Rilla LIVE From IRE 2024! - TRANSCRIPT

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of a live interview with Sebastian Jimenez from Rilla. You can read the interview below or watch the full interview.

Karen Edwards: Hello, and welcome back to the Roofer's Coffee Shop Soundstage. My name is Karen Edwards, and we are live at the International Roofing Expo in Las Vegas. I would love to welcome Sebastian from RillaVoice.

Sebastian Jimenez: Hi everybody. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me on, Karen.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, yeah. Can you just in a nutshell, tell anyone watching what RillaVoice is, what it does

Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, certainly. RillaVoice, we are the leading speech analytics software for the home improvement industry. What that means is when you have design consultants, sales people, technicians go out and talk to homeowners in the home to try to make a sale, they record their conversations on the RillaVoice mobile app from their phones or tablets and then we use AI to automatically transcribe, analyze and get them feedback to help them improve their sales, how they talk, what they say, so that they can convert more. We help their sales managers to what we call virtual ride-alongs that are a hundred times faster, better and more productive than physical ride-alongs. That's Rilla.

Karen Edwards: Wow.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah.

Karen Edwards: Okay. It's learning from the conversations. Especially if your entire sales team is using it and maybe somebody has a better close rate and someone else is struggling a little bit, it gives you the ability to kind of see what's working.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes. We work with a lot of the top contractors in home improvement, the companies that are above a hundred million, a billion dollars in annual revenue. Even the companies that are 5 to 10 million, there's always the power lot where your top 20% of performers bring in most of the revenue. Why that happens is because the top performers, they do certain things because of their personality or because of the way they are, that leads them to be naturally the top performers because they're just very good at sales naturally. You see that their conversion rates are 80%, 70%, while the average and their team is like 40.

Karen Edwards: Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: You're like, how, and your average ticket is much higher. You go, okay, typically what people thought of sales is there's this dark arts that's happening in the home. Nobody knows what's happening. If you ask the top performer, why are you so good, typically they don't know what-

Karen Edwards: They don't know.

Sebastian Jimenez: They don't know how to explain it. They're like, "Ah, you're just born with it, man." Or they give you some crap and be like, "You just got to give it 110%."

Karen Edwards: Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: Woo.

Karen Edwards: Woo hoo.

Sebastian Jimenez: Something happened. Rilla, what it tries to do is it tries to demystify the art of sales, and it tries to create the science of selling so that you can understand exactly what it is that your top performers are saying, specifically at what times for how long. Are they talking about pricing? Are they talking about the company's story? How are they handling this objection? How are they saying this? How much are they talking versus the customer? How fast? What's their patience before replying to a question? How many questions are they asking? It demystifies the whole in-home conversation and it tells you exactly, look, out of your 10 top performers, they're all talking 45 to 65% of the time compared to the homeowner, when your average reps are talking 75 to 85% of the time. If you want to increase your conversion rate-

Karen Edwards: Stop talking.

Sebastian Jimenez: Stop talking so much. Things like that, that you're going to figure out for your team. Normally we see things that are the same across company, like talk ratio, like the number of questions that you're asking, like when are you talking about financing. These are things that you can do as a business that we've researched. We've analyzed 500,000 sales conversations in the home and we've figured out what actually works and not. But for your team, there's going to be very specific nuances to your process and you're going to figure it out. The AI's going to tell you, here's what's actually working for the top performers and here's some parts of your sales process that they're not even using because they suck. This part of the sales process, you think it's all high and mighty, they actually don't use it. It helps you refine your sales process so you can bring everybody else to be a top performer.

Karen Edwards: What does that look like for a sales manager, maybe, who, I'm not listening to a three-hour, two-hour sales pitch. Right? It's kind of pulling the nuggets out for me.

Sebastian Jimenez: Correct. The first thing, Rilla is not a recording tool. For that, you could use your voice memos on your phone. That's a recording tool. It's not a transcription tool that transcribes the conversation. There's other transcription tools out there. Google has transcription you could use for free. It's an analytics tool. That's what it really is. Not only analytics tool, it's a coaching tool, because what it does is it uses natural language processing to understand what happened in that three hour conversation and analyzes the transcription. It gives you a report card of whether your salespeople followed your process and which parts they followed or not. It's like when you go do a physical ride along and you fill out a scorecard, it does that automatically for you.

Karen Edwards: Okay.

