ramp early: storm work is where a new rep is most tempted to overpromise to close a nervous homeowner, and it is exactly where overpromising is most dangerous. Make the compliant version the only version they learn.

ROOFCLAIM: shortening the documentation learning curve on storm work

The documentation-and-estimate side of storm work is genuinely hard for a new rep to learn, and it is the part that separates a credible roofer from a guesser at the kitchen table. RoofPredict's ROOFCLAIM module is built to compress that learning curve while keeping the rep strictly on the documentation side of the line.

Concretely, ROOFCLAIM lets a rep (and your supplement/production team) intake a claim linked to the specific home, upload and auto-classify and OCR the claim documents (the carrier estimate, your contractor estimate, photos, denial letters, invoices), and then runs opportunity detection that maps the estimate's line items against a roofing knowledge base and flags missing scope, code-required items, and missed supplements — with evidence anchors and pricing attached. For a green rep, that is a senior estimator's eye, on a template, catching the things they don't yet know to look for. It also runs a recoverable-depreciation checklist (completion evidence plus final-invoice items), tracks deductibles, scores packet completeness, and keeps a supplement follow-up cadence so a new rep's documentation doesn't fall through the cracks while they're still learning the process.

Every one of those outputs — supplement packets, depreciation-release letters, deductible invoices, missing-docs letters, audit reports — runs on locked, compliance-gated, contractor-documentation-only templates. The tooling is built so a new rep produces thorough, accurate documentation of their own scope without wandering into claim handling, coverage interpretation, or deductible promises. It speeds up the part you want sped up (documentation quality and completeness) while structurally keeping the rep on the safe side of the public-adjusting line. That is the right kind of acceleration for a ramp: faster competence, not faster shortcuts.

The standard inspection report: a template your new rep can't mess up

Give every new rep a fixed report format so the quality of their documentation doesn't depend on their judgment in week two. A workable residential roof inspection report includes:

• Header: homeowner name, address, date, rep name, roof age estimate (as a range), and roof type.
• Ground observations: gutters, fascia, soffit, downspouts, drainage, visible sag, landscape/access notes.
• Roof field observations: shingle condition, granule loss, seal/adhesion, cracking/creasing, prior repairs, layers.
• Penetrations and flashing: chimney, walls, valleys, pipe boots, vents, skylights — each noted and photographed.
• Storm/impact section (if applicable): dated, with impact marks on soft metals documented and located.
• Measurements: from your measurement source, with squares, pitch, and facets.
• Summary and recommendation: plain-language condition statement and repair-vs-replace recommendation, with the cost of waiting noted.
• Photo log: every photo labeled and tied to a location.

Require it on every inspection from inspection number one. A rep who learns a sloppy habit in week two carries it for a year. A standard format also makes your QA fast — you can glance at any new rep's report and immediately see whether the documentation is complete.

Comp, draws, and not starving your new rep out

No ramp plan survives a comp plan that financially breaks the rep before they get good. The single most common reason a promising new roofing rep quits in the danger window is money stress, not skill. You have to bridge them across the unpaid-learning gap.

Options, roughly in order of how well they support ramp:

• A recoverable draw against commission. The rep gets a guaranteed weekly amount that is later recovered from their commissions once deals close. It carries them through the first 60–90 days without the company simply giving money away. The risk: if the draw is too generous and the rep never produces, you eat it — so pair it with hard activity floors and a clear cutoff.
• A base plus commission, declining over the ramp. A real base for the first 90 days that steps down as commission ramps up. More expensive for you, but it dramatically lowers churn for hires who have other options.
• A pure-commission plan with a strong warm-lead supply. This only works if you are genuinely feeding the rep warm opportunities (your customer book, mailed-and-warmed doors, a tight due-roof list) so they can close fast enough to live on commission early. Pure commission plus cold doors plus no list is how you guarantee churn.

Whatever you choose, put it in writing, walk through a worked example of a real paycheck on a real average deal, and be explicit about chargebacks on cancellations and the FTC three-day cancellation right. A rep who understands exactly how and when they get paid sells with a clearer head.

What pros get wrong when ramping reps

The failure patterns are remarkably consistent across companies. Avoid these and you are ahead of most.

"Sink or swim." Handing a green rep a list and a polo and seeing if they make it. It selects for nothing except people who happened to already know how to do the job — which is most of the people you didn't need to train. It is the single most expensive hiring policy in roofing because of the churn and the wasted territory.

