October 28, 2025 • 26 mins
Are your techs missing chances to close bigger jobs? In this episode of Masters of Home Service, host Adam Sylvester talks with Phil Risher, founder of Phlash Consulting, about how to land contracts worth 10x the original job. He shares how simple tools like checklists, CSR scripts, and better follow-ups can help your team spot hidden revenue—and how one smart question (‘What else can we help you with?’) can turn a routine visit into a major win. New to Jobber? Masters of Home Service listeners can claim an exclusive discount for Jobber at http://bit.ly/4kAzgm0
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
The first thing is thetechnician incentive program.
So you go to them and you say, Hey, doyou want to make money while you sleep?
How does this, of course they say yes.How does this look for them? Well,
when you go out on a job and you createadditional estimate opportunities,
if it closes in a week,two weeks, five weeks,
then you'll get X percentage or a certainamount of dollar amount for that job,
(00:20):
and at this point you kind of got theirears perked up because they're going to
get excited about making more money onjobs that they're actively doing down the
line.
Welcome to Masters of Home Service,
the best podcast for home service proslike us. I'm your host, Adams Sylvester,
and I want you to crush it in business.
There comes a time in everybusiness owner's journey where they realize just how
(00:41):
important leads are, howexpensive they truly are,
and once you realize how expensive theyare and how much it actually costs to
make your phone ring, yourentire approach to sales changes.
And so if you are listening and you'reonly giving people what they want,
then you're missing out.
If you're not cross-sellingand upselling more services,
(01:03):
then you're missing a boat. Infact, most companies who don't,
they only sell what the person asks for.
A lot of 'em are broke andthey're always frustrated,
and they're struggling to get morework in their schedule. If that's you,
it's okay. We're going to helpyou today. Phil Richards with me.
Phil is a friend of the podcast and he'sreally good at helping you and teaching
you how to cross-sell andupsell your services. So Phil,
(01:26):
thanks for being heretoday. Welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.I'm excited to talk about this.
It's something I'm very passion,
passionate about is generatingadditional estimates for your business.
A lot of times you're just out runningservice calls and you don't get those
estimates and you don't have aprocess to get more estimates.
That's right.
So you're going to help our listenerscome up with a game plan for actually
putting this in practice, butfirst you own Phlash Consulting,
you help your clients keep theirschedules full, get more leads,
(01:49):
nurture those leads. Tellus more about what you do.
Yeah, so I used to be directorof business development,
so growth at a $3 millionhome service business.
And this was actually one of thebiggest pain points when I came into the
business was that we had 28technicians. The workforce,
English wasn't their first language,
and how are we going to build a systemfor them to go out on a job site and
generate additional estimates? So thatway, one, we can keep our schedules full,
(02:09):
but two,
which is the most important thing isthat you're getting these big ticket
estimates on the backend. So you'renot just relying on service call,
service call, service call.
Yeah, we want to turn a diamond to adollar, and so a job site that's small,
we want to make it a big job.
What is the biggest problem that you'reseeing people like me make with cross
sales? Maybe misconceptionsor just a lack of awareness?
What do you think is thebiggest problem here? As.
(02:30):
You start getting moretechnicians on the team,
and even if you're just outstill running service calls,
a lot of times you have blinders and youget sucked into whatever the customer's
asking for you to do,
and you just want to solve theproblem and move on to the next job.
You have a million things running andespecially when you have technicians
they're going in with do thework, move on to the next job,
make sure the customer's happy,
and they're not thinking aboutthe greater side of things,
(02:51):
which is generating estimates.
So it's really about buildinginside of your processes,
this function of generatingadditional estimates,
which we're going to talk about today.
Yeah. One of the most frustratingthings for my technicians,
my gutter technicians is when a techniciangoes to her house because the client
called in and said,
the gutter's leaking right over my frontdoor and it's really annoying. Great.
And they go in there and they fix theleak over the front door and maybe they
(03:14):
sell something else.
We have to come back for another day sothe next round of technicians come back
to do something completely unrelated,
but they somehow discoverthat there's 18 more leaks.
Exactly.
That's not good.
That's not a good customer experienceand that costs us money now.
We found 'em thankfully,
but there's always more thatthe client doesn't know about.
That's right.
So I was at an air duct cleaning companyand we also did dryer vent cleaning,
(03:36):
and when we were out on the job site,
imagine if you didn't analyze or lookat this person's dryer vent and you left
and then tomorrow it caughton fire because it's blocked and the person's like,
well, you were just here.
You could have actually literallysaved my house and solved this problem.
For me, it was like we need tocreate that type of urgency.
It's not just about making more money,
it's also about helping your customersso that they don't have more issues down
the line. And you were justthere. You're the experts.
(03:58):
If you go in for an oil changeand you have bald tires,
you want them to tell youthat you have bald tires.
You don't want to bring itin a month. That's right.
You want to bring a car in constantly yetto fix. You want to bring in one time,
get it all fixed all at once,and our clients are no different.
They want just a one timevisit. Get it all figured out,
get all fixed now and then we'll seeyou in five years, not next month,
next month. Drag it along,drag it along, drag along.
(04:18):
We don't want any of that stuff.
So how did you train yourpeople back in the day to sell?
Yeah, so it's not even just back inthe day I'll talk about the process,
but last year we had a HVAC contractor.
We implemented a couple of these playbooksthat we're going to talk about today
and they increased their estimatecount by 42% year over year,
and they ended up doubling their revenuejust by fixing their estimate thing.
(04:38):
And before we get into the playbook,
I want to really hit this home thenumber one way that you can grow your
business. It's not just moreleads. It's not just more jobs.
It's estimate count.
That's why you need to track this numberyear over year because estimate count
is literally more swings to the bat,And if you have a good sales process,
that's how you're goingto grow your business.
So you should be trackingestimate account.
The other piece of it is thatyou could get a bunch of leads,
but they're all trash estimate accountlets you know that your leads are
(05:00):
actually good and you're generatingestimates. Some of the playbooks,
the first thing is is the technicianincentive program and the first,
so I had 28 texts. Englishwasn't their first language,
so I had to get them bought in.
That's the first step is like get yourtechnicians bought in and what does this
look like? So you go tothem and you say, Hey,
do you want to make money while yousleep? How does this, of course they say,
yes course. How doesthis look for them? Well,
(05:21):
when you go out on a job and you createadditional estimate opportunities,
if it closes in a week, two weeks, fiveweeks, you have some nurture sequences,
some rehashing on these estimates,
then you'll get X percentage or a certainamount of dollar amount for that job
and at this point you got their earsperked up because they're going to get
excited about making more money on jobsthat they're actively doing down the
line. Now the second piece of this, andthis is the part that we talked about,
(05:44):
is removing the tech blinders becausethey're going in to do the service and
here's how you do this and anybusiness, you should do this.
This is great serviceand you just hit on it,
is you need to have a checklist for yourtechnicians. When you go into the home,
just like a car when you go in,you're analyzing the tire pressure,
the tread depth, the oil levels, allthe stuff that you're check marking.
They didn't ask you for all this,but you're doing it as a precaution.
(06:06):
So when you go out to do a service,you need to be checking everything.
So imagine in hvac, you go into the home,
you're there because theydon't have any ac. Well,
you ask them some qualifying questions,
do you have any hot orcold rooms in your house?
