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.
If you are encouraging your technicians to take proactive steps to recommend your products and services to your customers, you may be looking for ways to help them to explore for opportunities to help. Here are four simple steps that your technicians can take to uncover opportunities to help your customers to be better off.
1. Ask a simple question. At the beginning or end of each maintenance service call, get your technicians in the habit of asking, “Is there anything else that we can do for you today?” This simple question will often result in new opportunities that otherwise might go to someone else or go unfilled.
Your field service team can add tremendous value to your service relationships when they recommend products and services that you can provide that will help your customers be better off. They are in a unique position to do this; they have the knowledge of the technology, an inside understanding of your customer’s current processes and equipment and, hopefully an appreciation of your customer’s goals and objectives. They also have proximity to the customer. The question is however, if you engage your technicians in promoting your services, do you tell your customers?
I was engaged in a conversation recently about why communication plays such an important role in the world of service. It was an interesting discussion and allowed me the opportunity to share my definition of effective communication for the service business.
The quality of our communication is relied on to assess our competence
The quality of our communication is a major source of information that our customers rely on to evaluate our competence and the value of our work. As an intangible service, it is almost impossible for a customer to accurately evaluate actual work quality or competence directly. For example, if it takes us one hour to troubleshoot a problem, how does the customer know that the hour spent was amazing and that it would have taken anyone else a day or more to figure out the problem? The answer is that they don’t really know, so they look to their perception of the quality of our communication as an important input that they use to assess our competence.
In his book, Coaching for Improved Work Performance[1], Ferdinand Fournies notes that, although there are 16 reasons why employees do not do what they are supposed to do, 99% of the time it is because of only two – they…
