We’ve mentioned (here and here) how much more profitable it is to sell a premium program that gives the customer better outcomes than it is to negotiate on labor rates.
You’ll need a few things to sell a premium program:
Technology-enabled differentiators
A proactive maintenance and/or inspection plan
A defined service level agreement (SLA)
The goal of your SLA is to clearly state your customer service promises that will reduce their pain and indicate how easy you’ll be to work with. Your SLA should cover:
Your commitment to respond. Be specific about how quickly you will respond to emergency work.
A promise of a priority response. Give your attention to them first for maintenance or inspection work over customers that haven’t committed at the premium level.
How you’ll share the risk. Explain that by buying into the program, they’ll receive a valuable customer rate and/or eliminate some additional charges that non-plan customers pay like trip charges or OT labor.
You don’t have to go so far as to promise to love, honor, and cherish your customers, but let them know what you promise in return for their agreement to buy in at your premium program level.
Bust Customer Service Data Out of the Silo
Integration is a popular topic at ServiceTrade. More people are coming up with ways to integrate their customer service data with other operational programs – their website, CRM, accounting, or marketing programs. Once shared across applications, data becomes information that can be used by people throughout the company. Are you thinking about all the ways that your customer service data can be used in different departments?
If these groups don’t have access to your customer service data, give it to them and see what they can do. These ideas should be just a beginning.
Sales
Create demo accounts to use in sales presentations. You’ll win new customers when you show them a demonstration of your great customer service in action.
Convert deficiencies into jobs and revenue. Make sure that the deficiencies and repairs your techs find on the job are turning into quotes for your customers.
Monitor your quote approval rate and experiment with ways to improve it. Try new patterns and methods of following up on quotes to boost your approval rate. Experiment with the number of photos or try including video. Test a few new methods to build, send, and follow-up on quotes that convert.
Account Management
Ensure contract SLAs are being met. Wouldn’t you rather proactively know the reality of SLA performance than wait for an unhappy call from a customer?
Use service history to inform renewal contracts. Studying the service history for a location can help you build a preventive maintenance contract for the following year that is based on the reality in that facility.
Continually share useful information with customers. Whenever the customer calls with a question on a past job, send them an online report where they can get all the information they need.
Accounting
Get more information about the services that were offered on a job to create complete and accurate invoices.
Make answering questions about invoices a whole lot easier when you simply look up the job’s details in the customer service application.
Speed up the time to bill when information about a completed job syncs into your accounting platform as soon as it’s complete.
Marketing
Email customers based on shared criteria like a particular type of asset or their location. One of our favorite examples is when there are changes in weather in a region and you want to issue some advice for heading off problems from changing conditions.
Email customers based on their service schedule. How about sending an email to your customers who are due for a regular inspection or service call next month and ask them to start making a list of things that they might need you to look at or take care of while you’re there?
Send letters or mailers to customers based on criteria in their service data: Geography, business type, asset types, services you provide, etc.
Publish and promote the review content that comes in from happy customers. Post this prominently on your website to entice prospects and use them as excerpts or quotes in all of your marketing communications.
Service Managers
Tech report cards. There are a few ways that you can measure the performance of technicians across the board – how much billable time they tracked to jobs, how many of their jobs include media (photos, videos, documentation, audio), how many customer reviews they collect. Monitor the metrics that matter most in your company.
Monitor completeness of job records. Techs are on the front line of that great customer experience you want to provide, and that includes building complete job records of what they do on-site.
Create contests or reward programs for techs based on happy customer reviews. Take advantage of their natural competitiveness to drive them to collect more reviews from happy customers.
Advanced scheduling allows you to better plan the use of your fleet and predict its maintenance requirements.
Owners and Senior Leaders
As an owner or leader in the company, the best thing you can do is give people access to data and encourage them to use it. Heck, if you’re a ServiceTrade customer, office users are free, so there’s no reason not to open accounts for these users today. You might be amazed by the ways they can turn data into useful information for your company and its customers.