You might be able to sell a ductlesssystem. How is the air? Does it feel dry?
How's your skin? Now you mightbe able to sell a humidifier,
so you're asking some qualifyingquestions and that's the second step.
(06:27):
Just doing that alone isgoing to create opportunities,
but what we ran into as a business washow do we make this so easy for the
technicians to send estimates?
Because most people get this part wrong,And this is the one that if you make it
easy for them, you will get theestimates. If you make it hard for them,
it's going to fizzle out andit's just flavor the week.
I'm sure you may experience.
Oh no, never.
Exactly. You talk about it,your team meeting get a game,
(06:50):
more estimates and everyone's fired up,
but you don't have the process.So here's how you do it.
The first thing is you create aform or a page on your website slash
consulting.com/referral.
Then you put a form on there and thatform captures all the information for the
customer's information and youtell them, Hey, we have this form.
All you have to do after the job,
you go to this form and you fill thisthing out and you turn it into a QR code
(07:14):
and you put it in their truck. Theyscan the QR code after the job,
fill out this estimate referralform, then you're off to the racists.
Now I'm going to walk you throughwhat the word track looks like.
And that's for upselling andcross-selling 1000%. Okay,
so if they're at a house and they seesomething else, they don't sell it,
but they set someone else to come backto sell it later. That's right. Okay.
Our techs were service-basedtechs. They were not,
(07:36):
they weren't selling sales techs.They were there to just do the work,
and a lot of timesthat's what we fall into.
They're not upselling the opportunitiesafter the fact. So what we would do is
we would have someone upsell after thefact, but create the opportunities.
And so the word track would look likethis, Hey, while I'm at your house,
I do this checklist of all thisstuff. Then at the end of the service,
I know you told me about thishot or cold room in your house.
(07:57):
I think we have a solutionfor it. Fill on our team.
I think you just worked onanother house in the neighborhood.
I'll have him give you a call with someoptions. Does that sound good? Oh, yeah,
that'd be great.
Now you're creating opportunities withoutyour texts having to get in there and
sell because there's a layer to coachingyour texts on selling and it can get
very difficult because there's somuch stuff you're trying to do.
Yeah, yeah. I love this.
So you had 28 texts thatdidn't speak English very well,
(08:21):
and so you had to come up with adifferent way for them to still upsell,
and it's just the simple form that theywould fill out if they saw something
that needed to be addressed.
That's right. Now,
let's say you have awesome techs oryou're the tech and you're out there doing
service calls.
That checklist is your blueprint forupsells because you go through your
service and then at the end of the serviceyou say, now, Adam, you told me boom,
(08:41):
boom, boom. I wasn't ableto solve that problem,
but I think that thiswill solve your problem.
You want me to give you an estimatefor this? Boom, there you go.
Now you have tons ofestimate opportunities as well. I'll give you a good
benchmark. We figured this number out.
You should be generating30 to 50% on your jobs.
30 to 50% of your jobs should turninto estimates. You did a hundred jobs,
you should get 30 to 50estimates out of that,
(09:02):
just like a normalservice call based thing.
Yeah, that seems about right to me too.
I would say that's probably where weare. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Whenever I see my metrics,
our conversion rate isoften over a hundred percent because we go in and upsell,
so we'll get leads,
but then we generate even more leads andwe'll generate more quotes than we had
leads because we're generating moreand more work. It's so important.
(09:25):
So talking about upselling andcross-selling, it starts with the CSR.
Yes, the phone. Right. So thisis my second playbook here,
and this is what we ran into was,okay, some of our technicians loved it.
Some of them were like, I don't wantto do this, whatever, too much work.
But what if you can get to the upsellbefore your techs get out there,
and this is the CS R playbook, which theCSR playbook is when someone calls in,
(09:46):
there's two ways you can do this.Someone calls in and says, Hey,
I want to get my gutters clean,or whatever the service is.
Maybe you talk 'em through price or maybeyou have a dispatch fee and you send
someone out there. You literallysay, while my guy's out there,
do you want him to takea look at X, Y, and Z?
Because some of your neighborshave had the same issue,
and I'm trying to be proactivewhile I have a guy out there.
Do you want me to look at this?Teeing them up.
(10:06):
Sometimes your CSR gets a little rattledwith that because there's so much
conversation going on in the first call,
and here's how you do it in anothercall. If you're doing confirmation calls,
which you should be doing,
don't just rely on the audit the daybefore or something, right? Yeah.
A lot of people just rely on thetext to go out, which is okay,
but there's another opportunity ofcalling these people and saying, Hey,
I see we got you on the schedule fora gutter cleaning, and by the way,
(10:28):
while he's out there,
we were just doing a job last weekin your neighborhood for X, Y, and Z.
Do you want him to just give you an eserto take a look for you why he is out
there? I can just add it your ticket,there's no extra charge. That's right.
And then you tee your guys up. They loveit, especially if they're sales tech,
because then they don't have to actuallycreate the opportunity in the home.
They just have to say, Hey,
I know you talked to Phil on thephone and you talked about this.
It's just like butter basically.
(10:49):
Here you go, a walk in the park, cakewalk.
It's a cake walk for these guys.So when you get the team bought in,
I think the CSR and the tech side,
there's no way that you can't increaseyour estimate account if you do that.
A lot of people give us some pushbacklike, okay, Phil, this sounds great,
but now I got to train my CSR and my tech.
But there's even other waysthat you can do this as well.
Like what?
Yeah, so the third playbookis email marketing. Okay,
(11:11):
so we've talked about email marketingon the show and different strategies on
that. When you send outan email with promos,
special offers that's creatingsales opportunities for your techs,
and let's say you scheduled a joband you had an email sequence leading
up to that job that thensold different services, Hey,
while your techs out here, be sure toask 'em about boom, boom, boom, boom,
(11:32):
boom, boom. Here's why a lot of peoplelike this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And again,
you're just teeing them up for more stuffto just ask you instead of you trying
to create the opportunity in the home.
Yeah, for sure. Phil,
what do you compensatethe salespeople with?
What kind of percentage isit flat? How do you do that?
Let's get specific on that.
Yeah, for sure. So with the CSRs,
this is a big opportunity ifyou're selling memberships,
(11:54):
if you're selling theseupsell opportunities, there's kind of two ways to do it.
So with CSRs in particular,
a lot of times they're going to be hourlyemployees and an extra 10 or 20 bucks
is going to make a hugedifference for them,
and they're going to love that.If their sales techs that get paid,
a percentage of their upsells,
10 or 20 bucks might notmove the needle for them,
and they might not even be incentivizedto sell a membership to make an extra 10
or 20 bucks,
which is why it's better to have yourCSR do it because 10 or 20 bucks make a
(12:18):
big difference to them.Now the other piece of this,
and this is a really cool way to do this,
and we have some clientsthat literally run like this,
which is you can see who createdthe jobs, and if you have one CSR,
they created all theopportunities for jobs,
and you could give them a percentage ora dollar amount off of the total revenue
that they created based off the jobsthat they created. So over a month,
(12:38):
they generated 600 jobs or$60,000 worth of estimates,
and then they get 1% of thator whatever the numbers are.
So then you can get them bought intonot just creating opportunities,
but actually making sure that itturns into revenue for their business.
Gotcha.
Yeah. Now with the techs,
what we did was we would give them anextra 50 bucks if they upsold this or a
hundred bucks. If they upsold thisand trying to create the opportunity.
