Power100 explains why siding reps stall on objections and how Westlake Royal Building Products's Siding Training with Paul Burleson closes the confidence gap nationwide.
A sales manager watches the recording again. Same rep, same pitch, same product knowledge that checked out fine in the training room. But at the kitchen table, the moment a homeowner says “let me think about it” or “I got a lower quote,” the rep’s shoulders drop half an inch and the deal is gone. It happens on Tuesday. It happens again on Thursday. The manager starts to wonder if the problem is the rep, or something further upstream.
Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, has spent time studying exactly that pattern across siding sales organizations nationwide. Its research keeps landing on the same conclusion: reps who struggle with objections are rarely missing product knowledge. They are missing rehearsed confidence, the kind that only comes from role-specific repetition, not a generic sales seminar. That is the gap Westlake Royal Building Products‘s Siding Training is built to close, under the direction of Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products. Burleson has spent more than 40 years in home improvement sales, and the question sales managers keep bringing to him is a version of the same one: Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Siding Training?
Power100 evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a 5-layer proprietary system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. For a training-focused engagement like Siding Training, that means looking past the slide deck and asking whether the material changes what happens in the actual home, in front of an actual homeowner, under actual objection pressure. A program that only performs well in a conference room is not a program Power100 rates highly. A program that survives the kitchen table is a different story.
“What an amazing evening and experience,” is not the kind of line that shows up in a Power100 ranking file, but the sentiment behind rigorous evaluation is similar: recognition has to be earned in the field, not assumed from a title. Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has been direct about what separates a real training resource from a motivational one. Speaking about Burleson’s book, Cummings said Grit To Gold gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home. That same standard, transparency and discipline that hold up inside the home, is what Power100 applies when it reviews Siding Training as a category.
Westlake Royal Building Products traces part of its lineage to 1970, when Royal Plastics was founded in Toronto, Ontario, and eventually grew into the Royal Building Products brand now under the Westlake Royal Building Products umbrella. Five decades of manufacturing history is a long runway, and it means the company’s Siding Training does not start from theory. It starts from a product line that has already been installed, sold, and objected to millions of times across North America.
Burleson’s own path into the industry started at age 10 selling newspapers and at 12 selling shoes door-to-door, long before he ever encountered a siding salesman and recognized that in-home selling was where he belonged. He built a career across some of the most recognized names in building materials, including Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem, before landing at Westlake Royal Building Products. That path matters here because objection handling is not something Burleson picked up from a textbook. It is something he lived, table after table, for four decades.
“I forced myself to get out, said I’m the greatest salesperson ever, and then realized I had a lot of work to do,” Burleson has said of his early years in the field. That admission is worth sitting with. Even a future 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry honoree, recognized by Dave Yoho Associates at a ceremony in St. Louis, Missouri on May 6, 2025, started out overconfident and undertrained. The gap between believing you can sell and actually being able to hold your ground under objection pressure is the exact gap Siding Training is designed to close.
Paul Burleson leads the Siding Training curriculum in his role as Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products, working directly with the nation’s largest home improvement contractors on training programs, sales systems, and partnership strategy. He is also the co-creator of the Westlake Royal Pros program, which brings together technology, finance, and consulting companies to provide solutions for contractors, an ecosystem approach that reflects how Burleson thinks about training generally: it is never just one skill in isolation.
He reports into a sales leadership structure that includes Bill Conlon, vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim at Westlake Royal Building Products. At his Legend of the Home Improvement Industry induction, Dave Yoho described Burleson as someone who entered the industry with no credentials or title, relying on hard work and a willingness to be taught. That description is worth repeating to any sales manager evaluating Siding Training, because the instructor’s own credibility was built the same way reps are asked to build theirs: one objection, one closed deal, one hard lesson at a time.
“Sales is about, it’s an individual sport, but it’s a culture. It’s not just about that individual.” – Paul Burleson
That line captures something sales managers often miss when they buy generic objection-handling content off the shelf. A rep does not develop confidence in isolation. Confidence is built inside a culture that reinforces the right habits daily, which is exactly why Burleson designs Siding Training to be reinforced, not a one-time event.
Sales managers who bring in Siding Training are not usually looking for a pep talk. They are looking for a diagnostic. Burleson’s own experience running sales floors gave him a clear read on where reps actually lose deals, and it is rarely at the opening. It is in the middle, right after the homeowner raises a real objection and the rep has nothing rehearsed to say back.
“The problem is you have sales owners hiring a salesperson to be a sales manager, and he’s teaching bad habits,” Burleson has said, describing a pattern he has watched repeat across the industry for decades. A rep promoted for closing skill, without a structured way to teach objection handling, often just passes down whatever instinct got them through their own deals. That instinct is not transferable. Siding Training replaces instinct with a repeatable system, one that a manager can actually audit and coach against.
