Offering financing can be a powerful tool to boost project sizes, improve close rates, and make home improvement more accessible for your customers. But simply having a financing program in place isn’t enough—your sales team needs to know how to talk about it confidently and effectively.
If you’re a contractor using Hearth, your financing solution is already built to be simple and accessible. Now it’s time to equip your team to use it to its full potential. Here are five actionable strategies to train your sales team on offering financing—and making it a natural part of their sales conversations.
1. Help Them Understand the Financing Program
Before a salesperson can explain financing to a customer, they need to fully understand how it works. Start your training by covering the basics of your financing program:
Hearth offers access to loans from $1,000 to $250,000, with repayment terms between 2 and 12 years and APRs starting at 7.99%. Customers can get approved with credit scores as low as 550, and funding can arrive in as little as 24 hours.
Most importantly, Hearth operates on an annual subscription model—not dealer fees—so your team can confidently offer financing without worrying about profit loss from hidden charges. When your team knows the key benefits and logistics of the platform, they’re better prepared to frame it as a win-win for both you and your customers.
2. Make Financing Part of Every Sales Conversation
One of the biggest mistakes sales teams make is treating financing as a last-ditch option, only bringing it up when customers show hesitation. Instead, train your team to position financing from the very beginning—not as a backup plan, but as a valuable service.
During initial conversations, sales reps should mention that flexible monthly payments are available. When discussing project scope, they can explain how financing allows customers to choose higher-quality materials or complete the full project, rather than compromising due to upfront budget limits. And when it’s time to present the proposal, they should include monthly payment estimates alongside the total cost to help reframe the conversation around affordability.
When financing is a standard part of the pitch—not an afterthought—it becomes easier for customers to engage with it.
3. Train Them to Use Digital Tools Efficiently
The best financing tools are only useful if your team knows how to use them. Hearth’s digital platform is designed for contractors on the go, so make sure your team is comfortable navigating all its features.
Start with the Hearth mobile app, which allows salespeople to track customer applications, receive real-time updates, and follow up at the right moment—all from their phones. Walk them through how to generate quotes that include financing options, how to embed pre-qualification links into digital contracts, and how to explain the process to customers in just a few steps.
The more fluently your team can use these tools, the smoother the financing experience will be—for both your team and your customers.
4. Role-Play Real Scenarios to Build Confidence
Even with the right tools and knowledge, many reps hesitate to bring up financing simply because they’re not confident in how to talk about it. That’s where role-playing comes in.
Practice common customer conversations as a team. Walk through scenarios where a customer is unsure about financing, skeptical about interest rates, or confused about how it works. Focus on how to communicate clearly and build trust, not just recite terms. Make sure your team understands how to reassure customers that checking rates won’t affect their credit score, and how to explain that pre-qualification only takes a few minutes.
These practice runs help your team become more natural and persuasive in real sales situations—and more likely to bring up financing in the first place.
5. Build a Clear Follow-Up Process
Financing success doesn’t stop with sending a pre-qualification link. Your team needs to be trained on what happens next.
Set expectations for how and when to follow up after a customer checks their options. Make sure reps are monitoring application statuses through Hearth and understand what to do once a customer is approved. That might mean helping finalize paperwork, answering lingering questions, or coordinating project start dates.
The more streamlined your follow-up process, the more funding opportunities your team will convert—and the more revenue you’ll generate as a result.
Keep Momentum with Ongoing Support and Coaching
Like any sales skill, confidence with financing comes with repetition, reinforcement, and recognition. Make financing a regular topic in your team meetings—celebrate wins, troubleshoot challenges, and share success stories that highlight how financing helped close deals or increase project sizes.
You can also track key performance metrics like offer rate and funded rate by salesperson. Use these insights to offer targeted coaching or additional support to the team members who need it most.
The Bottom Line: Make Financing Second Nature
Offering financing isn’t just about helping customers pay—it’s about helping your team close bigger, better jobs. When your team understands how the program works, knows how to talk about it naturally, and has a system in place to follow through, financing becomes a powerful sales accelerator.
At Hearth, we make it easy to embed financing into your sales process. From intuitive tools to fast funding and hands-on support, our platform is designed to help contractors close more deals.
Ready to take your team’s financing confidence to the next level?
Schedule a demo today and see how Hearth helps contractors grow through smarter sales training and simple financing solutions.
