Lessons From the Field – A Time For Everything

A Time For Everything

There’s a lot to be said for growing older and maturing. Life experience teaches us wisdom, understanding, and (hopefully) patience. When we’re young, we “can’t wait” to move on to the next thing. We want to ride the big kid rides and later drive a car, graduate from school, and become a grown-up. We have little or no patience. We pick the fruit and eat it way before it’s ripe because we don’t know any better.

It’s no different in our careers and our relationships. Early on, we don’t understand the benefits of playing the long game. We take shortcuts, and our impatience wins out. Even in the sales world it rears its ugly head, and only training and experience will overcome it.

Simmer, Not Boil

When it comes to service calls, patience is a must. There’s a big temptation that arises when a tech is in the home. And that temptation is to turn the lead too soon.

It’s pretty standard for a technician to find a singular problem and then run to the homeowner and try to turn the lead into a big sale. But the reality is when a technician inspects a system on a call, there’s likely four or five problems there for the discovering. And I’m not just talking about the original problem they called about. It could be an indoor air quality problem. It could be an airflow problem. It could be the condensers in an inconvenient place in the backyard problem.

Impatience will make a salesperson or tech miss out on a much better opportunity. Missing opportunities is bad news for the homeowner, for the salesperson, and for the company.

Keys To the Kingdom

The key is this – technicians should be thorough when in the home. If they were called to come out and fix a problem, then they should take the time to check if there are other problems as well. The more problems that are found, the more options the tech or salesperson can present to the homeowner and the more leverage they will have for more business. Gather all the information for the homeowner and find all the existing problems before turning the lead. And as always, I mean legitimate problems the homeowner would benefit from being repaired or informed about.

Obviously, there’s not much of a choice if the technician approaches the homeowner and says, “Hey, you have a $1,000 problem you called about; would you like to purchase a new system instead?” You’re giving the homeowner a choice between $1,000 and about $20,000. Common sense says they will likely choose the simple repair strictly on finances alone. But if there are four or five problems with their current system, with the potential for more in the near future, then that’s quite a different animal and requires them to give the decision more consideration.

By informing them of multiple problems they weren’t even aware of, their mindset changes to “Okay, I’ll listen to a pitch about a new system because my existing system is far worse than I thought.” So the obvious implication is that when we find a problem, we don’t want to go straight to the homeowner and start trying to turn the lead.

An Eye-Opener

Let me give you an example. I often travel to do sales training and speak for small businesses and large corporations. On one of these trips, someone grabbed my attention. Usually, it’s for a glaring problem that training can solve, but I was surprised that it was for the opposite reason. It was an individual who had already been trained well, or had God-given talent. He had been setting tons of high-quality leads. As willing as I am to teach, I’m also willing to learn and incorporate techniques that work. So I joined him, Robert, on his next service call.

The homeowner had reported her unit wasn’t working, so we checked it out. He had pulled the blower motor and a couple of the little metal fins on the squirrel cage had actually broken off, jamming the whole motor where it was torqued and wouldn’t run. It had basically seized up.

Join us again next time where we’ll talk about patience paying off, and we’ll continue this story that illustrates an important concept in successful sales. Have a great week!