How Express Flooring coaches 150+ design consultants with Craft
- +20%
- close rate, company-wide
- +22%
- net sales per lead issued
- 150+
- design consultants coached
“A sales manager has the ability to now be in 20 ride-alongs a day, instead of being on one.”
Jonnathan Rodriguez
Chief Revenue Officer, Express Flooring
Express Flooring runs one of the largest in-home flooring sales operations in the country. Every appointment is a long, detailed conversation in somebody's living room. Until recently, all of it evaporated the moment the rep walked out the door.
Before Craft
A manager who could ride along with one appointment a day out of twenty. Trainers playing the customer in role plays while taking notes at the same time. Tens of thousands of unsold estimates handed to a rehash team whose only context was whatever the rep remembered to write down.
With Craft
One recording of every appointment, scored against Express's own methodology. Reps hear themselves and self-correct. New hires practice against an AI homeowner before they knock on a real door. Rehash reps open a lead already knowing the objection, the product, and the real bottom price.
Recording the conversation changed everything downstream of it: one operating layer on the conversations Express was already having, feeding coaching, training, follow-up, and the sale itself.
The problem
Coaching couldn't reach the whole floor, training ran on memory, and a rehash team worked blind
Express Flooring is a PE-backed contractor with more than 150 design consultants running in-home appointments across its markets. They have a formal sales methodology, the Forge, and a leadership team that takes process adherence seriously. What they lacked was any way to observe whether it was being followed.
The constraint was physical. A manager could sit in on one appointment a day. Everything else was invisible, and the reps who most needed correction were the least likely to request a ride-along. Training had the same ceiling: trainers played the homeowner and debriefed from memory, doing both jobs at once.
Downstream, a small rehash team triaged a large daily queue of unsold estimates with nothing but the consultant's note to work from. Reps called homeowners back without knowing the real objection, the product discussed, or the lowest price already offered, so they discounted again from a number they couldn't see.
The solution
One recording, four jobs: coaching, training, follow-up, and post-sale handoff
Design consultants record the entire appointment from a tablet tied to their CRM. Craft, which Express renamed Centurion to match their internal language, scores the conversation against the Forge rather than a generic template. Everything else runs off that one recording.
Coaching. Mid-appointment, a rep stepping out to the truck for samples can pull up a checkpoint: what they missed, which objections are live, a read on the homeowner. Afterward they get two things done well, one thing to improve, and jump-to-moment replay on the objections and the pricing conversation.
Training. New hires practice against an AI homeowner that varies by personality type — talkative, evasive, analytical, domineering — before they ever meet a real one. The full-script final runs while Craft records and scores it, so the trainer can be the difficult customer without also being the note-taker.
“This is a tool that just runs in the background. It's non-bias, it's not going to sugarcoat anything. It's always going to give you the hard, honest truth.”
Inside sales
The rehash team stops flying blind
Every unsold appointment now generates a structured summary for the inside sales team: the product and colors discussed, whether financing was needed, the budget, the price actually agreed to, and the objection that stopped it. Each lead is scored hot, warm, or cold, and the score keeps updating as new activity lands. Craft replaced their previous rehash tooling outright, and their Director of Inside Sales reported one of their best rehash months on record during the transition.
“Our inside sales team is no longer flying blind. They now have the information they need to close the customer, and Centurion (Express' internal branding of Craft) actually helps them close it.”
The results
A 20% company-wide close rate lift, and more revenue from the same lead flow
Express isn't running a pilot. Craft is deployed across every market and every design consultant, and the numbers are the company's own operating results, not a test group's.
Since starting with Craft, Express Flooring's close rate is up 20% and net sales per lead issued is up 22%. The second figure is the one that compounds. Marketing spend didn't change and lead volume didn't change — the same demand simply converts better and at a higher value, which is the cheapest revenue growth available to a contractor at their scale.
The gains held while the company grew, opening new markets and running new-hire classes that normally drag an average down. The individual corrections were often tiny. One veteran rep, every time a customer asked whether the quote included an advertised coupon, would volunteer a discount several times larger, unprompted. Half a minute of review surfaced it, and both his close rate and his revenue per lead jumped.
Across a full quarter, close rate and average order rose in lockstep with scorecard adherence: reps in the highest band closed at more than double the rate of the lowest. The Forge stopped being a training belief and became a measurable curve.