service technician sales training – jimbaston.com

Are You Fully Capitalizing on One of Your Most Valuable Assets?

Jim — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 01:51:45 +0000

Are you fully capitalizing on one of your most valuable assets – the knowledge and experience of your field service team? Sure, you depend on their expertise to provide maintenance service, troubleshoot and make repairs correctly and efficiently. But do you fully capitalize on their abilities to recognize additional work opportunities? They offer much more than the opportunity to identify more business. Their proactive recommendations can help your customers achieve results that they did not realize were possible and can differentiate you from the competition.

When you think about capitalizing on the proactive efforts of your service team, here are three questions to consider:

1. Do you see the field service professional’s promotion of services as an opportunity to serve your customers better or simply as a means for generating more business?

If we regard the field team’s proactive efforts as a service we will be more likely to treat it like one; we will be much more likely to support it, provide training for it and promote it like we would any other service we provide.

2. Do you discourage “selling” for the sake of merely gaining more business and insist that any recommendations by your field service team be directly tied to a customer benefit?

By focusing on how the recommendation will help the customer rather than how it will generate income, we will reinforce the service nature of the recommendations and show the field team why proactive recommendations are an integral part of their day-to-day service role.

3. Do you “convince” or do you “tell” your field team to promote your services?

To fully capitalize on our field team’s expertise, they must be willing participants. A field service professional who is not convinced that promoting services is part of the service that they deliver will never achieve their full potential. A willing participant must be convinced that business promotion is part of the service. We can do this by what we say, what we do and how we position business promotion as a service.

Our field service teams provide a valuable service when they apply their technical expertise to maintain or repair equipment – as do the service teams of our competitors. But we can offer more than this. We can enhance the value that our teams deliver and differentiate our business from our competitors by capitalizing on our field team’s ability to recognize opportunities to ultimately help our customers to be better off. By doing so, we will be capitalizing on one of our most valuable assets.

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

“The human mind is our fundamental resource.”

– John F. Kennedy

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Is Your Field Team Following Up on Their Recommendations?

Jim — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 13:30:32 +0000

At our workshops, I strongly encourage field service professionals to follow-up on the recommendations they have made with customers. It is a great way to uncover and revive opportunities. But much more importantly, it demonstrates exceptional customer service.

I often ask the field professionals who attend my workshop if they have made any recommendations in the last six months that their customer has not acted upon and that they honestly don’t know the customer’s intentions about it. Most hands go up.

When I ask why they think that the customer has not taken action, I get a mix of responses including that the customer might have:

Determined that the price was too high (often accompanied by nods of agreement – a discussion of value may be needed here)
Gone to a competitor
Decided not to take any action
Forgotten about the recommendation

It is this last point that I focus on.

The Customer Has Forgotten About the Recommendation

To illustrate the customer service aspect of following up, I share a conversation at the workshop that I had with a manager of a company about his service provider. He told me that after doing a routine maintenance, the service provider’s technician advised him that a critical piece of equipment was showing signs of failure. This manager went on to say, “The tech recommended that the equipment be replaced as soon as possible to avoid unplanned downtime. He wrote this recommendation on his work order and I signed it.”

“Time went by and I forgot about the recommendation – it completely slipped my mind. After about 5 months, the equipment did fail and, of course, it failed at the most inconvenient time. We had to scramble and we lost time and money. When the dust had settled, I had to explain to my management why I had not acted on the recommendation when it was brought to my attention.

“It was not a pleasant time for me. I was angry with myself for forgetting but that anger was soon redirected at the service technician and his company. Although he did the right thing by making the recommendation in the first place and duly recorded it on the work-order, he was back to our facility 2 or 3 times between the initial recommendation and the failure and not once did he remind me. If only he had followed up with me about the looming problem, I could have dealt with the issue proactively and avoided looking incompetent.”

Think of your customers. How many of them have not acted on your field team’s recommendations and, as a result, are headed for trouble? How valuable would a simple follow up be in helping them avoid embarrassment and possibly disaster?