(13:00):
Different services might getdifferent spiffs. That's.
Right. That's right.
Okay.
I think one reallyimportant piece of this,
especially with our techs as I mentioned,
is you wanted to make it so easy for themto comprehend what's happening and how
to do it and what is going to makeany employee compensation plan.
You got to make it easy for them tounderstand and explain to their spouse. If
they can explain it to their spouse,
then it's probably too complicatedfor them to understand themselves.
(13:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Phil,let's pause this conversation,
even though it's blowing my mind herefor a minute to talk about Jobber and how
Jobber can help our users reallystart upselling more in cross-selling.
How does Jobber help our listeners?
Well, for our clients that use Jobber,
we actually pull estimatecounts from their Jobber,
so you can see how many SMSthat you're actually generating,
and then you can look year over year tomake sure that you're increasing your
(13:45):
estimate count and keep track of thatnumber that I think is so important to
help you grow your business.
Yeah, totally. That reporting is great.Also, you can have advanced quotes,
which means you have optional line items,
so you can give them what they askfor, but then three additional upsells,
they could just check if they want to.
It's super easy and they have jobforms that are even more robust.
You can add photos to job form thechecklist that we talked about.
It's all in Jobber. Sounds like you needJobber too. If you're not using Jobber,
(14:08):
you need checklists, youneed advanced quoting.
You need to be able to upsell more andget more business for more leads and
estimates, estimate, report,all that stuff you need.
So go to Jobber.com/podcast deal anexclusive discount and start using
Jobber right now. Something thatAlex Hormo said, which I loved,
is if you're really hungry and you gointo a restaurant and you order a steak,
(14:29):
you're really,
really hungry at the end when you'refinished and you're full and you feel
great, and he said, how's thesteak? Oh, it's great. Great.
Do you want anotherone? Well, no, I'm full.
Why would I eat a second steakright now? But if you go in,
you're really hungry. Yeah,I'm going to steak. Great.
Would you like two steaks? Yeah,I'm starving. I'll take two steaks.
Yeah.
The time to sell the second steakis at the peak of desire, peak of
(14:52):
or need. Exactly. And so when is that,Phil? When is that for home service pros?
When is that time where peoplethink they need the most?
Yeah, it's at the point whenthey are asking for the service,
and that's when you want to strike.
So what we did at the Ducklingcompany is a lot of people,
they need their ducks in every four years.
Their driver went down every year or two,
and we work with gutter cleaning companiesnow that you really need your gutters
(15:13):
cleaned twice a year at least, And alot of people just call whenever it's
overflowing and they don't care aboutthe ongoing maintenance of the work,
whatever it looks like.
What we recommend doing is when theycall in and to get their gutters clean,
you say, Hey, we actually, you shouldget your gutters clean twice a year,
so why you're scheduling this one,
you should also schedule your next oneand we'll give you 10% off so that way
you have a cleaning plan in place sothat way it's not overflowing and your
(15:35):
stuff's not falling offyour house, whatever.
So really think about if you are inthis business that you need to do things
over and over again, how can youjust get people on the schedule,
maybe give 'em a little incentiveto move forward with it,
whether you call it a membership or youjust schedule stuff to actually happen
and you talk like this, it'svery easy for them to understand,
and then you get a lot moreopportunities generated.
Are there certain things that theCSR can say that can bomb the sale,
(15:58):
or are there certain keywordsthey should never say?
You don't want it to comeoff as a sales pitch,
especially when someone's calling to getproblem solved. You want to listen to
them, have empathy, and then solve theirproblem and give them recommendations.
So like, Hey, my gutters areclogged. Okay, this sounds good.
We can have someone come out there.
One thing that I would recommend doingis having a proactive maintenance plan or
(16:19):
a proactive approach to gutter cleaning,
and we recommend doing ittwice per year. If you like,
I can schedule this one and yournext one and we give you a 10% off.
That way you don't have to worryabout trying to call us in.
It's already on the schedule. Itsounds a lot better than, yeah,
we have this membership plan. It's $120.Do you want to sign up for it or not?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah. How you say it matters a lot.Absolutely, and it's all about,
(16:40):
I think, solving the person'sproblem. No one wants to be sold.
They all want their problems to besolved, and at the end of the day,
if you can help them solve their problemand maybe get them a discount of some
sort and be proactive,who wouldn't want that?
Yeah, totally.
The CSR is in position to be at thepeak of need my gutters river flowing?
I need some out here asap. Let's try tosell it then, and they say, yeah, yeah,
(17:01):
sure. Maybe I'll do it, but not right now.
I just want to get the gutters cleanfirst before I sign up for anything else.
Right. So then they go in and do it.
Are you putting special notes in thejob order or are you recapping the
conversation or are allthese things something that the technician's going to do
no matter what?
Yeah,
so this is why having that technicianchecklist is so important. Regardless if
(17:22):
you want to upsell opportunities or notlooking like a professional company in
your customer journey and having achecklist for them to go through and do is
going to help you stand out, andit's going to help you win more jobs.
The catchall to this, thelast playbook on this,
let's say your CSR botes itor they don't want to do it,
or they don't feel comfortable doingit, your technician goes out there,
they can't upsell, they can't do it,
but you have a checklist now youdo a happy call on the last day,
(17:44):
this is what we did. We called everysingle person the next day and said, Hey,
Adam was out there cleaning yourgutters. How do you do? How's it looking?
Any issues? Nah, it's beengreat. Thank you so much. Hey,
I noticed on the checklist you said thatyou have this issue of pulling in your
grass or this issue of blah,blah, blah, blah, blah.
I know a solution that can help you,
and I actually puttogether a couple options.
(18:05):
Can I send it over you to take a look atand just let me know if it's something
that might make sense for you?This is where your salespeople,
they don't have opportunities.
They need to be doing yourhappy calls all day long.
Salespeople doing happy calls,
that process I just told you is goingto create tons of opportunities. Right,
so not the CSR doing the happy.
Calls. That's right.Okay. Okay. Hold on. Okay.
You're breaking the microphone right now.
(18:27):
So the salespeople don'thave time for that, Phil.
They're out doing their thing. Youdon't have enough estimates or leads.
You have slow periods in your schedule.Your salespeople are going to say,
I don't have enough leads. Idon't have enough jobs to run.
Call all of our customers the next day,go through the job that they just did.
Talk about common things in theirhouse that's probably broken.
If they have a checklist, which youshould go over the checklist with them,
review the opportunities, create theestimates, send it to them, rehash those,
(18:49):
follow up on them. Now you haveinfinite estimate opportunities.
Do you require theclient to be home when we
come?
Is that a requirement for technicians tobe able to meet the client face to face
or not? Again, it all dependson your service. Lawn care.
Might not happen.
That's right.
But with lawn care, you could still doa checklist. You might do landscaping,
you might do gutter cleaning, youmight do certain upsell opportunities,
(19:13):
and you create them, and then you goand you call 'em next day like, Hey,
we are at your house. We didthis service. Everything's good.
I didn't notice this, this, and this one.
How much do you think that they'regoing to? They're like, wow,
this company actually cares. They'retaking a look at all this stuff.
I'm so glad that I work with them. Two,
they're looking out to be proactiveso that my stuff doesn't break,
and then I have to try tofind who's going to do it.
