ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘service-sales’ CATEGORY

Jim Baston outlines some key considerations for companies looking to improve the service of their sales by fostering a proactive approach to selling service amongst their field service engineers.

Proactive Service® is a term I use to describe the proactive efforts by field service personnel to promote their company’s products in services to help their customers achieve their business goals. It is an excellent way to differentiate your service and stand out in today’s ultra-competitive environment.

If you encourage your field service team to look for opportunities to promote your services, here are seven questions to ask yourself to help you ensure that you are getting the most from your efforts.

1. Is opportunity identification part of your service deliverable?
This is the most important question and is the biggest determinate of overall success. When the subject of field service personnel promoting services comes up, it is often viewed as a selling activity that is in addition to regular service work. This is unfortunate since when our field team take steps to uncover opportunities that they feel will benefit the customer in some way, they are providing a valuable service – a service as valuable as their ability to maintain the equipment in top running condition.

As a service, the act of finding new opportunities is not an “add-on” activity for the field team to do “while they are there”, but an integral part of the field service person’s expected service deliverable. Our field teams have an obligation to bring forward ideas that will help the customer achieve results they may not have thought possible. When we take this perspective, it becomes easier to win enthusiastic support from our team of field service professionals. From this perspective, it is also easier for us to recognize the importance of implementing specific tools and processes to formalize this “opportunity identification” role. (See Question 4 below).
How well do you integrate business development by your field team as part of your service to your customers? 

2. Do your technicians recognize the valuable service they provide by making recommendations to help their customers be more successful?
Many of the service professionals that I have met do not see their role as a salesperson. They tend to leave sales activities to the people with the expense accounts and fancy cars. What these service professionals fail to see is that, with a service perspective, we are not asking them to sell at all.

By identifying and speaking with the customer about the actions that the customer can take that will help them improve operational performance, reduce costs, improve tenant satisfaction, etc. is a valuable part of the service.

This is important because, it will be difficult to get enthusiastic engagement from your team if they don’t see their proactive business development efforts as part of the service that they provide. They may give it lip service, but it is unlikely that they will put their hearts into the effort.

How about your service team? What do they think of your expectation for them to promote your services? Do they talk as if their efforts are a sale or a service?

3. Do you “talk the walk”?
Language is important. Your team will scrutinize what you say in an effort to understand what you mean. For example, if you tell everyone that their proactive efforts is a service but you talk about it as if it is a sale, then they will think that your service idea was just for show. Or if you reward individual team members for their “sales” efforts but do not put emphasis on the “service” they have provided to the customer, your words will not be consistent with your purpose.

How about you? How do you describe the proactive efforts of your field team? How well do you talk the walk?

"Many of the service professionals that I have met do not see their role as a salesperson..."

4. Do your processes support your business development strategy?
There are implications from this approach on the processes used to support business development activities by technicians in the field. Because lead handling becomes just as important as lead generation, the successful firm will have to ensure that they have a failsafe process for handling leads from the field and following up on them in a timely manner.

What processes do you have in place to help the field service professional uncover opportunities? What questions do you require them to ask when they arrive on sight that might reveal problems that you can address? What steps can they take before leaving?
Think about your processes around the proactive efforts of your team. Are they consistent in quality and scope with the processes and systems you have in place to support the other services you provide?

5. Does your field service team have the skills and knowledge to deliver on the strategy?
Skills development is an integral part of the strategy. Service technicians will have to become as good at interpersonal skills as they are with their technical ones. They will need to be comfortable in speaking with the customer about their ideas and the benefits of taking action. Service management will need to be skilled at coaching and in opportunity management. Training on these interpersonal and communication skills will drive improved learning and skills adoption.

Knowledge is also critical. How well does your team know about the various products and services you offer and how they benefit your customers? You might be surprised by the answer. In my experience, there are gaps in the field team’s knowledge about their company’s capabilities. If the field service person doesn’t know of a product or service or if they do not know enough about it to engage the customer in a high level conversation about it, they will not bring it up to the customer.
What about your team? Do you ensure they have at least a conversational knowledge about all of the ways you can help your customers?

6. Do you tell your customers what you are doing? If you were to add a new service to your portfolio, would you tell your customers about it? Of course you would. So, if your field team is providing an exceptional service by using their knowledge and expertise to identify ways to help your customers be more successful why not tell your customers?

We should tell our customers this, just like we would tell them about any other service that we offer that would benefit them. Perhaps the conversation might look like this:

“We have encouraged our field service team to use their knowledge and expertise to identify opportunities to help you achieve your business goals. If they identify an opportunity that will benefit your business, would you have any objection if they bring their ideas to your attention?”

