Wondering what to do with the dreaded “roofing offseason”? Many roofers find themselves with a lighter schedule in January and February, as bad weather and cold temperatures limit the amount of jobs they can complete. And while the downtime can seem boring, it also presents an opportunity for long-term planning and strategizing for your year ahead.

One way to utilize the roofing offseason time well is to use it to prepare a roofing sales strategy. This way, when your work picks up and your sales team is back in the field, you’ll be able to generate more leads, win more jobs, and be more productive. Developing your strategy now can equip your teams to be more effective later. Here are a few things you can do during the roofing offseason to build your sales strategy.

Put Together Sales Training Techniques

How do you help your sales teams get up to speed and sell most effectively? Implementing training techniques can help you build a sales team with the expertise and efficiency to close more deals. If you don’t have standardized training for your salespeople, or it hasn’t been updated in a while, now is the time to put one together.

What should be in your sales training? Every roofing sales strategy will be different, but the training should include the most important components of selling for your business, in a way that is easy for your teams to understand and implement. It should help salespeople understand what to do when they encounter pushback from potential customers, how to talk about your roofing business, and when a prospect stops being worth pursuing. If there’s specific messaging you want potential customers to receive during the sales process, it needs to be clear in the training.

Training is also the place to help your salespeople understand what tactics they can use—should they be straightforward? Friendly? Persistent? How much freedom do they have to decide how to approach a given prospect?

There are many ways to train and reinforce strategy with your salespeople. Some businesses might benefit from slideshows and demonstrations. Others might want to train using skits and role-playing. Still others might want to have their sales techniques in binders or booklets. If you have a roofing software system like AccuLynx, you could associate sales training notes with the jobs and prospects that your salespeople are working on. Or maybe a combination of techniques works best for you. Whatever you do, just make sure that you’re training your teams in the same way and keeping your expectations consistent.

Get the Tools Roofing Salespeople Need to Succeed

Training is only one piece of the puzzle. A successful sales strategy also requires investing in tools and technology that will help your sales teams accomplish their goals and sell more jobs. During this time of year, it’s important to take a look at your business technology and determine what’s working for you—and what isn’t. Before things get busy again, you want to be equipped with the right technology to make selling easier.

Which technology will be most helpful for your business? Some of this will depend on your needs, and what challenges your roofing business is facing. Before you make any decisions about technology, it’s important to assess these factors and determine what you most need help with. But regardless of the challenges specific to your business, all sales teams can benefit from using tools that were specifically designed with roofers in mind.

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Roofing software like AccuLynx can provide sales teams with critical support. For instance, on the AccuLynx dashboard, you can see at a glance how your leads are progressing through the sales pipeline, making it easy to identify issues in the process and keep track of how your salespeople are doing. The SmartDocs feature enables you to create smart templates that streamline the estimate and contract process, allowing you to move jobs along more quickly. AccuLynx also integrates with lead tools like SalesRabbit, Spotio and HomeAdvisor to help you centralize your sales activities and eliminate duplicate data entry.

Empower Better Communication

One of the biggest challenges that many roofers face with their sales teams is poor communication. From information that gets left behind in the office to difficulties documenting interactions with prospects, communication problems can have a major impact on sales team performance. A key part of preparing your roofing sales strategy is making sure that your salespeople can communicate effectively.

Fortunately, many roofing software systems have created mobile apps that can improve communication between sales and office staff. AccuLynx offers the Field App, which lets sales teams take the functionality of AccuLynx out into the field with them. Salespeople can add notes to customer and prospect profiles, message the rest of the team, create and send documents, and order aerial roof measurements, right from their smartphones. When everyone on your team is on the same page and using the same tools, it reduces breakdowns in communication and enables more effective work.

Don’t wait to put together a roofing sales strategy until your busy season starts. Now is the time to make sure that your salespeople will be equipped for success in the coming months. Through training techniques, effective technology, and better communication strategies, you can read more customers and win more jobs in the new year.