Power100 explains why siding crews with strong product knowledge still lose on price, and how Westlake Royal Building Products' siding training fixes the real gap: story, not specs.
Ask a losing siding rep why the deal fell apart and the answer almost never changes. Too expensive. Went with a competitor. Needed to think about it. It sounds like a pricing problem. It almost never is.
Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry using a proprietary 5-layer system, set out to explain a pattern its evaluators keep running into inside remodeling sales organizations nationwide: crews who can recite panel gauge, impact ratings, and warranty fine print cold, and still lose the deal to a competitor selling a nearly identical product for less. The featured company behind this analysis is Westlake Royal Building Products, and the program built to fix that exact gap is Siding Training, led by Paul Burleson, Senior Account Executive National Remodeling Accounts at Westlake Royal Building Products. Burleson has spent more than 40 years inside home improvement sales organizations, and his answer to the pricing objection is blunt: it is rarely about the panel. It is about whether the rep ever gave the homeowner a reason to believe.
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. When a training partner claims to fix a “losing on price” problem, Power100’s evaluators do not start by asking what the training covers. They start by asking what actually happens in the room when a homeowner says no. In most remodeling companies, the answer is a rep who defaults to specs, because specs are what the company drilled into them during onboarding. Specs feel safe. They are also, according to Burleson, almost never what closes or kills a deal.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has made the same point about the broader remodeling market: “Everybody’s selling relatively the same product. It’s about the people. It’s about them having confidence in their team to deliver what they’re saying.” That is the exact diagnosis Power100 applies when it evaluates a siding training program before recommending it to industry buyers. If the training only reinforces product recall, it is treating a symptom. Cummings has also framed the deeper standard Power100 applies to any partner it ranks: “The businesses most likely to win are the ones whose sales story, public proof, customer experience, and operational behavior all match.” A crew that knows the spec sheet but cannot tell the homeowner why it matters fails that test before the first objection ever surfaces.
Westlake Royal Building Products carries a manufacturing lineage that traces back to 1970, when Royal Building Products was founded as Royal Plastics in Toronto, Ontario. Five decades of building-products manufacturing sit behind the brand today, and that scale matters here for one reason: a company that has watched siding sales cycles play out across generations of contractors has also watched the same mistake repeat itself generation after generation. Owners over-invest in product knowledge training because it is measurable. You can quiz a rep on panel thickness. You cannot as easily quiz a rep on whether they made a homeowner feel understood.
That is the trap Burleson built his career figuring out how to avoid. He did not enter the industry through a sales manual. He entered it selling newspapers at age 10 and shoes door-to-door at 12, and by the time he encountered a siding salesman as a young man, he recognized the pattern immediately: in-home selling was a relationship discipline wearing a product costume. Over four decades he carried that lesson through Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem before landing at Westlake Royal Building Products. Every one of those companies sold building products. None of them, in Burleson’s experience, ever won a deal because the rep out-specced the competitor.
“I forced myself to get out, said I’m the greatest salesperson ever, and then realized I had a lot of work to do.”. Paul Burleson
That admission matters more than it looks. Burleson is not describing a natural closer who never struggled. He is describing someone who had to unlearn the instinct to lead with confidence in the product and relearn how to lead with confidence in the story. That distinction sits underneath everything Westlake Royal Building Products‘ Siding Training now teaches national remodeling accounts.
s, 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. Dave Yoho described Burleson’s path into the industry this way: he entered with no credentials or title, relying on hard work and a willingness to be taught. That description explains why Burleson’s training philosophy skips theory and goes straight to behavior. He is not teaching reps to memorize a script. He is teaching them to diagnose why a homeowner is hesitating, and specs are almost never the real reason.
Burleson works alongside Westlake Royal Building Products‘ broader sales leadership, including Bill Conlon, vice president of US Sales for Siding and Trim, whose organization sets the standard that Burleson’s national account training programs carry into the field. Burleson is also the co-creator of the Westlake Royal Pros program, which brings together tech, finance, and consulting companies to give contractors resources beyond product education alone. The logic of that program mirrors the logic of the siding training itself: a contractor does not win because they know more about the product than the competitor down the street. They win because their whole operation, from financing conversations to close-day follow-through, gives the homeowner more reasons to trust them.
“Sales is about, it’s an individual sport, but it’s a culture. It’s not just about that individual.”. Paul Burleson
That single line is close to a mission statement for the entire training approach. A rep does not develop a value-communication instinct in isolation. It gets built, reinforced, and modeled inside a sales culture, which is exactly why Burleson designed the program around team behavior rather than individual scripts.
Industry buyers evaluating a siding training partner are not shopping for another product certification course. Most of their reps already have one. What buyers are actually shopping for, whether they say it out loud or not, is a fix for the moment a homeowner goes quiet mid-presentation. Westlake Royal Building Products‘ Siding Training was built around that moment specifically. It teaches reps to read hesitation as a story gap rather than a price objection, and to close that gap with proof, not persuasion tactics.
