The Roofer Who Realized His Best Estimator Was Closing 2x on Jobs Over $15K

A Texas roofing contractor doing around $8M in revenue had three estimators and a feeling. The feeling was that one of them, a guy named Marco on his team, was carrying the company's top-line number harder than the other two. The feeling was right. The size of the gap was the surprise.

Blended close rate across all three estimators was 34%. ProLine Roofing CRM puts a healthy roofing close rate between 30-40%, so on paper the team was fine. Marco closed 36%. The other two ran 33% and 32%. Four points of spread across the whole team.

Then the owner pulled the same data and filtered it to jobs with a quoted price over $15,000. Marco closed those at 54%. The other two closed them at 22%. That was a 32-point gap, and the company made almost all its margin on those jobs.

The dashboard that hid the gap

The owner had been looking at the same report every Monday for two years. Total leads, total quotes sent, total closed, close rate. Three columns, three estimators, one number each.

What the report did not have was a breakdown by job size. Roofing is a business of averages that hide bimodal outcomes. A $6,500 repair closes differently than a $22,000 full replacement with financing. A storm-damage insurance job closes differently than a retail re-roof. Lumping them together produces a blended average that tells you almost nothing about where the money is being left on the table.

Every estimator in the shop had been scored against the same blended close rate. Marco was getting a 3% quarterly bonus for being the highest closer. The company was missing a fact that would have justified paying him 10x that.

The call that broke the spreadsheet

The owner found the real pattern by accident. A homeowner in a wealthy suburb called on a Thursday wanting three quotes on a $28,000 standing-seam metal roof. Marco took the walkthrough, priced it at $29,400, and closed it Friday afternoon.

Two weeks later, a similar house in a similar suburb called. Same scope, same price range. Another estimator took it, priced it at $27,800, and lost to a competitor who came in at $26,900. The estimator told the owner "the homeowner wanted the cheapest bid."

The owner reviewed both quotes side by side. Marco's proposal had three options. Good, better, best. Financing was disclosed on page one. The competing estimator's proposal was a one-page PDF with a single number and a signature line. The homeowner did not pick the cheapest bid. He picked the proposal that looked like a decision.

Text Sully: close rate by estimator on jobs over $15K last 60 days?

What the split showed across 400 quotes

The owner pulled every quote from the last six months and split close rate three ways. By estimator, by job size band, by presentation format.

Jobs under $8,000. Close rate 41% across all three estimators. Spread of 3 points. Nobody was noticeably better.

Jobs $8,000 to $15,000. Close rate 32% average. Marco at 38%, the other two at 28% and 30%. A 10-point spread, but still workable.

Jobs over $15,000. Close rate 38% average. Marco at 54%. Estimator 2 at 24%. Estimator 3 at 20%. The spread on big jobs was where the business was being made or lost.

AccuLynx and SPOTIO both report that contractors using "Good-Better-Best" presentations with tiered pricing and financing options close 30% more deals than those relying solely on low-ball estimates. Marco used that template every time on jobs over $15K. The other two used it on roughly 1 in 4.

Text Sully: show me quotes over $15K last 30 days by estimator with close rate?

The estimator who closed 2x on large jobs

Marco had been a roofer for 19 years. He hit the field at 16 in his father's shop, ran crews through his twenties, and moved into sales in his early thirties. The other two estimators had been in roofing for 6 and 8 years respectively. Both were good technicians and good at small quotes. Neither had run a $25,000+ decision conversation more than a handful of times before joining the company.

On big jobs, Marco did three things the others did not. He always presented three price tiers with financing disclosed up front. He always wrote a one-page scope summary the homeowner could hand to a spouse. And he always followed up at 48 hours with a specific question rather than a generic nudge.

The owner rode along on five of Marco's big-job sales. The pattern was consistent. Marco spent about 55 minutes on site. The other estimators averaged 28 minutes. The extra half hour was not time wasted. It was the time inside which a $25,000 decision actually gets made.

