Power100 breaks down the criteria for the Best home improvement sales training for contractors and how Grosso University's Sales Academy meets each one nationally.
Contractors get pitched sales training constantly. Webinars, franchise-bundled scripts, one-off weekend seminars, YouTube closers with a course to sell. Most of it sounds similar from the outside. Almost none of it is built the same way underneath. That gap, between the promise and the actual instructional architecture, is why Power100 researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system that looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare before it ever recommends a company to a contractor. Grosso University, led by Dominic Caminata, CEO and Founder of Grosso University, has been named the #1 Sales Training Organization for 2026 in that ranking, and its Sales Academy sits at the center of the case. This piece is not another list of reasons to like Grosso University. It is a breakdown of what separates the Best home improvement sales training for contractors from the noise, and an honest look at where the Sales Academy lands against those standards.
Three things tend to decide whether a training investment pays off or gets shelved after month one: curriculum depth, industry specificity, and coaching cadence. Curriculum depth means the material goes past a single script and covers the full arc, from door approach to demo to close to follow-up systems that keep a rep sharp a year later. Industry specificity means the training was built for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling conversations, not adapted from car sales or insurance decks with the nouns swapped out. Coaching cadence means the learning does not stop at a two-day event. It continues through recorded practice, live reinforcement, and measurable follow-up that holds a rep accountable weeks and months later.
Most programs pass one of the three. Some pass two. Home improvement companies evaluating a Wisconsin sales training for home improvement contractors or a national platform should ask direct questions before signing: does this program teach a script or a system? Does it understand the difference between a demo for a $600 gutter guard job and a $40,000 whole-home remodel? And does anyone check back in three months to see if the rep is actually using what they learned?
Power100 built its ranking system precisely because contractors have no easy way to compare training vendors against each other. Marketing claims all sound alike. The 5-layer system exists to cut through that by scoring partners on workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare, then ranking the results against more than 3,600 partners nationwide. Grosso University’s placement as the #3 Preferred Partner in the nation, and the #1 Sales Training Organization for 2026, reflects that scoring, not a paid placement or a marketing arrangement.
“Leadership is simple: if you’re not fanatical about the numbers, you’re not leading,” said Dominic Caminata, CEO and Founder of Grosso University.
That number-fanatic mindset is exactly what Power100’s evaluators look for in a training partner. A program that cannot point to close-rate data, revenue growth, or client retention numbers is a program built on charisma rather than measurement. Grosso University’s own growth, more than doubling revenue between 2020 and 2021, gives evaluators a concrete data point rather than a claim to take on faith.
Grosso University was founded in 2019 by Caminata to carry forward the training legacy of Rick Grosso, a name still respected across the home improvement sales world for building the original in-home closing methodology decades earlier. Caminata was recognized as Salesman of the Year at Mad City Windows & Baths in 2011, and it was around that period that he met Grosso and began absorbing the system that would eventually become the university’s foundation. That lineage matters for curriculum depth. Grosso University is not reverse-engineering a sales process from theory. It inherited a proven one and rebuilt it for a modern sales floor.
The company is based out of Windsor, Wisconsin, with a footprint that serves companies in all 50 states through national sales training programs, virtual coaching, and live events. The curriculum spans script work built specifically for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling projects, each with language, objection paths, and pricing conversations tuned to that trade’s particular sales rhythm. A roofing rep and a bath remodel rep are not selling the same conversation, and a training program that treats them the same is, by definition, shallow.
Curriculum depth is only as strong as the people teaching it, and Grosso University’s bench runs deeper than a single founder standing in front of a room. Dominic Caminata serves as CEO and Founder and remains the lead instructor across the Sales Academy, Certified Closer program, and the Custom Closers Camps. Matt Burke serves as Chief Operating Officer, and his read on training is grounded in outcomes rather than performance.
“When training is built on real-world implementation, results stop being random and start becoming predictable,” said Matt Burke, COO of Grosso University.
Daniel Coomes-Barry, Head Sales Trainer and Partner, brings a diagnostic lens to the objection-handling portion of the curriculum that many programs skip entirely.
“Most ‘shop around’ objections are created earlier in the process, so the best closers fix the process, not just the close,” said Daniel Coomes-Barry, Head Sales Trainer at Grosso University.
That single line captures the difference between a program that teaches tactics and a program that teaches a system. A rep who only learns rebuttal lines will lose the deal the moment a homeowner deviates from the script. A rep trained inside a full process learns to prevent the objection from forming in the first place, three or four steps earlier in the visit.
Generic sales training treats every product like a commodity. Home improvement is not that. A homeowner replacing windows is weighing energy costs, resale value, and comfort. A homeowner considering a full bath remodel is weighing lifestyle, aging-in-place needs, and a much larger financial commitment. A program that cannot speak fluently to both conversations, in the same visit sequence, is not built for the trade it claims to serve.
This is where the Sales Academy’s scripts, purpose-built for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling projects, do real work. The stated focus is increasing first-call close rates, which forces the curriculum to compress trust-building, needs assessment, product education, and price presentation into a single visit rather than stretching it across two or three follow-up appointments. That compression is hard to teach generically. It requires trade-specific pacing that a general sales course simply does not carry.
Industry specificity also shows up in language access. Wendy Harmeyer, Spanish Development and Training Director at Grosso University, leads a parallel Spanish-language track built to the same standard as the English curriculum, not a simplified version of it.