Why is it so difficult to remember even a short speech, but so easy to remember an entire song? For example, what do these 7 digits do for you? 867-5309. Humming yet? Now that I’ve probably lost your attention to Tommy Tutone, I’ll try to make my point. We are creatures of rhyme, story, and imagery. Great salespeople use this trait to leave memorable impressions with the customer.
Let me give you another quick example by telling a story about overcoming the challenging trends service contractors face today:
You know One Truck Chuck? He’s the low-price competitor that steals your customer by undercutting your invoices.
Competing on price was fair game when technicians were easy to hire. That game has changed with the skilled labor squeeze which is predicted to worsen over the coming decade.
Feels like you’re stuck in the tightening jaws of a vice; right between increasing price pressure from One Truck Chuck and rising costs from the skilled labor squeeze. Fortunately, these challenges are not insurmountable.
But, before I present a solution, I want to point out the tools I’ve used so far to make this narrative memorable. When you step away from this blog post, you won’t remember this particular sentence but you will definitely remember the phrases “One Truck Chuck” and the “skilled labor squeeze” because of the imagery, rhyme, and alliteration I used. That’s powerful. You need to leave the same lasting impression with your customers and prospects.
Now, back to our story. You can’t afford to beat Chuck on price. You have to differentiate yourself and show the customer how you offer more value. A good portion of this blog post is dedicated to just that, but I think this image helps sum it up:
Your pitch can go something like this:
Prospective customer, this is what happens when you go with my cheap competitor, One Truck Chuck. It will take him twice as long, causes twice the aggravation, and results in twice the expense due to shoddy workmanship. He is undercapitalized, under-equipped, and under-experienced to provide the expertise you need. You will spend more time and more money dealing with him.
Obviously, this shouldn’t be the entirety of your sales pitch, but this is a great piece of ammunition to support the case that you are a high-value provider. Feel free to use any of the images or rhymes in this post during your next sales call and please let us know what you use to get your point across to the customer. Check out our webinar “Don’t sell on price. Sell a premium program.“ to learn more about using these tools and others to outsell your competition.
Beat your low price competitor, Chuck.
You know “one-truck Chuck,” or “white-van Stan” as I’ve heard him called before. He’s the one undercutting you and stealing your customers. It’s because he’s well rounded, and by that I mean he’s cut all the corners clean off. He has no overhead and he only wants to make a little more than his old hourly wage as an employed technician. But Chuck isn’t alone, is he? There’s Stan, Bill, Charlie, and the other new low-price competitors setting up shop every day.
You lose deals to Chuck and Stan every day. Prospects tell you “I’ve got a guy” and customers tell you that someone offered them a price they can’t refuse. So, what are you going to do? I suggest you take advice from a Chinese guy that died over two thousand years ago:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
OK, I know it’s passe to whip out quotes from The Art of War when you’re talking about business strategy, but bear with me on this one.
Know your Enemy
Chuck and Stan are really easy to understand. Like any of your competitors, they have strengths and weaknesses that you can exploit. Obviously, their biggest competitive advantage is price for the reasons mentioned above, but they also have personal relationships on their side. Their customers have their cell number and can give Stan a call anytime they want.
If you’re trying to grow a high-margin, premium brand, you’ll never compete with these fellas on low labor rate or personal relationships, and you don’t want to. Neither are scalable. And, if you want to beat Chuck, you should tell your customer that your goal is to expend as little skilled labor and customer-facing admin as possible. Tell them that skilled labor is costly for you and difficult to hire. Tell them that modern customer service doesn’t happen over the phone.
Instead, offer customers a technology-enabled plan for predictable outcomes at a predictable price. The goal is to reduce their risk and aggravation by implementing a proactive plan that uses data about their facility and equipment to intelligently target low-cost preventative work that curbs expensive repairs. By planning work as opposed to reacting to it, overall expenses will go down because less on-demand skilled labor is used and fewer parts are required. Throughout the service cycle, information will be pushed to your customers online to reinforce the value you provide and to build trust through visibility and transparency.
