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Getting Past the Price Objection | Clip of the Week

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Ask the Experts | Growth During the Summer Busy Season

Question: How do I get my techs to up-sell when they are really busy?

Weldon Long; New York Times Best Selling Author:

When our technicians are busy, they’re going to run in, fix the problem, and probably bolt because they have three more calls lined up. You can definitely lose revenue when this happens. This might be a great clue that it’s time to grow your business. I understand you can’t staff for summer then lay people off in the fall, but think about it this way.

Let’s say for example, you have 50 service calls. If you run those 50 service calls and you’re understaffed, let’s just say your average ticket is $500. But if you were fully staffed and your people had the time to do their job properly, you might generate $750 or $1000 on each call. So, your revenue could be significantly higher if you were properly staffed. That’s revenue that you can put back into your business, grow your marketing, and keep those new technicians you hired busy during the shoulder season.

The basis of this question is, “How do I manage all this stuff without suffering any of the consequences without growing?” Well, you’ll have to deal with the consequences of having your technicians driving lower average tickets and giving a substandard performance. If you want to avoid that, and you’re not willing to grow, you’re going to have your hands full.

The reality is, if you’re that busy, it should be a clue that you need to grow. Drive the extra revenue in the busy seasons, segregate that additional revenue, use that to drive marketing in the slower seasons. Say you hire three new employees this summer. If you do your job and manage your revenue, maybe you only have to let one of them go in the fall and you can keep two. The next year you hire three and keep two of those. That’s how you grow your company.

There should be no prejudice against growing the company. If the question is, “How do I keep my company the same size and not suffer all these consequences during the summer?” there probably isn’t a way to do that. Unless you have managers that can fill in the gaps. If you have service managers or warehouse guys that have some mechanical skills that can do some minor service, you can send them out in the field in the summer time without having to grow. In the fall, those people return to their normal positions.

You just have to decide what your objective is – what’s the big picture? Are you thinking, “Man, I really want to grow this company?” Well, there’s your sign. In that case, these are all good problems to have. You have to take the money when you’re busy to reinvest in the company. You don’t have the extra money when you’re slow, so if you’re ever going to grow your company, you have to grow when you’re busy. That additional revenue fuels and funds the growth.

You have to take that money and put it in retained earnings. It’s either going towards equity in your company or it’s going to your fall marketing strategy, which you should be planning now. You should have your whole fall marketing plan at least one business quarter earlier. You should know what you’re doing September 1, now. If you’re looking at September 1 and you say you want to do A, B, C, and D, you have to think of how much that’s going to cost you. When you do that, you’ll know how much you need to set aside during the summer time.

I did just that this weekend for my company. I went through and looked at the cashflow projections – here’s where I want to be, here’s how much it costs, here’s how much cash is necessary to do that. That’s called managing a business! There’s an entire course that EGIA has on financial planning as part of the Ten Core Curriculum.

This is all about managing a business. You should stop looking for a short-term solution and start thinking about these issues as a long-term opportunity. This is when you get your chance to grow! To me, that’s what it’s all about – it’s what we’re all dreaming about!

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

How to Improve Sales Skills During the Summer

Proactively dealing with objections can help maintain your average ticket during the summer busy season.

In this week’s #CrackingTheCode episode, Weldon Long demonstrates a systematic approaches to overcoming objections and holding margins during the sales process.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

Ask the Experts | Prioritizing Leads with a Full Dispatch Board

Question: What can my CSR’s do to not lose the customer when our dispatch board fills up and we may not be able to get out to them for a day or two?

Drew Cameron; President, HVAC Sellutions & Energy Design Systems, Inc:

First and foremost, we want to capture the customer information right up front. On the EGIA platform, we talk about how to schedule these calls and gather this information. There’re videos that talk about this as well. You can work on prioritizing your schedule. Prioritize your schedule with your service agreement and warranty customers first. They should always get same-day service no matter what else is on the board. So, if you have to bump noncustomers for your service agreement customers or your warranty customers, so be it.