They already do this service. Three,
(19:35):
you're creating opportunitiesfor your company.
It's the whole culture of solvingpeople's problems that's going to help you
grow your business.
If someone goes to a house and sees morework that needs to be done and submits
that form,
they're not pricing it or they'renot recommending a price or anything,
they're just generating another leadfor someone else to come back in and do
another sales appointment. Is that right?
It all depends how yourbusiness is structured.
If you have sales techs and they have aprice book and they can write something
(19:57):
up and give them anestimate, then do it. Yeah,
do it. But if you have techs that aremore service-based that are just trying to
get to the next job, get a five starreview and make sure the customer's happy,
they don't want to be bogged down withcreating these bigger ticket estimates,
do this process, it'sgoing to be much better.
And you can spend a lotmore time on your estimate.
When you're sending an estimateand you're not on site,
you should be recording a Loom videowalking them through what you're actually
(20:17):
sending them. Hey, my name'sPhil. I work with Adam.
I know when he was at your house,he talked about this and this stuff.
So I put together thisestimate, here's how this works,
and it can help you solve this problem.
And here's what I thinkthat you should do.
Lemme know if you have any questions,and then you send all that together.
It ties it all together perfectly.
And if you're a lawn care company or ahouse cleaning company where you're going
(20:39):
to the same house everyweek, high frequency,
you should be generating so many leadsbecause every single time you go to
someone's house, they're going to haveweeds in their beds, they're bushes,
be overgrown.
There's going to be a huge falling inthe limb or a branch that's laying the
road. We have to get clean up.
I'm speaking to long care companies andhouse cleaning companies specifically.
You need to be doing this constantlybecause there's so many opportunities that
(20:59):
you're at the house,
and if your guys just zipping around theyard cutting grass and not paying any
attention to anything else around them,low hanging branches, weeds, bushes,
dead bushes, all that kind of stuff,
you're missing out ona ton of new business.
That's right. I mean, that'swhy the checklist is beautiful.
That's why the first step is try to getthem bought in to make some extra money
so that they don't just have their techblinders on and just go to do the work.
(21:22):
And those two things, it takesthem extra five minutes on a job,
but if it could pay them an extra ahundred or $200 per job or something,
I mean, it's a home run for them.
And you can do that. And Jobber haschecklists. We integrate with company cam.
They have checklists,however you want to do it.
You can have an assistant that just herjob or his job is just to monitor those
checklists every day to make sure peopleare doing it. Yeah. Well, we literally.
(21:42):
Did what we did. So on Canva,
we created a checklist and then weprinted it out, we put it on their truck,
and then we would have littleC check marks next to it,
and they would take a picture of thischecklist that they did and that you Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Literally take a picture of thechecklist that they did with pictures and
explanation of the stuff. You don'thave to make this too complicated,
(22:03):
and if you don't know how tomake a checklist or whatever, it's very simple way.
Go to Google Forms, createa custom Google form,
and you can turn that into your process.And then those Google forms can go into
a Google sheet,
and now you have every single formthat goes into an Excel spreadsheet,
and at the end of the day,
you can literally go through and seeall of your checklist with pictures,
with information and everythingready to go. You can ask,
(22:25):
how old is your hot water heater? Greatquestion. And you could find that.
Then you have a whole list of all thesepeople's hot water heaters that are old,
call the peoples that have the oldestand sell them a hot water heater.
There's a million ways that you can dothis checklist that doesn't have to get
too complicated.
I want to go back to the Happycall because I want your opinion.
I'm going get some free advice on this,Phil, so I've got you here. Let ask.
It's very surprising to me,
(22:45):
the Happy Call is one of the leastfavorite calls that our people make,
and I've always thoughtwhy? They're happy. Well,
they say this or they give me a curveball here and they say that and I have to
do, and for whatever reason, when Ido follow-ups, they're always happy.
And I guess when my peopledo it, they aren't much.
Have you ever heard that before.
That the Happy Call isn't theirfavorite call to make? I mean,
(23:07):
I've done hundreds if not thousands ofhappy calls because I implemented it in
the company. I used to work atEnterprise coming out of college,
and that was a part of our process.When you rent a card or someone,
you call them the next day and checkto make sure there's no issues with the
car. And so when I went to work at theDuck Lane, I'm like, we need to do this.
So some people might say, yeah, I had anissue when I was here. Well, first off,
that catches it before it turnsinto a one-star review. Second,
(23:28):
it allows you to alleviate andshow that you actually care.
And then the third thing is it turns intomore opportunities for your business.
Of course, it's like now we got to goback out there because you called them.
If you didn't call them,one business owner said,
let the crying dogs lie or something.
Just let the upset people be Don'tdisturb them. Oh, gosh. It's like, dude,
we're all about giving great customerservice solving problems, and so yeah,
(23:49):
of course. Are you going toget some upset customers? Yeah,
but at the end of the day,
it's about making sure you have happycustomer solving problems and estimates.
Yeah. Now, one more flavor to thisis for our business, our technicians,
most of our technicians sell aswell, which I knew is kind of unique,
but there's other peopleout there that do it.
A lot of times when we do ahappiness call, for example,
there's already a quote pending.We gave him a quote yesterday.
(24:12):
It still hasn't been approved yet.
How do you talk about that quote withoutbeing like, are you going to approve?
It can turn from a happiness call tolike, are you going to approve call?
Yeah, so the questionthat you ask is, Hey,
just want to make sure that you gotthe estimate that I sent you yesterday.
I know that you had an issue with this.
I'm not sure if you got it or not.Even if you know that they got it,
just ask them, did you get it?They're going to say, yeah, I got it.
(24:33):
I'm just looking over it. I'll letyou know. Or No, I didn't get it.
Can you send it again? Thenthere's no back and forth,
or I'm here to try to sellyou again. It's just like,
I want to make sure yougot that solution that.
I sent you.
There's a lot of actionable things thatpeople can do today because of this
conversation. I'm going to wrap'em up in three right here.
Number one is you want to trackestimates, not leads, estimates,
the numbers should alwaysbe higher than leads.
(24:55):
I think that profit is in the upsell,
and so if you're having more estimatesthan leads, then you're on a good track,
but if you have the same number or less,
then you're just going to be constantlyturning over for more and more leads.
Number two is use checklist.You can use Jobber company cam.
You use paper or laminated.It doesn't matter.
You need to make sure that yourtechnicians, your salespeople,
your service people,
everybody is checking off everything theycheck to make sure that every possible
(25:18):
more additional work is beingaccounted for. And number three,
the sale starts with the CSR.
The CSR should be teeing your peopleup for success. Hey, by the way,
why they were going to bechecking for X, Y, and Z?
Is that cool with you or is thereanything else that they should check?
My favorite question is, what else? Oranything else that you can think of.
The CSR starts the sale, so make surethey're well equipped and trained, and.
(25:40):
Don't forget your happy calls becausehappy calls are not just, Hey,
how was a service? They aresales opportunities that most people miss out on.
Bingo. Well, Phil, thanks forbeing here. Appreciate it.
How do people find out more about you?
If you're a home service business ownerand you want a free marketing audit,
you can go to phlashconsulting.com,P-H-L-A-S-H consulting.com.
We hop on a call, we go throughall your digital marketing.
We give you the recipe and showyou how to grow your business.
(26:02):
Well, thanks for being here.Appreciate it as always. Thanks, Phil.