Chuck can’t offer that. Chuck shows up when the phone rings if he’s not too busy with another customer. Chuck fixes broken equipment that could have been repaired for much less if the issue was caught earlier. Meanwhile, the customer is aggravated because they have downtime, lost revenue, and unhappy employees or customers of their own. Chuck costs more when you calculate for these risks.
You can explain these risks until you’re blue in the face, but a large portion of prospects and customers will still choose Chuck and Stan over you. That’s OK. Those aren’t the customers that you want so don’t waste your time. Simply leave them with an accurate prediction of their future. Explain the many ways that Chuck will let them down, and when he does, they’ll remember you.
Know yourself (and what makes you better)
Let’s do a quick test. Which of the following are part of your company’s value proposition?
We work hard
We care
We have integrity
We are honest
We are dedicated
If any of these are in your brand’s value proposition, you have a problem. There’s a lot wrong with this list, but most of all, they aren’t competitive or differentiating. It only took 10 minutes of Googling service contractor websites to find the same values listed on multiple websites. Honestly, all of these values are table stakes for the industry and should be implicitly expected. So what makes you different? Do any of these values sound familiar?
We’re more experienced
We’re bigger
We do more
Each of these actually provides tangible value to the customer. More experience means that you are likely to solve problems faster and at a lower cost than your competitors. More coverage area and diversity of service offerings mean that your customers won’t have to manage as many vendors. These are a step in the right direction. How about these values?
We’re transparent
We’re accountable
We’re data-driven
We’re modern
These are rarely seen value propositions in our industry because they are difficult to offer without technology that enables mobility and modern online customer engagement. The vast majority of service contractors are still running on paper, server-based software, or accounting systems that don’t offer functionality for technicians or customers. That means that customer data is limited, inaccessible, and unusable. In other words, the opposite of transparent, accountable, data-driven, and modern. The companies that can offer these values will win the most desirable, high-margin customers.
Beating Chuck and Stan really isn’t that hard. It comes down to a couple easy steps. First, differentiate the value that you offer and understand, without a doubt, that your higher rates are warranted because you will reduce the customer’s risk and aggravation by providing predictable outcomes at a predictable price. Second, if the customer still isn’t convinced, let them go. Predict their future and they’ll come back.
Want to learn more? Watch the recording of our December 7th webinar, “Don’t Sell on Price, Offer a Premium Program” presented by ServiceTrade’s CEO and author of The Digital Wrap, Billy Marshall. Click here to watch the recording.
Beat the Technician Labor Crunch – Sell a Planned Maintenance Program
I saw statistics the other day that indicated the number of licensed electricians in NC over the age of 40 was 10X those that were younger than 40. Uh oh. If you thought the skilled labor shortage was already bad, it is going to get worse. So what can a service contractor do to avoid the pain from this scarcity? Migrate as much business as possible to a planned maintenance program.
Do you remember Captain Chaos?
When supply is tight, prices go up. When the prices go up, customers shop for alternatives and buy less of the expensive items. In economics, this is known as price elasticity of demand. In your business, it is known as a gross margin squeeze. For some trades, the alternative to the inevitable squeeze is to migrate as much work to planned maintenance cycles as possible to minimize expensive, reactive repair work. If you are going to pull off this trick over the next several years, you have to have a framework for selling customers on the plan and then executing the plan.
Get Your House in Order
The first order of business is actually being able to document and manage a plan in a scalable way. When you have systems that plan the scheduled work in a highly logical and visible way, you can maximize the utilization of your expensive technician workforce. You also need to be able to use those maintenance cycles to detect and demonstrate to the customer other potentially costly failures that should be handled in a planned way instead of waiting for an unplanned failure. Planned work is orderly and generally more satisfying for the technician and the customer than emergency repairs that generate chaos and uncertainty. It’s also funny how the chaos stacks up in one big pile that distracts the whole company. The random nature of reactive work makes it very difficult to deliver it without overtaxing resources.