It’s very common for the average ticket to go down and as the questioner says, we want our people to treat every After that, I look to repeat customers next. I put them in priority by quality of potential opportunity based on their equipment’s age and then I look to new customers. If you’re an existing customer that has done business with me but you’re not a service agreement customer, you have a lower priority then a service agreement customer or a warranty customer. If you have ten-year-old equipment versus five-year-old equipment, I’ll service the 10-year-old equipment first. That’s what I mean by order of the potential opportunity.

That’s the way you can change the prioritization. Then, you might think about inviting some of your non-service agreement and warranty customers to accelerate the speed in which they can get service by purchasing a service agreement over the phone. That way, your call takers can tell them they’ll avoid those potential breakdowns at the busiest time of year. You may also offer customers the opportunity to prepay the dispatch and diagnostic fee. I don’t know many companies around the country that do that but some of them say, “if you’re willing to lock in and pay your diagnostic fee upfront, we’ll accelerate your level of service and move you up in the queue faster if we get an opening.”

More often than not, when you look at your dispatch calendar, it’s filled based on the time you guesstimate the job taking to get done. Usually your team gets things done a little faster than you anticipate and things open up on our schedule a little bit sooner. So, we can move people into the queue a little bit faster. If they’re willing to become a service agreement customer or prepay their dispatch and diagnostic fee, then I’ll move them up a little bit faster.

You can also get a little bit creative and tell customers that you appreciate the confidence that day have instilled in your company and will give them the chance to save some money. Tell them if they’re willing to wait a bit longer, you’ll give them a scratch off ticket with a potential percent savings. Essentially, you’re rewarding them for electing to be served later. Again, the key is to capture their information early so you can get them into your database and let them know that you’re confident that you can provide them service.

Take for example the restaurant business. Say you’re going to a restaurant they tell you it’s going to be a 20-minute wait. More often than not, it ends up being only a 10-minute wait. Sometimes they ask if you want inside, outside, or first available. When you offer your customers options about the service they can expect and choose, they tend to stay in the queue. Some people are obviously not going to wait but by giving them options, you’re making sure that the majority of customers understand they’re valued.

What you could also consider doing if you have some runners available, and customers are without cooling or heating and you’re really backed up, you can have those runners deliver a temporary AC unit or heating unit. So those are just a few ideas I have for you.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

Service Tech Priorities During the Summer

Focusing on the right priorities during the summer can prime your contracting business for success throughout the rest of the year.

Weldon Long introduces the importance of driving your service agreement base and making sure your salespeople are properly trained on the repair-vs-replacement conversation. Plus, Gary Elekes explains how to provide an exceptional customer experience and our experts discuss getting home owners to the table.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!

Getting Both Home Owners to the Table | Clip of the Week

Having to conduct multiple in-home sales presentations can be inefficient, ineffective, and costly to your company’s bottom line.

In this “Clip of the Week” from Cracking the Code, Weldon Long leads a role playing exercise to demonstrate how to get both home owners to the table.

Watch the clip below, and visit EGIA.org/Show to watch the full show.

Ask the Experts | Capitalizing on Summer Leads

Question: As the summer velocity increases, my sales team gets more leads than normal. I can’t hire another salesperson just for the summer, so how do I ensure they still work each lead like it’s the only lead they have?

Weldon Long; New York Times Bestselling Author:

Great question! It’s something we all have to deal with, it’s a summer time challenge for sure. The problem is that when the volume increases, our people are running more leads and it’s very common for the average ticket to go down. Average ticket is a reflection of building a relationship with the home owner, conducting a thorough investigation, and recommending high-performance solutions. Some of that stuff goes by the wayside when we’re really busy. We don’t have as much time to build relationships and we look for the easy solutions, we close the deal and we move on.

