Preventative Maintenance for Business Promotion

This series of blogs discusses the application of preventative maintenance in order to maintain our field team’s product and service promotion effectiveness. [1]

Step 1 – Checking Overall Mechanical Condition and Wear

We add great value when our field service team takes proactive steps to identify opportunities to help our customers and bring those opportunities to their attention. Through their proactive efforts we can stand out from the crowd by helping our customers to be measurably better off.

Consistency is Key

Like the equipment that we service, our proactive business development efforts by your field team are subject to wear and tear. Unless properly maintained, those efforts will fail prematurely. To ensure that our field service team’s proactive efforts are working at their highest level, we should perform preventative maintenance on a regular basis. Step one of that maintenance is a general assessment of the overall “mechanical condition” of the initiative.

A Proactive Approach

A high level assessment before completing the maintenance not only gives us clues to the overall condition of the equipment but can also reveal possible areas of impending failure that might otherwise be overlooked. That’s why it is a good idea for our field professionals speak to the customer before preforming a maintenance service to inquire on any issues they may have experienced and any changes that have occurred since the last time a service was performed. It is also why a common practice is to look around the equipment for signs of possible problems such as stains or residue caused by possible fluid leaks, environmental issues that may impact performance and to listen to the experience of the operators of the equipment.

We can do the same for our proactive business development initiative. We can look for signs that there may be issues lurking in the background unseen. These could come from looking at the program metrics and by talking to the field service team who are working within the system for example. Program metrics may show a reduction in the number of proposals generated or a spike in emergency, unplanned service requests. Talking to the team may uncover areas of frustration that until this point have not surfaced. The results of this high level assessment may provide clues of issues that need attention that could be overlooked otherwise.

Next time, we will consider the parts of the business development efforts that can “wear” overtime and that may need refurbishing to keep everything working in tiptop condition.

Let’s Connect

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. 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

“Good is the enemy of great.”

– Jim Collins

[1] This series of blogs is based on an article published for Field Service News – https://www.fieldservicenews.com