“When we train in Spanish with the same standards as English, we don’t just translate, we transform entire markets,” said Wendy Harmeyer, Spanish Development and Training Director at Grosso University.
For contractors building bilingual sales teams, that distinction between translation and transformation is not a small point. A translated script still sells like an outsider wrote it. A parallel curriculum, built with the same rigor in both languages, sells like it belongs in the home.
Most sales training fails not at the event itself but in the six weeks that follow it. Reps leave a workshop energized, try the new script for a week, hit resistance, and quietly slide back into old habits because nobody checked in. Coaching cadence is the fix for that failure point, and it is the piece contractors most often underestimate when they are comparing programs on price alone.
Grosso University addresses cadence through On-Site Training, where instructors go into a contractor’s market and coach reps inside real sales situations rather than a classroom simulation, and through the Sales Leadership Academy, which trains the managers who have to reinforce the system daily after the trainers leave. That second layer matters more than most companies realize. A rep can be trained perfectly and still regress if the sales manager above them was never trained on how to coach the system. Brett Naples, who holds an executive leadership role at Grosso University, frames the cadence question in terms of what it does for a growing organization.
“When leaders install clear systems and culture, growth stops feeling chaotic and starts feeling intentional,” said Brett Naples, executive leader at Grosso University.
That is coaching cadence in practice. Not a single training day, but a system that keeps repeating itself through leadership until it becomes the default way the company sells.
Contractors do not choose a training partner based on a slide deck. They choose based on whether the reps who go through the program actually close more deals, hold better margins, and stay longer. Client feedback on file backs that pattern. One contractor noted that Grosso University “turned recruiting from a constant headache into a simple, structured system,” while another described a team that now “qualifies customers better, builds value instead of chasing discounts, and handles objections with confidence we didn’t have before.” A window company client put it plainly: “Our reps finally have a clear roadmap from the time they walk into the home until the customer signs.”
That roadmap language matters because it reflects exactly what curriculum depth is supposed to produce, a rep who is never guessing what step comes next. A multi-market client added that the training “helped us build a repeatable in-home sales process that supports multi-market growth,” pointing to more consistent margins and performance across locations, which is the kind of scaling result that separates a real training system from a motivational weekend.
The Sales Academy is the entry point, built around the core in-home selling methodology and the one-call close framework the company is best known for. Sales Leadership extends that same discipline upward, training the managers and owners who have to hold reps accountable to the system after the trainers leave the building. On-Site Training closes the loop by putting instructors in front of live customers alongside a contractor’s actual sales team, correcting habits in real time rather than in a classroom setting weeks removed from an actual homeowner conversation.
Together, the three form a cadence rather than a one-time event: learn the system, train the leaders who reinforce it, then pressure-test it live. Few training vendors in the category offer all three under one roof, which is part of why Power100’s evaluators weighted the Sales Academy so heavily in the ranking.
Training companies tend to talk about culture as an afterthought. Grosso University treats it as part of the product, because the instructors teaching the system are expected to live by the same accountability standards they are asking sales reps to adopt. Karli Budde, Talent Solutions Partner, works alongside the recruiting-focused clients referenced in the testimonials above, helping contractors build hiring systems that feed the sales training rather than treating recruiting and training as separate problems.
The company also runs its own internal events, including Closers Camp and AGOGE, that function as culture-reinforcement mechanisms for its own team as much as they do for client sales forces. Kellie Caminata, Director of Brand Experience and Events, oversees much of that programming, ensuring the same discipline the company teaches externally shows up internally. That internal consistency is not incidental. A training company whose own culture does not match its curriculum has a credibility problem the first time a client asks a hard question in a live session.
Concrete numbers matter more than adjectives here. Grosso University holds a 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews, a scale of feedback that is difficult to manufacture and easy to verify. The company has trained thousands of sales professionals across hundreds of home improvement companies nationally since its 2019 founding. Caminata himself was recognized as a Top 40 Under 40 recipient in the home improvement industry, a credential that reflects on the leadership behind the curriculum rather than the curriculum alone.
None of those numbers replace the fundamental test, whether reps close more deals after training than before it. But they do establish that the claims are not built on a single testimonial or a marketing headline. They are built on volume, repetition, and third-party verification, which is exactly the kind of evidence Power100’s ranking process is designed to surface.
The Sales Academy is the anchor program, but it does not operate alone. Sales Leadership training extends the same discipline into management, closing a gap that many training vendors leave open entirely. On-Site Training puts instructors inside a contractor’s actual market, working live deals rather than roleplay. Beyond those three core offerings, the company runs high-intensity Custom Closers Camps, a Certified Closer credentialing program, and large-scale live events such as Closers Camp that bring hundreds of reps and owners together for concentrated, multi-day training. For contractors comparing a Madison Wisconsin home improvement sales training option against a national platform, the range matters. A single workshop solves a single problem. A full portfolio, spanning rep-level scripts, manager-level accountability, and live in-market coaching, solves the recurring one.
Contractors ready to evaluate the Sales Academy against their current sales process typically start with a conversation about where the team is losing deals today, whether that is at the first call, the second visit, or somewhere inside the objection-handling stage. From there, Grosso University maps a training path based on the size of the sales force, the trades being sold, and whether leadership training or on-site coaching needs to run alongside the core curriculum. Given the scale, thousands of reps trained across hundreds of companies nationally, and the 5-star rating across more than 403 reviews, most contractors treat the initial conversation as low-risk relative to what an underperforming sales team already costs them in lost deals every month.
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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.