Yeah, man.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you heard to me today thatwill help you cross-sell and upsell more
services. I'm your host, Adams Sylvester.You can find me at adamsylvester.com.
Your team and your clients andyour family deserve your very best,
so go give it to 'em.
The first thing is thetechnician incentive program.
So you go to them and you say, Hey, doyou want to make money while you sleep?
How does this, of course they say yes.How does this look for them? Well,
when you go out on a job and you createadditional estimate opportunities,
if it closes in a week,two weeks, five weeks,
then you'll get X percentage or a certainamount of dollar amount for that job,
(00:20):
and at this point you kind of got theirears perked up because they're going to
get excited about making more money onjobs that they're actively doing down the
line.
Welcome to Masters of Home Service,
the best podcast for home service proslike us. I'm your host, Adams Sylvester,
and I want you to crush it in business.
There comes a time in everybusiness owner's journey where they realize just how
(00:41):
important leads are, howexpensive they truly are,
and once you realize how expensive theyare and how much it actually costs to
make your phone ring, yourentire approach to sales changes.
And so if you are listening and you'reonly giving people what they want,
then you're missing out.
If you're not cross-sellingand upselling more services,
(01:03):
then you're missing a boat. Infact, most companies who don't,
they only sell what the person asks for.
A lot of 'em are broke andthey're always frustrated,
and they're struggling to get morework in their schedule. If that's you,
it's okay. We're going to helpyou today. Phil Richards with me.
Phil is a friend of the podcast and he'sreally good at helping you and teaching
you how to cross-sell andupsell your services. So Phil,
(01:26):
thanks for being heretoday. Welcome to the show.
Yeah, thanks for having me.I'm excited to talk about this.
It's something I'm very passion,
passionate about is generatingadditional estimates for your business.
A lot of times you're just out runningservice calls and you don't get those
estimates and you don't have aprocess to get more estimates.
That's right.
So you're going to help our listenerscome up with a game plan for actually
putting this in practice, butfirst you own Phlash Consulting,
you help your clients keep theirschedules full, get more leads,
(01:49):
nurture those leads. Tellus more about what you do.
Yeah, so I used to be directorof business development,
so growth at a $3 millionhome service business.
And this was actually one of thebiggest pain points when I came into the
business was that we had 28technicians. The workforce,
English wasn't their first language,
and how are we going to build a systemfor them to go out on a job site and
generate additional estimates? So thatway, one, we can keep our schedules full,
(02:09):
but two,
which is the most important thing isthat you're getting these big ticket
estimates on the backend. So you'renot just relying on service call,
service call, service call.
Yeah, we want to turn a diamond to adollar, and so a job site that's small,
we want to make it a big job.
What is the biggest problem that you'reseeing people like me make with cross
sales? Maybe misconceptionsor just a lack of awareness?
What do you think is thebiggest problem here? As.
(02:30):
You start getting moretechnicians on the team,
and even if you're just outstill running service calls,
a lot of times you have blinders and youget sucked into whatever the customer's
asking for you to do,
and you just want to solve theproblem and move on to the next job.
You have a million things running andespecially when you have technicians
they're going in with do thework, move on to the next job,
make sure the customer's happy,
and they're not thinking aboutthe greater side of things,
(02:51):
which is generating estimates.
So it's really about buildinginside of your processes,
this function of generatingadditional estimates,
which we're going to talk about today.
Yeah. One of the most frustratingthings for my technicians,
my gutter technicians is when a techniciangoes to her house because the client
called in and said,
the gutter's leaking right over my frontdoor and it's really annoying. Great.
And they go in there and they fix theleak over the front door and maybe they
(03:14):
sell something else.
We have to come back for another day sothe next round of technicians come back
to do something completely unrelated,
but they somehow discoverthat there's 18 more leaks.
Exactly.
That's not good.
That's not a good customer experienceand that costs us money now.
We found 'em thankfully,
but there's always more thatthe client doesn't know about.
That's right.
So I was at an air duct cleaning companyand we also did dryer vent cleaning,
(03:36):
and when we were out on the job site,
imagine if you didn't analyze or lookat this person's dryer vent and you left
and then tomorrow it caughton fire because it's blocked and the person's like,
well, you were just here.
You could have actually literallysaved my house and solved this problem.
For me, it was like we need tocreate that type of urgency.
It's not just about making more money,
it's also about helping your customersso that they don't have more issues down
the line. And you were justthere. You're the experts.
(03:58):
If you go in for an oil changeand you have bald tires,
you want them to tell youthat you have bald tires.
You don't want to bring itin a month. That's right.
You want to bring a car in constantly yetto fix. You want to bring in one time,
get it all fixed all at once,and our clients are no different.
They want just a one timevisit. Get it all figured out,
get all fixed now and then we'll seeyou in five years, not next month,
next month. Drag it along,drag it along, drag along.
(04:18):
We don't want any of that stuff.
So how did you train yourpeople back in the day to sell?
Yeah, so it's not even just back inthe day I'll talk about the process,
but last year we had a HVAC contractor.
We implemented a couple of these playbooksthat we're going to talk about today
and they increased their estimatecount by 42% year over year,
and they ended up doubling their revenuejust by fixing their estimate thing.
(04:38):
And before we get into the playbook,
I want to really hit this home thenumber one way that you can grow your
business. It's not just moreleads. It's not just more jobs.
It's estimate count.
That's why you need to track this numberyear over year because estimate count
is literally more swings to the bat,And if you have a good sales process,
that's how you're goingto grow your business.
So you should be trackingestimate account.
The other piece of it is thatyou could get a bunch of leads,
but they're all trash estimate accountlets you know that your leads are
(05:00):
actually good and you're generatingestimates. Some of the playbooks,
the first thing is is the technicianincentive program and the first,
so I had 28 texts. Englishwasn't their first language,
so I had to get them bought in.
That's the first step is like get yourtechnicians bought in and what does this
look like? So you go tothem and you say, Hey,
do you want to make money while yousleep? How does this, of course they say,
yes course. How doesthis look for them? Well,
(05:21):
when you go out on a job and you createadditional estimate opportunities,
if it closes in a week, two weeks, fiveweeks, you have some nurture sequences,
some rehashing on these estimates,
then you'll get X percentage or a certainamount of dollar amount for that job
and at this point you got their earsperked up because they're going to get
excited about making more money on jobsthat they're actively doing down the
line. Now the second piece of this, andthis is the part that we talked about,
(05:44):
is removing the tech blinders becausethey're going in to do the service and
here's how you do this and anybusiness, you should do this.
This is great serviceand you just hit on it,
is you need to have a checklist for yourtechnicians. When you go into the home,
just like a car when you go in,you're analyzing the tire pressure,
the tread depth, the oil levels, allthe stuff that you're check marking.
They didn't ask you for all this,but you're doing it as a precaution.
(06:06):
So when you go out to do a service,you need to be checking everything.
So imagine in hvac, you go into the home,
you're there because theydon't have any ac. Well,
you ask them some qualifying questions,
do you have any hot orcold rooms in your house?
You might be able to sell a ductlesssystem. How is the air? Does it feel dry?
How's your skin? Now you mightbe able to sell a humidifier,
so you're asking some qualifyingquestions and that's the second step.
(06:27):
Just doing that alone isgoing to create opportunities,
but what we ran into as a business washow do we make this so easy for the
technicians to send estimates?
