Five Star Bath Solutions has been remodeling bathrooms since 1996. Now with 100+ locations across the US, their primary goal is empowering reps to speak the same language. Physical ridealongs offered a sanitized view, and sales strategy calls didn't provide enough feedback. They needed a smoother, more efficient process to verify delivery and help new agents self-correct.

The challenges

For a company like Five Star Bath Solutions, an efficient sales process is everything. 

‍"Sales is the most crucial operation of what we do," said Sam Armstrong, VP of Sales. "It's the magic that takes the money going into marketing and turns it into revenue."

The company had already built a powerful sales funnel, but wanted more visibility into their 100+ locations. Sales managers rarely had time for physical ridealongs, and even when they did, they found the interactions “too sterilized.”

"If you do a ridealong, you get a sanitized version of your rep's work," Sam said. "You don't really get a sense of what is really happening in the home."

Five Star Bath Solutions was particularly interested in optimization. The more granular their insights, the more pointed feedback they could provide to agents. "[We wanted to] improve the efficiency of the sales process, which improves the efficiency of the entire business," said Dominic Ortman, VP of Operations. "But we didn't know if the sales process was taking place in the home before Rilla."

Supporting the sales process with Rilla

President Dean Hartley heard about Rilla at a networking conference. 

"The idea of a tool that could give us insight into our customers and salespeople excited me," Dean said. "As you get a little bit larger, ridealongs don't get done as much as they should."

It didn't take long for the team to see Rilla's benefits, including the VP of Sales. "People come at me with software all the time," Sam said. "But when I saw Rilla was an opportunity to see sales interactions in homes across the country, I realized its full potential."

The results

Rilla has provided Five Star Bath Solutions with several innate efficiencies. It takes "just six months" to pay for the software, which is far less than the cost of physical ridealongs.

"Rilla allowed us to make critical decisions without cutting any corners," Dominic said. Bringing in an additional one sale a week per rep would more than make up for the Rilla license."

The company now has access to real-time feedback from customers, including talk ratios between agents and prospects. This allows them to make their "effectiveness exponential" and "avoid the skids that happen when reps go off script."

"Being able to steer a new agent in the right direction right from the beginning is critical to the longevity of the agent and location," Dominic summarized.

Dean agrees.

"We have a hundred locations around the country to deal with," Dean said. "[Rilla] gives me the ability to fly through a transcript. If I see something off, I can fast-forward and listen to the words. You can get a pretty good assessment in 1/10th the time of a ridealong."