Want your Technicians More Proactive in Promoting your Services? Your Perspective May be Getting in the Way

Many service managers I speak to see value in encouraging technicians to be more proactive in business development. Although many of those are taking steps to implement a formal plan for their service teams, many fail to achieve the results that they seek. If you want your technicians to be more proactive in promoting your services, check out your perspective. It might be getting in the way.

When it comes to engaging technicians in promoting services, many service managers see the role of selling as different from the role of service. They often describe selling and service as distinct and almost unrelated activities. With this view, when someone is selling they are not serving and when someone is serving they are not selling. The chart below illustrates this view of the relationship between selling and service activities.

The Distinct Activities of Selling and Serving

In the chart, we have reduced the activities that a salesperson and/or a technician perform to simply selling or serving. Obviously they do more than those activities in their daily work, but let’s make this assumption to simplify the point being made.

The vertical column of the chart represents a measure of the percent of time spent in an activity (in this case either “service” or “selling”) from 0% to 100%. Since we are only considering these two activities, then the total of the time selling and the time servicing must equal 100%. The horizontal axis represents the percentage of time spent in each activity. As we move across the axis, more time is spent in selling activities from nearly 0% in the “Pure Service” situation to nearly 100% in the “Pure Selling” situation. Note that in the position marked “Pure Service” there is still a small amount of selling taking place. This represents the technician’s time spent with the customer explaining the situation and recommending specific repairs. Likewise, note that at the position of “Pure Selling” there is a small percentage of time allocated to service.

When our perspective is that selling is an activity separate from serving then, if we want our technician to spend more time promoting our services, we must move the technician from “Pure Service” along the horizontal axis towards the position of “Pure Selling”. We would not contemplate moving our technicians all the way to the right – we do not want to turn our technicians into salespeople – but a little more to the right as depicted by the red arrow would be beneficial.

But this view may just be what is limiting performance and results. When we think of service as a distinct activity and look to “move our technicians towards the right” on our chart, we tend to see selling as an activity that is an “add on” to what our technicians are doing now (service) and not part of the service itself. This can result in a “while you’re there” perspective as in, “While you’re there, keep your eyes open for other things that we can sell to the customer.” It is this viewpoint that can limit the potential of our initiative and may even erode the relationship with the customer.

This perspective is limiting because it perceives selling as a tactic to be performed to win more business rather than as a service to deliver a more valuable service outcome and experience. With this perspective, our focus and attention is directed to how the customer can serve our needs rather than how we serve the needs of the customer and this will subsequently obscure much larger opportunities to integrate the promotion of our services into a differentiated service offering that is valued by our customers.

In my next blog, we will look more closely at the reasons why this perspective may be hindering our success and how a change in perspective will result in breakthrough thinking.

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Jim

“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”

– Woody Allen