They Hired a Sales “Expert”. A Year Later, Revenue Was Cut in Half

A remodeling company reached out to me a few weeks ago because they’d experienced a massive drop in sales over the past year and they wanted to fix the problem. One of the first questions we asked was: had they made any major changes to their sales process?

It turns out they’d hired a well-known sales trainer in the home improvement space. This trainer stepped in and told them that pretty much everything they’d been doing up to that point was wrong.

Specifically, the trainer told them to no longer discuss pricing with a prospect, under any circumstances, before they went into the home. Not on their website. Not on the phone. Not even if the homeowner asked something as simple as, “Can you at least give me a sense for what I should budget for this type of project?” The instruction was: say nothing.

A year ago they were doing over $12 million in revenue. This year they’re on pace to do well under half of that. The setback was so severe, and the disruption to their marketing, sales, and customer service cultures so deep, that recovery is genuinely in question.

Here’s how it happened.

The Lie That Legacy Sales Systems Still Teach

This is a company that had previously been leaning hard into trust and transparency. They were teaching homeowners on their website what actually defines value when it comes to remodeling. They were answering the real questions buyers ask. And it was working.

Then this one sales system unraveled all of that momentum in a matter of months. Without even realizing it, they had suffocated their pipeline. They were frustrating homeowners with the lack of transparency, and they were going invisible in search engines and AI tools because they had stopped addressing the obvious questions a homeowner would have when looking at a remodeling project.

For many years, companies have been able to succeed by being flat-out dishonest with the customer. This is especially true in home improvement, and you’ve probably seen it in SaaS too. The lie sounds like this: “I have no idea of pricing. I can’t give you any pricing. It’s impossible for me to give you any numbers at all.”

All of that, of course, is a lie. Call any company in the world right now, talk to an honest person who’s been instructed to communicate with integrity, and ask, “What is the average cost for your service or product?” They will have an answer. Every company has an average price range, an average customer, an average ticket. There is nothing new or controversial about this.

As someone who speaks all over the world and all over the home improvement space, I continue to be shocked at the resistance from legacy sales systems and contractor communities that hand out this kind of awful, horrendous advice. The fact that anyone would teach a business to be the antithesis of the golden rule, to build their entire model around hiding information from the very people they claim to serve, is so illogical that I struggle to understand how it still exists in 2026.

And I’m tired of just accepting that it does.

Homeowners Are Sick of It, and Now AI Is Too

This year alone I’ve talked with call center leaders across this industry, and every one of them is telling me the same thing: when they’re forced to tell homeowners they can’t share any pricing information whatsoever until a salesperson comes to the home, they are seeing more angst, more rage, and more frustration than they have ever seen in their careers.

That reaction is well-earned. The bar has been raised. Buyers expect to be treated with honesty and integrity. They expect the golden rule.

And there’s a newer layer to this that legacy sales trainers are completely oblivious to: AI and search engines have raised the information expectation bar. When a homeowner types “how much does a kitchen remodel cost in my city” into Google or asks ChatGPT the same question, the companies that refuse to address pricing are simply not showing up in the answer.

You can’t be the trusted voice in your market if you’ve trained your entire organization to dodge the most-asked question in your industry.

Sorry, not going to happen.

The Cultural Cancer Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part of this story that bothers me the most, and it’s the part I want every business owner reading this to sit with.

When you teach your employees to be dishonest – because of a scarcity mindset, because of a sales tactic, or because some “expert” told you to – that dishonesty does not stay in one department. It infected this company’s marketing culture. It infected their sales culture. It infected their customer service culture. A true cancer throughout the organization.

You cannot ask people to act with integrity in one room and deception in the next. They will eventually pick one, and it usually isn’t the one you want.

The Takeaway

To be clear, I am not suggesting you slap a price list on your website. I never have. What I am suggesting is that we stop treating legacy sales systems as gospel. We stop trusting “experts” who haven’t bothered to keep up with the times, people who are protecting an outdated business model and the IP they built around it instead of evolving toward what buyers (and AI) actually want today.

It breaks my heart to watch what happened to this company. Real momentum, real intent, a leadership team that wanted to take the organization to the next level. They fell prey to outdated legacy systems and to people who did not have the customer’s best interest, or the company’s best interest, at heart.

If you take one thing away from this newsletter, take this: the next time someone tells you to hide information from your buyers, ask yourself who actually benefits from that advice.

It’s almost never your customer.

And as this company is learning the hard way, it’s almost never you either.

If you’d like to learn how to handle pricing conversations without losing trust, we have a free book you can download right here. It’s short, practical, and built for today’s buyer.

Other Stuff I’m Keeping My Eye On:

• I’m seeing more and more Enterprise organizations getting smoked by their smaller competitors when it comes to using AI tools to grow. While these enterprise businesses are stuck using tools like Copilot, smaller shops are doing more work than they’ve ever done before while using tools like Claude Cowork, Hermes, or OpenClaw.
• Google made some massive updates at their recent I/O 2026 event. Biggest theme: Agents and agentic search are our future, and Google would very much like to be your “agent” of choice.

– Marcus