Sell Examples Instead of Promises
The second order of business is having a sales cycle that promotes a premium, planned maintenance program to the customer. You should have in place demonstrations of the applications you use to deliver orderly and repeatable service. Share examples with the customer from their locations that you survey as part of your sales preparation. Show them how you will engage them online with accountable and visual record-keeping – online notifications, photos, video, and service links that demonstrate you are on top everything. For all the suggestions you find during planned service, show them how they can review and approve them online to maximize convenience and further lower costs and risk. When they see the examples in the sales cycle, it is easier to buy into that concrete example than an empty promise that “we’ll git er done, no excuses!”
Have a Dotted Line for them to Sign
Finally, have the order ready for them to sign. If you do not already have the following three items in your arsenal, you need to develop them:
Master Services Agreement – these are all of the legal terms and conditions of your partnership relating to term and termination, definitions, payment terms, warranty, indemnification, jurisdiction for disputes, etc. All the basics without the specifics.
Planned Maintenance Program – these are all of the services for each piece of equipment that they should expect during the term, complete with details of service intervals, parts delivered in service, expected durations, and related fees. If something later demonstrates it is far out of tolerance from these boundaries, both parties have a foundation for negotiating change.
Service Level Agreement – this will document the response to be expected for various types of non-planned repair scenarios, including response times, definitions of criticality, fee structures, and level of effort to be applied.
When you can quickly generate the unique Planned Maintenance Program from the systems you actually use to deliver the work and the Master Services Agreement and Service Level Agreement are standard boilerplate, you have earned the right to ask the customer to buy into your premium plan. Ask for them to pay upfront for the planned services to save both of you the time and hassle associated with all of the aggravation of invoicing. When they also begin feeling the pain of the skilled labor shortage due to vendors that are not performing, you might be surprised how much you mop up the market with your strategic and thoughtfully planned maintenance program.
Stop Selling Parts and Labor! Sell the Program!
In the first chapter of my book, The Digital Wrap, I quoted Marc Andreessen:
“Software is eating the world.”
It is not exactly a quote, but rather a reference to the editorial that Marc wrote for the Wall Street Journal back in 2011. Marc is like the godfather of the Internet as he was the founder and CTO of the first browser company, Netscape. The one sentence summary of his editorial is that cheap computing power, plus everywhere networking, and mobile devices means that every industry is at risk of being disrupted by an Internet application. Witness what Uber did to the taxi companies who thought they had a safe, local monopoly. If software is going to eat the world, then every company needs to learn how to sell the program to avoid being eaten.
Have you noticed that almost all of General Electric’s advertising these days promotes the idea that GE is becoming a software company? Check out one of the many humorous commercials they are presenting to the world to both mock their stodgy history and promote their sexy future.
GE claims to be writing an “Industrial Internet operating system” called Predix (their words, not mine) that will collect tons of data from customer equipment to help GE provide better service and better outcomes for the customer. GE is moving its headquarters to Boston to further promote the transformation from stodgy manufacturing to sexy software. I give them a 50/50 shot at actually being successful with the strategy because it is very hard to change culture and strategy and behavior at such a large and established company. However, I give them an A++ for understanding that they need to transition from selling metal to “selling the program.” GE has a huge and profitable industrial business, and yet they feel the need to transition. Do you think the manufacturers you represent are going to be following GE? Instrumenting their equipment to own a longer and more profitable relationship with the customer? Selling maintenance and repair services based upon the data they collect? How about you?
Service contractors likewise need to transition from selling parts and labor to selling the program. Parts and labor are easy for the customer to price shop, and so every discussion with the customer is about price and not about better service and better outcomes. So what is the program that changes the discussion?
It is a set of technology and an approach that can be used to deliver better customer outcomes through data-driven customer service.
It is the price that will be charged for the customer to “buy into” the program because not everyone is a fit for this level of service.
It is the online representation to the customer every day and in every way that better outcomes and benefits are being delivered as promised.
OK, great. So how do you do this little trick?