Because most people get this part wrong,And this is the one that if you make it
easy for them, you will get theestimates. If you make it hard for them,
it's going to fizzle out andit's just flavor the week.
I'm sure you may experience.
Oh no, never.
Exactly. You talk about it,your team meeting get a game,
(06:50):
more estimates and everyone's fired up,
but you don't have the process.So here's how you do it.
The first thing is you create aform or a page on your website slash
consulting.com/referral.
Then you put a form on there and thatform captures all the information for the
customer's information and youtell them, Hey, we have this form.
All you have to do after the job,
you go to this form and you fill thisthing out and you turn it into a QR code
(07:14):
and you put it in their truck. Theyscan the QR code after the job,
fill out this estimate referralform, then you're off to the racists.
Now I'm going to walk you throughwhat the word track looks like.
And that's for upselling andcross-selling 1000%. Okay,
so if they're at a house and they seesomething else, they don't sell it,
but they set someone else to come backto sell it later. That's right. Okay.
Our techs were service-basedtechs. They were not,
(07:36):
they weren't selling sales techs.They were there to just do the work,
and a lot of timesthat's what we fall into.
They're not upselling the opportunitiesafter the fact. So what we would do is
we would have someone upsell after thefact, but create the opportunities.
And so the word track would look likethis, Hey, while I'm at your house,
I do this checklist of all thisstuff. Then at the end of the service,
I know you told me about thishot or cold room in your house.
(07:57):
I think we have a solutionfor it. Fill on our team.
I think you just worked onanother house in the neighborhood.
I'll have him give you a call with someoptions. Does that sound good? Oh, yeah,
that'd be great.
Now you're creating opportunities withoutyour texts having to get in there and
sell because there's a layer to coachingyour texts on selling and it can get
very difficult because there's somuch stuff you're trying to do.
Yeah, yeah. I love this.
So you had 28 texts thatdidn't speak English very well,
(08:21):
and so you had to come up with adifferent way for them to still upsell,
and it's just the simple form that theywould fill out if they saw something
that needed to be addressed.
That's right. Now,
let's say you have awesome techs oryou're the tech and you're out there doing
service calls.
That checklist is your blueprint forupsells because you go through your
service and then at the end of the serviceyou say, now, Adam, you told me boom,
(08:41):
boom, boom. I wasn't ableto solve that problem,
but I think that thiswill solve your problem.
You want me to give you an estimatefor this? Boom, there you go.
Now you have tons ofestimate opportunities as well. I'll give you a good
benchmark. We figured this number out.
You should be generating30 to 50% on your jobs.
30 to 50% of your jobs should turninto estimates. You did a hundred jobs,
you should get 30 to 50estimates out of that,
(09:02):
just like a normalservice call based thing.
Yeah, that seems about right to me too.
I would say that's probably where weare. Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Whenever I see my metrics,
our conversion rate isoften over a hundred percent because we go in and upsell,
so we'll get leads,
but then we generate even more leads andwe'll generate more quotes than we had
leads because we're generating moreand more work. It's so important.
(09:25):
So talking about upselling andcross-selling, it starts with the CSR.
Yes, the phone. Right. So thisis my second playbook here,
and this is what we ran into was,okay, some of our technicians loved it.
Some of them were like, I don't wantto do this, whatever, too much work.
But what if you can get to the upsellbefore your techs get out there,
and this is the CS R playbook, which theCSR playbook is when someone calls in,
(09:46):
there's two ways you can do this.Someone calls in and says, Hey,
I want to get my gutters clean,or whatever the service is.
Maybe you talk 'em through price or maybeyou have a dispatch fee and you send
someone out there. You literallysay, while my guy's out there,
do you want him to takea look at X, Y, and Z?
Because some of your neighborshave had the same issue,
and I'm trying to be proactivewhile I have a guy out there.
Do you want me to look at this?Teeing them up.
(10:06):
Sometimes your CSR gets a little rattledwith that because there's so much
conversation going on in the first call,
and here's how you do it in anothercall. If you're doing confirmation calls,
which you should be doing,
don't just rely on the audit the daybefore or something, right? Yeah.
A lot of people just rely on thetext to go out, which is okay,
but there's another opportunity ofcalling these people and saying, Hey,
I see we got you on the schedule fora gutter cleaning, and by the way,
(10:28):
while he's out there,
we were just doing a job last weekin your neighborhood for X, Y, and Z.
Do you want him to just give you an eserto take a look for you why he is out
there? I can just add it your ticket,there's no extra charge. That's right.
And then you tee your guys up. They loveit, especially if they're sales tech,
because then they don't have to actuallycreate the opportunity in the home.
They just have to say, Hey,
I know you talked to Phil on thephone and you talked about this.
It's just like butter basically.
(10:49):
Here you go, a walk in the park, cakewalk.
It's a cake walk for these guys.So when you get the team bought in,
I think the CSR and the tech side,
there's no way that you can't increaseyour estimate account if you do that.
A lot of people give us some pushbacklike, okay, Phil, this sounds great,
but now I got to train my CSR and my tech.
But there's even other waysthat you can do this as well.
Like what?
Yeah, so the third playbookis email marketing. Okay,
(11:11):
so we've talked about email marketingon the show and different strategies on
that. When you send outan email with promos,
special offers that's creatingsales opportunities for your techs,
and let's say you scheduled a joband you had an email sequence leading
up to that job that thensold different services, Hey,
while your techs out here, be sure toask 'em about boom, boom, boom, boom,
(11:32):
boom, boom. Here's why a lot of peoplelike this. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And again,
you're just teeing them up for more stuffto just ask you instead of you trying
to create the opportunity in the home.
Yeah, for sure. Phil,
what do you compensatethe salespeople with?
What kind of percentage isit flat? How do you do that?
Let's get specific on that.
Yeah, for sure. So with the CSRs,
this is a big opportunity ifyou're selling memberships,
(11:54):
if you're selling theseupsell opportunities, there's kind of two ways to do it.
So with CSRs in particular,
a lot of times they're going to be hourlyemployees and an extra 10 or 20 bucks
is going to make a hugedifference for them,
and they're going to love that.If their sales techs that get paid,
a percentage of their upsells,
10 or 20 bucks might notmove the needle for them,
and they might not even be incentivizedto sell a membership to make an extra 10
or 20 bucks,
which is why it's better to have yourCSR do it because 10 or 20 bucks make a
(12:18):
big difference to them.Now the other piece of this,
and this is a really cool way to do this,
and we have some clientsthat literally run like this,
which is you can see who createdthe jobs, and if you have one CSR,
they created all theopportunities for jobs,
and you could give them a percentage ora dollar amount off of the total revenue
that they created based off the jobsthat they created. So over a month,
(12:38):
they generated 600 jobs or$60,000 worth of estimates,
and then they get 1% of thator whatever the numbers are.
So then you can get them bought intonot just creating opportunities,
but actually making sure that itturns into revenue for their business.
Gotcha.
Yeah. Now with the techs,
what we did was we would give them anextra 50 bucks if they upsold this or a
hundred bucks. If they upsold thisand trying to create the opportunity.
(13:00):
Different services might getdifferent spiffs. That's.
Right. That's right.
Okay.
I think one reallyimportant piece of this,
especially with our techs as I mentioned,
is you wanted to make it so easy for themto comprehend what's happening and how
to do it and what is going to makeany employee compensation plan.