Do your customers know what your field team is doing through their proactive efforts and how it benefits them?

7. Do you measure the effectiveness of your efforts beyond revenues? If you engage your field service team in the promotion of your products and services, chances are you measure the increase in revenues. What additional business have we won that can be attributed to the efforts of the field team? But, if these proactive efforts are a service, shouldn’t we expect more results than simply improved sales?

What about customer satisfaction and retention? If a customer sees value in the proactive efforts of our team, should we not expect to see improvements in these areas? How about the amount of unplanned emergency work as a percentage of the contract base? If we take proactive steps to help our customers avoid unexpected failures, would it be reasonable to expect to see a change in the relationship between unplanned and planned work? And what about our customers’ level of satisfaction with the proactive efforts of our field team? Are they comfortable with their proactive efforts?

When it comes to assessing the impact of the proactive efforts of your field service team, what do you measure? What do you manage?

There is a tremendous opportunity to differentiate our service from our competitors through the proactive efforts of our field service professionals but unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we may not be achieving the results we had hoped when we embarked on the initiative – either for ourselves or for our customers.

Asking questions to help us reflect on our efforts may give us some insight to improve our effectiveness and further increase the level of service we are providing our customers.

Jim Baston is President of the BBA Consulting Group Inc.

As we conclude our series of excerpts from the exceptional industry guide 'Mobile Resource Management for Dummies', which has been commissioned by Verizon Connect we bring you ten benefits Mobile Resource Management (MRM) can bring to your business.

Is Mobile Resource Management a key Topic for you?! Dive straight into the full eBook by hitting the button below!    

 

Sponsored by: 

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content. 

 

---

If you have missed any of the other excerpts within this series you can catch up on the other topics we've explored which include: Understanding Digital Transformation in a Connected, Mobile World  also Thinking Outside the Silo and Harnessing the Power of Telematics,  Realising the Value of Mobile Resource Management and Avoiding Mobile Resource Management Pitfalls and Driving Employee Engagement with Gamification

However, the eBook contains a wealth of other key chapters offering important insight for any field service professional and we advise downloading the full eBook on either of the links at the top and bottom of the page...

 

Cloud-based MRM solutions can help your business to achieve numerous benefits: lower fuel costs, improved driver safety, better fleet utilisation, increased worker productivity, proactive maintenance and enhanced customer experience to name a few.

But the benefits to other areas of a company may not be as obvious. A comprehensive MRM solution can deliver benefits to many departments and roles within a company, including increasing return on investment (ROI) and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) of mobile assets, improving productivity, increasing business agility and achieving competitive advantage.

By connecting vehicles, mobile assets, people and work, MRM gives the organisation the insight, agility and customer experience to stop lagging behind competitors and lead the market – to not just succeed but thrive.

In this way, MRM can transform the way the organisation does business.

So let's explore a few of the benefits experienced across various areas within the organisation.

 

#1 Operations:

An MRM solution provides operations managers with the tools they need to be able to plan for the day, week, month and year ahead. It gives complete visibility into everything that’s on-the-go so that teams can help to control running costs, streamline operations, optimise current assets and staff, make the most of the customer experience, and ensure compliance with all safety standards and regulatory mandates. It provides the data to help to plan for the future as companies look to grow and advance.

You need a broad platform approach to help automate manual processes, ensure consistency and efficiency throughout all operations and know that it’s all working. You need to be responsive and agile to customer demands. A negative customer experience damages you, your operation and the company as a whole. Organisations all live and die on the efficiency of the operation, and you need to introduce new services quickly and cost-effectively to meet the fast-changing expectations of customers.

 

#2 Fleet Management:

MRM programs can keep fleets in the best shape possible by reducing management and maintenance costs, creating proactive maintenance alerts, and opening a direct connection to maintenance providers. An MRM solution can also help to optimise the way the organisation uses its fleet, with planning tools that help to ensure that the right number and type of mobile resources are assigned to the right jobs, people and vehicles.

 

#3 Information Technology:

Through the use of an MRM solution, IT can access the data it needs to support the optimisation and automation of work and cash flows across the organisation. A cloud-based MRM solution also means fewer systems for IT to maintain, easier integration without the need to create and maintain application programming interfaces (APIs), faster deployment in the cloud, and simpler management of a single platform.

An MRM solution allows the team to enable and secure the collection of operational data from vehicles and drivers, and integrate that data with other applications for complete operations visibility.

 

#4 Making Safety a Priority:

An MRM solution can help businesses to make safety a priority by monitoring mobile resources such as construction tools, cherry pickers, cranes, and other heavy equipment to ensure that they’re being properly operated and maintained.

