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How GatorGuard Grew Close Rates from 32% to 50%
About GatorGuard
GatorGuard Concrete Coatings is a small, family-owned, rapidly growing concrete coatings company based in the Midwest. The company installs a lifetime concrete coating product—meaning customers do it once and never have to do it again—which places a premium on the quality of the in-home sales conversation. Led by Mike Evans, Senior Vice President, GatorGuard recognized early that with high turnover common in the sales industry, they needed a way to ensure every new rep was hitting every box in the appointment. Rilla became that tool—and then some.
“Rilla enabled us to have our VP of sales everywhere all the time—as much as humanly possible—to be in tune with exactly what's happening in the home without doing an uncomfortable ride along.”
Close Rates Up 18+ Points in a Down Market—How GatorGuard Outperformed the Industry with Rilla
GatorGuard operates in a challenging market: concrete coatings and home improvement broadly have seen demand decline 15–40% industry-wide. Despite that headwind, GatorGuard has been playing even to last year in sales volume and is seeing what Mike Evans describes as "solid upper single-digit growth"—a remarkable performance in context. The company attributes a meaningful part of that resilience to Rilla's impact on sales effectiveness.
The core problem Rilla solved for GatorGuard was presence. A VP of sales can't physically be in every appointment, but the quality of what happens in the home directly determines revenue. Before Rilla, verifying that reps were following the process meant crossing your fingers and hoping—or burning time on ride alongs that were, in Mike's words, "uncomfortable" for both the rep and the client. Rilla replaced that uncomfortable dynamic with something far more scalable.
With Rilla, the VP of sales could effectively be in every appointment—listening to exactly what happened, identifying where reps were strong and where they needed development, and providing feedback grounded in actual data rather than memory or impression. For a company that sells a lifetime product in a single visit, getting every rep to check every box in the appointment is the difference between a closed deal and a lost one.
For new reps, Rilla transformed the onboarding and training process. Rather than hoping new hires would absorb best practices through shadowing alone, Mike could pull up Rilla recordings of top performers and show new reps exactly how a great appointment should run. "Okay, you saw how this is supposed to happen"—and then verify within five minutes whether a new rep has a specific skill down, rather than spending two full days running appointments with them. The time savings in training alone are substantial.
The individual performance results were striking. Mike Evans' own close ratio was around 30–32% before Rilla. In recent weeks, it had climbed to upwards of 50%—an 18-plus point improvement. That gain reflects what Rilla makes possible: when you can listen back to exactly what you said, identify the moments where a sale was won or lost, and adjust your approach appointment by appointment, improvement is not just possible—it's systematic.
GatorGuard's verdict on Rilla is direct: "I wouldn't recommend Rilla to any company that doesn't want to grow." For Mike Evans, the platform is now as essential to GatorGuard's operation as their sales presentation itself. In a down market where many competitors are struggling, GatorGuard is growing—and Rilla is a meaningful part of why.
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“Our Sales have increased by 45%.”
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