Be Data-Driven
First, you need to be able to easily collect and share data with the customer. This does not mean lots of ad hoc and unstructured emails and it certainly does not mean more phone calls. Software is eating the world, not email and dial tones. Do you have an existing application that makes it easy for you to survey the customer’s equipment and note condition and pre-existing problems as part of your sales cycle? During your sales presentation, do you present an online and interactive review of the customer’s situation along with your service commitments and repair recommendations and quotes? Is it easy to share these location records with the customer online? Is it easy for the customer to browse history and recommendations online? With a single click to authorize you to execute the next upgrade or repair? Are you using the information and data you collect on equipment to offer advice to the customer on which manufacturer to buy? Are you offering a competitive warranty in lieu of the manufacturer’s warranty as part of buying into your program? Do you have a plan for regularly replacing inexpensive parts that can lead to major and expensive level system failures? Can you easily search for equipment that is exhibiting failure modes to recommend repairs or replacements before failure occurs?
Use the Program as a Sales Tool
A sales presentation with a customer goes so much better when the conversation is grounded in a live review of customer equipment, relevant data about the state of that equipment, and the programmatic options you offer to minimize hassle and maximize return on expensive equipment investments. Humans are visual. They learn from images and stories. When you show the customer their situation, and when they can feel comfortable that they will always be able to review your efforts online via interactive records with photos, audio, and video, they can “buy in” to your program. Otherwise, the sales conversation will quickly devolve into a negotiation on labor rates and parts markup. Which conversation do you want to have?
Use the Right Application for Customer Service
This does not mean that you need to hire Owen from the GE commercial. It does mean, however, that you need to find a way to be comfortable researching and buying applications for customer service that look nothing like the historical accounting applications that you may have purchased for your back office operations. The currency of great customer service is information and data, and this type customer service data looks nothing like your accounting data. Sales and customer service data related to your front office operations will not fit neatly into your back office systems. There is an entire chapter in The Digital Wrap dedicated to the application review and purchasing process so you don’t have to guess at how to get it right.
If you want to build a premium service brand in a connected world, you need to prepare yourself to sell the program. Otherwise, software will eat your world, and some other brand (manufacturer? third-party aggregator? Internet titan?) will own your customer and you will become the parts depot and the labor bureau that helps them earn a premium profit.
Chapter 9 of the Digital Wrap book is about the application review and purchasing process Billy mentioned. You can read chapter 9 for free at digitalwrapbook.com.
6 Key Metrics That Boost Repair Revenue
Service contractors that work on complex equipment and systems all understand the importance and value of repair revenue for the overall success and profitability of their business. Most companies also recognize that the opportunity for repair work is often found while providing recurring services such as preventative maintenance work or system inspections. Unfortunately, most companies do not have formal workflows or systems in place to effectively convert deficiencies and problems reported in the field during routine visits to quotes and, ultimately, repair work. Those that do often have patchwork and minimal processes with few controls in place. Furthermore, without these systems in place, companies are unable to measure the key metrics necessary for a successful repair program. Obviously, a system is necessary to generate metrics, however, a great system can’t be developed without understanding that the ability to measure key metrics is a fundamental requirement. As the quote goes:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Before setting off to build or fix your company’s internal processes, here are the 6 key metrics that are critical to a successful repair program:
1. Ratio of recurring service revenue to repair revenue
This ratio is generally easy to calculate and is the best overall indicator of how effective a repair program is. Simply total your company’s recurring service revenue from preventative/planned maintenance jobs, inspections, cleanings, etc and compare it to the total revenue over the same period of time for repair work. Obviously, your company should strive to constantly improve this number, but strong industry benchmarks include:
Mechanical services – $1 of PM revenue to $4 of repair revenue
Fire protection – $1 of inspection revenue to $1 of repair revenue
For example, a Fire protection company performing $5M in inspections should expect to generate an additional $5M in repair work from deficiencies found on those inspections.
The remaining metrics will all help drive this core ratio.
2. Percentage of recurring service jobs that result in new quotes
This metric takes into account a few steps in the process:
Opportunity Discovery – During recurring services, how often do your technicians discover new deficiencies, problems, or service opportunities that are worth quoting?
Lost in the shuffle – How often are these reports making their way back to the correct personnel in the office?
Office accountability – What percentage of reported opportunities can office personnel convert into quotes?
