ServiceTitan’s recent acquisition of Convex, a leading sales and marketing platform built specifically for commercial service businesses, opens up a wide array of new features to help businesses find and win more commercial service agreements, and grow more profitably.
In a recent webinar, Blake Meulmester, Convex Co-founder and ServiceTitan Vice President of Product, and Evan Smith, ServiceTitan Principal Product Manager, explain how the partnership delivers an end-to-end solution to help commercial businesses find new prospects, optimize outreach, and win new customers.
“Convex today serves the commercial market. ServiceTitan is investing quite a bit into the commercial market. The partnership with Convex is a way to strengthen that offering and support that market better,” Meulmester says.
What is Convex?
Do you designate certain sales reps to perform outbound prospecting to find new customers and grow your business? Commercial businesses deploy Convex to not only find new customers, but also more profitable customers, Meulmester says.
“Maybe they're looking to move out of lower-margin types of properties they work at currently. They know what their ideal properties are, and they want to find more of those,” Meulmester says. “This is why they deploy Convex.”
Commercial businesses seeking to increase customer service agreements also utilize Convex.
“Maintenance agreements, for a lot of our customers, are some of their most profitable lines of work. It's recurring revenue,” Meulmester says. “Once you sell a maintenance agreement, there's a lot of pull-through [work]. And they tend to be higher-margin.
“A lot of our customers come to us because they may be trying to get out of new construction or project-based work, which can be very competitive and put a lot of pressure on [profit] margins,” he adds.
The Convex-ServiceTitan partnership also adds greater value to the service agreements feature in ServiceTitan, Smith says.
“The agreements feature within the platform is optimizing that operational efficiency and really putting the spotlight on profitability,” Smith says. “You can look back on an individual agreement, or the portfolio of your agreements, and understand how well you're estimating and how well your team is executing against those estimates.”
What Convex + ServiceTitan Means for Commercial Contractors
The ultimate goal of the Convex-ServiceTitan partnership is to help commercial contractors improve their bottom lines. To get there, companies must first win more business and maximize customer value.
Win more business
To win more business, Convex uses its proprietary tool, Atlas, to help commercial companies find potential customers, filter the data to build target audiences, and then work to convert targeted customers into service agreements.
“We provide a database of just about every commercial property in the U.S., in addition to the occupants and the people inside these properties,” Meulmester says. “Customers come to us today saying, ‘Hey, I know who my best customers are to sell maintenance agreements. Maybe I'm looking to go after offices, hospitals, or industrial facilities, but I really want to find more of those.”
For example, a commercial company might use Atlas to search for educational facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Atlas initially cuts the list down to 3,000 facilities, but that’s probably still too large of a list. You can narrow the list further by filtering for larger buildings, such as 100,000 square feet or above. This narrows the Atlas results to about 400 properties, which represents a manageable list of potential customers to work through.
“There are a number of ways you can use our product,” Meulmester says. “You can search for properties by the people who are in them, by the property itself, by assets that customers have uploaded, and property ownership characteristics.”
Once you’ve identified specific properties, Convex Data Licensing gathers even more details, such as:
City and location
Exterior photos to show approximate age of building
Height of building
Total square footage
Property owner
Current tenants
Permit history
Work history
“Let's say this looks like a good property, and let's say this fits within our ideal customer we are trying to serve and sell maintenance agreements to. What I'm going to do next is find a person to talk to,” Meulmester says. “We try to identify all the contacts who are associated with a given property.”
Atlas enables you to drill down into those property contact lists to find facility managers (educational), chief engineers (government and hospital), and property managers (apartments and condos). Once you find the person who seems like the best contact, you can search online sites, such as LinkedIn, to verify their backgrounds.
After completing data discovery, you can shift into the workflow of saving the appropriate contact for each property, linking that contact person to the property, then calling the contact directly from Atlas. Making cold calls can be intimidating for newer sales reps, so Atlas makes it simple.
“One thing we offer is the ability to generate talking points for a sales rep, and we can help them think about how they might want to approach a call like this, and they can actually call directly from the application,” Meulmester says. “We can also email them right from the application. Additionally, we help sales reps draft these types of communications.”
To view Atlas results from a different angle, a commercial company may search for potential customers by titles, or take a more individual approach rather than one based on property or building characteristics. For instance, you might search for all facility managers in the state of California. Then, to develop an even tighter-focused list, you could add specific industries, company size, or total revenue to your search parameters.
Maximize customer value
With workflows focused on helping sales reps making outbound calls to potential customers, Convex recognizes how difficult this cold-calling process can be for some businesses. Typically, Meulmester says, companies reach a 4% conversion rate for these first calls (out of 100 calls, 4% book services).
The recent release of Signals, a new Convex product, drives those numbers higher to maximize customer value.
“Signals is where we listen for people who we think are in the market, so you have a much higher probability of getting someone at the right time, and minimize the amount of cold calls you're doing,” Meulmester explains.
Signals creates a bundle of topics based on what people at these companies are searching for online, flags those topics for specific industries, and gives each bundle a score based on how strongly it matches your search criteria.
“We're taking companies who we think are researching things online, telling you who they are, what they're looking for, and then, again, recommending a property to call,” Meulmester says.
Once commercial businesses link their customer data with Convex, they may discover their current customers are searching online for services they provide.
“This might be a really good signal that that relationship might not be as locked in as you think it is, and you want to go after them,” he says.
Convex helps companies track new leads on a board by generating quick cards with lead information and adding the cards and tasks associated with them into the workflow. When you reach the proposal-creation stage for new commercial service agreements, you can find those saved lead cards easily.
