Your Technician Is Your Best Salesperson
In field service, your technicians are generally the first people customers see. If, for example, you are in the HVAC industry, your customers may have talked to you or people from your company on the phone, but they’re meeting your HVAC technicians in person. With that in mind, you need to make sure you hire technicians that are also good salespeople, so you can increase sales and keep your customers happy. There are two main areas to consider when it comes to your technicians: how to increase your service revenue and how to hire employees that will help you do that effectively.
How to Increase Service Revenue
Service revenue can be looked at in a couple of ways. It can include add-ons and extra money spent by customers when the technicians are at their house. However, it can also include money that is spent later, as a result of the information provided by the technicians during visits. Both of those ways of adding more revenue are significant, and can really increase your bottom line. If your technicians aren’t good salespeople, though, you could be missing out on a lot of revenue that your business could otherwise really use.
As your technicians work with the customers, they can provide information about the services they are performing and the options for the future. While there may not be that many services needed by some customers, other service calls will warrant further discussion of upgrades, more services, or other types of improvements that could be needed or wanted.
Customers may have questions, too, and if your technicians can’t answer them, that can undermine the trust that customers have in your technicians and in your company as a whole. To make sure your technicians can do their jobs and answer customer questions, you can train them and give them plenty of knowledge, but that won’t necessarily make them good at selling additional services.
How to Hire Employees Who Can Be Good Salespeople
In order to really see your technicians increase your service revenue, you need to know how to hire employees. You want workers who are personable and who are focused on doing their best for your customers. The more polite and friendly your service employees are, the more comfortable most customers are going to feel with them. That can lead customers to ask more questions, and to trust your company and your technicians to provide them with more services that they may want and need.
Some of the services that your technicians can offer may not even be services that your customers know they need, but once they learn about those services they may realize the value of what’s being offered to them. That’s much more likely to happen if you have technicians who are good salespeople. When you’re hiring employees, consider that carefully. The knowledge needed can be taught, but the personality of a salesperson is something that comes much more naturally to some people than it does to others. That personality should be the main focus of your hiring efforts.