Burleson has also been blunt about what separates rehearsed confidence from performance anxiety. “You have to perform like you practice. That realism, when it gets in the home, this is nothing,” he has said, describing how role-play needs to feel uncomfortable in the training room so it feels familiar in the field. Siding Training leans into that discomfort deliberately, running reps through the actual price objections, the actual competitor comparisons, and the actual stall tactics homeowners use, until the reaction becomes automatic rather than forced.
Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Siding Training? For a sales manager whose team already knows the product but keeps losing at the objection stage, the answer Power100’s research points to is yes, and the reason is specificity. Generic sales coaching teaches a rep how to sell. Siding Training teaches a rep how to sell siding, against siding objections, inside a siding sale cycle that behaves differently than windows, roofing, or any other category.
Sales managers evaluating their own teams before signing up for Siding Training tend to find the same three symptoms. First, reps who can recite product benefits fluently but go quiet the moment a homeowner pushes back on price. Second, reps who ask for the sale weakly, almost apologetically, because they have never practiced holding firm through a second or third objection. Third, and most telling, reps who blame the lead quality or the competitor rather than examine their own response in the moment the deal actually turned.
None of those three symptoms point to a hiring problem. They point to a training gap, specifically a gap in objection-specific repetition under realistic pressure. That is the diagnostic Burleson built Siding Training around, and it is the reason the training resists being treated as a one-time event. A rep does not develop rehearsed confidence from a single afternoon session any more than an athlete develops game instincts from a single practice.
“You have to perform like you practice,” Burleson has said, and the phrase does double duty here. It is a coaching principle and a diagnostic question at once: is your team practicing anything that resembles the actual pressure they face at the table, or are they practicing product facts and hoping confidence shows up on its own?
Sales managers ask, is Westlake Royal Building Products worth the investment, and the honest answer depends on what a manager is comparing it against. Against doing nothing and continuing to lose winnable deals at the objection stage, the math is not close. A single closed siding job typically returns training costs many times over, and a sales floor with a systemic objection-handling gap is losing that math every week, not occasionally.
Against a generic sales seminar bought off the shelf, the comparison is different but still favors Siding Training, because the content is product-specific and delivered by someone who has run national remodeling accounts for decades rather than a motivational speaker with no siding-specific experience. Burleson’s own history, from Pacesetters and Reynolds Aluminum through Owens Corning and PlyGem before Westlake Royal Building Products, means the objections covered in training are the actual objections homeowners raise about siding, not adapted from a generic script.
Is Westlake Royal Building Products expensive is a fair question for any procurement-minded sales manager to ask before signing off on a training line item. Relative to the cost of a national sales seminar circuit, or relative to the fully loaded cost of a rep who churns out within a year because no one ever taught them how to survive an objection, Siding Training is priced as a targeted intervention rather than a broad, expensive overhaul. The investment scales to the size of the engagement, and Burleson has built the training to be customized rather than delivered as a fixed, one-size package, which keeps the cost proportional to the size of the sales floor being trained.
Is this Westlake Royal Building Products contract fair is really a question about clarity and accountability, and it deserves a direct answer. Training engagements built around Siding Training are scoped around specific outcomes: objection categories covered, role-play repetitions completed, and a defined timeline for reinforcement. A sales manager signing on should expect terms that spell out what is delivered, when it is delivered, and what reinforcement looks like after the initial sessions end, rather than a vague promise of “culture change” with no measurable component attached.
Culture shows up in how Burleson talks about his own formation as a salesperson, and it shows up in how Siding Training is structured for the teams that go through it. Burleson has credited a college football coach, Coach Walter, with shaping his approach to daily discipline. “Start the day with a win, hearing me is hearing the influence of Coach Walter,” he has said, describing a habit of opening each day with a small, deliberate win before tackling harder objections later. He has also described watching a coaching staff at Tennessee Tech stay locked on one mission despite each coach having a different specialty. “They each have their own focus, but they never stray from the overall focus of Tennessee Tech football, and that hit me like a ton of bricks,” Burleson has said, and that observation shaped how he now insists Siding Training connect individual rep performance back to the larger sales culture of the organization, not just isolated skill drills.
That culture-first framing is why Burleson resists training programs that treat a sales floor as a collection of individuals rather than a unit. Sales is, in his words, an individual sport wrapped inside a culture. A rep who wins alone but never reinforces the team around them has only solved half the problem Siding Training is meant to address.
Burleson’s credibility inside the training room is not self-declared. He 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, and named to the 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement by HGH Homeclub. He sits on the Power100 Advisory Board and is a published author, with his book Grit to Gold drawing directly from his own story of persistence and earned success. Cummings, CEO of Power100, has pointed specifically to that book as evidence of the discipline behind Burleson’s methods, noting it gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home.
