How do you coach a hundred field sales reps when ride-alongs don't scale?

The bottom quartile closed roughly half as many appointments as the top. Same leads, same product, same price sheet.

At a national residential foundation repair company, reps in the bottom quartile closed roughly half as many appointments as reps at the top. Recording appointments and returning an automated coaching report card cut post-visit paperwork by more than half an hour per visit and pulled new-hire time to productivity from about ninety days to about forty-five.

Industry

Residential foundation repair

Who uses it

Field sales

What it does

Field sales coaching

Measured

2026, company reporting

The gap was not subtle. Same leads, same product, same price sheet, half the result.

The company's salespeople work alone. They pull up to a house, walk a homeowner through a crawl space or a basement, explain what is wrong with the structure holding up their home, and quote a repair that can run into five figures. Then they drive to the next one. There are more than a hundred of them.

There is a well-established way to close a performance gap like that. A sales manager rides along, watches the appointment, and gives feedback in the truck afterward. It works. It is also arithmetic: one manager, one rep, one appointment. You cannot ride along with a hundred reps every day, and the reps who need it most are usually the ones getting it least.

There was a second tax on top of the first. Roughly forty-five minutes of every visit went to paperwork. Writing up what happened, what was found and what was quoted, done at the end of a long day when the details had already started to blur.

What the company built with InstaLILY is, in effect, a ride-along that scales. The rep records the appointment. Afterward a report card comes back: what went well, what did not, what to do differently next time. The documentation writes itself from the recording rather than from memory in a driveway at seven in the evening.

The company's own reporting puts the paperwork saving at more than half an hour per visit, and time to productivity for a new hire cut from about ninety days to about forty-five.

But the more interesting number took longer to see.

Leadership had been pushing adoption hard, with mixed results. "Trying to get these people to follow the program and adopt the technology," is how the executive running the initiative described his problem. His managers had been on the reps for months. He was blunt about what he needed. "The technology does what it's supposed to do, but if we're not using it, it's a pretty heavy lift from a company expense standpoint. I need to be able to go to the board and say, are we getting value out of this?"

Then the analytics separated the reps who were genuinely using the app from the ones who had merely installed it. The heavy users' net sales per lead were climbing week over week, in a line that went up and to the right while everyone else's stayed flat.

That cut both ways, he added. It justified the spend to the board, and it justified the effort to the field. Reps who had been told the app would help them now had evidence from people sitting in the trucks next to them.

One design detail is worth noting, because it says something about how the company thinks about coaching. The dashboard names the top reps who handled a moment well, so managers can point to them. It deliberately does not name the reps at the bottom. Their examples show up anonymously. The lesson gets learned without the embarrassment.

The next feature in the pipeline is hands-free. A rep finishes an appointment, gets in the truck, and talks to the coach on the drive to the next house: what happened last Wednesday, what to work on today.

Which is roughly what a good sales manager would have done in the passenger seat, if there had been enough of them to go around.