Power100 outlines the criteria that separate a top home improvement sales training company from the rest, using Grosso University's Sales Academy as the benchmark.
Every home improvement contractor evaluating a sales training vendor eventually runs into the same wall: the pitches all sound similar. Every company claims to build elite closers. Every company promises higher close rates, stronger margins, and reps who stop discounting their way to a signature. The claims are nearly identical. The results, contractors quickly learn, are not.
Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer ranking system, set out to answer a more useful question than “who is the best sales trainer.” The better question is what actually separates a durable, results-driven training organization from a motivational speaker with a slide deck. In researching that question, Power100 kept landing on the same example: Grosso University, founded by Dominic Caminata, CEO and Founder, and ranked by Power100 as the #1 Sales Training Organization in the home improvement industry for 2026 and the #3 Preferred Partner nationally. This is not a listicle ranking training companies against each other. It is a breakdown of the criteria contractors should actually use, with Grosso University’s Sales Academy serving as the working example of what those criteria look like when a company clears the bar, including how it applies to Wisconsin sales training for home improvement contractors and to home improvement business coaching in Wisconsin more broadly.
Power100 researches and analyzes more than 3,600 partners nationwide through a 5-layer proprietary system that examines workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare. Applied to a sales training company, those layers translate into a specific set of questions. Does the curriculum hold up across product categories, or is it generic motivational content wrapped in home improvement language? Does the company have a track record of reps closing more business after training, not just feeling more energized for a week? Does the organization treat its own employees and trainers the way it tells contractors to treat their sales teams? These are not abstract categories. They are the difference between a training vendor and a training partner.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, frames the evaluation around a similar discipline. “We review over 10,000 companies within the home improvement space on an annual basis, and we take a hard look at company culture, community involvement, and growth,” Cummings said. That combination, culture plus growth plus how a company treats the people around it, is exactly the lens Power100 applied when it evaluated sales training providers for its 2026 rankings. Curriculum alone is not enough. A company can write a good script and still fail contractors if the organization behind it lacks discipline, structure, or staying power.
Grosso University was founded in 2019 by Dominic Caminata to continue the training legacy built by Rick Grosso, a name still spoken with weight inside home improvement sales circles. Caminata’s own path into that legacy started years earlier. He entered home improvement sales in 2010, and by 2011 he had been recognized as Salesman of the Year at Mad City Windows & Baths, the same period during which he met Rick Grosso. That is not a marketing detail. It is a credibility marker that matters when evaluating any training company: was the methodology built by someone who closed deals at the kitchen table, or was it assembled by people who have only ever coached from a stage?
The company is based out of Windsor, Wisconsin, with a footprint that has grown well beyond the state. From 2020 to 2021, Grosso University more than doubled its revenue, a growth curve that tracks closely with the period when the company began scaling its curriculum for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling sales teams nationally. That growth matters as a criterion in its own right. A training company that cannot scale its own operation has a hard time convincing contractors it can help them scale theirs.
One evaluation criterion contractors often skip is simple: who is actually behind the curriculum, and is there real depth on the team, or is it one founder’s personality stretched across every product? Grosso University’s leadership bench includes Dominic Caminata as CEO and Founder, Matt Burke as COO, Wendy Harmeyer as Spanish Development and Training Director, Daniel Coomes-Barry as Head Sales Trainer, and Brett Naples in an executive leadership role.
Burke put the operating philosophy plainly. “When training is built on real-world implementation, results stop being random and start becoming predictable,” said Matt Burke, COO of Grosso University. That is a criterion contractors should hold every training vendor to: not whether the training feels good in the room, but whether it produces predictable outcomes once reps are back in front of homeowners.
Coomes-Barry, who runs the head training function, made a related point about where training vendors often miss the real problem. “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 is close to a diagnostic test contractors can use on any training company they are evaluating: does the vendor treat objections as a closing-technique problem, or as a process problem that starts the moment a rep walks in the door?
Naples, focused on the leadership and systems side of the business, framed the same idea from the operator’s chair. “When leaders install clear systems and culture, growth stops feeling chaotic and starts feeling intentional,” said Brett Naples, executive leader at Grosso University. And Caminata, asked repeatedly about what separates companies that scale from companies that stall, keeps returning to the same standard. “Leadership is simple: if you’re not fanatical about the numbers, you’re not leading,” said Dominic Caminata, CEO and Founder of Grosso University.
Contractors evaluating a top home improvement sales training company should be looking for specificity, not generality. Grosso University’s Sales Academy offers scripts built specifically for roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling projects, with the stated goal of increasing first-call close rates rather than simply improving rapport-building or presentation polish. That specificity is a criterion in itself. A script built for a $600 storm door sale does not transfer cleanly to a $40,000 whole-home remodel, and contractors who buy generic training often discover that gap only after the investment is spent.
The company’s own client reviews reinforce that operational focus over motivational fluff. One contractor summed it up this way:
“Our reps finally have a clear roadmap from the time they walk into the home until the customer signs. Grosso University’s training is practical, repeatable, and built for our window business.”
