5 Keys to Managing a High Performance Restoration Sales Team

Leading a high-performance restoration sales team isn’t just about hiring charismatic reps or setting ambitious goals—it’s about engineering an environment where consistent execution, strategic planning, and full-team alignment become the norm. In this article, I’m breaking down five essential levers that drive sales success in restoration: the tools, rhythms, and frameworks that separate the teams that consistently win from those who stall out or churn talent. Whether you’re building a sales org from scratch or leveling up an existing crew, these keys will help you move from chaos to clarity—and get results that stick.

1. Every Rep Needs a Plan

At Floodlight, we refer to it as the Sales Blueprint. Just a fancy way of saying a customized sales plan.

A sales plan not only helps to build confidence within the rep early on, it also serves as a north star for the rep and their leader to work off of. Here are the key elements of a good plan:

• Industry verticals they’re going to be focused on
• Referral partner categories or geographic areas they are responsible for
• Trade groups, associations, and other networking groups they’re going to build a presence in 
• Roles/Titles they will be reaching out to (Chief Engineer, Risk Managers, GM’s, Administrators, Community Managers)
• Methods for sparking relationships (ERP, MSA, Facility Services, Plumber Programs, CE Classes, Golf Outings, Private Events, Equipment Staging) 
• Daily/Weekly/Monthly activity mix and minimum volume (cold calls, sales meetings, networking meetings, 50/5/1) 
• Budget for prospecting and events
• Target revenue
• Target job volume

This plan becomes the north star of your weekly one-on-ones. The fact that you have a documented plan might actually be more important than the numbers and information in it. Why is that?

Because it gives you a basis for recalibrating. If we don’t sit down and create a plan of attack for the reps, when they’re not succeeding, it’s very hard to determine what to change. We’re often left to simply prescribe more activity or the gradual death spiral of “maybe this rep just doesn’t have what it takes.”

But with a plan, we have the potential to methodically pull levers and flip switches to see if we can produce the results.

Here’s what I mean—if the original plan called for the rep to get 50 fresh contacts or drop-ins each week, and after three months, there are no jobs coming in or qualified prospects in the pipeline, one of the first things we’d coach that rep to do, is increase the number of fresh contacts they’re making every week. Maybe they need to do 100 per week for the next 60 or 90 days to generate more qualified prospects and get more opportunities coming through the door. 

Likewise, if the rep previously ramped up their activity, and still isn’t seeing the results, then we shift gears and explore the quality of the interactions they’re having during their field activity.

And then lastly, if we have a sales rep who has ramped up their activity, is following the methodology, and is skilled in their conversations, it’s possible we need to shift to a different vertical. Perhaps there’s a more underserved vertical that the rep could exploit that might yield results more quickly.

2. Weekly One-on-Ones

One-time sales training doesn’t stick. Reps need:

• Weekly one-on-ones with performance review and coaching
• Call ride-alongs or CRM review sessions
• Feedback loops focused on improvement, not inspection

For a lot of owners, this is the hardest part of managing a sales team, even if you have only one or two to oversee. With all the other responsibilities on their plate, many owners struggle to maintain a cadence of consistent one-on-ones with their reps. Yet, it’s probably the most powerful management tool. 

The one-on-one is really in service to the sales rep. This is where we help them strategically update their plan if their current approach isn’t working. It’s all about rallying around the plan, and updating our strategy and activity mix until they find their groove and the results start popping.

One-on-ones are for our hotshot reps, too. The focus is different for our reps that are thriving. If we’re on pace to smash their goals, maybe we need to help them ideate what it would be like to move the horizon and chase a bigger goal. During one-on-ones we help them forecast what that would mean for their personal situation, overall income and their career if we moved the goal posts. We also help them identify what behaviors or disciplines they may need to implement to jump to a new level. 

One-on-ones must be weekly to milk the maximum potential out of the team. 

3. Pick a compensation structure that rewards high performers: 

When crafting a compensation package, we want to address the full cost of the sales rep, and ensure that the company is receiving a good ROI on the spend, but we also want to motivate top performers to keep reaching after they’ve hit their quota. We never want someone to max out their commission- there should always be motivation to push beyond. 

Here’s a structure we’ve seen work really well: 

• Establish a quota based on the salary that you had to offer to land them, add in benefits and burden to get a full cost, then multiply by 10. Until they hit this number, they’ll be paid a discounted commission on the work they bring in. 
• Pick commission rates you’re comfortable with based on your current pro forma. A good default for most restorers is 2% of everything they bring in. Some restorers separate out commission for MIT vs RECON, but generally, we recommend you pay a flat commission for both. It’s easier to account for and easier for the rep to project their earnings. 
• Once the rep hits their base quota, they jump to 3% commission on everything that they sell. 
• Lastly, we like to add a high performer threshold. Once the rep reaches it, they receive 5% commission on everything they bring in for the remainder of the year. For this commission, we recommend that it’s MIT only, and 3% for RECON. This booster gives a high performer a large incentive to keep hunting.

Getting the compensation structure right will help you attract the best talent, and keep from overpaying the underperformers while they’re on your payroll.

4. Equip your reps with the right training and methodology

Even highly successful sales reps need training and guidance. Inexperienced reps can be made more successful with the right approach, and top reps can continue to level up with the right skill building and increase in confidence. 