Obviously, technicians won’t discover quotable opportunities during every recurring service and this percentage will vary significantly by industry, however, all opportunities of sufficient value should result in a quote. the second and third metric above should be very close to 100% once a reasonable process and/or system is put in place. I only mention them here because many companies I’ve observed fall short on these activities due to an absence of any system whatsoever.
Ultimately, this leaves the overall percentage in the hands of your technicians and the easier it is for them to report these opportunities to the office, the higher the percentage will be. Your techs are far less likely to handwrite complex descriptions than simply snap pictures, record videos, and provide voice recordings to the office summarizing their findings. Mobile technology is a tremendous aid when working to improve this metric.
3. Average quote turnaround time
This average will vary by industry and repair complexity, but the simple takeaway here is that turning quotes around fast yields significant results for your overall quote approval rate and it should be possible for commercial service contractors to turn the vast majority of their quotes around in 24-48 hours. More transactional repair quotes that fit a templatized format should be sent to the customer no later than the day after the opportunity is discovered. Quotes that require substantial part cost lookups should be turned around within 48 hours depending on the availability of the necessary cost information.
4. Quote approval rate
This is a simple metric determined by dividing the sum of approved quotes sent to the customer in a certain period of time by the total number of quotes sent during that same period of time. For example, if 40 of the 50 quotes sent in June were approved, the approval rate would be 80%.
Note that this will be a lagging metric as quote approval can take place well after a quote is sent to the customer. Therefore, this statistic will not be accurate for a given period of time until all quotes are responded to or expired. Alternatively, if the quotes you send to customers tend to age for long periods of time, you can calculate an estimated approval rate by dividing the total number of quotes approved in a given period of time by the number of quotes sent in that same period of time. For example, 40 quotes were approved in June, and 60 quotes were sent in June, yielding a 67% approval rate. As long as you account for fluctuations in the number of quotes sent from month to month, this can be an effective, up-to-date measurement.
Many factors impact quote approval rate, but the top 3 factors that we’ve found to positively impact it are:
Quick turnaround. The faster the customer has a quote in hand from the date of last service, the more likely they are to approve the quote.
Include pictures. Showing your customers exactly what is wrong with their equipment is much more effective than describing it in text.
Send an online quote. Make it very easy for your customer to say “yes” by providing them with an online quote with 1-click approval as opposed to paper, emails, PDFs, scanners, etc.
5. Quote gross profit per administrative hour
One of the metrics that will help your company make good decisions about how much admin time should be dedicated to creating a given quote is the gross profit of all approved and unapproved quotes generated per hour of administrative time it took to create those quotes. Alternatively, this can also be calculated by totaling the gross profit of repair work and dividing by the quote approval rate. Ultimately, this will help you determine a gross profit goal per hour, day, week, and month for your office staff. This goal will help your team quickly determine how long it should take to create quotes of all sizes with any margin.
For example, if the goal for a team member dedicated to creating quotes is $32K of gross profit for all quotes generated in a month, they should aim for about $1.6k of gross profit quoted per day and $200/hr. A small quote with a gross profit of $200 shouldn’t take more than an hour to generate. A larger quote with a gross profit of $2k shouldn’t take longer than 10hrs to create.
6. Quote gross profit per technician labor hour
Let’s face it, one of the biggest challenges in your business is hiring good technicians. This causes high labor costs with a shrinking margin due to unchanging customer expectations of how much they should pay for skilled labor. Fortunately, repair work often represents a unique opportunity to generate revenue independent of labor costs thanks to the margin on the parts sold. However, high margin alone is not necessarily a great indicator of whether or not a job was worthwhile. A better measure of whether a job is good for the company is gross profit per labor hour. For example, let’s compare the following scenarios:
Job A – $12K in revenue with a margin of 40% requiring 60 hours of technician labor.
Job B – $20K in revenue with a margin of 15% requiring 10 hours of technician labor
A simple gross profit comparison suggests that job A is better for the company, however, this simple calculation ignores the fact that job B had a low labor requirement. Job A calculates to $80 of gross profit per labor hour, while job B calculates to $300 of gross profit per labor hour. With your available labor force, would you rather perform one of job A or 6 of job B?