No leading-metric tracking. Watching only signed jobs. By the time the lagging metric tells you a rep is failing, they've already mentally quit. You must track doors, conversations, and inspections daily and react to those.

Teaching the close before the inspection. Reps who can close but can't inspect write garbage scopes that production and homeowners hate. Build competence in the right order: product → safety → doors → inspection → presentation → close.

Letting the rep pick their own doors from day one. A green rep left to choose their own streets gravitates to comfortable, low-yield areas and burns weeks on roofs that don't need them. Hand them the list. Earn the right to free-range later.

No ride-alongs after week two. A few days of shadowing then total abandonment. Schedule a vet ride-along at least weekly through week eight; it's where the highest-value coaching happens because it's specific and in-context.

Vague feedback. "Good job" and "you'll get there" coach nothing. Feedback has to name the specific behavior and the specific change.

Overpromising on storm work to make the first sale. A scared new rep facing their first close on a storm job is exactly the person most likely to say "we'll get your deductible covered" to get the signature. That one sentence can cost you a license complaint. The compliance module is not optional and it is not a formality.

Comp that starves the ramp. Covered above. Money stress kills more promising reps than lack of talent does.

A field-ready 90-day ramp checklist

Print this. Hand it to the new rep and the manager. Check the boxes.

Before day one

• Gear, CRM access, field app, all tested and logged in
• First defined area and ranked due-roof list ready
• Written 90-day plan and comp plan in hand
• Compliance + storm conduct rules in writing

Week 1 — foundation

• Product and roof-aging literacy taught
• Ladder/roof safety, hands-on and supervised
• Opener drilled 50+ reps, three door-responses handled
• Shadowed 20+ doors with a vet

Week 2 — field

• I-do / we-do / you-do ride-along run across the week
• Standard inspection routine learned
• First inspection set and run solo
• First clean written report produced

Week 3 — pitch and close

• Findings-presentation flow drilled
• Big-four objections drilled
• 10 mock closes run
• First signed job

Weeks 4–8 — consistency

• Daily activity floor tracked and reviewed
• Morning huddle + end-of-day number habit
• Weekly funnel-math one-on-one
• 8–12 live opportunities self-sustained

Months 2–3 — full ramp

• Funnel stages all within range of a tenured rep
• Break-even on closed gross profit
• Storm/compliance frame solid and tested
• Producing at the tenured floor, predictably

Measure the whole thing: ramp time as a number you manage

Last piece. Treat ramp itself as a metric you improve over time, not a one-off. Track, for every rep you hire: days to first inspection, days to first signed job, days to break-even, and 90-day and 180-day retention. Once you have a few reps through the plan, you can see which weeks leak, which managers ramp people fastest, and whether a change you made (a better list, a draw, more ride-alongs) actually moved the number.

RoofPredict's results funnel helps here on the demand side of the ramp: it tracks delivered → views → form → calls → leads → wins with cost-per-lead and cost-per-win, and shows actual vs. estimate vs. an industry benchmark, with A/B variants on campaigns. When you're feeding a new rep mailed-and-warmed doors and a ranked list, that funnel tells you whether the inputs you're handing the rep are actually producing the warm conversations that make ramp fast — so you can separate "the rep needs coaching" from "the rep was handed bad doors." Honest measurement of the inputs makes honest coaching of the rep possible.

The companies that ramp reps fast are not the ones with the most charismatic hires. They are the ones who decided that ramping is a system — a defined finish line, a week-by-week build, the right doors handed to the rep, leading metrics watched daily, real coaching in the field, a comp plan that doesn't starve them, and a compliance line they never cross. Build that system once and every rep after it ramps faster than the last. If you want to hand your next new hire a ranked list of the roofs in your area that are actually due — and warm those doors with tracked mail and a microsite before they ever knock — that's exactly what RoofPredict is for. Book a demo and we'll show you what your service area looks like, house by house.

FAQ

How long should it take to ramp a new roofing sales rep?

With a structured plan, a full-time residential rep should book and run a solo inspection by week two, sign their first job by weeks three to five, build a self-sustaining pipeline of 8 to 12 live opportunities by weeks six to eight, and reach break-even (their closed gross profit covering their comp and carry cost) by month two or three, with full ramp to a tenured production floor by month three or four. Storm markets, insurance vs. retail work, and your average ticket shift these numbers, so set your own targets from your crew's actual history rather than treating any benchmark as fixed.