Another contractor, describing the shift away from price-based selling, noted:
“The training was game-changing. Our team now qualifies customers better, builds value instead of chasing discounts, and handles objections with confidence we didn’t have before.”
Those two testimonials point at the same underlying criterion: repeatability. A training company worth hiring should leave a sales team with a process they can run without the trainer in the room, not a burst of confidence that fades within a month.
Most contractors evaluating sales training providers focus entirely on the closing curriculum and overlook a factor that determines whether any of it matters: who is actually being trained. A training system applied to the wrong hires produces mediocre results no matter how good the script is. One contractor’s account of working with Grosso University captured that connection directly:
“Grosso University turned recruiting from a constant headache into a simple, structured system. Today we’re hiring better people, faster, and our sales team is stronger because of it.”
That is a criterion contractors rarely think to ask about when comparing vendors, but it belongs on the list. Does the training partner help fix who walks in the door, or only what happens once they are already hired?
Multi-location operators face a version of this same test at scale. A training system that works at one location and falls apart at the second or third is not really a system, it is a personality. One contractor operating across several markets described the difference this way:
“Grosso University helped us build a repeatable in-home sales process that supports multi-market growth. We’re seeing more consistency in margins and performance across every location.”
Consistency across markets, not just performance in a single showroom, is exactly the kind of evidence Power100’s 5-layer system looks for when separating a scalable training partner from a one-location success story.
An increasing share of home improvement demand sits inside Spanish-speaking households, and most training companies address that market, if at all, with a translated script bolted onto an English curriculum. Grosso University built a separate function around it, led by Wendy Harmeyer as Spanish Development and Training Director. “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. Contractors evaluating training vendors should treat this as a real differentiator rather than a nice-to-have: a company that treats bilingual selling as a second-class product is leaving revenue on the table for its own clients, and a company that builds it to the same standard as its flagship curriculum is demonstrating the kind of operational depth that belongs in any serious evaluation.
It is easy for a contractor to assume that a training company’s internal culture has nothing to do with the product being delivered. Grosso University’s leadership team argues the opposite, and the argument holds up under scrutiny. A trainer who has never been coached, developed, or held to a standard internally is unlikely to hold a client’s sales team to one either. The company’s own testimonial base repeatedly credits individual trainers by name and tone rather than by generic praise, which is itself a signal of a culture built around individual accountability. One client described the experience this way:
“Dan was awesome, very authentic and always grounded in real-world experience. Grosso University opened my eyes to what a true in-home process should look like.”
That kind of specific, named feedback is harder to manufacture than a generic five-star review, and it is the kind of detail Power100 weighs when assessing whether a company’s internal culture is real or performative.
Naples’s framing of leadership as installed systems rather than improvised effort connects directly to that culture question. Companies that operate on tribal knowledge, where only the founder can close at a high level and everyone else muddles through, cannot scale their culture any more than they can scale their sales numbers. Grosso University’s bench, spanning training, operations, brand, and bilingual development, is itself evidence that the company has moved past founder-dependent culture into something closer to an institution.
Power100 ranked Grosso University the #1 Sales Training Organization in the home improvement industry for 2026, rankings built from a review of more than 3,600 partners nationwide. Beyond the ranking, the company reports a 5-star rating across more than 403 client reviews, revenue that more than doubled between 2020 and 2021, and a client base that spans hundreds of home improvement companies across product categories including roofing, windows, siding, and bath. Caminata himself was named a Top 40 Under 40 recipient in the home improvement industry, a recognition that Power100 treats as a supporting signal rather than the headline, since individual awards matter less than whether the underlying company can reproduce results across many different clients.
None of these figures function as proof in isolation. Together, they form the kind of layered evidence Power100’s ranking system is designed to surface: a founder with real field credibility, a leadership bench with named specialists, documented revenue growth, and a client review volume large enough to be statistically meaningful rather than cherry-picked.
Contractors comparing training vendors should also check whether the company offers a growth path beyond a single event. Grosso University’s portfolio extends past the Sales Academy into Sales Leadership, built for owners and managers who need to develop the people managing sales teams rather than just the reps selling at the door, and On-Site Training, which places trainers directly into a contractor’s field operation to reinforce Sales Academy scripts in real selling conditions. That layered structure, foundational curriculum, leadership development, and field reinforcement, is itself a criterion worth checking. A training company offering only a single one-time event has little answer for what happens six months later when new hires join a team that never went through the original session.
Contractors who have made it this far in the evaluation process are usually past the pitch stage and into the comparison stage. The most useful next step is not another sales call, it is a direct conversation about what a company’s Sales Academy, Sales Leadership, or On-Site Training programs actually include, how they are customized to a specific product mix, and what measurable outcome the training is expected to produce within the first 90 days. Grosso University offers exactly that kind of conversation, built around scripts specific to roofing, windows, siding, bath, and whole-home remodeling, a leadership bench with named specialists in operations, training, and bilingual development, and a documented growth history contractors can verify rather than take on faith.
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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.