You got to make it easy for them tounderstand and explain to their spouse. If
they can explain it to their spouse,
then it's probably too complicatedfor them to understand themselves.
(13:23):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Phil,let's pause this conversation,
even though it's blowing my mind herefor a minute to talk about Jobber and how
Jobber can help our users reallystart upselling more in cross-selling.
How does Jobber help our listeners?
Well, for our clients that use Jobber,
we actually pull estimatecounts from their Jobber,
so you can see how many SMSthat you're actually generating,
and then you can look year over year tomake sure that you're increasing your
(13:45):
estimate count and keep track of thatnumber that I think is so important to
help you grow your business.
Yeah, totally. That reporting is great.Also, you can have advanced quotes,
which means you have optional line items,
so you can give them what they askfor, but then three additional upsells,
they could just check if they want to.
It's super easy and they have jobforms that are even more robust.
You can add photos to job form thechecklist that we talked about.
It's all in Jobber. Sounds like you needJobber too. If you're not using Jobber,
(14:08):
you need checklists, youneed advanced quoting.
You need to be able to upsell more andget more business for more leads and
estimates, estimate, report,all that stuff you need.
So go to Jobber.com/podcast deal anexclusive discount and start using
Jobber right now. Something thatAlex Hormo said, which I loved,
is if you're really hungry and you gointo a restaurant and you order a steak,
(14:29):
you're really,
really hungry at the end when you'refinished and you're full and you feel
great, and he said, how's thesteak? Oh, it's great. Great.
Do you want anotherone? Well, no, I'm full.
Why would I eat a second steakright now? But if you go in,
you're really hungry. Yeah,I'm going to steak. Great.
Would you like two steaks? Yeah,I'm starving. I'll take two steaks.
Yeah.
The time to sell the second steakis at the peak of desire, peak of
(14:52):
or need. Exactly. And so when is that,Phil? When is that for home service pros?
When is that time where peoplethink they need the most?
Yeah, it's at the point whenthey are asking for the service,
and that's when you want to strike.
So what we did at the Ducklingcompany is a lot of people,
they need their ducks in every four years.
Their driver went down every year or two,
and we work with gutter cleaning companiesnow that you really need your gutters
(15:13):
cleaned twice a year at least, And alot of people just call whenever it's
overflowing and they don't care aboutthe ongoing maintenance of the work,
whatever it looks like.
What we recommend doing is when theycall in and to get their gutters clean,
you say, Hey, we actually, you shouldget your gutters clean twice a year,
so why you're scheduling this one,
you should also schedule your next oneand we'll give you 10% off so that way
you have a cleaning plan in place sothat way it's not overflowing and your
(15:35):
stuff's not falling offyour house, whatever.
So really think about if you are inthis business that you need to do things
over and over again, how can youjust get people on the schedule,
maybe give 'em a little incentiveto move forward with it,
whether you call it a membership or youjust schedule stuff to actually happen
and you talk like this, it'svery easy for them to understand,
and then you get a lot moreopportunities generated.
Are there certain things that theCSR can say that can bomb the sale,
(15:58):
or are there certain keywordsthey should never say?
You don't want it to comeoff as a sales pitch,
especially when someone's calling to getproblem solved. You want to listen to
them, have empathy, and then solve theirproblem and give them recommendations.
So like, Hey, my gutters areclogged. Okay, this sounds good.
We can have someone come out there.
One thing that I would recommend doingis having a proactive maintenance plan or
(16:19):
a proactive approach to gutter cleaning,
and we recommend doing ittwice per year. If you like,
I can schedule this one and yournext one and we give you a 10% off.
That way you don't have to worryabout trying to call us in.
It's already on the schedule. Itsounds a lot better than, yeah,
we have this membership plan. It's $120.Do you want to sign up for it or not?
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah. How you say it matters a lot.Absolutely, and it's all about,
(16:40):
I think, solving the person'sproblem. No one wants to be sold.
They all want their problems to besolved, and at the end of the day,
if you can help them solve their problemand maybe get them a discount of some
sort and be proactive,who wouldn't want that?
Yeah, totally.
The CSR is in position to be at thepeak of need my gutters river flowing?
I need some out here asap. Let's try tosell it then, and they say, yeah, yeah,
(17:01):
sure. Maybe I'll do it, but not right now.
I just want to get the gutters cleanfirst before I sign up for anything else.
Right. So then they go in and do it.
Are you putting special notes in thejob order or are you recapping the
conversation or are allthese things something that the technician's going to do
no matter what?
Yeah,
so this is why having that technicianchecklist is so important. Regardless if
(17:22):
you want to upsell opportunities or notlooking like a professional company in
your customer journey and having achecklist for them to go through and do is
going to help you stand out, andit's going to help you win more jobs.
The catchall to this, thelast playbook on this,
let's say your CSR botes itor they don't want to do it,
or they don't feel comfortable doingit, your technician goes out there,
they can't upsell, they can't do it,
but you have a checklist now youdo a happy call on the last day,
(17:44):
this is what we did. We called everysingle person the next day and said, Hey,
Adam was out there cleaning yourgutters. How do you do? How's it looking?
Any issues? Nah, it's beengreat. Thank you so much. Hey,
I noticed on the checklist you said thatyou have this issue of pulling in your
grass or this issue of blah,blah, blah, blah, blah.
I know a solution that can help you,
and I actually puttogether a couple options.
(18:05):
Can I send it over you to take a look atand just let me know if it's something
that might make sense for you?This is where your salespeople,
they don't have opportunities.
They need to be doing yourhappy calls all day long.
Salespeople doing happy calls,
that process I just told you is goingto create tons of opportunities. Right,
so not the CSR doing the happy.
Calls. That's right.Okay. Okay. Hold on. Okay.
You're breaking the microphone right now.
(18:27):
So the salespeople don'thave time for that, Phil.
They're out doing their thing. Youdon't have enough estimates or leads.
You have slow periods in your schedule.Your salespeople are going to say,
I don't have enough leads. Idon't have enough jobs to run.
Call all of our customers the next day,go through the job that they just did.
Talk about common things in theirhouse that's probably broken.
If they have a checklist, which youshould go over the checklist with them,
review the opportunities, create theestimates, send it to them, rehash those,
(18:49):
follow up on them. Now you haveinfinite estimate opportunities.
Do you require theclient to be home when we
come?
Is that a requirement for technicians tobe able to meet the client face to face
or not? Again, it all dependson your service. Lawn care.
Might not happen.
That's right.
But with lawn care, you could still doa checklist. You might do landscaping,
you might do gutter cleaning, youmight do certain upsell opportunities,
(19:13):
and you create them, and then you goand you call 'em next day like, Hey,
we are at your house. We didthis service. Everything's good.
I didn't notice this, this, and this one.
How much do you think that they'regoing to? They're like, wow,
this company actually cares. They'retaking a look at all this stuff.
I'm so glad that I work with them. Two,
they're looking out to be proactiveso that my stuff doesn't break,
and then I have to try tofind who's going to do it.
They already do this service. Three,
(19:35):
you're creating opportunitiesfor your company.
It's the whole culture of solvingpeople's problems that's going to help you
grow your business.
If someone goes to a house and sees morework that needs to be done and submits
that form,
they're not pricing it or they'renot recommending a price or anything,
they're just generating another leadfor someone else to come back in and do
another sales appointment. Is that right?