What is the single biggest thing that speeds up rep ramp?

Handing the rep the right doors instead of letting them choose their own streets. A green rep has a small, fragile amount of early effort, and spending it on recently-replaced roofs or low-yield streets crushes both their pipeline and their confidence. When you point them at homes that are genuinely due or overdue for a roof — by age band plus storm exposure — more of their conversations turn into inspections, and the funnel math starts working in their favor in week four instead of demoralizing them in week one.

Should I pay a new roofing rep a base salary, a draw, or pure commission?

A recoverable draw against commission is usually the best balance: it carries the rep through the unpaid-learning gap of the first 60 to 90 days and is later recovered from their commissions, so the company doesn't simply give money away. Pair it with hard activity floors and a clear cutoff. A declining base plus commission lowers churn further for hires with other options but costs more. Pure commission only works if you are genuinely feeding the rep warm opportunities; pure commission plus cold doors and no list reliably produces churn. Whatever you choose, put it in writing and walk through a real example paycheck.

In what order should I teach a new roofing rep their skills?

Build competence in a sequence that compounds: product and roof-aging literacy first, then ladder and roof safety, then the door opener and objection handling, then a repeatable inspection routine and clean write-up, then the findings presentation, and only then the close. Teaching the close before the inspection produces reps who can talk a homeowner into a contract but write scopes that production and the homeowner don't trust. Each skill should be solid before you layer the next on top.

How do I tell whether a struggling new rep is fixable or should be cut?

Read their funnel, stage by stage, against a tenured rep. If doors aren't turning into conversations, it's the opener or the targeting. If conversations aren't turning into inspections, they aren't asking for the look or aren't building value. If inspections aren't producing proposals, the inspection or write-up is weak. If proposals aren't closing, it's objection handling. A rep who 'isn't selling' is never just one thing, and a specific stage problem is usually coachable. A rep who is short on raw activity day after day despite coaching, with a clean list handed to them, is a different decision.

What can a new rep say about insurance and deductibles on storm jobs?

Keep them strictly on the documentation side. A rep documents the roof, writes an accurate repair estimate for their own scope of work, and hands it to the homeowner, who files the claim while the insurer decides coverage. A rep must never negotiate or handle the claim, interpret the policy or tell the homeowner what is covered, promise a payout or approval, promise the deductible will be waived or absorbed (illegal in many states and considered fraud), advertise a 'free roof', or represent the homeowner against the insurer — that last one is unlicensed public adjusting. Teach the do-not-say list as hard as you teach the door opener.

How important are ride-alongs, and how long should they continue?

Ride-alongs are where the highest-value coaching happens because the feedback is specific and in context. Run the apprenticeship model deliberately in week two — I do, we do, you do — and then keep a vet ride-along at least weekly through week eight. The common mistake is a few days of shadowing followed by total abandonment. The feedback discipline matters more than any script: name the specific behavior and the specific change, not 'good job.'

What's a reasonable daily activity floor for a new door-knocking rep?

In a normal (non-storm) market, a full-time new rep working doors might attempt 60 to 80 doors, have 8 to 12 real conversations, and set 1 to 2 inspections per day, with inspections run and proposals presented climbing as their calendar fills in weeks three and four. These are starting frames — adjust hard for storm markets, retail vs. insurance work, and whether the rep is also working your existing customer list, which produces warmer, higher-converting contacts. Track the floor daily in the CRM so you catch a shortfall the same day, not at month-end.

How can mail and microsites shorten a new rep's ramp?

Cold door-knocking is the hardest version of the job to learn on. When a homeowner has already received a piece of mail with your name or scanned a QR code to view a personalized report of their own roof, the rep is following up rather than cold-opening, and the conversation starts several steps ahead. A per-home QR leave-behind also gives a nervous new rep a graceful action at no-answer or 'not now' doors — 'scan this and see a quick rundown of your roof' — which turns dead doors into trackable opportunities instead of empty walk-aways.

Should I track ramp time itself as a metric?

Yes. Treat ramp as a number you improve over time, not a one-off. For every hire, track days to first inspection, days to first signed job, days to break-even, and 90- and 180-day retention. Once a few reps have run the plan, you can see which weeks leak, which managers ramp people fastest, and whether a change you made — a better list, a draw, more ride-alongs — actually moved the number. Managing ramp as a metric is how each new rep ramps faster than the last.