An MRM solution can also help management to create safer driving behaviours, such as avoiding speeding and harsh braking, through the use of driver scorecards and coaching tools, monitoring seatbelt usage, and providing accident notifications with airbag deployment alerts, along with in-cab alerts and live reporting. It can also help the team to reduce the possibility of accidents by optimising drivers’ routes and cutting out unnecessary travel. Finally, an MRM solution can help drivers with regulatory compliance.

 

#5 Risk Management:

With MRM, risk management teams have the ability to ensure regulatory and policy compliance in vehicles and demonstrate a mobile duty of care.

By identifying unsafe driving behaviour, providing insights into accident or damage claims, mitigating fleet liability risks, and protecting against potential fraud, theft and supervisory negligence claims, businesses can reduce risk due to consequential losses.

In other words, MRM software is the eyes and ears to ensure the on-the-go organisation is running as smoothly as possible, and provides peace of mind for business owners and directors, as MRM insights allow for greater control and measurement of key compliance and safety legislation.

#6 Sales and Customer Relations:

An MRM solution helps to give sales and customer relations one of the very best outcomes possible – more on-time service calls, deliveries and appointments, and better customer estimated time of arrival (ETA) visibility. That, in turn, creates long-term fans and brand advocates who’ll come back again and again.

 

#7 Human Resources:

Human resources can use an enterprise fleet management solution to gain a near real-time connection to all on-the-go employees. Whether it’s visibility, near real-time coaching, training or helping drivers to hit more of their targets by being more efficient, an MRM software solution gives human resources the tools they need to make employees even better.

 

#8 Tax Recordkeeping:

An MRM solution includes driver apps, simplifying the classification of business and personal journeys. This helps to reduce administration time and produces mileage reporting in an HMRC- ready format. MRM solutions can also control routes, helping to avoid road tolls.

 

#9 Payroll:

By making aspects like miles and hours driven, hours on site, and time from clock-in to departure easy to measure, and by moving from paper to electronic timesheets, an MRM solution helps payroll to perform more efficiently.

MRM helps you to better manage wage bills by matching the right skill to the right job, rather than sending overqualified staff to easier, low-level jobs. An MRM solution can also help you to manage labour distribution efficiently so that you can assign jobs to less utilised employees earning standard time, rather than employees earning overtime for a given pay period, when possible. And when payroll is more efficient, salaries and payments go out on time – which makes everybody happy.

 

#10 Finance:

An MRM solution improves cash flow and speeds up billing, by helping the finance department to speed up all payment and processing operations, as well as reduce invoice and settlement disputes. Financial reporting is also faster with easy-to-create and distribute reports that demonstrate savings and productivity throughout the organisation. This is possible because an MRM program can help to automate the entire workflow – moving from paper to digital.

Want to know more? The full eBook is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Access it now on the button below... 

---

Sponsored by: 

 

 

Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.

---

Be social and share

With service becoming more and more integral to business strategies across the globe the role of the service leader is equally becoming increasingly crucial within successful organisations. Nick Frank, Principal Consultant and Founder of Si2 Partners explores what makes a great Service Leader...

For Service leaders wanting to develop their talent, or companies wanting to recruit new talent, knowing the competencies required to achieve your business goals is vital.

To start, we need to define what a ‘Service Leader’ looks like, smells like and tastes like, similar to a fine cheese it is not one dimensional.

As with most things in life, what defines success is often contextual.

In defining service leadership, we have identified four relevant perspectives.

1. Business Evolution;
2. Service Evolution;
3. Organizational Structure;
4. People or the individual.

Business evolution

Businesses are constantly developing and pass through different stages such as start-up, maturity or transformation.

What we find is that many companies run into problems when their business context changes due to economic realities, and their leadership cannot adapt fast enough.

As a service leader you will consequently need to be clear on your current and future position aspiration.Successful leaders need to be able to demonstrate different competencies depending on this business context. As a service leader you will consequently need to be clear on your current and future position aspiration.

For example, if you currently work for a start-up or a business at its early stages, it will be critical for your long-term career development that you acquire a higher level of business acumen. In a larger more mature business, leaders will develop change management capabilities which are essential for business transformation.

Service evolution 

The overall business context of the company drives the service evolution, inevitably putting new demands on service leadership.

Breaking this down, we observed four generic service strategy steps, which describe the journey of companies when evolving from product focus to service orientation:

1. Product life cycle; Ensure equipment availability
2. Product performance; Optimize performance over the lifecycle
3. Process support; to help the customer in improving their business processes
4. Process Outsourcing; perform processes on behalf of customers

This evolution is influenced by the mix and maturity of customer profile(s) and will impact both the breadth and depth of competence requirements.

