Generating revenue on the front line: Using your field technicians as sales people

Maximize your organization’s potential by empowering and transforming your field technicians into your best sales people.

The field service industry has long be known for their intimate transactions between organization and consumer. Depending on the type of field service delivery, a service organization often has a much closer interaction with their customer than they do other businesses whose exchanges are limited to physical goods at a storefront.

A field service technician may come to a person’s residence or place of work. They may also interact regularly over a long period of time. The best field service technicians develop close relationships with their customers, often becoming trusted advisors. Why? Because a field technician is your customer’s go-to guy.

The last machine that was broken or the continuing maintenance to keep that machine running falls on the technician (aka your salesperson in the field, your client’s superhero) who makes problems go away quickly and prevents them from happening in the first place.

Field technicians can be some of your best sales reps

So your technicians are superheroes… now what? Now is the time for your service organization to maximize its potential by empowering your field technicians and transforming them into your best sales people. Think of it like this: your technician has already done most of the heavy lifting. They have already done what a sales guy would have had to do to close a deal.

They have already:

• Built a relationship with the customer
• Become an expert problem solver
• Established trust (they fixed previous problems)

But how does all of this help a technician, who often times has been specially trained in something other than sales, to create an additional stream of revenue for your organization?

Typically, no matter how diverse your sales organization is, a process (or flow) similar to this is followed:

• Discover a need
• Create an opportunity
• Nurture and manage the opportunity
• Generate a quote (quote for a request or contract)
• Close the deal

By equipping your field technicians with the right tools and mobile technology, this sales process can be followed on site with an actively engaged customer.

Think about it, have you ever:

• Purchased an extended warranty after having a furnace installed in your home?
• Purchased a more expensive model based on the recommendation from a salesperson?
• Purchased something you didn’t know existed after speaking with someone at your local hardware store?

Enabling them to sell in the field

The same concept can be applied to enable field service technicians to sell in the field. They can follow the same sales process/flow that’s listed above while onsite, taking unique advantage of their proximity, relationship, knowledge and access.Providing technicians with the right technology

Providing technicians with the right technology

With the right technology, they can readily access customer information and enter new information and opportunities based on their exchange. This information, otherwise not so easily gathered, can be used to market the right products and services to the customer in the future.

Providing technicians with the right mobile solution

With the right mobile solution, they can upsell a complimentary product or service, extend a warranty, create a new service agreement and even promote a newly launched product or service.

Providing access to a fully mobile field service solution

With a fully mobile field service solution, they will be able to close a deal on-site with technology that can generate a quote, capture a signature, take a credit card and more.

The possibilities for field sales are endless, and technology only acts as a booster in helping to drive this additional revenue stream. Feedback from the field in the form of business analytics can help drive your product or service development, creating better value for your customers. Signature capture and payment on-site will reduce time to invoice and increases cash flow. On-site generated renewals and upgrades reduce work on the back end for your call center or sales people.

According to Bain & Company, it costs 500% more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones, and the cost of bringing a new customer up to the same level of profitability as an old one is up to 16x more expensive. With ever-surmounting consumer demands and dwindling profit margins, empowering your technicians seems like common sense. Just make sure you have provided them with the right tools and technologies to be sales heroes as well as install-it, build-it, fix-it experts.

Want to learn more about the initiatives your organization can take to help transform your field technicians into your best sales people and generate additional revenue streams? Watch the Field Technologies Online webinar in which Christine LaVoi, Field Service Client Success Manager, discusses how to take your field sales to the next level.