Defining the Steps to Supercharging your Technicians’ Revenue Generation Efforts

Feb 17, 2021 • Features • management • BBA Consulting • field service management • Jim Baston • Leadership and Strategy • Customer Satisfaction

Jim Baston, President of BBA Consulting Group, continues his series on “supercharging” revenue generation through the field service team. In this third blog he looks at defining the steps to ensure that the proactive efforts of your field service team will be successful.

In my last blog, I spoke about how the success of our field team’s business development efforts will be dependent upon whether they accept that their proactive efforts are part of their service role and whether the customer sees value in their recommendations. We can do this when we take a service perspective. How? Treat revenue generation as the valuable service that it is and engage our technicians in the proactive promotion of our services in a manner that we would be proud to tell our customers about. Then, support our techs’ efforts as we would any other service that we offer.

Let’s look at this a little more closely. Imagine you are about to add a new service to your portfolio and you want to take steps to ensure it’s successful. For the purpose of this exercise, we’ll call the new service “Super Service”. The service you are about to add has the following characteristics:

It complements existing services (does not replace any of the services you are currently providing)
It’s a new concept – the customer needs to be educated on the value
Some new knowledge and skills are required but your existing technicians can perform the service – no additional staffing required
Existing tools and test equipment can be used – no significant capital equipment needed
It has the potential to be highly profitable – efficiency in delivery is critical
You must rely on another division within your organization to deliver a small part of the service
Super Service has the potential to be a game changer

The question is: What specific steps will you take to ensure the success of this new service?

Take a few minutes to write down what steps you’ll take to launch this service successfully. Don’t worry about completeness of this list for now. We’ll come back to this list later. We only want you to start generating ideas about the steps you would include.

To successfully launch this new service, here is a list of possible steps we could take:

Define the service
Support the initiative
Get buy-in from supporting divisions
Talk the walk
Tell our customers
Maintain focus

How does this list compare to yours? Chances are there are a lot of similarities

Now, look at the description of Super Service once more. Notice that the Super Service described also applies to the actions of business promotion by our field service team. Through their recommendations for example, the their efforts can complement our existing services. Their actions will require explanation to our customers so that they understand the motive behind, and the value in, their efforts. Although some new knowledge and skills may be needed by the techs, no additional staffing will be required. In addition, there will be no need for any significant capital increases and the results of their efforts can be highly profitable. Finally, our field team’s promotion of products and services can be a game changer if we can help our customers see how they’ll be better off for those recommendations.

So, we can supercharge our techs’ revenue generation by treating their efforts as the valuable service that they are. This means identifying those things that we must do well in order to successfully encourage and support their efforts.

Our next step is to determine and apply the specific actions we’ll take. Using the list above, my next blog will look at some examples of actions we can take. Please note that the actions that we identify may not necessarily be the actions that you, in your specific situation will take. It’s the approach that is important here, so simply apply the same approach used here to your list.

Reflection

Go back the list of steps that you have created that will ensure that the proactive efforts of your field service team will be successful. Is the list complete? What’s missing? Rework the list until you assured that those steps cover all that is necessary for your success.