For example, looking at how leaders deal with segmentation, a company focusing on solving product issues will segment their business by-products and geographical markets, whereas companies focusing on business outcomes will segment in terms of customer value.

Understanding the service evolution context is probably the most important area to consider when hiring/developing future service leaders.

Organisational structure

Increasingly, service organizations are being managed as a stand-alone business where companies see it as a strategic driver of growth with its own Profit & Loss responsibility. Led by a single Service leader with subordinate sub-function leaders, business acumen becomes more important than the technical knowledge of service.

The more traditional cost focused service organizations are often organized along functional lines with leaders for Field Service, Technical Support and other ‘technical’ teams.In contrast, the more traditional cost focused service organizations are often organized along functional lines with leaders for Field Service, Technical Support and other ‘technical’ teams.

Here technical expertise is more important.

The difference between the two business needs is profound. Having the wrong person in a leadership role can become a major barrier to growth. It is not that they are a poor performer, but that their skill sets and temperament have not developed to be effective to overcome a particular business challenge.

People or individual

As companies develop internal talent or search for new talent externally, Service Leaders may come from a non-technical function and/or background.

For example, Sales people are increasingly being asked to lead service organizations because of their commercial background. Alternatively, the current Service leader might only have worked within a specific organizational context such as Field Service or Digital Marketing.

The impact in both scenarios is that an individual is being moved or promoted into the position, shouldering new accountabilities with a different and/or limited traditional, service knowledge.

As service organizations become more sophisticated and require a leadership team with a diverse mix of competencies it becomes more important to be cognizant of the complementary expertise required as well as how it fits into company culture and people strategies, processes and aspirations.

Linking context to competency

Competencies are the parameters we use to describe the capabilities of people.

Within service, we have identified 30 of these competencies which can be grouped under leadership, management, personal attributes and technology (in the digital context). Successful service leadership comes from conscious adoption of these competencies to the business context and service maturity you operate in.

Coupled with a genuine understanding of your current/aspired structure, values and culture will enable leaders to create an organizational environment where people can succeedCoupled with a genuine understanding of your current/aspired structure, values and culture will enable leaders to create an organizational environment where people can succeed. So how can we use this insight when recruiting new service leaders into your teams.

One of the most powerful factors applied in the selection of competencies is undoubtedly the job/position requirements. To support this and to provide a summary overview, we found it was possible to distinguish four functional groups, Service Sales; Service Delivery; Service Excellence and Service Innovation.

Each of these groups include a complete set of relevant accountabilities.

For example, for Service Sales we include customer management, sales management, business development and product development. In total, one position should ideally include 5-8 clearly articulated and prioritized competencies.

The mix of these competencies will depend on the context we have discussed and in combination, will be used to develop job descriptions that more accurately reflect the needs of the business, rather than an intuitive perception of what the business leader thinks.

In summary

Great is defined by a number of contextual factors, therefore, the consideration of the competencies required and the weighting of each is going to be essential to be able to articulate the right job profile for a given context.

Whether you are developing the capabilities of an existing employee or hiring externally, our recommendation is to ‘go slow to go quick’, meaning take the extra time to consider your context at the outset of your search. Companies’ likelihood of finding and developing great service leaders in the B2B world will be greatly enhanced.

If you would like to know more about the competencies that define great Service leaders, than you can download our white paper by contacting the authors at dag.gronevik@servicepeoplematters.com, richard.cowley@servicepeoplematters.com or nick.frank@si2partners.com

Be social and share

Rosanne Gresnigt and Hilbrand Rustema at specialist service management consultancy Noventum tackle one of the big challenges all field service organizations face - aligning the core functions of service and sales...

It’s one of the questions we hear so often. How can a company build a scalable service sales and delivery model? With increased commoditisation, pressure on growth and margins are forcing companies to think outside the box when it comes to their services.

Service businesses need savvy innovation programmes, which allow them to evolve quickly and nimbly – they need to create new customer-oriented offerings, quickly adapting to changing markets. However, navigating the right path to service transformation isn’t always straightforward. Most common approaches, Big Bang and Incremental, carry risks and yield surprisingly low success rates.

There’s an alternate path, however, increasingly being adopted by today’s more successful and forward-looking service organizations: ‘The Service Factory’.

The Service Factory approach is an agile, systematic, highly successful, low-risk approach to service transformations enabling companies to adopt innovations in tandem with today’s fast-changing customer and market needs.

How does it work?