If you are unable to track these metrics now, consider new processes and systems that will enable you to do so. Simply tracking these numbers will not improve anything for your company, however, it is the first step in understanding how to make improvements. In order to leave you with something to think about, I’ll close with a quote that is a little more extreme than the one I used in the introduction:
“If you can’t measure, it doesn’t exist”
Reminder: The free Self Starter ServiceTrade account provides you with unlimited online quoting. Learn more here.
Photo Cliches Drive Sales and Retention for Service Contractors
We’ve all heard, and likely loathe, the plethora of bad cliches about pictures. As overused and seemingly meaningless as these cliches are, they hold a literal wealth of knowledge for field service contractors. From new sales to retention, these sayings will drive growth in your field service company:
The big picture.
Why should service contractors consider photos important for day-to-day operations? Online businesses have proven the importance of imagery for customer engagement and sales. Even though you may not be engaging customers online at the moment, technology, like ServiceTrade, makes it easy to move your service activities online with rich job summaries and quotes. With this in mind, the stats below represent a huge opportunity for every field service companies:
Online articles with images get 94% more total views than those without imagery.
In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product.
In an online store, customers think that the quality of a product’s image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%).
92.6% of people say that visuals are the top influential factor affecting a purchase decision online.
Offering multiple product views and other alternative images lead to 58% more web sales.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Imagine writing a description of the picture above in the space provided on the paperwork you provide your customers after every job. Did you have enough room to describe, in detail, the flying cats, splashing water, and mustachioed artist in a way that anyone could understand? Is your handwriting even legible? Would anyone reading your summary even believe you?
Every year, your company is wasting hundreds, or even thousands, of hours attempting to summarize technical details in illegible handwriting that the customer is unlikely to understand, value, or trust. Again and again, ServiceTrade users have proven that providing pictures to customers for every job, not only speak volumes about the quality of their work and the value they provide, but also builds trust with their customers because “seeing is believing”.
Take a picture. It will last longer.
Left with the wrinkly, coffee-stained paperwork as the only remnant of the work you did, are you memorable to your customers? Does your company stand out as one your customers enjoy working with, or are you replaceable?
The picture above is a time capsule for the ages. Without referencing Wikipedia, you probably knew this was taken on V-J day, the final day of WWII. This image will forever represent the end of the war for America and encapsulate a national memory. Similarly, you can turn every service for a customer into a memorable experience. Beyond the “wow” factor you can elicit by exceeding their expectations for information, months from now, when they have questions about what you did for them, pictures will remind them how valuable your services were.
Additionally, pictures can save technicians time by converting their individual memories about a job into tribal knowledge shared in the office. How often does someone in your office end a conversation with a tech using the phrase “just go back” due to lack of information collected on an initial visit? Along with audio notes and videos, pictures are one of the primary forms of rich media that will ensure that everyone in the office knows what the next steps are for every job without relying on the technician’s fading memory. Instead of wasting time calling technicians and, even worse, sending them back to collect forgotten information, have them catalogue their experience in a way that helps everyone understand not only what was done, but also what is left to be completed.
The whole picture.
As seen in the series above, one or two pictures cannot tell the whole story. Similarly, your company should provide customers with as many pictures as necessary to explain everything they need to make an informed buying decision; whether that is to make a new purchase or retain you as the long-term vendor of choice. There is no hard and fast rule about how many pictures you should provide, however, more is better in the vast majority of situations.
Get the picture?
Take a lesson from retailers. Moving online and engaging your customers with rich content (photos), will lead to favorable outcomes including increases in sales and retention via the trust you build with photographic evidence of your value.
Modern Tools for Service Contractors, Part 3: Outbound Sales and Marketing
Both residential and commercial service contractors rely heavily on new sales for growth. Where residential contractors rely on converting inbound leads, commercial contractors lean on a mix of inbound and outbound tactics. This post lays out a handful of sales tools that are not only easy to use, but also extremely powerful across the entire lifecycle of new sales from prospecting to closing. Residential contractors will likely find more value in the last two sections, while commercial contractors will benefit from the entire suite of tooling listed below.