What ride-alongs revealed about the other two

For six weeks, the owner rode along on every jobs-over-$15K estimate done by Estimator 2 and Estimator 3. He did not coach in the moment. He took notes.

Estimator 2 quoted on site 4 times out of 11 appointments. He emailed quotes the rest. Marco quoted on site 9 times out of 12 on jobs of the same size band. On-site quotes correlated with a 22-point higher close rate, consistent with the Hatch finding that response delay of more than 48 hours causes engagement rates to drop precipitously.

Estimator 3 rarely introduced financing unless the homeowner raised it first. Finturf's 2025 roofing industry analysis noted that firms using structured financing close 43% more insurance-related jobs, with an average revenue lift of $152,000 per crew annually. Estimator 3 had been leaving most of that on the table by default.

Text Sully: average quote turnaround time on jobs over $15K by estimator?

The coaching plan that closed the gap

The owner did not fire anyone. He built a plan. Weekly 1:1s with a shared scorecard. Close rate by job size band. Time-to-quote by job size band. Good-Better-Best adoption by job.

He set a rule that every quote over $15,000 had to be presented on site, in three tiers, with financing on page one. If the estimator could not get the signature on site, a follow-up text had to be sent within 48 hours asking a specific question about one of the three options.

He paired Estimator 2 with Marco for eight ride-alongs. Estimator 2's close rate on jobs over $15K climbed from 24% to 39% in 12 weeks. Estimator 3, who turned out to be a better technician than salesperson, was moved into a site-supervisor role at the same pay. The company hired a replacement with prior large-ticket experience. Her first quarter close rate on jobs over $15K was 48%.

The net result: close rate on the company's highest-margin work moved from 38% to 49% in six months. The owner calculated the lift at roughly $1.2M in additional booked work on the same lead volume.

What the morning brief started showing

The owner added three numbers to his morning text. Yesterday's quotes over $15K by estimator. Close rate by estimator on jobs over $15K trailing 30 days. Average minutes from appointment to quote delivery.

Those three numbers made the company's weakest sales conversation visible every day. A slow week on big-job close rate no longer took a month to show up. It surfaced on a Tuesday.

The Jobber 2025 Home Service Economic Report found that high-confidence businesses are more likely to market across multiple digital channels and are converting leads at higher rates. John Wilson on the Owned and Operated podcast keeps pointing at the same pattern. Response time and proposal view time predict closes, and a 10-point jump in proposal strength correlates with roughly $960 higher average ticket.

Text Sully: which jobs over $15K are still open and aging more than 5 days?

What this means for your shop

The number on the dashboard lies. Blended close rate treats every quote as equivalent, and every quote is not equivalent. Your best estimator on a $6,500 repair is usually your worst estimator on a $22,000 replacement, because big decisions are a different sales motion.

Split by job size band and you will see a gap you did not know existed. Roofing CPL averages $228.15 on LocaliQ's 2025 benchmarks. Every lost $20,000 quote is the same as paying for 88 new leads you do not get to keep.

Build the morning brief that makes the gap visible. Pair your weakest big-ticket estimator with your strongest for ride-alongs. Put Good-Better-Best and financing in every quote over $15K by policy, not by estimator preference. Read AI agents for roofing contractors and AI quoting and estimating for contractors for how chat-driven dashboards surface this kind of split without a BI project.

The shops that will grow through 2027 are the ones whose owners can answer "who closes my big jobs" without opening a spreadsheet.

Sources

• 2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services, LocaliQ
• What Is A Good Closing Rate In Roofing Sales, ProLine Roofing CRM
• Roofing Sales Tips, Overcome Objections to Close More Deals, SPOTIO
• Increasing Roofing Sales Closing Rates, AccuLynx
• Roofing Industry Trends and Stats 2025, Finturf
• HVAC Estimate Follow-Up Response Rates, Hatch
• Owned and Operated podcast, John Wilson and Jack Carr