The Service Factory approach is an analogy to an actual factory and consists of three core steps:

• Creating and maintaining a high-level vision of the future for your business with a defined portfolio of services that you want to offer to your customers
• Defining a precise architecture of your business model components that you need to sell and deliver the services in the portfolio
• Defining a roadmap in which the components are improved step-by-step according to new and changing requirements

In further detail, having developed a high-level vision of your organization’s future services portfolio, the approach requires that you break down your business into sales and delivery model components; Request Management, Diagnosis, Planning, Maintenance Engineering and Knowledge Management are examples of valuable components in your Service Factory.

Each component is then looked at from the following perspectives:

• Management Practices
• Processes
• Performance Metrics
• IT functionality

Businesses implementing this approach must:

• Have a clear vision of how the business will develop in years to come.
• Set out well-defined long-term business objectives
• Develop an understanding of what components are required and what they should look like.

Using this holistic approach, businesses can embark on an ongoing process whereby a new component is implemented every 6-8 weeks.

As such, the Service Factory is a high-paced, focused approach involving fixing, raising and maturing the level of the business, component by component.

Where to begin?

A thorough assessment of the business is a good place to begin.

Companies can start by benchmarking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like Customer Experience, Productivity, Gross Profit Margins and Growth Rates against top performers in their industry and proven standards.

This will enable the company to identify what the biggest areas for improvement are. As a next step, a more qualitative assessment can help to identify the root causes of under-performance and best practices.

By prioritizing the opportunities that are derived from such assessment, based on time/complexity to implement and expected added value for the company, a service transformation roadmap can be created.By prioritizing the opportunities that are derived from such assessment, based on time/complexity to implement and expected added value for the company, a service transformation roadmap can be created.

As Europe’s leading Service Management experts, Noventum has developed a comprehensive library of industry benchmarks and best practice industry standards for components covering all the major capabilities of a Service Factory.

They are developed and updated frequently based on our research activities and our work with leading service businesses across the globe.

Start with Self Assessment:

To help you move forward we're pleased to offer you access to our free online self-assessment tool which covers a limited scope of functional service business areas which is available @ www.noventum.eu/fsm-assessment-demo

This assessment will take approximately 30 minutes of your time and then upon completion of the assessment, you will directly gain access to your personalized report of opportunities that could help you to improve your own business and get your sales and service operations more closely aligned.

Be social and share

As Jim Baston continues the serialisation of his excellent service orientated book Beyond Great Service our protagonist Charlie begins outlining the solution to the sales and service equation to his team of service engineers...

If you're new to this series then you can catch up on the story so far by clicking here

Last time, Charlie introduced the strategy to the service team. This time he presents the details.

Great, then let’s examine the actual strategy in more detail.” Charlie powers up the projector again and moves to the next slide. The slide says:

Charlie reads from the screen and then advances to the next slide.

“Let’s talk about what we need to do to deliver an ‘exceptional experience that is valued by our customers and differentiates us from our competitors’,” suggests Charlie.

“The first bullet simply means that we have to do our jobs well; like responding quickly to a customer’s needs, fixing the problem right the first time, showing up promptly, doing PMs as scheduled, cleaning up after our work, etc. All the things that people actually pay us to do.”

“The second bullet refers to the interpersonal experience the customer has over and above the technical work that we do. It is the positive attitude, the welcome smile, the way we interface with people in the workplace, and all the tiny but important interactions we have with our customers or their customers/ employees/ tenants/patients/etc. during the course of our work.

The last bullet is a catch-all to remind ourselves of the importance of continual follow-up, and how such a simple act can help reassure customers they have made the right decision to work with us over any of our competitors.“Perhaps the critical bullet here is moments of truth. Each time we have an occasion to interact with the customer: a visit to the site, an email, a follow-up phone call, a casual meeting in a coffee shop, it’s an opportunity to reinforce in the customer’s mind all the positive reasons why they do business with us, through what we say and write and how we act. It’s the moment we have to help the customers say to themselves ‘That’s why I do business with Novus’.”

“The third bullet is the topic of our discussion today. It’s going beyond doing our jobs pleasantly and professionally and in a responsive and attentive manner. It includes our efforts to proactively look for ways that the customer can make improvements to their operations, and then take the time to discuss these recommendations with the customer.”

“The last bullet is a catch-all to remind ourselves of the importance of continual follow-up, and how such a simple act can help reassure customers they have made the right decision to work with us over any of our competitors."

“So, what do you guys think? Can we add real value for our customers while differentiating ourselves from our competitors in this way?”

Angus stands up. Charlie is surprised and more than a little concerned. It looks to Charlie as if Angus is going to walk out of the room. If Charlie can’t get Angus on board, then the whole initiative is lost, or at least, greatly compromised.