Develop a Process to Follow Up on Recommendations

If you have not already done so, I suggest that you develop a process to ensure that all outstanding field generated recommendations are followed up in a timely manner. This is particularly important for recommendations that have been made and recorded as part of a work order but have not been converted into a formal proposal. These recommendations tend to be less visible and more subject to falling through the cracks.

A simple but effective process might include:

Positioning opportunity follow up as a customer service activity rather than a sales activity
Providing a summary of any outstanding recommendations on associated work orders so that they can be discussed with the customer by the field service representative
Teaching the field team a simple and professional approach to discussing open recommendations

No doubt your customers are busy and juggling multiple tasks in fast-paced, ever changing environments. It is little wonder that they forget some things, even things that are important.

Help your field team recognize the important role they play when following up on their recommendations and put in place the process to help them easily do so as part of the service that they provide.

Jim Baston

“There are no traffic jams along the extra mile.”

– Roger Staubach

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Developing a Proactive Business Development Culture for the Time Strapped Service Manager

Jim — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 15:03:38 +0000

You believe that you can offer a better service by getting your field service team to make recommendations aimed at helping your customers to be better off. You have taken steps to support your expectations of a more proactive approach by your techs, including providing training and putting in place a process to capture leads and communicate progress on all opportunities. However, you are disappointed that more techs have not fully embraced this strategy and time is not a luxury you have to devote to this problem.

If this sounds like you, then here are five steps that you can take to changing to a proactive business development culture when time is a limiting factor.

Don’t Stop Talking

Take every opportunity to speak about the proactive business development by technicians’ initiative and how it benefits customers. Start and end every meeting by mentioning the strategy and tying it back to the topic at hand.

Remind your technicians that you have taken this approach because, when they use their knowledge and expertise to make recommendations that will help their customers achieve their business goals, they are providing a higher level of service. Use every interaction as an opportunity to reinforce the value that they bring by taking this initiative. Don’t stop talking.

Watch Your Language

People take important clues from the words that we use so it is critical that we use language that focuses on the service we are providing through the proactive efforts of our techs. Avoid words like selling or promoting and focus every conversation on the subject on how it helps the customer.

Remember that you are offering a service by engaging your technicians in business development efforts. Your reward comes when the customer recognizes the value in the technicians’ recommendations and rewards you with more work and greater loyalty. Use words that communicate service. Watch your language.

Become a Super Model

Our employees look to our actions to determine if we really mean what we say. For example, if you are encouraging everyone to pitch in and go the extra mile, but show up each morning after 10:00 AM and leave by 2:00 PM with your golf clubs clearly visible in the back of the car, your message will have little, if any, effect.

Show your techs that you’re serious. Talk about how previous recommendations have helped customers. Step in quickly when there is a failure in the process or someone else in the organization doesn’t do their part. Go out and see customers and let them know what you have asked your techs to do and why. Become a super model.

Blow Your Techs’ Horn

When a technician makes a recommendation that the customer acts on, let everybody on the team know. Tell them what the tech recommended and why. Discuss how this will directly benefit the customer. Make sure that everyone knows how this recommendation directly contributed to your customer’s well-being. Blow you techs’ horn.

Have a Back Up Plan

Not everyone on your team will feel comfortable – at least at first – in engaging the customer in conversations about recommendations to help them to be better off. If you have members on your team who are uncomfortable engaging the customer in this way, have a back up plan so that they can still participate.

Ensure your process includes situations where opportunities can be identified and given to someone else in the organization to discuss with the customer. That way, a hesitant technician can still benefit their customers even if they don’t speak to the customer directly about their recommendation. Over time, you can focus on helping these reluctant techs to become more comfortable and enthusiastic about their proactive role in the strategy but in the meantime, have a back up plan.

Although time is not a luxury that service managers have, we can maintain focus and achieve the change to a more proactive business development culture by integrating our efforts into our daily routines.

