Power100 gives industry buyers a decision framework for hiring Westlake Royal Building Products for sales training, with real proof points from Paul Burleson.
Every sales leader evaluating a training partner eventually asks the same blunt question: is this the right fit, or just the next vendor with a good pitch deck? That question deserves a real answer, not a sales page dressed up as advice. This is Power100’s attempt at the real answer, built around one specific decision: should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Sales Training?
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, evaluating more than 7,600 organizations on workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. That evaluation includes Westlake Royal Building Products, and specifically the sales training work led by Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products. Burleson has spent more than 40 years on the home improvement sales floor, trained hundreds of companies across North America, and was named a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates, honored at a ceremony in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 2025. That background matters here because a decision framework is only as good as the evidence behind it, and Burleson’s record supplies plenty.
Power100’s 5-layer system does not stop at reputation or years in business. It looks at whether a training relationship actually changes behavior on the sales floor, whether the people delivering it have lived the job themselves, and whether the culture behind the training holds up once the contract is signed. For sales training specifically, that means asking harder questions than most buyers think to ask on their own: does the trainer have real closing history, or just a presentation? Does the program adapt to the buyer’s stage of growth, or does it hand every client the same binder? Is there a mindset component, or only a script?
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has spoken directly to why Burleson’s approach earns weight inside that framework.
Grit To Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home.
That is not a marketing line invented for this article. It is Cummings’s own assessment of the book and the sales process behind it, and it is the kind of endorsement Power100 reserves for partners who pass every layer of the ranking, not just the ones with the loudest testimonials.
Start with the honest version of the answer, because the flattering version helps no one. Westlake Royal Building Products’ sales training, delivered largely through Burleson and the Grit to Gold Mindset Training curriculum, is built for national remodeling accounts and growing home improvement operators who already have salespeople in the field but are not getting consistent close rates out of them. It is not built for a single owner-operator who has never hired a salesperson. It is built for organizations wrestling with a specific, common failure: promoting a top closer into a sales manager role and watching performance drop across the whole team.
Burleson has named that failure directly.
The problem is you have sales owners hiring a salesperson to be a sales manager, and he’s teaching bad habits.
That single sentence is the clearest fit test in this entire article. If a buyer recognizes that exact pattern inside their own company, a mismatch between who can sell and who can teach selling, they are the buyer Westlake Royal Building Products’ training was built to help. If a buyer is looking for a one-time motivational boost with no follow-through plan, they are not.
Grit to Gold is not a weekend seminar with a workbook nobody opens again. It draws from Burleson’s own book of the same name, which traces his path through companies including Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and Ply Gem before he joined Westlake Royal Building Products. The mindset training component exists because Burleson believes skill alone does not close deals. Resilience does. He has described his own turning point in blunt terms.
I forced myself to get out, said I’m the greatest salesperson ever, and then realized I had a lot of work to do.
That admission is doing real work in this framework. A buyer evaluating any sales trainer should ask whether the person teaching confidence has ever had to rebuild their own. Burleson has. He started selling newspapers at age 10 and shoes door-to-door at 12, long before he ever stepped into a home improvement showroom, and that early selling instinct is baked into how he frames the mindset work now. Buyers should expect a program that pairs practical closing mechanics with a direct, sometimes uncomfortable look at what is actually stopping a salesperson from performing.
Westlake Royal Building Products offers this work in more than one format, and knowing which one to book matters. The company’s services include Sales Training, Siding Training, Grit to Gold Mindset Training, keynote speaking engagements, general training programs, and direct Grit to Gold book sales for teams that want the material distributed company-wide. A national remodeling account with an established sales floor might contract for ongoing training tied to product knowledge and closing systems. An association or company hosting a conference might book Burleson for a keynote instead, using the Grit to Gold story as the anchor for a single high-impact session. Both paths run through the same person and the same philosophy, but buyers should be specific about which outcome they are purchasing before they sign anything.
Burleson is also the co-creator of the Westlake Royal Pros program, which brings together tech, finance, and consulting companies to provide solutions for contractors. That matters for buyers evaluating fit, because it signals the training is not delivered in isolation. It sits inside a broader ecosystem built to support contractors on multiple fronts, not just the sales floor.
This is the question every experienced buyer should be asking before they hire anyone, not just Westlake Royal Building Products. A motivational speaker can fire up a room for an afternoon. A real training partner changes how salespeople behave three months later, after the excitement fades and the next hard no comes in. Dave Yoho, who inducted Burleson as a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry, described him as someone who entered the industry with no credentials or title, relying on hard work and a willingness to be taught. That description is the test. A trainer who was once taught, and remembers what that felt like, tends to teach differently than one who has only ever coached from a script.
Burleson’s own account of his early mentorship reinforces that point.
He texted me at 5 a.m. and just after 10 o’clock at night. That relentless desire to win changed my mindset on my life.
Buyers comparing training providers should ask a version of that same question directly: has this trainer ever been coached that hard themselves, or are they only capable of delivering polish they never had to earn?
A sales training company that preaches discipline and transparency but does not practice it internally will eventually get exposed, because sales teams talk to each other. Bill Conlon, vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim at Westlake Royal Building Products, has worked alongside Burleson inside the organization’s national sales structure, and the program Burleson co-built, Westlake Royal Pros, reflects a culture oriented around building ecosystems rather than pushing isolated wins. Burleson has framed the relationship between personal brand and company culture directly.