“Charlie, in all the time I have worked for this company, this is the first time that management has talked about business development by putting the customer first. Usually, the question is: ‘What other services can we sell to our customers?’ i.e. what can our customers do for us? What you’re asking, that is if I hear you correctly, is: ‘What can we do for our customers?’ The results might be the same—more sales—but the motivation is quite different. I like it!”

Charlie is thrilled. Getting Angus on side is a big step forward. A couple of other people offer opinions, and they’re along the same lines as Angus’. Angus remains standing and Charlie can feel a big “but” coming . . .

“But . . . ,” complies Angus. “Saying the right words is a lot different than doing

the right things. How are we going to make this work?”

“Yet another good question, Angus.” Angus smiles and takes a bow as the room breaks out in applause.

As Angus finally sits down, Charlie says, “We have a lot of work to do. Here is a summary of what we need to do from my perspective. Perhaps you guys might think of some additional things.” Charlie discusses the bullets on the next two slides:

Charlie goes through the steps in detail and answers questions as they arise.

He points out that since this initiative is driving the overall customer experience, then everyone who has contact with the customer must participate, not just the technicians.

Since this initiative is driving the overall customer experience, then everyone who has contact with the customer must participate, not just the technicians.Although the techs play a large role in this, they must be supported by the entire organisation.

Everyone who has contact with the customer; from technician to the accounts receivable person, all contribute to the overall experience and therefore must be in sync. That is why point number four references ‘all customer-facing personnel’.

After answering a couple of more questions, Charlie sums up by saying,

“Thanks everyone for your input today. I am really excited about what we are doing and I sense that you are too. Ken and I will get to work on the next steps. In the meantime, if any further thoughts come to you on this issue, please let Ken or me know.”

“Also, please be proactive in discussing with the customer those things you feel would be in their best interests to implement and work with us to ensure that they are properly followed up until we can bullet-proof the opportunity management system.”

With that, Charlie hands the floor over to Ken to discuss this week’s safety item.

Thinking about your business:

Is your business development strategy clearly tied to your overall plan to provide each customer with an exceptional customer experience?

Does everyone know what they need to do to deliver on your strategy?

Are support functions aligned to facilitate the efforts of the field team?

Next time Charlie seeks feedback from one of his ex-customers.

Be social and share

Sumair Dutta, Chief Customer Officer at The Service Council offers his insight on how to leverage the untapped power of your field service operations to build additional revenue streams...

There is an increased responsibility on field service organisations to complement operational and customer facing improvements with commercial results. In The Service Council’s (www.servicecouncil.com) 2016 field service research, the lack of revenue opportunities was seen as a major strategic challenge by 40% of organisations.

To counter this challenge a number of organisations were looking at their front-line field service personnel to identify new business opportunities (aka Leads) or to sell when in front of the customer.

Most organisations currently have some form of a field service lead program in place and more are beginning to equip their engineers with the tools necessary to sell. There’s not enough room to debate if field engineers should be selling in the first place. In our research, we’re finding that more field service customers are accepting of a sales approach from a field service engineer if they have a relationship with that engineer or if the engineer has resolved their current challenge and is working to provide them with additional value.

In terms of field service lead generation, there are several best practices to consider when building a program. These best practices are compiled from our 2015 research on service sales and revenue growth and from a recent IdeaShare discussion that we hosted with several business leaders.

Develop a Dedicated Lead Management Process and Support it With Technology

Lead generation must be easy and effective if the field service team is going to bother with the added responsibility. Field engineers will abandon the process immediately if it doesn't work. Typically, the two major failure points occur around lead follow-up by sales and in lead affiliated compensation for field service engineers.

 

A lot of the core areas of lead management can be automated with the aid of mobile and CRM solutions. That said, its essential that there is well thought out process for how leads are managed throughout the entire sales cycle, all the way from identification to closure.

Deliver Training Materials at All Levels of Field Service

Change management is essential in the rollout of any new program. Poor attention to this often leads to unsuccessful adoption of the program and poor attainment of desired goals. Its likely that field service engineers will resist when asked to participate in lead generation as they will see this as a proxy to selling.

Therefore, organisations need to prepare this engineers on the purpose of the program and then reinforce the impact of the program on all stakeholders impacted, including the customer.

Once purpose has been established, the ‘how’ of lead generation needs to be reinforced with training sessions and materials. Preferably training content and scripts are available on-demand for engineers to refresh their knowledge as needed.

Its also essential that relevant instructional content is developed for multiple parties in the field service chain, starting with the engineers and moving up to supervisors and regional leaders.