It’s very common for the average ticket to go down and as the questioner says, we want our people to treat every lead as if it was their only one. There are a couple of things we can do. Number one, you can do precisely the thing you said you didn’t want to do and hire a new salesperson. Don’t look at is as hiring only for the summer, look at it as a springboard to grow your business. Say you have two comfort consultants and you don’t want them running three or four leads per day, so you bring on a third person. Now your team is running the two leads per day that they’re used to. If you have three people running two leads each, the margins are going to be higher on those tickets than if you had two people running three leads each.

Overall revenue is going to be better if we do it that way. We can take some of that extra revenue and stock it away, now we have some really good marketing money for the fall to grow the business. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 – if you never spend the money to hire the additional salesperson during the summer, you wouldn’t have the additional revenue to grow the business. If business is booming and you can bring on an additional salesperson, take the extra revenue and use it in the next step of growing your business.

I can tell you what we did in our company, two things that will help you in this situation. You can more stringently qualify your leads when they come in when you’re really busy. You can ask the question, “Mr. and Mrs. home owner, on a scale of 1-10, what’s the likelihood you’ll be replacing your system in the next week?” If they say, “Well, we’re just getting information for next spring,” you can say, “Right now is our busiest time of the season. Our demands are high so our prices are high. You’d probably be better off waiting to see us in the fall for a better deal.” You should prioritize leads who are saying they are looking to make a decision in the next week. Those are red-hot prospects. Filter out less qualified leads, the home owners with less urgency.

Another thing I did in my company was that I had my service manager and my general manager trained and qualified to run a sales lead. So, in the summer time when we were really busy, they could go out in a pinch and run a lead or two. That was part of the gig. They could run a sales presentation. They probably weren’t as skilled as our top comfort consultant but it was better than overwhelming our salespeople and have them out the dropping bids. So those would be the three things I would consider.

To recap, it might be a great opportunity to begin building your business by bringing that extra salesperson on and setting aside some of that extra revenue for marketing in the fall. If you don’t want to do that, you can better qualify your leads so that your salespeople can fully capitalize on the remaining leads. And make sure you have other people at your company qualified to run a sales lead by completing some pre-season sales training. A combination of these three things should help pick up some of the slack.

This is the weekly Ask the Experts free excerpt. To listen to all of this or past calls, or to see the schedule and register for future calls, click here.

10-50% Savings + 20% Rebate with Service First

The EGIA Contractor Marketplace features some of the biggest discounts in the industry on vetted and EGIA-approved products and services that are crucial to running a successful contracting business. Today we cast a spotlight on one of the truly singular rebates in the industry, solely available to EGIA members through our partner: Service First Processing.

Service First Processing delivers credit card processing services that goes above and beyond the usual fare, thanks to SFP’s resources and breadth of knowledge and commitment to keeping reliability and ease-of-use at the forefront of their customer service.

But not only does Service First Processing facilitate reliable and predicable payment processing with every transaction, they offer our members one of the biggest rebates in the industry.

EGIA members who sign-up for Service First Processing through the Contractor Marketplace receive a host of discounts and benefits, including an unheard of 20% rebate on the net processing revenue that SFP generates from your account.

On average, EGIA Members using these credit card processing rebates have had an annual cost savings of $3,617. To get a better understanding of how those numbers can add up, two member-companies –click here to view Jon Wayne Heating & Air and here for Service Champions Heating & Air — provided testimonials on how SFP has impacted their companies and bottom-lines.

EGIA members can log in and request more information from SFP on the Contractor Marketplace. The first 25 members to apply for a savings proposal will be entered to win a $500 Visa gift card.

Improving CSR Skills During the Summer Season

The last thing we want to do is lose an opportunity during the summer.

Weldon Long demonstrates a role playing exercise that can help dial in your customer service representatives and dispatchers to capitalize on every opportunity. Plus, Gary Elekes explains how to effectively dispatch the right technician to every call.

All that and more, on this week’s episode of Cracking the Code!