How Pella Houston Boosted Close Rates by 5 Points

Pella Houston faced a growth challenge common to many professional services companies: how to scale the expertise of top performers. The company was conducting physical ride alongs at a traditional frequency of 14-20 per month, which limited how much coaching any single salesperson could receive.

More importantly, there was no systematic way to identify exactly what the best salespeople were doing differently or to replicate those techniques across the team. The company needed visibility and feedback at scale.

Rilla transformed Pella Houston's coaching approach completely. Within months, the company scaled their ride along frequency from 14-20 per month to 40-50 per month—a more than 200% increase. But the real innovation was the introduction of virtual ride alongs, which eliminated the time and travel constraints that had limited previous coaching. The sales team could now review calls on their own schedule, identify opportunities, and implement improvements much faster. As one leader noted: "Rilla is designed to give you good feedback. It's the only way to really know if you're doing something really well to keep doing it. If you're missing something on every appointment, work on that a little bit."

Pella Houston also leveraged an advanced feature within Rilla: Rick, an AI engine that could answer specific questions about appointments. A sales leader could ask Rick, "What product did we demonstrate?" and Rick would provide the answer with precise references to where in the call that product was discussed. This AI-powered insight tool made analysis incredibly fast and accurate. As the team noted: "Rick makes things very fast and he's scary accurate."

The sales results were extraordinary. Over the first five months, Pella Houston achieved a five-point increase in their close ratio—moving from 20% to 26.4%. In the window and doors industry, this is an unheard-of improvement. Industry leaders don't talk about five-point close ratio improvements because they're virtually unprecedented. Yet Pella Houston achieved this while simultaneously increasing their average job size. This represents a remarkable accomplishment: typically, when average job size goes up, close ratios go down because larger jobs face more objections and require longer decision-making. Pella Houston accomplished the opposite.

The company's leadership reflected on this unusual achievement: "We also saw an increase in average job size, which is strange because typically when average job size goes up, close ratio goes down. Rilla and the training we've been able to do allowed us to lift both numbers simultaneously, which is actually very odd in the 34 years I've been here to see that number."

Beyond sales metrics, Pella Houston saw meaningful improvements in customer satisfaction. Their Google review rating climbed from 4.5 to 4.7 stars in a relatively short period of time. For a company that had been operating for 34 years, moving the needle on customer satisfaction in this way is difficult and meaningful. The company's conclusion was clear: "We totally believe that it's the information we got from Rilla. In 34 years, to see this combination of metrics improve simultaneously is rare. How are you going to grow your business and get it to thrive without Rilla?"