Jim Baston

“One of the things I learned when I was negotiating was that until I changed myself I could not change others.”

– Nelson Mandela

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Six Components of a Robust and Failsafe Opportunity Management Process

Jim — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:27:47 +0000

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.

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

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Four Simple Steps Technicians Can Take to Uncover Opportunities

Jim — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 15:19:22 +0000

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.

Other questions you may wish your techs to ask include, “Have there been any changes in the building/process/operations since the last time I was here?” or “Have there been any issues or concerns related to the building/process/operations since last time?”

2. Take the customer on a tour of their own facilities.

This approach was shared with me by a seasoned HVAC technician who regularly took his customers on tours. He used it as an opportunity to showcase the work he was doing, point out equipment that was not under contract and suggest new ideas to make improvements. His customers appreciated the opportunity to learn more about their systems and he used the time to learn more about the customers’ goals and objectives.

3. Follow up on previously quoted work.

No doubt you have several proposals that have been sent to customers that have not had any follow up. To the best of your knowledge, no action has been taken by the customer, but you are not certain of the status. In many cases, it will be because the customer has forgotten about them.

Encourage your technicians to speak to the customer about those outstanding proposals. The customer will appreciate their interest and they will thank the technician if their follow-up prevented something from falling though the cracks.

4. Offer to demonstrate a new technology or software.

Technology is changing at a rapid pace and it is almost impossible for our customers to keep on top of what is going on. When there is a technology or software that you offer that can help customers get a competitive edge, then you will be providing a valuable service bringing it to your customer’s attention.

By taking the initiative to proactively explore for opportunities to help your customers to be better off, not only will you generate more revenues, but your technicians will actually be delivering a higher level of service. Your customers will appreciate the added attention and see great value as you help them achieve their business goals.

Jim Baston

“I learned that you don’t get anywhere by sitting comfortably in a chair.”

– Conrad Hilton

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Is it Time to Stop Paying Technicians for Leads?

Jim — Tue, 23 Aug 2016 13:34:09 +0000

I recently read Daniel Pink’s book, Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and found that the conclusions from the book are directly relevant for those managers who are looking for ways to encourage their technicians to proactively promote their products and services. These conclusions made me question, “Is it time to stop paying technicians for leads?”

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Rewards

In Drive, Pink presents compelling evidence that extrinsic rewards for completing certain tasks – for example, external rewards such as commissions, lump sum payments, etc. – do not always work and can even cause harm. According to Pink, this is particularly true where the task is not routine and when it entails thinking and creativity.

The evidence suggests that creative tasks, such as evaluating and presenting the best solution for addressing a particular need, provide their own rewards in the doing. These are called intrinsic rewards because the reward comes from performing the task rather than from an external source. In situations like these, it is the reward of actually completing the task itself that largely motivates the employee to continue.

This last point is consistent with what I have experienced in my work with technicians. There are many field service professionals who naturally bring ideas to the customer without any prompting or incentives. They do this because they see it as part of the service they provide. They get satisfaction and take pride from the fact that they are truly helping the customer. They don’t need extrinsic rewards to get them to act; their reward comes from the act itself.

The Problem with Extrinsic Rewards

The problem with extrinsic rewards is that they can diminish intrinsic motivation for doing a task and turn that task from an interesting part of the job, into a menial chore. But that is not all that Pink found to be problematic about extrinsic rewards. Diminishing intrinsic motivation is just the first of the “Seven Deadly Flaws”[1] as described by the author. The other six flaws of extrinsic rewards are:

They can diminish performance.
They can crush creativity.
They can crowd out good behaviour.
They can encourage cheating, shortcuts and unethical behaviour.
They can become addictive.
They can foster short-term thinking.

What Can Be Done?

