How To Increase Service Sales In Your HVAC Department

How we sold a $1,000 filter on a service agreement fulfillment

 Tom said he never brought it up in the past because he ASSUMED the client would not be interested.  How many of these opportunities are in your business?  I tell you these opportunities are everywhere.

Yesterday, I was riding with Tom, a service technician in New Jersey, and our first call was a regular client in need of service agreement maintenance.  I questioned Tom about the client; he knew the account history and felt familiar with the client.  She was recently divorced and her ex-husband had previously taken care of the maintenance, so this was almost more of a landlord-tenant situation.  The system has been replaced two years ago and we were to work fast.

Not so fast. This is our problem. We did the maintenance on the new system and everything was working fine, which one would normally expect, but we were actually missing an opportunity because Tom assumed the ex- husband would be uninterested and say “no.”

Do not assume that the customer will say “no.” One must always ask for what he or she wants and let the client decide for him or herself.  We have all seen this a million times and you probably have several thousand of these opportunities in your service business.  You know how we cut a slit in the return next to the blower and slide a low velocity standard one-inch filter in the return? How many times have you seen a clogged filter pulled into the blower? We all know that this is a sloppy way to engineer design the filtration, but it’s real cheap and real fast to so…

I instructed Tom to explain this to the client over the phone how I had taught him in class.

How to ask for what you want:

1. Express what you see or hear, in your own words. Be honest.
2. Express how you feel about what you see or hear. Be honest and direct.
3. Ask for what you want.
4. Give the benefits or consequences.

BINGO! An extra grand before 10:00 a.m.

 What’s the bottom line?

 Ask for what you want in life and let others decide for themselves.