Google – Discover Great Prospects
Let’s start at the beginning of the sales cycle: Prospecting. Who are you trying to sell your services to? Google makes it extremely easy to find the best prospects if you know how to take advantage of its powerful search features. For example, if you are a commercial HVAC company trying to find the best restaurants and restaurant groups to sell to, here are a few different search techniques you could employ:
Review and Price – The best prospective restaurants are likely to both serve high-priced meals and have good online reviews. Use the review and price filters to find these restaurants as I did for this search in Atlanta, Georgia.
Site Search – The “site:” search feature can be used to search public directories such as www.manta.com. For example, you can search Manta for restaurant groups in Atlanta via Google with a search query that looks like this site:manta.com restaurant group Atlanta.
Advanced Search Operators – Further narrow down your search results by using other advanced Google search operators such as quotations for exact string matches and “-” to exclude certain terms. For example, you can search for the exact term “Restaurant Group” in Atlanta and exclude consulting companies with this search “Restaurant Group” Atlanta -consult. Find a full list of Google search operators here.
LinkedIn – Find Contact Information
Now that you’ve targeted the companies you would like to pursue, it’s time to find the correct contact and their information. Start by using LinkedIn’s advanced search to search by title, company name, location, and any relevant keywords. Much like advanced Google searches, you can use quotation marks for exact string matches. You can also use “AND,” “OR,” “()” operators. For example, you could search “president OR CEO OR owner” in the title field or “(facility OR general) AND manager” in the title field to find the facility manager or GM. Once you find the profile for the person you need to contact, use a Google Chrome extension such as Email Hunter or FindThatLead to unearth their email address.
Note: LinkedIn can also be used to find prospective companies by using relevant searches. For example, searching for “Restaurant Group” in the keywords field, “CEO OR president OR owner” in the title field, and limiting to relevant locations returns very useful results. For more information on using LinkedIn in the prospecting process, check out our blog post Lead Prospecting Guide for Tech-Savvy Contractors.
Pipedrive/PipelineDeals – Manage Sales and Prospects
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help organize and manage your sales pipeline. An entry-level application such as Pipedrive or PipelineDeals is perfect for companies new to CRM, while platforms like SalesForce and Infusionsoft will be a better fit for larger, enterprise sales organizations. These platforms house all sales related contact information and tasks to ensure that nobody drops the ball in the sales process. Email integrations makes it easy to log communications so that no one has to dig through emails to understand the last or next steps in a deal. When properly managed, these applications help any sales rep handle more prospects, deals, and opportunities.
MailChimp – Build Value with Customers
MailChimp is a great entry-level email marketing platform. Setting up your first email marketing campaign is a breeze with their simple interface that takes you from contact list to beautiful email in no time. Because of its widespread use, MailChimp integrates with many other applications including WordPress to collect contact information on your website and CRM (like those mentioned above) so that your company can easily broadcast marketing messages to prospects or customers.
Email marketing provides service contractors with an incredible opportunity to build tremendous value with both their prospects and customers. Simple, targeted emails can endear you and build trust and credibility. This is especially true when you:
Predict the Future – If you predict the future of their service needs accurately, your customers will be blown away. For example, an email campaign to customers warning them about possible equipment failures they could expect with changing weather will let the customer/prospect know that you are looking out for them.
Provide Helpful Tips – Tips that will help your customer save money in the short run will result in more loyalty and higher lifetime value for each long-term customer.
Offer Seasonal Discounts – This strategy will both fill the slow months with off-season work and build strong relationships with your customer base.
Take a close look at your sales organization and ask yourself if you have the visibility and productivity you need to reach your personal and company goals. If sales is an integral part of your growth plan, these tools will not only make your life easier, but also accelerate your business development. Every single tool listed above is either free, or extremely cost effective. Your only commitment is the time it takes to learn a new tool which I guarantee will be far outweighed by overall sales performance improvements.
