There is a lot of controversy that has been stirred up over the years as to whether a company should allow a service tech to sell larger jobs or if they should be turned over to a sales person. Watch this video as Joe Crisara, Rick Picard and others share their thoughts.
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The Guillotine Or the Rack?Each week I get several calls from contracting business owners asking for some advice on how to handle a “tough situations” with the employees or customers in their business. Each time I hear about one of these supposedly insurmountable scenarios, I am immediately reminded about a chapter I read awhile ago in a book by author Seth Godin titled, “Small Is the New Big.” In this chapter he simply asks, “Do you want to face the guillotine? Or do you want to be tortured on the rack?”
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Selling To Beancounters I received a desperate sounding phone call last week from a sales manager at a service company in the mid-west. He informed me that he thought our material was great and that he wanted to send several techs to one of our upcoming Total Immersion Summits and 5-Week after coaching experience.
When he tried to raise the prospect of investing in sales training for the techs, sales people and himself the CFO of the company gave a host of reasons why they could NOT possibly invest in such a program at this time.
He called me to ask if their was a “business case” for sales training that he could present to the owner of the company to convince him that the “Bean Counter” was a bit off in his thinking. I then thought about it for a few hours and came up with this e-book below. Enjoy it and use it by all means to sell your company’s bean counter on this important message.
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Your Personal EconomyWhat can you do to bust your personal recession? One thing for sure is that the economy always improves whenever a good service or sales person shows up at the door. The same is true of your personal economy. It always gets better when we create better results. Yes there are stories of carnage in the contracting industry with record numbers of businesses failing. But there is one thing to remember. This truth is undeniable. That truth is that a sale is never lost. It just goes to your competitor.
Because of this truth, ironically there are a few contractors who have grown enormously when they grab this seemingly “lost” sale. That’s right. When you lose an opportunity to capture a customer, you not only lose the customer and the money but your competitor is fueled by getting the immediate dollar and the long term relationship. A relationship that if managed correctly can result in between $30,000 to $50,000 in opportunity over the next 5 to 7 years.
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This is a 10 minute video of Rodney Koop talking about the struggles he went through as a service contractor and what lead him to eventual success.
To watch the entire 30 minute video, login as a member of ContractorSelling.com
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Talk About ProcrastinatingTwo weeks until my sister’s wedding, and I hadn’t had my bridesmaid dress altered yet. I admit that I am a procrastinator, but this was ridiculous even for me.
To be honest, I was not looking forward to wearing the dress. Don’t get me wrong, it was a beautiful dress. It was long, a flowing, raspberry-colored gown with a strapless bodice and a few rhinestones adorning the middle that connected two ends to a sheer piece of material that bustled around the back of the dress. It was gorgeous on the model wearing it online. Once I tried it on, though, I quickly realized that a strapless dress was not meant for my body type and thus the reason I was not looking forward to wearing the dress. And now we were only two weeks away from the wedding day, and I needed a miracle worker.
I decided to ask a friend for a referral. She had lived in the area all her life and quickly recommended a woman on 12th street in Paso Robles. Joe and I drove over to the shop first thing in the morning only to be greeted by a sign saying they were not open until 11am. “OK,” I said. “We’ll come back at lunch.”
At lunch time, Joe drove me to the shop again and dropped me off in front of the store while he went to find a parking space. I quickly walked inside with my dress hanging from my arms to find a young woman at her sewing machine while an elderly woman appeared from behind a curtain and greeted me with a coarse and irritated, “Can I help you?”
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“Tired” Of Being The BossI know I may be dating myself but I remember an old Randy Newman song called “My Life” in which Randy in the song, speaking in the voice of Bruce Springsteen utters these words that still ring in my ears. He sang, “Randy, I’m tired of being the boss. Can you be the boss for awhile?”
Being the boss is difficult and especially so regarding managing sales people or front-line employees who have been given the chore of listening to customer problems that clients have and then selling the solutions. Of course in the service world, problems are just opportunities to serve.
Over the years I have observed a few characteristics of the mediocre sales manager. These people are definitely “tired” of being the boss and it shows through their ineffective styles of management which leads to poor results by their people. Here we begin to explore why these managers are so tired.
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The Problem of TurnoverOne of the first questions I always ask new clients who are struggling to get control of their salespeople and increase their results is a very easy one to answer. Here is the question…
“Of the last 10 salespeople to leave, how many of them quit and how many were dismissed or as I like to say “de-hired?”
When I listen to sales managers answer that question, I don’t only listen for the words they tell me but also watch how hard it is for them to access this information. If a sales manager takes a long time to answer because they can’t remember the last time a sales person left the company, I know they have a turn-over problem. Not enough, turn-over that is.
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Your Sales “Boss”I remember the not so distant “good old days” when I made sure that I was home every Sunday night to watch one of my favorite shows. You would have to be from Mars to not know of or remember the HBO hit show The Sopranos which featured an inside look at some of the “alleged” New Jersey mob figures.
I know it seems like this is a product of the twisted mind of a sales consultant who has been on the road for a few weeks too long. But one evening while watching a re-run of the show, I began to think hmmm…
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Many business owners experience difficult times — periods when sales are low and cash flow is a dribble. But when a business is on the brink of closing, it takes hard work to keep the doors open. And a little bit of faith.
Bill Campbell, 56, has been in the HVAC business for 33 years. While Campbell describes himself as a “worker,” in 1993 he took on the title of owner and founded West Deptford, NJ-based Campbell’s Comfort System.
The 17-year-old business has seen its normal peaks and valleys, like any other HVAC company. But in 2008, as the recession worsened, Campbell’s business almost closed. Campbell recalls seeing the oncoming recession in early 2007.
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