Communicate and Then Communicate Some More

In this day and age of mobile content and self-service portals, it might seem silly to develop flyers and brochures to reinforce the message of a lead program, but these methods do work.

The message is simple, the more a program is discussed and reinforced, the more it is adopted.

 

In addition to reinforcing steps, best practices, and procedures, its also beneficial to reinforce the value of the program in the form of engineer success stories or customer results.

What’s even more impactful is an actual testimonial from a customer of how the extra time spent by a front-line engineer directly impacted the customer’s results and outcome.

Ensure Visibility Across the Lead Lifecycle

Part of the communication process involves giving engineers visibility into the status of their leads. If its assumed that leads are just going into a black hole, the lead pipeline will eventually dry out. Engineers don’t need to see every lead be successful, they just need to know that their effort is being followed up on.

Push for Sales Accountability

The monetary value of a service lead might not compare with that of a regular sales opportunity.

This might be enough to detract sales people from following up on service-generated leads.

 

Therefore, its essential that sales leadership is bought into driving accountability for a service lead program. An easy way to do this is to show the impact that top performing regions or districts are having when it comes to top-line revenue.

If sales isn’t motivated by that performance, business leadership will be.

Compensation – Make it Timely

Most organisations develop a financial reward system for field service engineers based on leads closed. Some offer incentives for lead generation.

The issue is that most programs stop here. While the field engineer cares about the amount of recognition received, they care more about getting recognised in a timely and painless manner.

They shouldn’t have to fight for the recognition or have to wait for it for a considerable amount of time. Therefore, its essential that the reward system developed, monetary or otherwise, is efficient enough to deliver the reward to the field engineer in an expedited manner.

Evaluate Metrics that Drive Action 

Activity drives results and while its essential to measure the impact of a lead generation program to garner further buy in, its absolutely essential to track activity-based metrics as leading indicators.

[quote float="Right"]Activity drives results and while its essential to measure the impact of a lead generation program to garner further buy in, its absolutely essential to track activity-based metrics as leading indicators.

These metrics could include participation rates, referrals per tech, and average cycle or follow up time for leads. One of the organisations participating in our IdeaShare uses an engineer confidence index to measure the health of their lead program.

 

The index measures how confident the engineers are in their ability to get paid on leads. The higher the confidence, the greater the activity.

We’ve worked with organisations that have developed and grown lead generation programs into significant revenue contributors. These programs don’t require a great deal of investment from a technology point-of-view, but they do require leadership, a rigorous process, and a focus on change.

Sumair Dutta is the Chief Customer Officer at The Service Council. He has over 12 years of experience as an analyst in the field service management space. His work can be found at www.servicecouncil.com.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst with Strategies for GrowthSM explains why the key to successful service sales lies within understanding your customers and their needs...

Most people would seem to agree that a physical product, like a copier, printer, or scanner, is the easiest thing to sell. Companies can include photographs and hardware specs for these types of products in their brochures and catalogs; photographs can be included in the company’s web site descriptions; and demos can be conducted right at the customer’s site, etc.

But, in many cases, selling a product can actually be one of the most difficult things to do, especially if you have never sold anything to a particular prospect in the past, or if they are not familiar with your company’s lines of copiers, printers, or scanners, etc. This is why we are suggesting that a maintenance agreement, or professional services, for an existing business imaging system (or any other type of equipment) may actually be easier to sell than the original product itself.

Let me explain.

Chances are, some of the accounts for whom you provide copier service and support purchase dozens, if not hundreds, of individual pieces of equipment every year. For most of your smaller accounts, any single equipment purchase is, in a relative sense, a major consideration for them, both from an absolute and a financial perspective.

However, once they have made the decision to purchase a particular piece of equipment, they have already “bitten the bullet” with respect to its importance to their business operations, and they have accepted all of the financial considerations that will be tied to its acquisition and use.

 

You may have already heard the expression “total cost of ownership”, or TCO; what this means is that, in real life, there is usually more to the “total cost” of an individual piece of equipment than just the price that was paid for its acquisition.

In addition to the specific purchase price, there is also the cost of ongoing hardware and software maintenance support, replacement parts, help desk support, consumables (like paper, toner, etc.)and many, many others.

For some, the acquisition of new equipment also requires moves or changes to their physical facility to create space for a new business imaging system or copier machine, as well as additional training for the individuals who may be tasked with various internal maintenance and/or administrative responsibilities. The general rule of thumb with respect to TCO is that, over the course of several years, the “actual” cost of ownership for any particular piece of equipment may be up to twice the initial purchase price (or more).