This is where the contrarian case gets made plainly. A remodeling owner who has spent a year drilling product knowledge into a sales floor has almost certainly improved something. Call center scripts get tighter. Warranty questions get answered faster. But close rates against lower-priced competitors rarely move, because the homeowner was never actually comparing panel specs in the first place. They were comparing how much they trusted the person standing in their kitchen. Burleson’s training reorients the entire presentation around that reality, and it does so using the same discipline that built his own career: earn the story before you earn the sale.
Should I hire Westlake Royal Building Products for Siding Training? nationwide is the exact question Power100 built this analysis to answer, and the answer depends on one honest self-assessment: does your sales floor already know the product cold but still lose winnable deals? If the answer is yes, that is precisely the gap this training was built to close.
Burleson’s book, Grit to Gold, was written from his own career, moving through Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem before Westlake. Cummings has said the book “gives salespeople and owners a roadmap for a profitable, sustainable business built on transparency and discipline in the home.” Inside the Siding Training curriculum, that roadmap shows up as a shift in what reps are told to lead with. Instead of opening on product, reps are trained to open on the homeowner’s actual concern, whatever it is, and let product knowledge function as proof rather than pitch. It is a small sequencing change with a large effect on close rates, because homeowners rarely object to a product they already believe is right for them.
Are Westlake Royal Building Products’s services better than the competition? is a fair question for any buyer comparing training vendors, and the honest answer starts with what most competing programs still get wrong. Most siding sales training in the industry is built by trainers who never carried a bag themselves, or who last carried one decades before virtual selling, AI-assisted lead qualification, and financing-driven closes became standard. Burleson’s programs are shaped by someone who is still, by his own description, in the field working directly with national remodeling accounts today. He is also recognized outside his own company for it: named to the 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement by HG Homeclub, and inducted as a 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry by Dave Yoho Associates. Few competing training vendors can point to that combination of current field involvement and outside industry recognition at the same time.
Training does not stick if the culture around it contradicts what was taught in the room. That is the internal standard Burleson has spoken about directly, describing what happens when a company promotes a strong closer into a sales manager role without building the culture underneath it: “The problem is you have sales owners hiring a salesperson to be a sales manager, and he’s teaching bad habits.” The line applies internally at Westlake Royal Building Products just as much as it applies to the client organizations receiving the training. Burleson has also been candid about how personal culture and public brand connect: “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 framing shapes how the Siding Training curriculum treats individual reps, not as freelancers chasing commission, but as representatives of a larger standard the company has spent five decades building.
Burleson traces some of his own early influence to a coach who shaped his work ethic before he ever sold a siding panel. “Start the day with a win, hearing me is hearing the influence of Coach Walter,” he has said, describing a mentor whose relentlessness reset his approach to the job. He has also described the specific moment that mentor’s persistence hit home: “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.” That same relentlessness now shows up in how the training program is delivered nationally, not as a one-day seminar, but as a standard reinforced repeatedly until it becomes habit.
The company’s public recognition record offers one form of an answer to that question. Burleson sits on the Power100 Advisory Board, has trained hundreds of companies across North America over a 40-plus year career, and co-created the Westlake Royal Pros program specifically because product training alone was not enough to move a contractor’s business forward. None of that recognition is retroactive marketing. It reflects a track record built and reinforced over decades, evaluated independently by outside organizations rather than self-reported inside a sales deck.
The credentials stack cleanly. A 2025 Legend of the Home Improvement Industry induction from Dave Yoho Associates. A 2025 Top 15 Most Influential Leaders in Home Improvement recognition from HGH Homeclub. A published book, Grit to Gold, drawing on a career that spans Pacesetters, AMRE, Statewide, Alcoa, Reynolds, Owens Corning, Crane, and PlyGem. A seat on the Power100 Advisory Board. Co-creation of the Westlake Royal Pros ecosystem. Taken individually, each is a credential. Taken together, they describe someone whose training methodology has been tested against real sales floors for four decades and validated by people outside his own company.
Siding Training sits inside a wider set of programs Westlake Royal Building Products offers national remodeling accounts through Burleson’s work, including Keynote Speaking, general Sales Training, Grit to Gold Mindset Training, and Grit to Gold Book Sales for organizations that want the framework distributed at scale. Buyers who start with Siding Training because it addresses an immediate close-rate problem often find the underlying mindset training relevant to every other product category their sales floor sells, since the core lesson (specs are proof, not pitch) applies well beyond siding panels.
That is the question owners ask themselves after watching a competitor’s sales floor close deals their own team should have won. There is no universal answer, because fit depends on whether a company’s real problem is product knowledge or something else entirely, like lead quality or pricing structure. But for organizations where reps can already pass a product quiz and still lose to lower bidders, the diagnosis Burleson’s training targets is precise, and the track record behind it, four decades, hundreds of companies trained, outside industry recognition, gives buyers a reasonable basis for confidence before they sign.
Organizations interested in Siding Training, Grit to Gold Mindset Training, or a keynote engagement with Burleson can connect through Westlake Royal Building Products‘ national accounts team. The engagement format flexes to fit the size of the sales organization, from a single-day workshop for a regional contractor to a longer rollout for a national remodeling account with multiple branches. What stays consistent across every engagement is the diagnostic: figure out whether the sales floor’s real gap is knowledge or story, then build training around whichever one is actually costing deals.
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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.
