Are You Fully Capitalizing on One of Your Most Valuable Assets?

Are you fully capitalizing on one of your most valuable assets – the knowledge and experience of your field service team?  Sure, you depend on their expertise to provide maintenance service, troubleshoot and make repairs correctly and efficiently.  But do you fully capitalize on their abilities to recognize additional work opportunities?  They offer much more than the opportunity to identify more business.  Their proactive recommendations can help your customers achieve results that they did not realize were possible and can differentiate you from the competition.

When you think about capitalizing on the proactive efforts of your service team, here are three questions to consider:

1. Do you see the field service professional’s promotion of services as an opportunity to serve your customers better or simply as a means for generating more business?

If we regard the field team’s proactive efforts as a service we will be more likely to treat it like one; we will be much more likely to support it, provide training for it and promote it like we would any other service we provide.

2. Do you discourage “selling” for the sake of merely gaining more business and insist that any recommendations by your field service team be directly tied to a customer benefit?

By focusing on how the recommendation will help the customer rather than how it will generate income, we will reinforce the service nature of the recommendations and show the field team why proactive recommendations are an integral part of their day-to-day service role.

3. Do you “convince” or do you “tell” your field team to promote your services?

To fully capitalize on our field team’s expertise, they must be willing participants.  A field service professional who is not convinced that promoting services is part of the service that they deliver will never achieve their full potential.  A willing participant must be convinced that business promotion is part of the service.  We can do this by what we say, what we do and how we position business promotion as a service.

Our field service teams provide a valuable service when they apply their technical expertise to maintain or repair equipment – as do the service teams of our competitors.  But we can offer more than this.  We can enhance the value that our teams deliver and differentiate our business from our competitors by capitalizing on our field team’s ability to recognize opportunities to ultimately help our customers to be better off.  By doing so, we will be capitalizing on one of our most valuable assets.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. And as always, please feel free to leave a link back to your own blog if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

“The human mind is our fundamental resource.”

– John F. Kennedy