• Give them a proven methodology and approach for their sales. Make sure the entire team speaks the same language of selling for this industry. Consultative or pain/solution selling is far and away the most tested and proven selling system for commercial sales and referral partner development.
  Give them tools and techniques for managing their time effectively, to minimize their time lost to driving/travel. At Floodlight we teach the anchor strategy, but there are also apps designed to minimize drive time, like Badger Maps. 
• Give them a full overview of the key people, processes and systems that differentiate your restoration company from the other contractors in your market. 
• Role Play key talk tracks with the reps. Build confidence through repetition before they hit the field. 

Obviously, training is not limited to their onboarding. Coaching, mentoring and training around specific skills, talk tracks, discovery questions and delivery are key elements of weekly one-on-ones and team meetings. And nothing is more powerful than role play. We can roleplay property walks, ERP’s, discovery conversations, cold call openers, sponsor talks on the mic at events, curious questions to ask during sales meetings, using assumptive language, etc. 

5. Rigorously pursue alignment with the Service Team

The number one reason that sales reps fail in the service industries is that they lose confidence and conviction in their sales team. They cease to believe that their team can deliver on the promise they’re making in the field. 

This is a major part of your job as either the sales manager or the Owner if you’re managing the sales team for now. Your job is to create alignment between what’s being sold in the field, and delivered by the ops team.

One of the most powerful ways that we can prevent this as a company or owner is to do what we at Floodlight call the Pain/Solution Table Exercise. 

This is where we gather our leadership and our salespeople. (Or for a smaller company, you, the owner or GM meet with your department managers and your sales rep.) We get in front of a white board or flip chart and do the following: 

• Create a simple T-table: Title the left-hand column “Pain” and the right “Solution”
• As a team, make an exhaustive list of all the pain points, frustrations, irritations, and moments of confusion that occur during the typical restoration experience. Be as specific as possible and take your time really thinking through all the possibilities. Give consideration to the fact that you have several types of customers you serve- consider their unique pain points- adjusters, referral partners, Mr. & Mrs. Jones, commercial decision-makers
• Then, as a team, one by one, address each of those pain points and ask yourselves- “what system, process, or person on our team solves this pain-point?” And write that in on the right side, opposite each pain point.

It’s important to get very clear

You’ll find that this is actually a very strategic and powerful exercise for the whole team. A couple of things to pay attention to:

– Avoid generic pain points like “Communication.” While communication is unquestionably a major pain point in all of home services, it’s critical for the exercise to be more specific. There are in fact several forms of pain related to communication. Communication can be unclear and unprofessional—uber-long paragraphs that no one will want to read, poor spelling and grammar, etc. It can also be an issue of frequency—the customer is frustrated because they aren’t getting updates from us often enough.

– Be really clear about what the actual pain is. You can achieve this by asking, “How is that painful?” or “Why is that painful?”

If we have any hope of identifying our existing solution to these pain points or developing one to close a current gap, we have to first be clear on what the actual pain is.

Here is another quick example of a pain point that many multi-family property managers have experienced: 

A mold remediation is taking place in a unit at an apartment complex. An unrelated tenant walks by the technicians working in the affected space and asks, “What are you guys doing?” Without pausing, one of the technicians replies, “We’re just taking care of some mold in this unit.”

This is an example of a technician having an inappropriate conversation on a job site. But think about the pain to the property manager. What happens when that tenant tells other tenants, complains that they also have a problem, etc.? 

Identifying the Solutions

The solutions to these pain points should always be a person/role on your team, a system, or a process. Be very careful not to reference one of your company values as an intrinsic solution to a particular pain point. We call that cheerleader solutions- “That would never happen with us, communication is one of our company values.” 

Here’s an example of a solution to a common pain point we refer to as the Silent Phase. This is the period following MIT before repairs begin, when we are negotiating scope with the adjuster and lining up our subs. It often feels to the client like, “Nothing is happening! What are we waiting for?!”

It is often a source of great frustration for your typical homeowner. 

So, what is a good solution for this? Well, there are probably endless ways to solve that pain, but here’s what Brandon and I did years ago. We hired the graphic designer who did all of our fliers and things, to create a Monopoly or LIFE gameboard-style graphic of the whole restoration process, from the initial response to the final pack-back and post-construction cleaning.

Our estimators started reviewing this gameboard-style graphic with their customers during their initial scope walk, ideally before MIT was even finished and equipment was still in place. The results were strong. By proactively pointing out “The Silent Phase” ahead of time, and explaining what was actually being done behind the scenes, we almost instantly saw a reduction in customer calls and complaints, “Why is no one here starting work?” “When are people going to get here and start doing the repairs?” 

Take Action on Your Sales Rep’s Customer Feedback

When your sales rep brings negative feedback from a customer, it’s critical you respond appropriately. Here’s a good four-step approach that will help preserve your sales rep’s confidence in the team and recover the client’s trust: 

• Investigate what happened
• Get clear on the customer’s requirements- what do they need or prefer to see happen
• Come up with a service recovery plan
• Communicate everything to the sales rep so they’re in the loop

I know this is basic stuff, but often, especially in restoration, we can default to being defensive when our sales reps bring back criticism from the client. We can default to “defending” our technicians, PMs or admins. Even at times telling the sales rep, “You don’t know how hard it is to do what we do.”

Customers don’t expect perfect service, and neither do most sales reps. But they do expect the company to make it right and in a timely fashion. 

If we can just hold to that standard and continually work to implement clear and concrete solutions to our customer’s most common pain points, we can build a team that has maximum conviction about what they’re able to accomplish for their client. And everybody wins. 

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