Sebastian Jimenez: Not only does it tell you whether they did the right things or not, it literally scores them. It tells you how well they did it compared to your sales process. That's the first thing it does. You don't have to listen to the whole three hour conversation, you just look at the score.

Karen Edwards: Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: You don't even have to look at the score for each conversation, you can look at the score on aggregate. That's why you have sales managers on Rilla that are managing 40, 50, 60 plus people, because your sales managers become 40 to 50 times more productive at their job because now they don't have to go to each individual conversation. Of course you can if you want to listen to it and listen to the game film, but you get the aggregate analytics that show you exactly what's going on with this particular rep.

You log into Rilla as a sales manager, you know that this rep is struggling with the conversion rate. Immediately you go to see how they're doing the company's story, what's their score? See if they need help in the company's story, if they need help in the product demo, if they need help in the evolution where you're trying to compare your products to the competitors. If this rep has a problem with average ticket where their average ticket's too low, well, you go to the pricing negotiations, see what their score is there. What are they doing different than the top performers? Are they talking about it too late or talk about it for too little time? You see these reports that really allow you to get a really big picture of what's wrong with that particular rep and then you sit down with them in your one-on-one and you know exactly what to talk about.

Karen Edwards: What have you seen in terms of adoption? If a company decides they're going to implement Rilla, do the sales reps, are they like, "Oh, no."

Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, yeah. They hate it a hundred percent of the time. Salespeople, when you launch Rilla, your salespeople are going to be off. It happens every single time. We've launched with tens of thousands of salespeople at this moment. We're growing pretty fast. Every single time that we launch, there's not even an exception. There's always salespeople that they're like, "This is a violation of the Geneva Rights Convention. This is my private, this is illegal. Don't record me." Every single time. Here's what happens. Your reps, some reps are going to hate it less than others. Your top performers are going to absolutely hate this. The tool is designed to figure out what your top performers are doing and share it with the rest of the team. They don't like that.

Karen Edwards: Okay.

Sebastian Jimenez: Top performers don't like you sharing their secrets. They hate it completely. They're going to come up with a bunch of things they really don't like you sharing their secrets. They hate it. People in the middle, they're kind of slightly concerned to reticent. They're kind of reticent to use Rilla, but they don't hate it as much as the top performers. Then it's the people at the bottom and the new people who know nothing better, those are the people who adopted it the fastest.

Karen Edwards: Really? Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: At the bottom, if somebody tells you do this, and you're like, "No," you're like, "Bro, you're not closing anything. What are you talking?"

Karen Edwards: Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: What ground do you have to stand on? If you're new, you don't even have any expectations set on the business. First month on Rilla, after the salespeople record five times, something in the human chimp brain goes off and you lose the fear completely. It's called the Hawthorne effect in psychology. When people know that they're being studied or reviewed or recorded, their senses are heightened. They're in fight or flight. It's like public speaking, you know people are watching and you're really scared. Fight or flight. Once the Hawthorne effect, that you've been in the Hawthorne effect for two or three hours, Hawthorne effect goes away because your brain can't possibly be on fight or flight for more than three hours. It can't, it gets tired. You forget that the recording's there after five recordings.

Karen Edwards: Yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: Back-to-back, and then you forget ab- Because they're like, "Ah, screw you. I'm not going to be on it." What happens is your bottom performers, your new performers all the sudden become the top performers in the last month. We had Long Home Products; they saw that one of their reps went from 15% conversion rate to like 60% conversion rate in one month and she was about to get fired. Their average annual revenue per rep went up by $350,000 per rep. Every single rep was making $350,000 more on average at the company. When the top performers see that, you know what they fear more than the recording? They fear not being the top performer.

Karen Edwards: Right, right, yeah.

Sebastian Jimenez: When they see that, because it works, every single time we've done this, the same thing happens. People hate it. They like, "Oh no, this is bullshit." Then people get on it and then the bottom performers get on it, they improve. The top performers get on it. The top performers, it's so funny because they are naturally the people who love tools like this when they get on them, because they love improving and reviewing their own game film and reviewing their analytics. What happens is after the first month the top performers get on it. They become the power users.

Karen Edwards: Okay.

Sebastian Jimenez: We have this guy Taylor from Louisiana from a roofing company. We have a back-to-back testimonial from Taylor. First day with Rilla be like, "This is a bunch of crap, man. This is a violation of my human rights. I don't know, man, I'm not using this, to be completely honest." Three months later, he'd be like, "Listen, man, honestly, I really like what you guys are doing. Rilla is a great tool. I didn't even know I was talking so much. I've improved my close rate 50%." It literally happens every single time. Top performers hate it, they become the power users after a quarter or so. The bottom performers and the new reps, they're the ones who bring the adoption in your team.