As such, it is easy to imagine that any one of your accounts that has already planned to purchase a major piece of capital equipment such as a copier, scanner, or printer would have already examined the anticipated TCO for that unit, and would have budgeted accordingly. However, even the most sophisticated business planners may sometimes misjudge what the ultimate TCO will be for an individual piece of equipment (or not forecast it at all).

For example, they may have only anticipated requiring warranty service for one year or so following acquisition, without planning for any further post-warranty support that, if provided on a time and materials basis, would end up being quite expensive. Some may not have anticipated losing the staff that was originally trained on a particular piece of equipment, and may ultimately find themselves in a situation where new hires may need “fresh” training for an existing business imaging system. These are both classic cases where your existing accounts may already be clamouring for enhanced maintenance, or warranty agreements, or for various other types of professional services that your company may already offer (i.e., user training, train-the-trainers assistance, custom documentation, etc.).

 

Whether any of your existing accounts have either mis-planned - or didn’t plan at all - when they made their initial purchase decision, they have one thing in common: at some point, they will recognise that they need additional support over and above what they initially received when they purchased the equipment, and that this support will typically manifest itself in either the need for an enhanced maintenance agreement, specific professional services, or both.

If you have been observing and monitoring your accounts all along the way, you probably can already pick out which ones are “ripe” for selling maintenance agreements or professional services.

If you have also been keeping up-to-date with your company’s product and service support offerings, you are also ready to speak to those accounts with respect to what you believe will make their ultimate “total cost of ownership” less in the long run. Armed with this information, you will find yourself in the perfect position to make the sale of maintenance agreements and professional services as easy as possible - certainly easier than making a “cold” sales call to a new prospect.

All you really need is the understanding of what your customers require, matched against the products and services your company offers, and many of these prospective “sales” will simply be waiting there for you to “close” them.

 

---

 

Be social and share this feature

Nick Frank, Consultant with Novetnum Service Management continues his exclusive series looking at building revenue from services...

Selling services, how difficult can it be? Talk to a product sales person: ‘Piece of Cake, but…’.     Talk to the Services Sales specialist about their product colleagues; ’They don’t understand…. all they care about is the big deal’

In truth it’s not black and white, which is why it’s not so easy. Product Sales people can be very successful at selling services, if they are packaged as a product. For example I have seen great results for well defined service maintenance contracts, sold up front with the product. But I have also experienced complete frustration with some product sales people, as they struggle to sell managed services to more senior decision makers.  Generally this because they do not fully understand the strategic growth issues the boardroom faces and focus on service features.

To find the best path for your business requires an in depth knowledge of your customer’s buying processes, your own service propositions and your people. Get the answer right and it’s possible to create tremendous momentum, where you can start to see growth rates of between 20-40% per year in your services business.

Easy words, but what about the reality. Lets look at the experiences of a world leader in packaging equipment, Bobst SA based in Switzerland. The Head of the Service Business Unit, Stephan März saw the opportunity to transform the Services into a sustainable engine for long term growth. Two years in and Parts & Service is starting to push past 6% annual growth. This growth has been led by a focus on services where contract penetration has doubled. Although he is mid- journey, some of the lessons Stephan has learned about energising service sales are a good guide for anyone making this transition:

 

1. Technology leadership is not enough anymore: Spend time with the product sales force repeating this message. ‘Good Services are key to selling more Machines’. They will get it in the end, especially when you look at their incentives!
2. Focus, Focus, Focus: Creating a separate service team gave service an identity and motivation. Bobst had gone as far as creating a separate Business Unit, which allowed Stephan to demonstrate who was making the money…and it was not the products! Dedicated marketing, sales and supply chain allowed him to develop and implement very effective service proposition quickly. A focus on sales people skills; who were hunters or farmers. And often a successful approach for complex equipment manufacturers, leveraging  the customer perception of Regional Service Managers as trusted advisor’s, and using their skills to drive Service Sales.
3. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate: It’s a major cultural change, but change does not happen overnight. Even though Stephan had 100% commitment from the CEO and the Executive team, he still had to work through the silos issues, dealing with jealousy, finger pointing, remuneration, profit & cost allocation and yes, car policy. Bobst worked very hard on team work with their product Sales colleagues, making sure roles and responsibilities were clear; and its beginning to work!
4. Patience, Patience, Patience: Business is impatient for results, but service sales is in fact part of a long term transformation programme, where the business model, processes and people all need to be challenged. It takes time commitment and management skill to achieve the desired relationship and results.

If you are interested in how to sell service more effectively, why not look to attend Noventum’s next Service Sales Course or look at our article on ‘How to boost Service Sales at this link