Sales Byte®

When You Are NOT Ready To Train Your Comfort Advisor

When you invest thousands of dollars in quality sales training you expect to see an immediate change in your comfort advisor’s behaviors and his or her results. That doesn’t always happen. Here are some roadblocks to getting better results, no matter how good the sales training is. You might want to deal with these situations first…then send them to training.

1. You pay your comfort advisor a salary.

A sales professional is motivated by the challenges that selling provides. He or she doesn’t want their income to be limited. Find me a sales person who wants a salary and I’ll show you someone who is happy with average results.

2.  Your comfort advisor won’t run leads after 5:00 PM or on weekends.

This is a “retail” business and consumers do their shopping at nights and weekends. Sorry, but this is a requirement.

3. Your comfort advisor is obsessed with “price”.

This is very common with comfort advisors who have been installers or technicians and know a lot about the labor and materials that go into a job. They tend to think of “cost plus” and often look for ways to be cheaper. Far better to establish a flat rate or cookbook pricing model and have them sell the solution…not the price. Take away any price discounting and teach them to sell the value, not the price.

4. You pay a sliding-scale commission based on gross profit.

This is management’s way of putting responsibility on the comfort advisor for profitable work. The problem is that the comfort advisor doesn’t control the labor team and this method nearly always puts installers and comfort advisors at each other’s throats. Train the comfort advisor to provide the information that installation needs and let the installation manager take care of the rest.

5. You simply have the wrong person in the job.

He or she doesn’t fit your culture, or they are not motivated, or they are totally self-focused, or they cut corners…whatever. When you find this out then deal with it decisively. Everyone in your company knows this is going on and you will be better off finding a new person who will be a better fit.

Once all of these are cleaned up then send your comfort advisor to our Accelerate! sales training program and you will get the results you are looking for.

Good Selling.

- Tom

Other stories

Ductwork, Ductwork, Ductwork

In my last article I discussed the importance of incorporating Ductwork Assessment into the selling process and just how challenging from a logistics standpoint this can be.  How do you add this critical component to the required steps that lead to a successful sales outcome?

One of the key areas of ductwork assessment, other than insulation and leakage, is the overall design capacity of the existing system.  We have developed an innovative tool inside of TRUST PRO® online that can assist you in quickly (just minutes) evaluating the overall design capacity and generate a great credibility document to share the results with the customer.

We will share a stand-alone version of this critical Duct Capacity Assessment Tool at NO COST. As an extra value, we will also include a companion Survey Form to use on the sales call to gather all sorts of information about the customers’ needs and other important technical information, including the data required to input into the Duct Capacity Assessment Tool.  To claim your free tools, just give me a call so I can review its setup and use with you.  Call me at 612-284-5024 ext. 100 M-F, 7:00-5:00 Central.  Leave a message if you don’t reach me on the first try.

This Duct Capacity Assessment Tool and many more critical features are built into TRUST PRO® online.  To learn more click here to go to our website where you can click on any of the “Sign up for a free demo” banners.  Or if you like let me know when you call about the Duct Capacity Assessment Tool and we can set up a demo time on the same call.

If you have an existing Comfort Advisor in need of a technical tune-up on ductwork assessment or new Comfort Advisor in need of full HVAC technical training, let’s discuss our upcoming Accelerate! sales training sessions.  We spend a good deal of time during these sessions training on how to incorporate ductwork assessment into the sales process, including how to use the Duct Capacity Assessment Tool to both identify ductwork issues and create corrective action options for the customer’s situation.  If ductwork assessment is not something that your Comfort Advisors are including in each and every home visit, Accelerate! is the perfect investment in your growth.

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