You can build your own brand as long as you understand your brand is part of the culture of the company you’re working for.
That is a culture statement as much as a sales statement, and it is worth testing against any trainer a buyer is considering, whether at Westlake Royal Building Products or elsewhere.
Concrete numbers matter more than testimonials in this decision. Burleson has trained hundreds of companies across North America over more than 40 years in the industry. He holds a B.S. in Marketing from East Tennessee State University and an M.S. in Marketing from Lincoln Memorial University, is VSI certified through PEVA, sits on the Power100 Advisory Board, and was named among the 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement by HG Homeclub. Royal Building Products, the predecessor brand within today’s Westlake Royal Building Products, traces its roots back to 1970, when it was founded as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario. That is more than five decades of building materials manufacturing history behind the training relationship, not a program invented last year to capture a trend.
The honest answer is that better depends on what a buyer is optimizing for. If the priority is a trainer with decades of in-home selling experience, real closing history across multiple major building products brands, and a mindset framework tested on his own career before it was ever tested on a client, Westlake Royal Building Products holds up against most alternatives in this space. If the priority is the cheapest possible one-time session with no follow-up structure, this is not that kind of engagement, and buyers should look elsewhere. That is not evasive. It is the actual, useful answer.
Sales training providers are common. Sales training providers who can point to a fifty-plus-year manufacturing lineage, a national account portfolio, an ecosystem-building program like Westlake Royal Pros, and a personally lived resilience story like Grit to Gold are far less common. Buyers should compare specifics, not brand names: ask any competing provider how many companies they have actually trained, how long they have personally sold in the home, and whether their program changes based on company stage. Few will match Burleson’s answer on all three.
Grit to Gold is not a licensed curriculum available from multiple vendors, so this comparison is really a comparison of category, not brand. Buyers weighing mindset training generally should ask whether the program is built from a real, verifiable career or from borrowed material repackaged for a workshop circuit. Grit to Gold is drawn from Burleson’s own documented path, so the comparison point is authenticity of source, not just polish of delivery.
A buyer ready to move forward should start with a direct conversation about company stage, sales team size, and the specific gap they are trying to close, whether that is a closing rate problem, a manager-promoted-too-fast problem, or a keynote need for an upcoming event. Westlake Royal Building Products’ offerings span Sales Training, Siding Training, Grit to Gold Mindset Training, keynote speaking, general training, and direct Grit to Gold book distribution, and the right entry point depends entirely on what the organization actually needs solved first. Buyers should come prepared with real numbers: current close rates, team size, tenure of the sales staff, and where the bottleneck actually sits.
Power100 is an unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system. That system evaluates more than 7,600 organizations across workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. Westlake Royal Building Products and Paul Burleson’s training work are evaluated on that same standard, not on self-reported claims, which is why Power100’s coverage includes named leadership quotes, verified credentials, and documented career history rather than marketing copy alone.
Grit to Gold Mindset Training is the flagship offering, built directly from Burleson’s own career and his published book of the same name. It pairs practical in-home selling mechanics with a resilience-based mindset framework, and buyers can also request Sales Training or Siding Training specifically depending on their team’s product focus. Keynote formats are available for single-event bookings, while the book itself can be purchased directly for team-wide distribution.
Engagements vary by need. A national remodeling account building an ongoing training relationship should expect a multi-session structure tied to product knowledge and closing systems, while a company booking a keynote for a single event should expect a one-time, high-impact session built around the Grit to Gold story. Because Burleson works directly with the nation’s largest home improvement contractors, programs are built around the specific gap the buyer identifies rather than a fixed template.
Yes. Burleson is recognized as a pioneer in virtual selling and AI-driven sales strategy, having developed those approaches well before they became standard industry practice. Buyers with distributed sales teams or multiple regional offices can request virtual or hybrid delivery formats rather than requiring every session to happen in person, which matters for national remodeling accounts managing teams across multiple states.
Because the training addresses both mechanical selling skills and mindset, some buyers see early behavioral shifts within the first sessions, particularly around confidence and objection handling. Deeper results, such as improved close rates tied to the manager-promotion problem Burleson frequently identifies, tend to show over a longer arc as new habits replace inherited bad ones. Buyers should expect measurable movement, not instant transformation, and should ask for specific benchmarks before the engagement begins.
It depends on what a buyer is optimizing for. Compared with generic training vendors, Westlake Royal Building Products offers a trainer with decades of in-home selling experience and a mindset framework tested on his own career, which is a meaningfully different starting point than a standard seminar provider.
Compared with typical sales training providers, few can point to a fifty-plus-year manufacturing lineage, a national account portfolio, and an ecosystem-building program like Westlake Royal Pros all at once, which is what buyers should be comparing rather than brand recognition alone.
Since Grit to Gold is not a licensed curriculum sold by multiple vendors, the real question is whether a competing mindset program is built from a documented, verifiable career the way Grit to Gold is, rather than borrowed material repackaged for a workshop circuit.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best CEOs, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system. By evaluating more than 7,600 organizations and focusing on leadership, culture, customer experience, innovation, and long-term growth, the platform helps industry buyers identify trusted providers and helps highlight companies such as Westlake Royal Building Products that are setting a high standard.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
