That’s why I insisted on a short meeting between the owner, the service manager and me. I explained, “I’m going to be dragging you into the desert for awhile and you ought to know that there’s a promised land at the end of our journey.
“A comprehensive operations manual is more than rules and company policies. It’s about systematic approaches to everything the company does. The outline of every task my company did took a year to write! And here’s the good news: You don’t have to create this encyclopedic work, just edit what I’ve done.”
They both breathed a sigh of relief.
“If I gave you five talented techs who passed all your testing and were highly motivated, would you put them to work tomorrow?” I asked.
Their answer was “yes.”
“What are the chances that you could send all five out and have them install a new electric panel the way your company wants it done? The answer would be none. They’d all install it the way they had been trained or thought best.
“But once we define the task with a cookbook-type approach to your company way, we can hire as many new techs as we want and have them read and train on the manual, and feel pretty confident that they’ll understand what we want.”
What’s really great is that the operations manual does so much more than this. It’s the foundation for sales training for all existing techs, new techs and for the apprentices we build into our future techs.
The manual is also a marketing tool. Having a manual is another way to tell your customers you’re different and worth the money. It assures them that your techs will follow a set procedure to diagnose and fix their problems. And, a similar result on an install will also come from a set procedure to follow and a checklist approach.
Think of what a marketing advantage this is. And, if you run operations meetings, and I absolutely insist you do, and train on this manual, you are effectively able to say to your customers, “My techs have been fully trained at my company. I’m not coming to your home to learn on the job.”
Imagine owning a bicycle shop and letting your employees assemble bicycles anyway they may have learned —without a set of specific directions. Compare that to having been trained to use a precise step-by-step set of instructions that allows excellent results each and every time.
Have you ever lost a tech on a call because they went way too far for the minimum service fee (trip charge)? They got into trying to find the problem and after three hours they solved the problem and still hadn’t quoted the customer a price and gotten his or her approval. It’s going to be tough to defend the value. But, if you set up the tasks correctly, there is a logical sequence of steps as to how far to go in the initial diagnosis. That comes from knowing what questions you ask and what you test for, which leads to a meaningful conversation with the customer, which leads to quoting a price for the work.
So why is the manual a powerful sales tool for techs? Well, the power of the written word is enormous. It doesn’t even have to be correct, although I want yours to be. When talking to the customer about the work you’re proposing, you show them the manual and use it as a prompt for what they’ll be getting. The manual should contain benefits, best practices, company policies and code requirements.
The task prompts the tech (even the most technically minded) to sell by asking the right questions, checking for the right things and making the right recommendations that give the options that empower the customer to choose. There’s no pricing to make a customer feel pressured. It’s a discussion at this point. Can you see how powerful this is?