Karen Edwards: All right. If somebody wanted to get started and hop on the RillaVoice train, how do they do it?
Sebastian Jimenez: I recommend go to RillaVoice.com. That's R-I-L-L-A voice.com and click on the book a demo link. That's going to put you in touch with one of our highly trained sales consultants who have been trained with the latest in AI technology. We train them with Rilla and they're really good. You tell us how we did. If you're in, I mean at this point, I think we're missing two states in America. We have customers like 48 out of 50 states. If you're interested in Rilla, just go on Facebook, reach out to your peers, ask them. Don't take it from me.

Karen Edwards: Are you using it?

Sebastian Jimenez: Just ask your peers in your market. If you're in one of the large roofing markets like Texas, California, Florida, the Midwest, the top companies are on Rilla. We work with contractors of all sizes, but all the top roofing companies are certainly by now on Rilla. Yeah, ask them how they're using it. Go on the Facebook group, talk to your peers, go your masterminds and just talk and ask. How did you implement it? What were the hiccups? What were the problems? Book a demo, and we'll do that too. If you don't know anybody, we'll put you in touch with customers that are using it. Our customers are great at sharing insights, and we learn a lot from them also. Yeah, just talk to your fellow roofers.

Karen Edwards: Wow. Yeah, that sounds great, wow. Well, thank you so much for being here today.

Sebastian Jimenez: Thank you.

Karen Edwards: You do have a booth here, so if you're coming out to the show tomorrow or Thursday, there's still two more days.

Sebastian Jimenez: It's very big, you won't miss it.

Karen Edwards: Go see them and yeah, learn more about it. That's awesome. You guys are on Metal Coffee Shop, so you do have a directory on there.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes.

Karen Edwards: They're part of the Sherwin-Williams MetalVue Program.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes, we are.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, all you need to know, RillaVoice.com or Metal Coffee Shop.

Sebastian Jimenez: Correct, yeah. MetalVue's a great program for anybody who's interested in selling metal roofing. It's a great market, great product. There's a lot of roofers getting on the metal train, so MetalVue's a great, great resource if you're thinking about metal. We are partners with them because they're all about not just giving you the learnings about the product and the concept, but really helping you sell this new thing to customers. They have a great partnership with Grosso, so they're doing great stuff there.

Karen Edwards: Oh, you know what? I almost forgot. You are having a session tomorrow.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes, on AI?

Karen Edwards: On AI.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes.

Karen Edwards: That's going to be with Dominic Caminata.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes.

Karen Edwards: From Grosso and Josie Parks.

Sebastian Jimenez: And Josie Parks, yes.

Karen Edwards: Yeah, who was our keynote speaker this morning.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah.

Karen Edwards: Is that 7:45 tomorrow?

Sebastian Jimenez: I think that's at 9:30.

Karen Edwards: 9:30.

Sebastian Jimenez: 9:30 A.M. Pacific, yeah.

Karen Edwards: Okay.

Sebastian Jimenez: That's going to be awesome. I'm going to be talking very little about Rilla. It's a really exciting time in home improvement. The reason people like me exist that are building startups, tech startups specifically geared towards the roofing industry and the home improvement industry at large, is that there's really interesting market dynamic that's pushing a lot of money into the roofing industry because of covid, because of a lot of different things. Home improvement and roofing have actually become the first industry that will be the first AI adopter, which is kind of crazy.

Karen Edwards: I know because we're always the last. Right?

Sebastian Jimenez: Yeah, exactly. But what's happening now is that the tech companies don't have any money, but I'm going to be talking about it tomorrow. That's going to be a really, really exciting talk. I encourage, if you're in roofing home improvement, you really, forget about Rilla, you really have to be thinking about AI and how to implement it in your business for marketing, for sales, for operations. We're going to be talking about all of that tomorrow, so highly recommend that talk.

Karen Edwards: It's going to be really interesting. Thank you so much, Sebastian, for being here.

Sebastian Jimenez: Thank you.

Karen Edwards: It was great to talk to you.

Sebastian Jimenez: Yes.

Karen Edwards: Thank you all for watching. Stay tuned. As I said, we're going to be doing these videos the entire time, so we hope to see you on the next one. Thanks.

Sebastian Jimenez: Peace.

Karen Edwards: Bye-bye.