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A RocketLevel piece for restoration owners and sales managers who have a commercial rep underperforming and cannot tell why, backed by decades of experience in the trade. About a 7-minute read.
Your rep is probably good at the job they came from, and nobody told them the job changed.
In RocketLevel's experience, most stalled commercial meetings in this trade trace back to one of two behaviors, and both were correct in the role the person came from. Neither corrects itself, because from the inside both feel like doing the job well.
You promoted your best production lead, because they know more about a building than anyone on the payroll. Now they are across the table from a facility director who asks how long the third floor is going to be down.
They answer with airflow. Equipment counts, the drying goal, why they cannot commit to a date before Wednesday's readings. Every word of it is correct, and the facility director still has nothing to work with, because they do not have an airflow problem. They have forty people who will ask this afternoon when they get their floor back, and they need something to tell them.
Understand what is actually happening before you correct it. The production person withholds the date out of fear of being wrong, and in the old job being wrong about a date had consequences they could feel in their week. What they have not learned yet is that this decision maker needs a date more than they need it to be accurate. A facility director can work with a range. They cannot work with silence, because silence is the one thing they cannot forward to anybody.
So do not make your rep guess. Teach them the shape of a professional answer: the earliest, the latest, what decides between them, and the day the range narrows. "Best case Thursday, worst case Tuesday. It turns on what the subfloor reads Wednesday morning, and I will call you Wednesday by ten either way." It holds up technically, and the facility director can forward it as written.
Then run the same translation across everything else they say. Six air movers and two LGR (low grain refrigerant) dehumidifiers becomes: the hallway is loud and closed through Thursday, send your third-floor people to the north stairs. A Category 3 determination becomes: nobody goes back into that space until we are finished, and here is the one sentence you can put in an email explaining why.
Decision: at the next debrief, take the three most technical things they said and write the business consequence of each one. If they cannot produce the consequence, that is the coaching, and it is an hour of work rather than a personality problem.
The other failure moves your best residential rep across. They are fast and warm and they close in the room, because in residential the person in front of them can actually say yes. It is a homeowner standing in their own kitchen.
In a commercial building that person almost never can. Push a facility manager toward a decision they have no authority to make and they get defensive, then stop returning calls without ever telling you why. Your rep books it as a lost deal, and neither of them ever learns what happened.
The part that catches people out is how commercial authority splits, and it splits in a way peculiar to loss work. Many facilities do give the manager standing authority to authorize emergency mitigation, because waiting on procurement while water spreads makes the loss worse and everyone in the building knows it. So you can get a handshake at two in the morning and have equipment running by three. Then the reconstruction that follows goes somewhere else entirely: a different approval path, frequently a competitive bid, often a different budget line, because emergency spend and a capital rebuild are not the same money.
Contractors who read that 2 a.m. authorization as owning the rebuild find out in week three that it is out to bid. Nobody acted in bad faith; that is how the building has to buy.
Which makes the qualifying question obvious once you have watched it happen once: "What can you authorize on your own at two in the morning, and what has to go somewhere else?" Ask it in the first meeting, long before there is a loss. Facility managers don't hear it as rude. It tells them you have worked in buildings like theirs.