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Building Proposals and Delivering Agreements with ServiceTitan
Using all of the data collected through Convex, you’re now ready to create and send a commercial services agreement proposal within the ServiceTitan platform.
Start by accessing the new customer’s page and scrolling down to the service agreements section, Smith says. From there, you can tailor the specifics of each agreement based on the customer’s needs, their site, and the installed equipment or assets currently present at the site.
For example, a service technician or company rep might take an initial walk-through of the customer’s site using ServiceTitan Mobile to capture all of the equipment or asset information. Let’s say the customer has one large air conditioning unit and 10 air purification systems. These details inform what type of maintenance service will be delivered as part of your proposal.
Next, you’ll use the scope-of-work section to tailor the customer’s maintenance schedule based on the needs included in this commercial services agreement. A quarterly maintenance schedule, for instance, will also include its own estimates for labor hours, material costs, and the approximate delivery window for performing the services. The visit templates feature also allows you to add supplemental visits to the schedule, if needed.
Once you know the services, maintenance schedule, and estimated costs, you can determine the right pricing for the commercial services agreement, Smith says.
“Some of you might price these things at a loss — as a loss leader, it’s understanding you're really out there to get your foot in the door and get some nice change-out or replacement revenue,” Smith says. “Some of you might like to profit on these agreements, or set them at a zero margin. You've got all of that control here on the pricing.”
For pricing, customers typically pay an annual fee upfront or at time of service. And if your maintenance tech identifies pull-through work or additional opportunities while delivering scheduled services, ServiceTitan automatically applies preferred rates on your behalf so you can automate some of those pricing decisions.
In addition to making this new service agreement data available in your ServiceTitan account, the system automatically merges the data into a document template that converts into the actual services agreement itself.
“In just a couple of weeks, we'll have the ability for you to email this agreement out from within ServiceTitan and track that email through the accepted and activation stages,” Smith says. “Later in the year, we're adding our e-sign capability as well. So, you'll have a full end-to-end workflow for producing, delivering, and getting these documents signed by your end customer.”
Managing Active Agreements and Scaling Business
Service agreements become active once a customer accepts and signs your proposal. As you manage and deliver that agreement, you can easily see the number of planned visits, monitor job progress, and add the customer’s preferred billing schedule. You can also store details, notes and tags, as well as assign specific account managers to the agreement.
The service agreements section also shows techs what materials they need to have on hand when they perform a scheduled maintenance visit for a specific customer. And reporting features enable managers to aggregate lists of required materials across all of your maintenance visits for the year, which informs your inventory and purchasing departments.
“So, how do we know if we're doing a good job or not? We have an idea of how long each maintenance visit is going to take, but how long is it taking for our guys to actually perform that? How well are we estimating or vice versa?” Smith asks.
ServiceTitan service agreements capture the labor hours and materials for each visit, allowing you to easily compare actual numbers to the estimate. Upon examining this data, you may discover techs are taking too long and need better coaching, or you may need to increase the price for next year because you completely underestimated the job.
“At the individual agreement level, you’re keeping a pulse on your business and understanding both how well you're estimating and how well you're performing,” Smith says.
When managing a portfolio of service agreements at scale, ServiceTitan reporting options allow you to:
See all agreements activated last month
See all agreements by seller
See all agreements by account manager
See which agreements are pending auto-renew
See which agreements were canceled
See all agreements by materials forecast
“Leverage the scheduled report functionality,” Smith advises. “At the beginning of each month or at the end of each month, you can schedule a report on your sales of agreements and send that to your leadership team by email. Or the agreements that were canceled last month, you can schedule those to be sent each month to your account management team.”
The service agreements section also allows you to filter service agreements by status, such as draft, sent, or follow-up and accepted, rejected, or activated. Another frequently used filter is “next month,” which customers use to plan ahead.
“All of this is an example of how we can take a lead that we might've sourced from Convex, work it through ServiceTitan to the point where we generated a tailored proposal and the document that accompanies that proposal, and then how we can deliver that to our customers, get that accepted and activated, and how that informs our team's operations,” Smith says.
Most important, however, Smith says it’s about shining a spotlight on profitability.
“For next year, we can do a better job estimating or a better job performing and improve our profitability, improve that bottom line,” he adds.
Convex Signals Delivers on ROI
After conducting extensive research on Convex’s return on investment for customers, Meulmester says the new Signals feature delivers amazing results.
“One of our customers, Comfort Systems Southwest, closed $60,000 in new business in two weeks using Signals,” he says. “Another mechanical customer, Perfection Group on the East Coast, told us they found 70 customers who were a good fit and scheduled 10 qualified meetings in their first session.”
Based on buyer intent data, Meulmester says research also shows:
96% of customers achieve their goals with intent data
64% of users generate higher return on investment and conversion rates
50% of buyers say intent data improves sales and marketing alignment
What’s Next for Convex + ServiceTitan?
Future enhancements for Convex include adding more powerful data, such as more high-level contact information.
“At the end of the day, you need to call a person, and we know that really high-quality contact data is one of the best things we can give you,” Meulmester says. “We're really close to having the best industry solution available.”
Convex and ServiceTitan also plan to add integration features.
“Imagine situations like being able to pull your entire maintenance base into our product and light it up on the map so you can see all of your active maintenance agreements being sold,” Meulmester says. “You can imagine how powerful that'd be to pull in your ServiceTitan service agreements and see your Signals data or intent data overlaid on top of that.”
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