It all depends how yourbusiness is structured.
If you have sales techs and they have aprice book and they can write something
(19:57):
up and give them anestimate, then do it. Yeah,
do it. But if you have techs that aremore service-based that are just trying to
get to the next job, get a five starreview and make sure the customer's happy,
they don't want to be bogged down withcreating these bigger ticket estimates,
do this process, it'sgoing to be much better.
And you can spend a lotmore time on your estimate.
When you're sending an estimateand you're not on site,
you should be recording a Loom videowalking them through what you're actually
(20:17):
sending them. Hey, my name'sPhil. I work with Adam.
I know when he was at your house,he talked about this and this stuff.
So I put together thisestimate, here's how this works,
and it can help you solve this problem.
And here's what I thinkthat you should do.
Lemme know if you have any questions,and then you send all that together.
It ties it all together perfectly.
And if you're a lawn care company or ahouse cleaning company where you're going
(20:39):
to the same house everyweek, high frequency,
you should be generating so many leadsbecause every single time you go to
someone's house, they're going to haveweeds in their beds, they're bushes,
be overgrown.
There's going to be a huge falling inthe limb or a branch that's laying the
road. We have to get clean up.
I'm speaking to long care companies andhouse cleaning companies specifically.
You need to be doing this constantlybecause there's so many opportunities that
(20:59):
you're at the house,
and if your guys just zipping around theyard cutting grass and not paying any
attention to anything else around them,low hanging branches, weeds, bushes,
dead bushes, all that kind of stuff,
you're missing out ona ton of new business.
That's right. I mean, that'swhy the checklist is beautiful.
That's why the first step is try to getthem bought in to make some extra money
so that they don't just have their techblinders on and just go to do the work.
(21:22):
And those two things, it takesthem extra five minutes on a job,
but if it could pay them an extra ahundred or $200 per job or something,
I mean, it's a home run for them.
And you can do that. And Jobber haschecklists. We integrate with company cam.
They have checklists,however you want to do it.
You can have an assistant that just herjob or his job is just to monitor those
checklists every day to make sure peopleare doing it. Yeah. Well, we literally.
(21:42):
Did what we did. So on Canva,
we created a checklist and then weprinted it out, we put it on their truck,
and then we would have littleC check marks next to it,
and they would take a picture of thischecklist that they did and that you Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Literally take a picture of thechecklist that they did with pictures and
explanation of the stuff. You don'thave to make this too complicated,
(22:03):
and if you don't know how tomake a checklist or whatever, it's very simple way.
Go to Google Forms, createa custom Google form,
and you can turn that into your process.And then those Google forms can go into
a Google sheet,
and now you have every single formthat goes into an Excel spreadsheet,
and at the end of the day,
you can literally go through and seeall of your checklist with pictures,
with information and everythingready to go. You can ask,
(22:25):
how old is your hot water heater? Greatquestion. And you could find that.
Then you have a whole list of all thesepeople's hot water heaters that are old,
call the peoples that have the oldestand sell them a hot water heater.
There's a million ways that you can dothis checklist that doesn't have to get
too complicated.
I want to go back to the Happycall because I want your opinion.
I'm going get some free advice on this,Phil, so I've got you here. Let ask.
It's very surprising to me,
(22:45):
the Happy Call is one of the leastfavorite calls that our people make,
and I've always thoughtwhy? They're happy. Well,
they say this or they give me a curveball here and they say that and I have to
do, and for whatever reason, when Ido follow-ups, they're always happy.
And I guess when my peopledo it, they aren't much.
Have you ever heard that before.
That the Happy Call isn't theirfavorite call to make? I mean,
(23:07):
I've done hundreds if not thousands ofhappy calls because I implemented it in
the company. I used to work atEnterprise coming out of college,
and that was a part of our process.When you rent a card or someone,
you call them the next day and checkto make sure there's no issues with the
car. And so when I went to work at theDuck Lane, I'm like, we need to do this.
So some people might say, yeah, I had anissue when I was here. Well, first off,
that catches it before it turnsinto a one-star review. Second,
(23:28):
it allows you to alleviate andshow that you actually care.
And then the third thing is it turns intomore opportunities for your business.
Of course, it's like now we got to goback out there because you called them.
If you didn't call them,one business owner said,
let the crying dogs lie or something.
Just let the upset people be Don'tdisturb them. Oh, gosh. It's like, dude,
we're all about giving great customerservice solving problems, and so yeah,
(23:49):
of course. Are you going toget some upset customers? Yeah,
but at the end of the day,
it's about making sure you have happycustomer solving problems and estimates.
Yeah. Now, one more flavor to thisis for our business, our technicians,
most of our technicians sell aswell, which I knew is kind of unique,
but there's other peopleout there that do it.
A lot of times when we do ahappiness call, for example,
there's already a quote pending.We gave him a quote yesterday.
(24:12):
It still hasn't been approved yet.
How do you talk about that quote withoutbeing like, are you going to approve?
It can turn from a happiness call tolike, are you going to approve call?
Yeah, so the questionthat you ask is, Hey,
just want to make sure that you gotthe estimate that I sent you yesterday.
I know that you had an issue with this.
I'm not sure if you got it or not.Even if you know that they got it,
just ask them, did you get it?They're going to say, yeah, I got it.
(24:33):
I'm just looking over it. I'll letyou know. Or No, I didn't get it.
Can you send it again? Thenthere's no back and forth,
or I'm here to try to sellyou again. It's just like,
I want to make sure yougot that solution that.
I sent you.
There's a lot of actionable things thatpeople can do today because of this
conversation. I'm going to wrap'em up in three right here.
Number one is you want to trackestimates, not leads, estimates,
the numbers should alwaysbe higher than leads.
(24:55):
I think that profit is in the upsell,
and so if you're having more estimatesthan leads, then you're on a good track,
but if you have the same number or less,
then you're just going to be constantlyturning over for more and more leads.
Number two is use checklist.You can use Jobber company cam.
You use paper or laminated.It doesn't matter.
You need to make sure that yourtechnicians, your salespeople,
your service people,
everybody is checking off everything theycheck to make sure that every possible
(25:18):
more additional work is beingaccounted for. And number three,
the sale starts with the CSR.
The CSR should be teeing your peopleup for success. Hey, by the way,
why they were going to bechecking for X, Y, and Z?
Is that cool with you or is thereanything else that they should check?
My favorite question is, what else? Oranything else that you can think of.
The CSR starts the sale, so make surethey're well equipped and trained, and.
(25:40):
Don't forget your happy calls becausehappy calls are not just, Hey,
how was a service? They aresales opportunities that most people miss out on.
Bingo. Well, Phil, thanks forbeing here. Appreciate it.
How do people find out more about you?
If you're a home service business ownerand you want a free marketing audit,
you can go to phlashconsulting.com,P-H-L-A-S-H consulting.com.
We hop on a call, we go throughall your digital marketing.
We give you the recipe and showyou how to grow your business.
(26:02):
Well, thanks for being here.Appreciate it as always. Thanks, Phil.
Yeah, man.
And thank you for listening.
I hope that you heard to me today thatwill help you cross-sell and upsell more
services. I'm your host, Adams Sylvester.You can find me at adamsylvester.com.
Your team and your clients andyour family deserve your very best,
so go give it to 'em.
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