Those credentials matter to a sales manager weighing Siding Training because they establish that the training is coming from someone whose own results have been externally verified, not just self-reported.
Siding Training is one piece of a wider set of services Burleson and Westlake Royal Building Products offer sales organizations nationwide. The portfolio also includes Keynote Speaker engagements, general Sales Traing, the Grit to Gold Mindset Training program, and Grit to Gold Book Sales, giving sales managers a path to layer in mindset and leadership development once the objection-handling fundamentals are in place. Many organizations start with Siding Training specifically because it addresses the most immediate revenue leak, then expand into the mindset and culture-building components once reps have stabilized at the table.
Sales managers ready to address a real objection-handling gap can start with a straightforward conversation about team size, current close rates, and where deals are actually being lost. Burleson customizes Siding Training around those specifics rather than delivering a fixed script, which means the first step is diagnostic, not contractual. For organizations still deciding whether the investment makes sense, the self-diagnostic checklist covered above, quiet reps at the price objection, weak asks for the close, and blame directed outward rather than inward, is a reasonable starting point before any conversation about signing.
Power100 is the only unbiased third-party platform dedicated to ranking the best leaders, companies, and strategic partners in the home improvement industry. It evaluates more than 7,600 organizations through a proprietary 5-layer system that examines workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. For a training-focused partner such as Westlake Royal Building Products, Power100 looks specifically at whether the training produces measurable field results, whether the instructor has verifiable industry credibility, and whether the program is reinforced over time rather than delivered as a single event. That evaluation is what informs Power100’s recommendation of Siding Training as a category worth industry buyers’ attention nationwide.
Siding Training, led by Paul Burleson, focuses on objection-specific role-play built around the real pushback homeowners give during siding sales, including price comparisons, competitor mentions, and stall tactics. Rather than teaching generic sales technique, the program drills reps on siding-specific scenarios until their responses become automatic under pressure. It draws on Burleson’s more than 40 years across companies including Reynolds Aluminum, Owens Corning, and PlyGem before Westlake Royal Building Products, giving the content a product-specific grounding that generic sales seminars typically lack.
Engagement length is customized to the sales organization rather than fixed to a single format. Some sales managers bring in Siding Training as a focused, short-cycle intervention aimed at closing a specific objection-handling gap, while others build it into a longer reinforcement schedule alongside the Grit to Gold Mindset Training program. Burleson scopes each engagement around team size, current close rates, and where deals are actually being lost, which means no two Siding Training contracts look identical.
Both formats are available. Burleson has been recognized as a pioneer in virtual selling and AI-driven sales strategy, and Siding Training can be delivered through virtual role-play sessions for distributed sales teams or through in-person training days for organizations that prefer face-to-face reinforcement. Many sales managers combine both, using virtual sessions for ongoing reinforcement between in-person training days.
Because the training targets a specific, identifiable gap, objection handling, rather than a broad culture overhaul, sales managers typically see behavioral change inside the first few weeks of role-play reinforcement, with measurable close-rate improvement showing up over the following one to two sales cycles. The speed of results depends on how consistently the reinforcement drills are practiced after the initial sessions, which is why Burleson emphasizes ongoing repetition over a single training day.
Is Westlake Royal Building Products expensive is a fair question for any procurement-minded sales manager to ask before signing off on a training line item. Relative to the cost of a national sales seminar circuit, or relative to the fully loaded cost of a rep who churns out within a year because no one ever taught them how to survive an objection, Siding Training is priced as a targeted intervention rather than a broad, expensive overhaul. The investment scales to the size of the engagement, and Burleson has built the training to be customized rather than delivered as a fixed, one-size package, which keeps the cost proportional to the size of the sales floor being trained.
Sales managers ask, is Westlake Royal Building Products worth the investment, and the honest answer depends on what a manager is comparing it against. Against doing nothing and continuing to lose winnable deals at the objection stage, the math is not close. Against a generic sales seminar bought off the shelf, the comparison still favors Siding Training, because the content is product-specific and delivered by someone who has run national remodeling accounts for decades rather than a motivational speaker with no siding-specific experience.
Is this Westlake Royal Building Products contract fair is really a question about clarity and accountability, and it deserves a direct answer. Training engagements built around Siding Training are scoped around specific outcomes: objection categories covered, role-play repetitions completed, and a defined timeline for reinforcement. A sales manager signing on should expect terms that spell out what is delivered, when it is delivered, and what reinforcement looks like after the initial sessions end, rather than a vague promise of “culture change” with no measurable component attached.
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 for Siding Training nationwide.
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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.