So, what can we do if we want to encourage this proactive behaviour on the part of our technicians? Here are some ideas:

Ensure that the baseline compensation is fair and adequate.
Constantly reinforce the fact that the act of identifying opportunities to help and speaking to the customer about them is an integral part of the service provided. As part of this, showcase examples of where technicians have acted in this way and how it specifically has helped the customer.
Openly praise and provide feedback to reinforce desired behaviours.
Offer rewards that are not contingent on the individual act of promoting services, but which recognize group-wide achievement. Pink calls these types of rewards “now that” rewards – as in, “now that you have achieved this, here is a reward to recognize that achievement.” These are rewards that are not typically communicated in advance. Pink cautions that this approach can lose its effectiveness if the “now that” rewards become expected (or contingent) rewards.

In the end, I think it all comes down to how we think about the task of making recommendations to customers. If we see this task as part of the service, then we should treat and support it like we do all other services. If we don’t provide extrinsic rewards for completing routine repairs for example, does it really make sense to do so for making recommendations? The evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards may have the opposite effect to what we intend.

Jim Baston

“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what
you want them to do because they want to do it.”

– Dwight D. Eisenhower

[1] Daniel H. Pink, Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009), p. 59.

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The Limiting Reality of Getting Technicians to “Sell” – 4 Reasons Why

Jim — Wed, 20 May 2015 11:40:39 +0000

How we define the world impacts our perception of it. How we define our technicians’ role in promoting our services is no exception. This blog post is about the limiting reality of getting technicians to “sell” and the 4 reasons why this is the case.

Maslow is attributed as saying, “If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This sentiment applies to how we view the role of service technicians. If we see the proactive efforts of technicians to identify and speak to the customer about our services as that of a “salesperson” then everything they do in this regard looks like “selling”. Unfortunately, this viewpoint greatly limits our imagination to capture the real value in what our technicians are providing. This constrains our ability to capitalize on these efforts as a valuable and differentiated service offering.

In my opinion, a technician who feels – based on their knowledge and experience – that the customer would benefit from a particular product or service in some way, and brings this to the attention of the customer is providing a service and is not selling. It is part of their job – as important as their ability to fix or maintain the equipment itself. In fact, I suggest that they have an obligation to the customer to discuss any action that would be of benefit to their operations.

Despite this, many service managers I speak to as well as several in the training and consulting community, talk about this activity as “selling” by technicians. Here are the 4 reasons why this viewpoint will significantly limit our success.

Opportunistic/Short-term Focus. As I mentioned in my last blog, when the proactive recommendations by our technicians are seen as selling they become “add-on” activities and we tend to see them from an opportunistic perspective. “While you’re there have a look for other things that we can sell to that customer.” This misses the opportunity to imbed this activity into our overall service strategy.

Skills Development is Focused on Selling. When we view the activity by our technicians as selling in nature, then it is natural to look to sales training to upgrade the skills of our technicians to handle the new expectations. Although these are important skills and can be helpful in many cases, they aren’t the only skills or even the most important. The technicians’ ability to build trust and maintain credibility is more important. Unfortunately, if we simply teach our technicians to sell, they may come across more like salespeople and actually diminish the amount of trust they have with their customers.

Measurement is Limited to Selling Activities. When we regard the technician’s role as selling, then we will tend to limit our measurement of the success of the initiative to factors such as overall revenues, small project work vs. contract base, number of proposals by technician, etc. Although it is prudent to measure these things, this limited focus may cause us to miss key measures that will impact our long-term success. It may also cause us to reward certain activities that may encourage unnecessary “selling” activities that may also erode trust.

Difficult to Promote as a Differentiating Service. Many service companies that view service technicians’ proactive efforts as “selling” fail to capture and communicate the value of this activity to their customers. These firms typically don’t mention to their customers that they are encouraging their technicians to look for more opportunities. After all, how do you communicate the value from the customers’ perspective of the fact that your technicians are actively looking for more ways to make more money from them?

Next time we will look at changing our perspective of the proactive activities of our technicians from that of selling to serving and how that simple change in mindset can have a enormous impact on our ability to deliver a differentiated (and valued) service experience.

I welcome your feedback. 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

“If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”

– Abraham Maslow

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