If you are engaging your field service team in business development efforts, you will be aware of the importance of having a robust and failsafe opportunity management process.  Poor processes drop opportunities, fail to keep everyone informed and generally defeat your efforts to get everyone enthusiastically involved.

In this blog, I thought it would be helpful to consider the Six Key Components of a Robust and Failsafe Opportunity Management Process for your team.

1. Clearly identify what you want your technicians to do

The process starts with having a clear understanding of what you want your technicians to do if they do find an opportunity to help.  For example, do you want them to:

• Simply pass the opportunity over to sales (or other) for follow-up?
• Review their ideas with the customer and get their permission for a salesperson (or other) to call?
• Review their ideas with the customer, provide pricing, and seek the customer’s agreement to proceed?
• Other?

2. Provide clear expectations on how you want technician to be involved in the solution

Options can include:

• None – they leave it up to the sales team
• Some – they provide input then back out of the process
• Most – they work closely with the sales team (or others) to determine the final solution
• All – they determine the final solution, price it, and present it to the customer

3. Build in flexibility to accommodate different situations

Be clear on how you want the technician (and sales team) to act as circumstances change.  Do your expectations of your field service team change depending upon the nature of the opportunity?  For example, will their actions change depending upon the:

• Size of the opportunity?
• Products and/or service contemplated?
• Nature of the customer?
• Other?

4. Define how progress on each opportunity will be communicated

Typically opportunities take time to address.  Customer visits are required, a solution must be developed and priced, customers need time to evaluate the solution, etc.  To keep the field service team engaged and enthusiastic, it is critical to keep them informed of the progress that is being made.

This also allows the technician to respond professionally in the event the customer asks a question about progress on the solution.  Having a technician respond with a flippant “I don’t know.  Those guys in the office never tell us anything”, is not helpful and certainly not professional.

5. Make it clear on who will follow up and how the follow up will take place

It is logical to place responsibility for follow up on the sales team or the person who presented the customer with the final proposal.  But, if the opportunity was quoted through sales or through another department, can the technicians play a role here?

Would it make sense to provide them with a list of outstanding proposals for each customer that they visit so that they can ask if the customer has come to some decision and perhaps provide supporting information?

I recognize that each company and each opportunity is different so this approach may not work in all cases.  However, letting a proposal to replace an old piece of equipment before it fails fall through the cracks does not help the customer if the equipment fails because they forgot about the issue.

6. Actively work to keep things on track

No system is truly failsafe for every circumstance.  Despite your best efforts, things will go wrong.  When they do, we can show leadership by addressing the underlying issues and getting things back on track quickly.

We can also address those that don’t follow the process and ensure that they understand the importance of doing so.  Failure to address problems quickly and consistently will tell everyone that the process really isn’t all that important after all.

Our technicians provide a valuable service when they take proactive actions to make recommendations that help our customers to be better off.  We can help them and help our business by ensuring that the processes we have in place work consistently and correctly.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. And as always, please feel free to leave a link back to your own blog if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

– W. Edwards Deming

The post Six Components of a Robust and Failsafe Opportunity Management Process appeared first on jimbaston.com.

Our field service technicians represent a huge opportunity to generate revenues. They have a special relationship with our customers based on a high level of trust. Through that relationship, they have gained a unique understanding of our customers’ goals. They have a practical understanding of the latest in technology and they know our company’s capabilities. Who better than them to recognize and explore opportunities for your company to add more value through more services?

Despite this truth, we have found that most service firms are not fully capitalizing on the unique relationships that their service people have. This is unfortunate for both the service firm and the customer. When we do not fully leverage the special relationships that our service technicians have, we are missing a tremendous opportunity to grow our business, reduce competition and increase customer satisfaction levels. But there is more to it than that. The customer is being denied the opportunity to run their plant or facility better. The customer is not benefiting fully from the knowledge and expertise of our service technicians.

Many firms have considered teaching their service technicians to become part time salespeople. Unfortunately, those firms that we have worked with who have taken this approach report mixed results and any improvement in business development appeared to be short lived.

One of the main reasons that turning technicians into part time salespeople does not work as well as we might hope is because customers trust the service technician to give them objective advice based on their knowledge and experience.  Unlike salespeople who are compensated for what they sell, service people are compensated for what they know and using that knowledge to do their job well – installing, fixing or maintaining things.  They are viewed as honest brokers – “telling it like it is” with no hidden agendas.  It would seem natural that, if they just put a little more effort in selling to those trusting customers, then they will be instrumental in building more revenues and profits.

Unfortunately, the harder the technician tries to “sell” to the customer, the less effective they will be in building new business.  The reason is that the moment the service technician starts to “sell”, he/she transcends that bond of trust that has been forged with the customer.  The technician’s focus changes from the needs of the customer to the interests of making the sale.  The very reason the customer trusted the service technician in the first place – the fact that they aren’t out to sell them anything – is suddenly no longer the basis of the relationship.   When the customer senses that they are being “sold”, they become confused.  To the customer, the technician has just changed from being a “trusted advisor” to just another “salesperson” and the relationship advantage is lost.

The solution is to provide the field service technician with training that ensures that any new business opportunities that are identified are based on solving the needs of the customer – not on the need to sell the services of our company.  This subtle change in approach directs the field service technicians to change their focus from our firm and our services – i.e. what we have or do that can be sold – to the needs of our customer – i.e. what our customer needs and how we can best address it.

When service technicians approach business development in this way, they offer a higher level of service altogether. They will be using their knowledge, skills and experience to help our customers realize how they can make improvements.  They will be giving our customers their heads as well as their hands.

I’d love your feedback. Feel free to leave a link back to your own blog as well via the commentluv feature here on the site.

Jim Baston

P.S. If you would like to explore the “Five Hurdles to Engaging Technicians in Business Development Activities“, I encourage you to download my article which you will by clicking here.

 “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it.
But if you love what you are doing,
and always put the customer first, success will be yours.”

-Ray Kroc

The post Increase Revenues Generated by Your Service Techs appeared first on jimbaston.com.